What factors lead to China becoming a Republic in 1912?

The question of why China became a republic in 1912 carries with it a number of implicit questions about events that did not happen, namely:

Why didn't China become a Christian theocracy in the 1850s?
Why was the attempt at creating a constitutional monarchy in 1898 unsuccessful?
Why were the reforms towards constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy after 1900 unable to avert the revolution in 1911?
Why did the revolution not result in a constitutional monarchy (as had been the case in the French Revolution)?

Now, the reasons for why the Qing Empire could not survive as an absolutist, Manchu-led state is something that I've covered in this recent answer – in short, the rise of ethnic and national consciousness among the empire's Han Chinese majority meant that Qing minority rule was increasingly untenable, and at the very least there would eventually have to be some kind of reckoning with that. But I suppose I did not address why the product of the Qing's collapse period was a republican and not a constitutionalist settlement.

For this we have to start by looking at the dynamics of the Taiping War in the 1850s. On the surface, this conflict pitted the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a mass peasant movement seeking to overthrow Manchu rule, restore what they believed to be China's pre-Confucian Abrahamic religion, and establish a theocratic monarchy, against the Great Qing and its loyalist supporters, broadly drawn from the property-holding elite of southern China. But closer examination of the supporters of the two sides shows that loyalties were not drawn simply on class lines. Many elites, whether out of opportunism or genuine belief in political radicalism, willingly supported the Taiping, who also made a conscious attempt to appeal to them, and as Xiaowei Zheng argues, the conflict in some regions (particularly Zhejiang in 1860-64) can better be understood as a horizontal conflict between elite (and some popular) factions, rather than as a vertical conflict pitting the working and leisure classes against each other. Prominent elite supporters of the Taiping included He Wenqing, a local strongman in northwestern Zhejiang who, having raised an army ostensibly in defence of the dynasty, declared for the rebels; Wang Tao, a man of letters in Shanghai who passed intelligence to the Taiping leadership in 1862; and Yung Wing, the first Chinese man to graduate from Yale, who briefly offered his services to the Taiping before eventually defecting to the camp of Zeng Guofan, a Qing-loyalist commander.

Whichever side they backed, elites did not fight purely out of altruism, but rather expected to gain something out of their support for one side or the other, namely in the form of greater political autonomy. The most notable loyalist elites, Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang, would spend the rest of their careers subverting the authority of the imperial centre and supporting personal and provincial interests. Zeng's reconstruction of the ruined former Taiping capital of Nanjing, for instance, emphasised symbols and institutions of the literati elite, rather than of imperial authority, prioritising academies and local temples over the damaged Ming Dynasty tomb complex. In Gansu and Shaanxi, Zuo (and his less well-remembered colleague Cen Yuying in Yunnan) led brutal suppression campaigns against Chinese Muslims as a sort of final, bloody coda to decades of eroding goodwill between the court and the empire's Muslim population; subsequently he used his army to apply pressure on Russia in the Ili Valley as part of a move to force it to concede control over the mineral-rich region, as part of a push to overturn the Manchu-negotiated Treaty of Livadia in favour of a new settlement, to be negotiated by Zeng Guofan's son. Li Hongzhang, meanwhile, favoured retrenchment from long-standing imperial commitments (of varying levels of direct control) in Xinjiang, Vietnam and Korea. It would be fair to say that while the Qing survived the war, they did not win it. The postwar consensus would not be determined by the Manchu aristocracy or the core Qing court in Beijing, but by cliques of provincial officials.

Why bring up these dynamics? Simply put, the Han Chinese propertied elite held a variety of political positions, but by and large were united in their opposition to the centralised, Manchu-led structure of the Qing status quo before the Taiping, and favoured the devolution of political power to the provinces, where Han interests dominated. What differed was how far along the scale they tipped. Elites who were already part of the imperial bureaucracy, like Zeng Guofan, were happy to keep the metropolitan government in Beijing more or less as it was, but bolstered the autonomy of the provinces through measures like the lijin transport tax. There were those, however, who favoured a more fundamental alteration to the Qing state, where the institution of the 'inner court' (neiting) would be overturned, and the limits of imperial power clearly delineated, with power shared with a group of (Han Chinese) elites. The constitutionalist movement, which reached its apex in 1898 with the Hundred Days' Reforms, sought to radically transform – but not to overthrow – the Qing state from the centre, through advocating for the 'modernisation' of the empire's military, economy, education, and indeed its political system, laying the groundwork for a transition to constitutional monarchy.

This reform movement was headed ideologically by a group of radical New Text Confucian scholars from outside the bureaucracy, including Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and Tan Sitong, but its big break came from the fact that the emperor himself was the one who was putting their proposals into action. So, with seemingly so much support, what went wrong? This answer goes into more detail, but the key issues were that:

The constitutionalists seem to have been actively plotting pre-emptively against Cixi, which led to her fomenting a pre-emptive counter-coup;
The constitutionalists were perceived as excessively radical by a substantial portion of the establishment bureaucracy, who backed Cixi; and
The constitutionalists' reforms to the 'inner court' included effectively disbanding the Banner system and therefore the foundations of Manchu identity, and stripping away Manchu political privileges, which was perceived as a fundamental threat by the Banner aristocracy (and indeed Cixi.)

Cixi's reassertion of authority in the wake of the 1898 reforms is often seen as the effective end of the constitutionalist movement in China, but the reality is that the exiled members of the radical constitutional movement continued to back the (house-arrested) Guangxu Emperor as well as involve themselves in anti-Cixi plots. More importantly, the push for constitutional monarchy did not end. Cixi herself, following the Boxer Uprising, initiated a process of reform known as the New Policies, which by 1908 included plans to introduce a national parliament and a set of elected advisory councils. The New Policies covered a variety of spheres, from education to rural policing to military reform, but in general terms, it sought to 're-imperialise' the Qing government by creating central bodies and by subordinating what had been relatively ad hoc elite arrangements to new central governmental bodies, for instance by transferring control of the Beiyang Army from Yuan Shikai to the Ministry of the Army in 1906. In theory, the New Policies might have managed to establish a stronger state at the cost of a weaker monarch, and created a constitutional monarchy that might have lasted well into the twentieth century. Why, then, did this not transpire? Opposition to the policies in rural areas was clear: Roxann Prazniak has written an excellent set of microhistories on rural uprisings against the New Policy reforms (Of Camel Kings and Other Things) which I won't go into here. But disjointed uprisings by rural farmers against the specifics of certain Qing reforms were not exactly the sort of thing to bring down the Qing state entirely. Rather, the key locus of opposition revolved around the continued emphasis on Manchu privilege and dominance within the Qing state, despite the ongoing reforms.

Yet this did not guarantee the establishment of a republic. The old constitutional faction, now headed by Kang Youwei's much more radical protégé, Liang Qichao, still supporting the Guangxu Emperor from exile, remained active, though with a much more explicitly anti-Manchu bent by the 20th century. Liang in particular advocated for the enforced miscegenation of Manchus with Han, so as to subsume the former into the latter, integrating the two 'races' in time for what he believed to be the coming racial conflict between the white and East Asian populations of the world. Despite this advocacy for the dissolution of the Manchus as a people, the constitutionalists still believed this could be reconciled with the hereditary monarchy of the Aisin Gioro clan. As was demonstrated in 1898, the Manchus were not exactly in agreement.

[TBC]