Republicanism -did- spread rapidly in China before 1911.Kang Youwei is sort of the poster child for how rapid this was, since he went from being wild radical calling for constitutional monarchy in 1895 to a pointless relic who wanted to restore the Qing after the 1911 Revolution.            

    The reason it is so hard to untangle the rise of “republicanism” is that it was not the key topic of conversation in 1895-1911, as odd as that may seem to us, for whom democracy and voting are the ultimate source of political legitimacy. Zarrow (2005) talks about “Confucian radicalism” in the last years of the Qing, with Kang Youwei as one of the main proponents, at least at first. Radicals favored radical reform (unsurprisingly) but the big change in political form they wanted was a constitutional government, rather than what China currently had, which might be called autocracy. This should not be that surprising. Of the Great Powers of the time, only the US and France called themselves republics. Britain is sort of a middle case, but Russia (sort of), Germany, Italy, and above all Japan were all constitutional monarchies. Kang’s main objection to autocracy was that created a gap between the ruler and the people, and thus paralyzed China in a time of international competition. His solution was not elections and a republic, but to have a sage-like ruler use his charismatic power to transform China’s institutions. His early model was the Meiji emperor in Japan.Zarrow (2012) makes it clear that Kang was a radical Confucian, but not a radical republican. Also, a lot of Kang’s talk about the state existing to promote the good of the common people, or concerns with creating an uncorrupt set of institutions is just bog-standard Confucianism or Qing statecraft thought.You don’t need republicanism to explain him.

There -were- people calling for a republic. Sun Yat-sen (who really did not fit in with the elite people above) was one of them. Even he was not necessarily in favor of a republic at first. The charter of his Revive China Society (Xing zhong hui), founded in Hawaii in 1894, did not call explicitly for a republic. Bergere (1998) does not accept the claim that some of the early participants that the members of the organization swore a secret oath to establish a republic. In fact, the Sun group seems to have been mainly motivated by anti-Manchuism. Some of his supporters, like Ho Kai, were explicitly calling for a constitutional monarchy, and mostly the group does not seem to have had very clear idea what they wanted  the new China to look like.

So, how did republicanism grow? Well, to some extent it was educated radicals like Kang’s student Liang Qichao becoming more in favor of a republic, or more accurately more convinced that trying to reform the Manchu-dominated Qing dynasty was a waste of time. They came to see the court as hopelessly corrupt and incompetent, even after it started the various New Policies reforms,plans for a constitution, and the start of the provincial assemblies (elected from a very limited franchise) in 1909. To the extent that Liang did support the idea of keeping the emperor as a symbol of national unity or a link to tradition or whatever, he completely abandoned that as soon at the Qing were overthrown.His interest in the emperor was functional, and once they had been overthrown they had lost any symbolic use. Kang Youwei remained personally committed to the dynasty that had given him rank and office (like a proper Confucian) and after 1911 spent his time raising money for his Protect the Emperor Society (Baohuanghui),mostly among Overseas Chinese, who were not part of the intellectual trends back home. He supported Zhang Xun’s attempt to restore the Emperor in 1917, although he wanted to call the restored state the Chinese Empire (Zhonghua diguo)rather than the Great Qing (Da Qing) (See Zarrow 2012 p.263)

The Revolution of 1911 which overthrew the Qing and established a republic was mostly made by provincial-level elites who’s ideas of a “Republic” were even less democratic than people like Liang. Zhang Xiaowei(2018) points out that the Sichuan Railway movement wanted to “liberate the people from the yoke of the Qing” and believed in popular sovereignty and popular power, but did not necessarily see elections as the be-all and end-all of a republic. Zhang and Harrison (2000) talk about things like people standing rather than kneeling at court trials, new marriage rituals and of course queue-cutting as Republicanism. When Yuan Shikai ignored the results of the 1913 election and in effect became a dictator there was some resistance to this, but not a lot.When he abandoned the name of the republic and make himself emperor in 1915 he lost almost all his support. Republican rhetoric and symbolism and claiming authority on the behalf of the people were essential after 1911 (Yuan had a “representative assembly” offer him the monarchy) but the idea that the will of the people was best (only) seen through elections was not that big.

 This sort of explains, I hope, why someone like Kang Youwei,who was committed to the forms and symbols of empire became such a political fossil after 1911, and also why finding a clear explanation of the rise of “republicanism”and or “democracy” in this period is so hard.  

Sources

 -Bergère, Marie-Claire. Sun Yat-Sen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

-Harrison, Henrietta. The Making of the Republican Citizen :Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China 1911-1929. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

-Zarrow, Peter. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformationof the Chinese State, 1885-1924. Stanford University Press, 2012

.———. China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

Zheng, Xiaowei. The Politics of Rights and the 1911Revolution in China. Stanford, Stanford University Press 2018.

-This is a topic where the literature is really convenient. Zarrow and Zheng are both good books and will explain pretty much everything for you.