China's
last monarchy, the Qing Court, ended when the 1911
Revolution started. Violent revolutionaries, ambitious
generals and conspiring politicians combined forces in a
rebellion that swiftly brought down the 268-year-old
hereditary dynasty and replaced it with a semblance of a
robber-baron republic.
Okay. Everybody knows
that. But how many also know what made those
opportunists among the insurgents decide October of 1911
was the time to risk their lives, and the lives of
everyone in their clan? The Qing had a law that
sentenced to death every rebel together with every
branch of his family. So what started the revolution
that ended the mighty Qing Dynasty?
The cause
couldn't be more unlikely or improbable. In May 1911,
some 2,000 miles away from the Forbidden City, the
Emperor's seat of power, people in Sichuan were gravely
concerned when Beijing nationalized the privately owned
railroads running through their province, the most
populous in China. Dismay turned to anger when they
learned that the central government had mortgaged the
tracks to foreign companies for expansion loans.
Demonstrations spread to country and town, leading first
to market shutdowns and school closures, and then to the
people's rejection of tax-collection notices.
The Sichuan provincial government cracked down
in September, arresting the leaders of the protest and
clearing the streets by opening fire at will. However,
in contrast with the past, the bloodshed didn't scare
the people into submission. Instead, it spurred armed
rebellion that, with the army confining itself to its
barracks, swept through the province and spilled over
into the rest of the country. Within a short month, the
whole country was on fire. On October 10, it took all of
an engineering battalion in a neighboring province to
topple its provincial government and install a
revolutionary government that declared independence from
Beijing. From that point, the Qing became history. And
October 10 became the National Day in the succeeding
Republic of China.
Of course, the railroad
incident, violent as it was, couldn't in itself
overthrow the government. But it was the key event that
set off a chain reaction, exposing the vulnerability and
weakness of the ruling Manchurian regime. A more
balanced opinion is that the dynasty imploded, collapsed
on itself. The ruling class was old, recalcitrant,
self-important and incompetent. The officials at all
levels were as corrupt and usually as well off as the
common people were dirt-poor. The powder was accumulated
and kept dry under the oppressors, just waiting for a
match.
And nearly 100 years later, that match
appears to have been struck again, and the fire
rekindled, in the same manner and in the same place.
Just last October 18, a laborer/farmer in Wan
Zhou near Chongqing in Sichuan province accidentally
brushed against a woman on a busy street. The woman’s
husband refused to accept profuse apologies. He beat the
offending farmer up and broke the man's leg. To
discourage passers-by from intervening, he declared
himself to be a government official, though government
officials deny that. The message: "I beat him because I
can." This enraged the townspeople. Within hours up to
40,000 people surrounded the main government building,
setting a police van on fire and repelling police
crowd-control squads.
Ten days later, the city
of Han Yuan, also in Sichuan province, was shut down as
hundreds of thousands of farmers staged a sit-in at the
site of a hydro-power station under construction. Faced
with government-backed eviction from their land without
adequate compensation, the farmers protested. There are
sketchy allegations of clashes with the armed police.
Witness accounts gleaned from the tumult claim that
students joined the farmers and together they stormed
the government buildings and that police reinforcements
were sent in. But the government has since cut off all
roads and communication lines, imposing a news blackout.
Beijing declared on Thursday that the Han Yuan
incident was a case of "uninformed masses storming
government institutions". No prosecution will be pursued
but that leniency does not extend to the "leaders of the
incident", according to official media.
These
two cases of civil unrest by angry and violent
protesters are believed by many analysts to be the
largest of their kind since the Communist Party
established the People's Republic of China in 1949; by
contrast, the June 1989 student movement at Tiananmen
Square was orderly and peaceful, until the People's
Liberation Army was ordered in to crush the people.
In the past, there have been small-scale
spontaneous street demonstrations: in 1956, for example,
hundreds of middle-school students and their teachers in
a little town in Hubei province crowded the local
government building, demanding not democracy or
cleansing of corruption, but a few more quota seats for
the college entrance examinations. The communist
officials responded by handing down death sentences to
the leaders in the protest. Three teachers were executed
for disagreeing with the Communist Party on education
policies. Facing the same firing squad was a tradesman
who took no part at all in the protest but was condemned
to die as well. The verdict: The man had an
uncontrollable habit of blinking his eyes, a tic. So he
was clearly sending out secret codes by winking to his
fellow "class enemies" while the demonstrators passed
his roadside bicycle-repair shop.
This time, no
executions of individuals or of groups have taken place
as yet. The latest word from Beijing has it that Chinese
President Hu Jingtao has ordered that the displaced
farmers are taken care of and compensated so they are
not destitute before the construction of the power
station begins.
That is a marked improvement in
China. At the same time, it also sends out a signal to
other downtrodden people that it is now less deadly to
protest. While Mao Zedong executed an occasional
protester at public meetings and Deng Xiaoping ordered
the Tiananmen students dispersed and killed with
machine-guns, all President Hu does now is offer
appeasement. And that represents weakness in the eyes of
opportunists ready to seize on any perceived failing.
Beijing is not what it used to be and finally
vulnerabilities are showing.
Dr Sun Yat-sen,
widely regarded as the father of the Republic of China
that succeeded the Qing Dynasty, was thankful for the
uprising in Sichuan. He said, "Without the rebellion by
Sichuan comrades, our revolution may have been postponed
by a year or two."
Now the question is, by how
many years have these two recent incidents of popular
unrest advanced another drastic change?
Li
YongYan is a veteran observer of Chinese economics,
finance, politics and social trends.
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