An unfinished republic: leading by word and deed in modern China

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Strand, An Unfinished Republic

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An Unﬁnished Republic

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A

BOOK

The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books in commemoration of a man whose work at the University of California Press from 1954 to 1979 was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies. Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment of a great and beloved editor.

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An Unﬁnished Republic Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China

David Strand

University of California Press Berkeley

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Los Angeles

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London

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strand, David. An unﬁnished Republic : leading by word and deed in modern China / David Strand. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26736-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. China—History—Republic, 1912–1949— Biography. 2. Political activists—China—Biography. 3. Sun, Yat-sen, 1866–1925. 4. Tang, Qunying, 1871– 1937. 5. Lu Zhengxiang, 1871–1949. 6. Political oratory—China—History—20th century. 7. Political leadership—China—History—20th century. 8. Elite (Social sciences)—China—History—20th century. 9. Political culture—China—History—20th century. 10. China—Politics and government—1912–1928. I. Title. ds776.8.s8 2011 951.04092—dc22 [B]2010037307 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 10

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This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked ﬁber. FSC recycled certiﬁed and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certiﬁed, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

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Strand, An Unfinished Republic

For Eleanor and Erik

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction: Republican China Slapping Song Jiaoren Speaking Parts in Chinese History A Woman’s Republic Seeing Like a Citizen Losing a Speech Sun Yat-sen’s Last Words Conclusion: Leading and Being Led

Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

xi xiii

1 13 52 97 146 186 236 283

291 343 347 373

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Figures

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Sun Yat-sen in 1912 / 34 “Obstacles to Women’s Suffrage” / 47 Chinese students in Tokyo / 85 Tang Qunying / 112 Sun Yat-sen presiding in the Nanjing Senate / 119 Carrie Chapman Catt / 138 “Remember” / 180 “Current Affairs” / 184 Lu Zhengxiang / 188 The Guangzhou site of Sun’s 1924 lectures / 255 Sun Yat-sen speaking in Guilin in 1921 / 275

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Acknowledgments

A fellowship from the National Humanities Center helped begin this project under ideal conditions. Dickinson College provided generous sabbatical and summer research support. Guy Alitto, Neil Diamant, Joan Judge, Wolfgang Müller, Susan Naquin, Qin Shao, Kristin Stapleton and Wen-hsin Yeh offered indispensable advice for improving the manuscript. Anderson Burke, Eleanor Strand, and Ceceile Strand also read the manuscript with keen editorial eyes. Dickinson librarian Yunshan Ye provided valuable bibliographic advice and assistance. These friends, family members, and colleagues spared me countless errors. Any mistakes of fact or interpretation that remain are my responsibility alone. Colleagues and students at Dickinson College supplied intellectual stimulation that helped me look at the problems I set for myself in fresh ways. Invitations to a series of academic conferences on related topics provided opportunities to share and test ideas. I thank the organizers of these meetings, including William Theodore de Bary, Léon Vandermeersch, Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton, Elizabeth J. Perry, Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, Pauline Yu, Wen-hsin Yeh, Joseph Esherick, Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, Merle Goldman, Madeleine Yue Dong, Joshua Goldstein, and Sherman Cochran. Reed Malcolm expertly guided me through the editorial and publication process. Sheila Berg provided careful and insightful copyediting. Portions of the book were published ﬁrst elsewhere and are reprinted here by permission: parts of chapters 1 and 2 from Strand, “Citizens in the xiii

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Acknowledgments

Audience and at the Podium,” in Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, edited by Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry, pp. 44–69 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; part of chapter 6 from Strand, “Calling the Chinese People to Order: Sun Yat-sen’s Rhetoric of Development,” in Reconstructing Twentieth-Century China: State Control, Civil Society, and National Identity, edited by Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and David Strand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 33–68, © 1998 by Oxford University Press; and part of chapter 6 from Strand, “Community, Society and History,” in Culture and State in Chinese History, edited by Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 326–45, © 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. I am especially grateful to Tang Cunzheng, grandson of Tang Qunying, who graciously welcomed me on a visit to the Tang family home and museum in Xinqiao, Hunan. Mr. Tang’s own research on Tang Qunying is essential reading for anyone interested in this remarkable woman. Minglang Zhou kindly helped arrange this trip and the historian Zhu Xiaoping accompanied me and gave me the beneﬁt of her insights into the history of the women’s movement in Hunan. This book is dedicated to our two children, Eleanor and Erik, outspoken and thoughtful since birth.

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Introduction Republican China

Once the 1911 Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty, monarchy was gone for good in China; revolutionaries drew a line that became a great and deﬁning gulf. In 1915 President Yuan Shikai, who had inherited the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen’s brief and provisional presidency, tried to make himself emperor. Although Yuan had in his possession formidable political skills and resources, he failed miserably in attempting to pick up where the child-emperor Puyi left off at his forced abdication on February 12, 1912. Yuan’s failure was not the result of the early Republic’s clear success. There were few signs the new regime was more capable than the empire it had replaced. Revolutionaries themselves complained that the Republic was little more than a “signboard” without real substance. However, when the chips were down, and Chinese faced the prospect of President Yuan becoming the Hongxian (“Grand Constitutional Achievement”) emperor, citizens with the wherewithal to resist, did so. Within a few years the Republic became entrenched, not so much as a set of national political institutions, but as a political way of life in which citizens confronted leaders and each other face-to-face in a stance familiar to republics worldwide. Political equality as a value and an everyday practice stood in stark contrast to the inequality and hierarchy that long formed the spine of China’s social and cultural order. This change in political and physical posture was accompanied by considerable trepidation and even alarm, as well as excitement and anticipation, especially 1

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when contending parties were separated by age, sex, or class. A young woman with bobbed hair scolding a middle-aged male politician standing in the way of her winning political rights conjured up a new brand of politics. These behaviors were partly artifacts of a revolutionary moment in which older conventions broke down in the heat of battle and protest. Even so, when the moment passed activism endured as a new repertoire of public and outspoken things citizens did. Widely shared political practices like speech making, political debate, and street protest, as well as more routine meetings, reports, voting, and assemblies, fostered a political culture of seemingly endless talk punctuated by talkdriven action. Every political leader now made speeches. Remaining behind palace or government ofﬁce walls and delegating others to speak for you was no longer the preferred option. This was true in the careers of three public ﬁgures proﬁled in detail here: the suffragist Tang Qunying, the diplomat Lu Zhengxiang, and the politician Sun Yat-sen. All three were pioneers in their respective ﬁelds of social advocacy, diplomacy, and national politics. Each spoke out to advance his or her agenda. Venues for their public performances ranged widely, from Chinese student clubs in Tokyo in 1905, where Tang ﬁrst declaimed her support for patriotic and revolutionary causes, to peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, where Lu gave orations to fellow diplomats on behalf of the Qing dynasty and China, and to countless halls, temples, schools, and outdoor gathering places in and out of China, where Sun delivered his revolutionary message. Sometimes the performance site was the same, even if the message delivered and the response received were radically different. Tang Qunying, Lu Zhengxiang, and Sun Yat-sen each spoke at the Republican national legislature, or Senate (Canyi yuan), in 1912. Sun Yatsen, newly installed as president, attended the formal opening of the Senate in Nanjing on January 28 and gave an address warmly applauded by his fellow revolutionaries.1 Lu Zhengxiang, serving as prime minister in summer 1912, made a speech on July 18 at the Senate, by then relocated to Beijing, in which he bemoaned the bad habits of China’s political elite. The remarks, though heartfelt, were so poorly received that they helped drive Lu from ofﬁce. Tang Qunying also spoke—or rather shouted—on the ﬂoor of the Nanjing Senate, on March 19, after forcing her way into the chamber waving a pistol and leading a band of angry suffragists. The Senate, as a republican institution, was the scene of many other speeches and debates in 1912 conducted in atmospheres ranging from decorous and sleepy to incendiary and violent. These public encounters

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among the national elite mirrored the measured discourse and noisy tumult then occurring in native-place lodges, party headquarters, public parks, school dormitories, and faculty lounges throughout the country. Republicanism had not yet struck deep roots. As one student of the period put it, political organizations like parties, clubs, and societies ﬂoated “like duckweed” on the surface of politics.2 At the same time, though often improvised and simply structured, the resulting political performances constituted a growing and pervading presence that colored and shaped public life. In a 1929 primer on the new phenomenon of political oratory Mu Jinyuan insisted that nowadays “everyone must hold meetings (kaihui) and those who hold meetings must make speeches.”3 Republics by their nature are less than democratic. Leaders, including those in polities with deeper cultural commitments to popular sovereignty and political equality than China, spend a great deal of time attempting to ﬁx the game of politics in favor of incumbency of person and class.4 In China in 1912 the republican political game had only just begun to be tested for its strengths and weaknesses in admitting citizens to play a genuine role in affairs of state or in maintaining the power of the few. Speeches were given, elections held, and issues debated in the press. At the same time, politicians were assassinated, speakers driven from the stage, and dissent stiﬂed by political threats and violence. One objection to taking the notion of “Republican China” seriously is that, whether conceived of narrowly as a regime or more broadly as a political culture, the era seemed to be dominated by Chinese traditions and foreign additions that made genuine political equality nearly impossible. There is no doubt that antirepublican forces were in play. Montesquieu once observed that England was a nation “where the republic hides under the form of a monarchy.”5 Given the likes of Yuan Shikai and other power holders impatient with rule of law and skeptical of popular sovereignty, the Chinese Republic seemed to offer the reverse: an “emperorism” or “monarchism” (huangquan zhuyi) concealed within bodies such as a senate often cowed by military strongmen or in roles like that of citizens who sometimes acted more like subjects.6 Add to this the wellknown hostility right-wing nationalists and left-wing communists show toward procedural and representative democracy, and what republicanism remained after the rise of autocrats writ large, like Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong, or small, like local power holders in provinces, towns, and villages, presumably succumbed to a common elite ambition to control nearly everything a citizen might say or do. Nonetheless, Republican China was republican. Not only republican

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to be sure. Traditional ideas about political authority and leadership endured. Chinese republicanism absorbed key elements of traditional political thinking, for example, the notion that the unity of government and people should be absolute.7 The difference was that republicanism by its nature must test this bond. Discomfort with scenes of chaos in a parliamentary chamber or a meeting hall did not prevent parties from competing, or citizens from using moments on the political stage to attack opponents. After the reorganization of the Nationalist Party along Bolshevik or party-state lines in 1924, Leninism with its commitment to top-down control of political life became the operational code for both the Nationalist and Communist Parties.8 Nationalists and Communists agreed that open political competition denied the country the unity needed to counter imperialism and solve China’s internal problems. Communists also argued that mere political equality alone could not supply social and economic justice. When suffragists allied with the Nationalists demanded the vote for women in 1912, they meant educated women, not illiterate or poor compatriots of either sex.9 In the 1920s the Communist Xiang Jingyu, while acknowledging her debt to women who ﬁrst spoke out in public about such issues, criticized suffragists for their belief that sitting alongside men in the parliamentary “pigsties of the capital and the provinces” would advance the cause of all women or China.10 Nonetheless, Nationalists and Communists, from Sun Yat-sen on down, cut their political teeth on open, competitive, and republican politics. They lived political lives of speech making, debating, passing resolutions, petitioning, protesting, pamphleteering, and running meetings that numbered adversaries as well as allies among the participants. Even Chiang Kai-shek, with a military career in which giving and taking orders rather than debating them was the rule, while a student in Tokyo from 1908 to 1911 was exposed to republican ideas in the radical expatriate and Shanghai newspapers he read and in his friendships with revolutionary publicists like Dai Jitao.11 When he returned to Tokyo for further study in 1912 Chiang founded his own journal, the Army Voice Magazine (Junsheng zazhi).12 A republican more by association than deep political principle, Chiang had quickly returned to China upon hearing word of the 1911 Wuchang Uprising, and he fought for the new Republic.13 When Sun, Chiang, and Mao and their contemporaries became political leaders, they did not so much turn their backs on the republican politics of their youth and middle age as absorb the repertoire into their Leninist regimes. Speech making (yanshuo or yanjiang) became re-

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port giving (baogao). Voting was for party-vetted candidates and legislation only. Published writings were censored. Mass assemblies were choreographed and controlled. They and their subordinates called and ran all the meetings to the point that by the 1950s, kaihui, once the hallmark of citizen activism, became the object of satire as an empty and mindless bureaucratic ritual. In Li Zhao’s 1955 play, “Busy Going to Meetings” (Kaihui mang) a self-important midlevel Communist ofﬁcial named Zheng Ruzhi proudly presents himself as a “professional kaihui expert” schooled in “the most democratic way of solving problems [and one that, in formal Leninist terms, is] both democratic and centralized.”14 When Zheng’s three-year-old son is asked what his father does, the little boy answers, “He goes to meetings.” And so, by then, did the whole country. However, as democratic revolutions of the twentieth century have shown, under a republic each of these antidemocratic and bureaucratic transformations is reversible. This was the case in Eastern Europe in 1989, the Soviet Union in 1991, and Taiwan in 1988. China in the democracy movement of 1989 was “almost” this kind of revolution.15 In a mild but telling tremor that preﬁgured the 1989 upheaval, a vice mayor of Beijing asked a group of Peking University students on mandated summer military training in 1987 a rhetorical question: “Military training must be very interesting?” He received in reply from one student the unwelcome citizen-to-citizen answer, “It’s a waste of time.” Shen Tong, a future participant in the Democracy Movement, recalled, “We did everything we could to hold back our laughter. I hugged my knees and buried my face in my arms. Other people’s shoulders were shaking. The vice mayor didn’t know what to say.”16 A social technology of citizenship built from meetings, assemblies, reports, voting, and oral, written, and symbolic communication pitched to audiences sitting in judgment of what they see and hear may look in certain cases politically hardwired for democracy or dictatorship alone.17 Political language can be “formalized” or fortiﬁed in ways that make difﬁcult a challenge to an approved catchphrase like “people’s democratic dictatorship.”18 As Vaclav Havel pointed out for the case of “post-totalitarian” Communist systems like Czechoslovakia’s, the effect is basic to “the entire power structure.” “[It] integrates its communication system and makes possible the internal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. It is rather like a collection of trafﬁc signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure.”19 However, such sloganeering, and an enabling circuitry of ofﬁcial media, indoctrination ses-

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sions, and surveillance, can also include a set of rhetorical switches, not easily pushed or pulled one way or the other but within reach of citizens nonetheless. One day, in Havel’s famous illustration, a green grocer takes down the “Workers of the World, Unite” sign at the shop where he works and the “directional signs” begin to shift.20 For every “disciplinary technology” deployed, alternative “procedures and ruses” invariably emerge to form an “antidiscipline.”21 Speaking to fellow citizens as if they agree with you tests the premise. Boos, instead of applause, that surprised the Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu at the center of Bucharest on December 21, 1989, at a planned and choreographed “pro-government” rally can turn ceremonies of absolutist power into moments of resistance and the beginnings of reform or revolution. China’s “harsh monologue of political orthodoxy” was subtly revised by pressures for dialogue (duihua) that began as educational reforms in the 1980s and then surfaced in spring 1989 in events like a televised corrosive duihua between hard-liner Li Peng and student leader and hunger striker Wuer Kaixi, giving viewers “the unprecedented spectacle of a twenty-one-year-old student in a pair of pajamas dressing down the premier of China.”22 A precondition for such reversals, commonplace in China in the immediate aftermath of the 1911 Revolution, is the political equality idealized by modern citizenship. The force of such power “inversions” lies not only in their improvisational and tactical nature—as the “art” or “weapon” of the weak—but also in claims to possess and repossess the strategic arts and weapons of the strong.23 Debate and dialogue practiced by citizens can short-circuit disciplinary technologies of persuasion and propaganda directed at citizens but only if the forms of republicanism, however dormant or emptied, exist to be awakened and ﬁlled. The boos of a Romanian student or the scolding by a Chinese student may have roots in everyday arts of resistance described by Michel de Certeau, like “writing a love letter on ‘company time,’ ” or in the “hidden transcripts” of mockery and criticism contained in peasant proverbs analyzed by James Scott.24 Making these sentiments and transcripts public requires, by contrast, reclaiming the common ground of citizenship, a maneuver that can turn tactics of resistance into transformative strategies or, as the events of June 4, 1989, amply demonstrated, repression dedicated to preventing change. Leninism as a peculiarly efﬁcient political and social technology of control helps explain how Communists, and Leninist Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, were able to turn a politically lively Republican China into totalitarian and authoritarian polities. An exclusive focus on top-down

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motions of leadership and governance has a harder time explaining why debate, dissent, and a spontaneous public life have periodically returned in every decade of Communist rule since 1949 and, in the case of Taiwan, ﬁnally led to the transformation of Chiang Kai-shek’s police state into a democratic republic. Hong Kong, with its colonial and neocolonial institutions, has been poised on the edge of such a transformation for the past twenty years. One possibility is the “hydraulic” one that posits that if you put enough pressure on people, they will push back, even against a highly repressive government.25 The unrestrained state undoes itself by being too powerful for its own good. This can help explain the intensity of an outburst but is less well suited to explaining dissent that is principled and protracted. Another explanation for the survival and revival of republican politics is the role played by a leader like Mao in periodically knocking the pins out from under party control and inciting those who had been silent to speak out. Mao’s charisma contributed to the “Hundred Flowers” episode of 1956 when Mao at ﬁrst invited and then suppressed dissent among students and intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s when Mao called students to revolutionary action against the Communist Party. In the case of the Hundred Flowers episode, Mao unleashed and then suppressed dissent in part by the device of ﬁrst “suspending” formulations like “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “class struggle” and then reimposing them when the criticism that erupted hit too close to home.26 By permitting political opposition on Taiwan shortly before his death in 1988, Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo demonstrated how leadership can help release latent republican and democratic forces. However, the presence or absence of charismatic or transformative leadership does not fully explain the democracy movements that followed Mao’s death.27 Nor can this factor account for a robust public and political life in China before Mao’s rise or on Taiwan long after Chiang Ching-kuo’s death. In addition, memories of dissent by a single iconoclast like the writer Lu Xun, an entire generation like the student protesters of May 4, 1919, or Taiwanese who witnessed violent suppression of the February 28, 1947, protest against Nationalist rule can also incite and inspire political speech and action. The same is true for the introduction or reintroduction of ideas from abroad—republicanism, democracy, or human rights. However, memory and borrowed ideas alone, without the opportunity and means to speak and act, offer an incomplete path to the place and moment where and when the playing ﬁeld of politics levels off enough to permit political accountability and participation.

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Under certain conditions reports become speeches again, censored materials come out of the drawer, formalized language is mocked and discarded, a free show of hands is taken, and spontaneous meetings and assemblies take place. Patterns of control are interrupted and subverted by everyday acts of resistance. The revival of a republican repertoire forged early in the twentieth century is possible in China because the forms were preserved along with the core value of citizenship in the rhetoric and in the institutional practices of regimes themselves. After Yuan Shikai’s failure to reanimate monarchy, China faced not the prospect of imperial revival but rather the periodic return of republicanism and active citizenship, helped along by the irresistible elite compulsion to speak to the people as if their opinions mattered. In the original Chinese Republic some basic republican features were present while others were not. First, like other republics, the Chinese Republic was republican above all because it was not a monarchy. This was by clear choice. The exiled reformer Kang Youwei favored a constitutional monarchy, as did the Qing itself in the last few years of the dynasty, but this option was forcefully rejected in the 1911 Revolution in favor of a republic. Opposition to rule by monarchs, and by extension any titled or privileged order, is the ﬁrst principle of republicanism. Second, the rhetoric of revolution in China found a touchstone in the republican cry for freedom over slavery.28 Admittedly, many Chinese ﬁrst favored a republic for this reason out of racial hatred for the Manchus, who, they claimed, had enslaved Chinese in their seventeenth-century conquest.29 One of Sun Yat-sen’s more creative political maneuvers was to foster anti-Manchuism as racially charged resistance to enslavement and then channel these rebel sentiments into republican ideology. This antislavery rhetoric endured, broadened, and deepened. While no longer “slaves” of Manchu rulers, Chinese still found themselves under the “semicolonial” domination of the “Great Powers” and therefore, in Sun’s words,“slaves of more than ten masters.”30 Politically active women who experienced and condemned patriarchy as a form of slavery felt the same need to resist domination and were consequently among the most ardent republicans. “If we have no rights, we are slaves; if we have no freedom, then we are imprisoned,” one advocate for women wrote in 1904.31 Iconoclasts like the future Communist Party founder, Chen Duxiu, extended this republican critique to a wholesale condemnation in 1915 of traditional values like “loyalty, ﬁlial piety, and chastity” as “a slavery mentality that makes oneself subordinate to others.”32 Third, and consistent with the republican call for freedom against slavery, is the general im-

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pulse to resist subordination and a willingness “to look others in the eye.”33 The rapid disappearance of the kowtow, or full prostration, as a political gesture in favor of a standing bow or doff of a hat was an immediate indication that the nature of authority had changed.34 The political record of the early Republic contains plentiful examples of men and women striking this kind of deﬁant, self-possessed pose. One could still choose to avoid the gaze of one’s superior or ﬁnd other means of signaling a subject status, but this was now, for an expanding circle of Chinese, a choice one made. Finally, citizenship, not only as an idealized state of mobilized support for the Chinese nation, but also as a pattern of individual and group activism, took hold on an everyday basis. As beﬁt a culture that assumed individuals were fundamentally social beings, meetings with comrades, colleagues, and coworkers became the distinctive foundation of political, professional, and occupational life. Groups accustomed to meetings and assemblies as a cultural inheritance, like merchant, craft, and native-place guilds, found the practice becoming more formal, codiﬁed, and, in some cases, democratic. Others, like university students and advocacy groups, took the mandate to formally organize, meet, vote in leaders, and chart an agenda as the natural order of things among citizens. The areas where the Chinese Republic was least republican were critically important ones: electing political representatives to serve in national institutions and sustaining free and open political debate. After a national election in winter 1912–13 in which 40 million men, or one out of every ﬁve males, participated, political representation shifted from the selection of leaders by voters or electors in local assemblies to self-selection by ofﬁcials, militarists, and political party leaders.35 Voting continued sporadically at the provincial and local levels, and not only for government ofﬁce but also in guilds, chambers of commerce, professional societies, and unions, to select leaders or decide issues. In many instances electoral rules were manipulated by a cabal of merchants, labor bosses, or other social elites.36 However, elections did inject uncertainty and accountability into such bodies sufﬁcient on occasion to oust incumbents.37 Despite periodic repression by national and local governments and warlord generals, actions like giving or attending a speech, participating in a boycott or protest, writing or signing a petition, or sending an open telegram or letter to the editor became ever more widely available. The failure to sustain elections as a secure institutional practice harmed ﬂedgling republican institutions. In 1912 and 1913 the Senate as a representative republican body peaked in a crescendo of activism and in-

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ﬂuence. When succeeding assemblies ceased being taken seriously, the Republic suffered a decided blow to its legitimacy. Into the gap ﬂowed the national leadership of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong as well as other leaders and organizations. The Nationalist and Communist political parties claimed to represent all Chinese even in the absence of electoral mandates, but so did nationally organized merchants, bankers, students, doctors, workers, and other groups in their respective professions and occupations. Claims to represent the nation absent the kind of clear certiﬁcation elections can supply made public displays of authority and authenticity even more important as continuous tests and proofs of legitimacy. Modern China remained republican despite the fact that republicanism did not become “the kind of exalted political ideal” found elsewhere with the power to trump other ideologies and traditions.38 This was not for lack of trying by committed republicans like Sun Yat-sen. Sun by 1901 had declared that establishing a republic in China was a prime objective of the revolution.39 His very name became synonymous with the word Republic.40 Sun never wavered in his republicanism or succumbed to imperial fantasies about his own role as a leader. In his myriad recorded speeches and writings, Sun used the word republic (minguo or gonghe guo) slightly more often than revolution or even China.41 Commentators noticed the constancy of Sun’s republican loyalties even as they cast doubt on the commitments of rival leaders. An editorialist argued in 1924 that while other leaders “take serving the people as their mantra and chant abstractly like an emperor ten thousand miles away,” Sun sincerely believed in the Republic.42 Evidence of the manifest and latent power of republicanism in modern Chinese history encourages a rethinking of the Republican period. The standard story is that the 1911 Revolution toppled one set of imperial vintage institutions and replaced these with a new republican set that did not work. Republicans like Sun’s young colleague Song Jiaoren tried and failed to consolidate a politics of parties, parliament, and elections. Their failures were clear for all to see. For his trouble Song lost his life in 1913 to assassins dispatched by the autocrat Yuan Shikai. Sun Yatsen heralded the Chinese Republic and was then obliged to give up the presidency to Yuan even before national elections were held. Disappointment with the immediate outcome of the 1911 Revolution led to a number of desperate acts ranging from armed revolt by revolutionaries against Yuan’s debased Republic in 1913 and Yuan’s own brief turn as emperor in 1915–16 to the dramatic rise of a patriotic movement poli-

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tics, pioneered by students in the 1919 May Fourth Movement and soon joined by all segments of urban society. Under the viselike grip of imperialism on the one side and internal protest and rebellion on the other, a hardened and repressive Leninist regime emerged in the 1920s, led ﬁrst by the Nationalists and then by the Communist Party. The new regime struggled to suppress, co-opt, or harness popular movements while building a state unencumbered by democracy. However, a history of dueling autocratic institutions and democratic movements fails to capture the great middle range of civic life in Republican China where the meanings of citizenship, patriotism, rights, and justice were hammered out even as early Republican institutions faltered and Leninist regimes struggled to ﬁnd their footing. A premise of this book is that political leadership, despite and because of asymmetries of power and authority, is a relational and collaborative venture in which what a leader does or says draws on the details of social and cultural life, even as the lives of followers are shaped by the leader’s example and agenda. Making these kinds of connections was a matter of great urgency in early-twentieth-century China. Since the revolution was powered in good part by the pursuit of a better China, the worse government became in terms of weakness, corruption, and brutality, the greater the demand for the arts and institutions of active leadership and citizenship. The Chinese Republic failed in ways that permitted many of its core values and practices to survive. Revolutions are made, at least in part, by individuals who in the heat of the moment are believed to mean what they say and who carry others along with them. Such meanings and modes of expression can spread like wildﬁre and burn into individual and collective identities as people come to believe in and perform them. All that is required for this to happen is the capacity to replicate stirring moments, tuned to local personalities, issues, and other circumstances, from point to point on the political landscape and take possession of the reasoning and emotions that result by making them each person’s “inside property.”43 Neither the Nationalists nor the Communists achieved anything like a fully disciplined party, army, or government until the late 1920s. Neither was in a position to impose a way of political life—much less an agreed upon right way of political life or political culture—on the larger population until later than that, and only then in parts of the country they ﬁrmly controlled.44 What were the Chinese people doing in the intervening twenty to forty years? In 1913 a young American journalist, Gardner L. Harding, interviewed Sun Yat-sen and Tang Qunying and had

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Introduction

occasion to observe Lu Zhengxiang and other members of the new Republican political class in action. Harding wrote in reply to the notion that the Chinese Revolution was over almost as soon as it began, “I do not believe that the Chinese Revolution has failed, for I do not believe that it is ﬁnished.”45 Hu Shi, philosopher, reformer, and political liberal, quoted the remark with approval in his own stinging attack on Yuan Shikai’s imperial adventure.46 The Chinese Revolution was many things, from bloodletting to manifesto writing and from training soldiers to learning how to run a meeting. From the battleﬁeld to the provincial lodge or student dormitory, this great political process was always rhetorical, and not in the sense of “just words”—though the desire to transform words into deeds was intense and pervasive—but in the sense of words that expressed larger arguments, deep feelings, and powerful interests. In an earlier study of Republican politics, I found that conventional ideas about the relationship between political elites and ordinary people like the rickshaw pullers of Beijing seriously overestimated the ability of leaders to impose their will on the “masses” and underestimated the capacity of these often “nameless” individuals to shape their political world, to sometimes dramatic and riotous effect.47 This book, a social and cultural history of the politically famous and almost famous, makes it clear that elites can riot too, even as they exert the more structured inﬂuence on fellow citizens that justiﬁes use of the term leadership to describe the speaking parts they played in helping create, undermine, and sustain a Chinese Republic.

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Chapter 1

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Political Travelers in a Long Revolution The Chinese Revolution was remarkable for lasting so long and covering so much territory in and out of China. Conventionally thought to commence with the Opium War (1839–42) and end with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the revolution has few rivals as a protracted conﬂict. Among them might be the French Revolution, with its ﬁve Republics to 1958, and the American Revolution, understood as extending through the Civil War of 1861–65 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even a more restrictive bracketing of events requires at least four or ﬁve decades to tell the story of the collapse of an empire and the building of a new Chinese nation. This was a revolution revolutionaries, if they were lucky, grew old in. Tang Qunying was born in 1871, joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolution against the Qing dynasty in 1905 in Japan as a young widow and student, and struggled for women’s rights and suffrage throughout the 1910s and 1920s. By the mid-1930s, and in her sixties, as Mao Zedong and the Communists on their Long March yet again eluded annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, Tang was living in Nanjing on a meager sinecure provided by the Nationalist government to her as a retired revolutionary. She grew annoyed when an elite visitor would drop by solely to have a photograph taken with her as a heroine of the nowlong-past 1911 Revolution. After all, the goal of women’s suffrage, like many other revolutionary objectives, had not been reached. As she remarked to her adopted son’s wife with a deep sigh, “These people are so 13

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different. The nation and people, and the liberation of women, are all now forgotten. All they think and talk about are their own creature comforts. They fritter away their days at the card table and then suddenly turn up in front of me showing off their high positions. This is really too shameful and sad.”1 As a woman who had led an active political life as terrorist, secret agent, propagandist, soldier, editor, educator, and organizer, Tang was understandably vexed by what appeared to be a lull in the revolution, if not its end. Tang Qunying died in June 1937, a month before the Japanese invasion of North China that would eventually help propel the Communists to power and continue the revolution and a year after the Nanjing government included universal male and female suffrage in its draft constitution.2 The Chinese Revolution also traversed a geographic expanse to rival in magnitude its longevity as a historical process. The landscape of its politics was vast not only because Qing conquests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries doubled the size of the preceding Ming dynasty, bequeathing a gigantism only a few nations exhibit, but also because critical sites of the revolution extended far beyond China’s borders, to East and Southeast Asia, America and Europe. As political lives unfolded in a long revolution, they also crossed boundaries of hometown or village, province, country, and continent. The history of revolutionary thought and action winds through exile and immigrant communities in cities like Tokyo and San Francisco, work, study, and training experiences in Lyon, New York, and Moscow, and diplomatic postings in Paris and St. Petersburg. Seeds of revolutionary thinking about rights and social justice were sown in China by returning ofﬁcials, students, workers, and merchants, with the help of foreign visitors like globe-trotting suffragists and Comintern agents. An inveterate traveler by force of circumstance as a political refugee twice, from 1895 to 1911 and from 1913 to 1916, and also by choice and conviction as a political campaigner, Sun Yat-sen eventually found travel so vital to his purposes that he declared it a “necessity” for everyone along with “food, clothing and shelter.”3 Sun would have been lost without steamships and trains. He traveled to raise money and plot revolution but also to collect slogans and insights for the struggle back home. Returning to China in 1911, Sun continued to journey around the country by train, boat, and the occasional sedan chair. Sun was not alone in embracing what Marie-Claire Bergère has termed in his case “extreme geographic mobility” as a political response to the vastness of China it-

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self, the expanse of “Greater China” in diaspora, and the pressing fact of a global context for national and even local events.4 The accelerated opening up of China to the world brought change in every area of life. A 1918 essay titled “The Woman Problem” in the progressive journal New Youth noted that because of the “dense networks of transportation and communication” that now bound the world as one, “what is happening in European societies today will happen in our society tomorrow.”5 With transoceanic telegraph lines in operation, tomorrow might actually mean the next day if not week, month, or year.6 By the 1880s Shanghai was served by most international steamship lines.7 The reciprocal opening up of the world to Chinese with the means and motivation to travel made geographic mobility a stimulus to political thought and a credential that might induce others less traveled to agree with you. Leaving home, and returning changed, helped make the case for a New China. Upon his return to his home province of Hunan in 1913 after ten years of study in Japan, Britain, and Germany, the scholar Yang Changji, Mao’s college teacher and the father of his future wife, Yang Kaihui, wrote an article for the local Changsha magazine Public Word titled “My Opinions on Reforming Society.”8 Yang noted that as a result of the political revolution that took place while he was away in Tokyo, Aberdeen, and Berlin, “China has experienced tremendous change in the transformation of its political system into a republic, the profound nature of which can hardly be expressed.” He cited the end of the imperial examination system, cutting of Manchu-style queues on men and boys, banning of foot binding for girls, and suppression of opium. Yang still retained powerful attachments to Confucian thought and criticized what he saw as excessive Western reliance on self-interest in ethical matters.9 Yang also embraced the urgent need for social change and attacked customs like arranged marriage and concubinage.10 Pressing ahead on these fronts “loudly” was needed in order to “reach the ears of those who are still deaf.”“Recently,”Yang wrote,“I have lived and traveled in several countries both East and West, asking after customs and examining how customs change. There is a great beneﬁt in doing so since the way change actually takes place is through international communication. By comparing customs, the good and the bad become visible.”11 The good in the West for Yang included fundamentals like free speech and small pleasures like not having family members read your mail. The bad in China ranged from poor public hygiene to fellow scholars failing to return borrowed books. In Changsha one can visit the teacher’s college where Yang Changji

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held forth as the “Confucius of First Normal” and Mao Zedong was his student.12 There are also less prominent historical sites like a small museum in a turn-of-the-century house dedicated to another Hunan native, Li Fuchun. One of the architects of the new socialist economy of the 1950s, Li spent 1919 to 1924 in France where he joined the Chinese Communist Party and, brieﬂy, in the Soviet Union studying revolution.13 Among the exhibits in the museum are postcards Li sent from Paris, a leather document case from his post-1949 party service, eyeglasses, and a large map titled “The Tracks of Li Fuchun’s Life.” On the map one can follow Li from his birth in Changsha to journeys throughout China, including a visit to Beijing to study French, his participation in the Long March, and battles in Northeast China during the ﬁnal civil war with the Nationalists in the late 1940s. Once he took his place in the central bureaucracy in the 1950s, aside from a diplomatic visit to Moscow in 1952, plotting out Li’s life becomes a matter of tracking his ascent through ministries in Beijing rather than charting domestic and international travels.14 Li’s early sojourns in Paris and Moscow are represented by a small inset map. Such cartographic devices typically show a detail of a larger map, like the city plan of Changsha on a map of Hunan Province. Here, instead, geographic details of places once remote and unfamiliar, like France and Russia, ﬁnd their way onto a map of China. Even Mao Zedong, whose “tracks” did not lead out of China until his 1950 mission to Moscow to meet Stalin, as a young man began a walk through ﬁve counties of Hunan after he read about two other students who journeyed on foot all the way to Tibet.15 Later Mao traveled widely in China not only on revolutionary business but also for more personal reasons, to visit the hometown of Confucius in Shandong Province as a tourist and to Beijing to woo Yang Kaihui.16 As Sun Yat-sen intuited early in his career, China’s gigantic size and poorly defended borders represented challenges to national governance but also opportunities for individual growth and political careers. Documenting and interpreting the movement of early-twentieth-century politicians and activists requires attention to these global details. As a recent study of the Republic’s place in the world suggests, this was, for many, especially men and women of ambition, an “age of openness.”17 In Republican China, “everything important had an international dimension.”18 This moving and globalized picture of revolutionary politics-in-themaking is at odds with the by now discredited stereotype of Chinese as “earthbound tillers.”19 In a revolutionary era one expects individuals,

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ideas, and organizations to be set in motion as tradition is uprooted. In fact, late imperial China was already moving according to its own rhythms. Scholars traveled to attend school, take the ofﬁcial examination, and assume ofﬁce in the capital or a distant province. Merchants journeyed far in search of proﬁts. Though ordinary people might wish to remain on ancestral lands, they were often forced to move by war, natural disaster, or economic distress.20 Even relatively earthbound farmers moved around quite a bit within the circuits of the market towns that surrounded them.21 Political activists in the modern era did blaze some new trails—to Moscow, for example, for training in Marxism—but they also followed the well-worn tracks of ofﬁcials and their agents, merchants, laborers, and mendicants of the imperial era while acquiring, reﬁning, and delivering their political message at an ever-accelerating pace. Wen-hsin Yeh has shown how young people from provincial backwaters were radicalized in their journeys as students from conservative rural communities to provincial capitals like Hangzhou, then on to Beijing and Shanghai to study and work in the epicenters of intellectual and political upheaval.22 The resulting juxtaposition of remembered landscapes and new vistas encouraged a complex rethinking of values. Some youths took up avantgarde ideas like anarchism, liberalism, and communism not only for novelty’s sake but also, like Yang Changji, “out of a fundamentalist ardor to salvage the ethical intent of the Confucianism they had imbibed in their family and village schools.”23 New uses for older travel routes and social expectations as to who would be out and about on them led to artful dodges and comic missteps. During one of her pre-1911 revolutionary missions in rural Hunan Tang Qunying disguised herself as an itinerant tea picker in order to misdirect Qing troops.24 Not shedding the clothes and demeanor of her feminist persona would have been a giveaway to ofﬁcials on the lookout for revolutionaries. By contrast, when the Communist revolutionary Peng Pai set out one day in 1921 full of more hope than guile to organize the peasants of his home province of Guangdong, “wearing a student-style Western white suit and solid white cap,” he was mistaken for a tax collector by a vigilant, and world-wise, farmer.25 The dynamic landscapes of old and new China invited one to blend in, or stand out. Courtesy of railways and steamboats, political cadre often moved more quickly and farther than had been possible in the past, and so did their counterparts in business and other ﬁelds.26 Any moment, large or small, in the long and expansive Chinese Revolution forms a knot of inﬂuences

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and consequences that leads in many directions: backward and forward in time and to and from a given point on the map. The event chosen to anchor this book is a brief but dramatic moment in the early history of the Chinese Republic: a public ﬁght over women’s rights during the founding of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) in Beijing on August 25, 1912. The political convention is important enough to merit a small stone monument in the now-restored Huguang NativePlace Lodge (Huguang huiguan) where it took place and brief mention in histories of the period.27 The larger signiﬁcance of the encounter arises from the very ordinariness of the participants’ efforts to grasp and guide an unﬁnished revolution over cultural ground at once familiar and strikingly new. The knotted inﬂuences of history and geography meant there was more than a little London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and rural Hunan in the hall that day, as well as echoes of Rousseau, Mencius, Mencius’s mother, Mulan the Woman Warrior, and Robert’s Rules of Order. Chapters 2 and 4 survey the evolving political culture of early-twentieth-century China as a pattern of old and new and Chinese and foreign ideas and feelings about power and authority that together made political navigation from empire to nation, and monarchy to republic, so challenging. The three individuals chosen to represent Republican politics in summer 1912 are proﬁled in chapters 3, 5, and 6. The suffragist Tang Qunying fought hard for rights for women with the support of thousands of women and not a few men who believed the Chinese Republic ought to include both sexes as full citizens. Classically educated and politically radical, she was gifted in areas as diverse as bomb making, poetry, battleﬁeld tactics, and public speaking. Tang Qunying had imperfectly bound feet, a quick temper, and a ﬁerce loyalty to comrades and revolutionary ideals. The Qing diplomat Lu Zhengxiang as a prime minister of the young Republic held the kind of high ofﬁcial position denied Tang. Lu’s experiences as civil servant and politician in the early Republic were as typical in their turbulent course as he was unusual in his deep Catholic faith, fastidious professionalism, and cosmopolitan sensibility. He lost the post of prime minister, the highest ofﬁce he held in his long career, as a result of the corrosive and contentious nature of public life and his own surprising missteps. As one of the most important political ﬁgures of China’s twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen is a tricky subject for the biographer on account of his mercurial behavior, seemingly facile approach to politics, and ability to inﬂuence nearly all aspects of modern Chinese politics both despite and because of his slight record as actual ruler of

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China. Being the “good father” ﬁgure of a Republic he never really commanded contrasted with the records of his more violent and powerful successors and imitators Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.28 Sun Yat-sen knew Tang Qunying well as a loyal revolutionary comrade and political thorn in his and his party’s side on the subject of women’s rights. Sun and Tang were much alike in their rhetorical styles of leadership and ability to attract public attention. Together, their lives as political equals, who were attached by bonds of loyalty and common cause but not by romance or marriage, offer an opportunity to examine shared and separate experiences of men and women in the Chinese Revolution. Sun and Lu Zhengxiang met in late August 1912 in the aftermath of the Nationalist Party convention and in the midst of Lu’s political ordeal. Sun knew Lu well enough as a fellow political actor on the national stage to upbraid him personally during that encounter for a lack of toughness and fortitude as a leader. Both men exempliﬁed geographic mobility and political ﬂexibility, and each built a career on the political and cultural fault lines that ran between China and the outside world. Fighting a long revolution took levels of courage, cunning, and endurance on the part of men and women like Tang, Lu, and Sun that made wavering and faltering an occupational hazard and stubborn determination in deﬁance of reason a sometimes unwelcome and uncomfortable virtue. And so, on a warm summer morning, August 25, 1912, in the ﬁrst year of the Chinese Republic, and also the thirteenth day of the seventh lunar month of the Renzi year of the water rat that began on February 18, in the forty-ninth year in the sixty-year cycle of heavenly stems and earthly branches that commenced in 1864 and would be completed in 1924, three women—Tang Qunying, Shen Peizhen, and Wang Changguo—rushed the stage of the Huguang Lodge ceremonial hall in Beijing where Sun Yat-sen had just spoken and threw the inaugural convention of the Nationalist Party into turmoil.29 August 25 was also a Sunday according to the Western calendar, a day of rest for government ofﬁcials and foreigners and a convenient time for the new political classes of the capital to assemble.30 By their disruptive actions and angry words, the women, members in good standing of the about-to-be-declared Nationalist Party and its immediate predecessor, the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui), made it clear they felt betrayed by their comrades. The new Nationalists, led by the young and charismatic male politician Song Jiaoren, had abandoned an earlier commitment to equal rights for women in a bid to win

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the support of conservative allies in the Senate. Shen Peizhen and Tang Qunying slapped Song, who happened to be onstage at the time, hard in the face with their fans.31 The women denounced Song’s and their party’s actions before an audience of a thousand party members, dignitaries, reporters, and other spectators. Unable to restore order, Zhang Ji, a fellow veteran revolutionary and the convention chair, adjourned the meeting until the afternoon. Even with this respite, the war of words, and fans, continued. The day’s business concluded with votes that conﬁrmed the defeat of women’s rights as a party principle and with a long oration by Sun Yat-sen announcing support for the change in policy that so angered Tang Qunying and her fellow suffragists. Sun also promised that one day women in China would have the right to vote. Women played a surprisingly important role in the early stages of the revolution. Their proﬁle was high partly because political women stood out as a striking and controversial manifestation of revolutionary politics. Press accounts of the period “were obsessed with the mere sight of women in public spaces and their personal styles and behavior.”32 Women were carefully counted at such events (“40 to 50” out of 1,000 participants in the Nationalist convention according to one newspaper).33 The length of their hair and style of clothes was noted. Short hair (jianfa) signaled radicalism in Beijing just as it might in New York, Tokyo, or London. In the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution young women organized Women’s Haircutting Societies (Funü jianfa hui) to the consternation of government ofﬁcials like Republican governor of Hunan, Liu Renxi, who was so affronted by this “weird thing, neither Chinese nor Western, neither male nor female,” that he ordered one young woman in Changsha who founded such a society to grow her hair back.34 The demand by women for full political rights and personal freedoms met resistance both from those who believed giving the vote to women was going too far and from those, like Sun Yat-sen, who were planning for a revolution long enough to eventually accommodate ever more radical ends. Women ﬁnally were able to vote at the national level and serve in the national legislature only in 1947.35 By that time a Chinese citizen’s ballot had ceased to have much value. For Nationalist Party members, constitutional democracy and meaningful voting for men and women arrived only in 1996, an octogenarian life span later, with the election of the Nationalist leader Lee Teng-hui as president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, forty-seven years after the defeated Nationalists were driven from the mainland by the Communists. In 1912 radical ideas like democracy, social justice, and China becoming a great power loomed large

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against a horizon for their realization that receded as revolutionaries moved toward it. Being a revolutionary meant carrying on in the face of work that might not be ﬁnished in your lifetime.

A Liquid Age What happened in Beijing on August 25, 1912, marked one of many revolutionary beginnings and also the culmination of a complex set of inherited pressures and inﬂuences. The past in different forms and guises was very much present among Chinese bent on change. Just as 1912 was still the Renzi year to most Chinese with water element associations that portended turbulence, so the disastrous Second Opium War was Gengshen 1860–61, the calamitous Sino-French War Jiashen 1884–85, the humiliating Sino-Japanese War Jiawu 1894–95, and the bloody and disorienting Boxer Uprising Gengzi 1900–1901.36 As Luke Kwong notes, “Almost inexplicably, events in recent memory had begun to stack up or accumulate, gathering a forward thrust toward the future.”37 The past was an enemy for some except by way of negative example and an ally for others who were convinced that only culturally Chinese solutions would work to solve the country’s crises. Yang Changji condemned certain traditions he found oppressive and held on to Confucian commitments to a politics of virtue. In effect, Yang proposed a coalition of past and present of a kind that made sense to many reformers and revolutionaries alike. Even so,“a new emphasis on the present moment” gained over the past as authority and mandate.38 As Kwong suggests, the future also became ever more vivid and compelling as a new awareness of “linear time” opened up wider possibilities for reform leading to progress. The mirroring and distorting effects of these temporal ﬁelds made for uncertain boundaries between past, present, and future. The past might stretch back thousands of years. Present time depended to a degree on which calendar one consulted. The future materialized out of elements of the past and present assembled as a projection of what one found good and bad about them both.39 Admittedly, the 1911 Revolution, together with the founding of the Chinese Republic in winter 1911–12, was one of those turning points in history that quickly seemed to many no real departure at all. A few months of violent conﬂict and the defection of key Qing ofﬁcials to the revolutionary side put an end to a two-thousand-year-old imperial tradition. This ending was widely acknowledged to be a great and unprecedented act. The Republic that followed failed to match this grand col-

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lapse with a convincing entrance of its own. In his inﬂuential ﬁctional account of the 1911 Revolution, Lu Xun has his hapless hero Ah Q complain, “This whole revolution business was a big disappointment. . . . [T]here ought to be more to it than this.”40 About the same time in the 1930s that Tang Qunying was having her morose thoughts about what happened to the revolution, the writer Lin Yutang concluded that 1911 had succeeded only as a “racial revolution” against the Manchus. The upheaval “blew an empire into powder,” leaving only “some ruins and debris and choking dust behind.”41 Hu Shi left China in 1910 for the United States and returned in 1917 with a B.A. from Cornell and a Ph.D. from Columbia.42 His reaction upon returning to China so changed himself was very different from that of Yang Changji. Hu had “left an imperial China and returned to a republican one”; but when he disembarked in Shanghai “he found to his dismay that his motherland was almost exactly the same as he had left it in 1910.”43 As the scholar and political reformer Liang Qichao summed up in one of the lively metaphors he was known for: “It [the 1911 Revolution] was like when you open a bottle of cold beer—the foam quickly bubbles up to the surface and appears awfully busy. But when the moment is over and the foam dissipates, it is still a cold bottle of beer.”44 In fact, the political energy Liang feared would evaporate survived by dispersing and pooling in the provinces or by ﬁnding a place in party politics, social life, and the state itself. The returns from abroad of individuals like Yang Changji, Hu Shi, Lin Yutang, Sun Yat-sen, and Liang Qichao, no matter what their mood or degree of excitement or skepticism, contributed to this energy. So did the charged atmosphere they came home to. Upon returning to China in 1912 after fourteen years of exile to the public acclaim he expected and deserved, Liang Qichao confessed privately that being a public ﬁgure was more taxing than he had bargained for: “The misery of socializing is absolutely beyond words. If one has to live such a life constantly, I wonder where the pleasures of life could be. . . . People here in the capital welcome me as if they were crazy. Every day I have to go to some three different gatherings.”45 Liang had long called for such politically excited social interaction as a pathway to citizenship. He attributed the failures of 1911 to the inability of the revolutionaries to forge strong enough ties with the people as citizens.46 However, even he had not fully anticipated the public demands of being Liang Qichao in Republican China. The Republic was failing in ways that made going back through the rubble impossible and going forward through dust and confusion a

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matter of continuous discussion and pressure. Political failure at the center paradoxically succeeded in widening and deepening a public life that stretched from the political elite to millions of citizens. The Chinese Republic, as a “series of inspirations, improvised upon a complete but tremendously vital confusion of ideas,” resisted coherent ordering.47 Some kind of Republic was here to stay even if what it meant to be a republican remained a work in progress, a kind of sprawling political bricolage, or “making do.”48 Winston Churchill, Liang Qichao’s contemporary and equal in the use of vivid political language, offered in writings on European and his own family history a metaphor that extends Liang’s ﬂuid and foam conceit in a helpful direction. Like many Chinese, Churchill thought and spoke of the past and present in coalitional terms. As a conservative, he was less enamored of a future that promised radical change. Churchill contrasted the position of his ambitious and capable ancestor Marlborough with that of Napoleon a century later as a difference between Marlborough being “only a servant in a liquid age, instead of a sovereign in a molten one.”“Napoleon could order, but Marlborough could never do more than persuade or cajole.”49 The two decades and more that surround 1912 in China were in this sense liquid rather than molten but trending toward a warmer brand of politics congenial to Napoleonic or Maoist ambitions and nation building, or what Sun Yat-sen called “construction” or “reconstruction” (jianshe). For the moment, as Liang Qichao put it in elegant, naturalistic terms, “The form of historical movement is like an excited body of water, in which the initial ripple is always followed by innumerable others.”50 The 1911 Revolution in China and its aftermath stimulated the reﬂections of scholars and writers and also produced popular summations like one simply picturing “the emperor overthrown and the queues cut.”51 The peaceful abdication in Beijing of Puyi brought the Qing dynasty to an end. The cutting of men’s queues all over China, some by choice and some at the point of a gun or the edge of a sword, symbolically severed the bond of loyalty between the Manchu Son of Heaven and his male subjects and their families. Some men escaped the scissors and kept their queues for years to come. Citizens not only cut their hair but also stopped kowtowing to political authority.52 Conveniently, and unlike the queue, kowtowing was a socially detachable practice that one could reject in public and maintain at home or in other nonpolitical settings like weddings or funerals.53 Despite delays in bringing customs up-to-date and the ability to com-

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partmentalize some changes, 1911–12 represented the end of an era in a deep and hard to plumb sense. Ancient institutions and time-honored customs began to disappear. A new political world opened up, though its dimensions and nature were less than clear as the weeks, months, and years passed. As Mary Rankin has observed, the revolution “gave old frameworks and integrative systems a sharp jolt from which they did not recover.”54 This was the intention of Sun Yat-sen, who supported replacing the monarchy with a republic precisely because he believed Chinese needed a “psychological jolt” in order to join the modern world.55 The founding of the Chinese Republic in Nanjing on January 1, 1912, the thirteenth day of the eleventh month by the old calendar and less than three months after the October 10, 1911, troop mutiny in Wuchang that triggered the revolution, was meant to signal a decisive political transformation. The place and the date of the founding were no accidents. A capital in Nanjing would break with the Qing use of Beijing as imperial center and align the launch of the Republic with the Ming founding of the last ethnically Han Chinese dynasty at Nanjing in 1368 (in 1421 the third Ming emperor moved the capital north to Beijing). To underline its hope for a new era, the revolutionary government in Nanjing also adopted the Western calendar on the last day of December 1911 and set the ﬁrst year of the Republic to begin on the ﬁrst day of January, designated now as China’s new New Year’s Day and the year 4,609 since the reign of the Yellow Emperor.56 Thus 1912 would be the “First Year of the Republic” (Minguo yuan), 1913 Year Two, and so on. The people and their Republic would now reign and number the years as emperors had done within each dynasty. Of all the bold proposals broached in 1912, deciding a new date and meaning for “Chinese New Year” just as Chinese families began to make traditional end of the lunar year preparations was among the most ambitious and overreaching. In their haste to be seen as victorious, the revolutionaries in Nanjing also declared China a republic before the Qing court accepted ﬁnal defeat. As a result China for nearly a month and a half had both an emperor and a president, a state of dual sovereignty indicative of confusion that reigned more securely than any single ruler or chief executive.57 Most Chinese did not even know the year in question was “1912.”58 World travelers like Liang Qichao of course did. Liang began using the Western dating system during a voyage to Hawaii in 1899 in a conscious embrace of cosmopolitanism.59 The revolutionary Zhang Binglin knew it was 1912 too but adamantly opposed adopting the new calendar as

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part of his ﬁerce defense of Chinese traditions.60 Any republic Zhang would support had to run on Chinese time. According to the old calendar, the ﬁrst weeks of the Republic still lay within the third year of Emperor Puyi’s Xuantong reign, the Xinhai year by heavenly stem and earthly branch. Accordingly, the more accurate, inclusive name for the “1911 Revolution” is the Chinese one: Xinhai Revolution (Xinhai geming). Xinhai was supposed to be the year of triumph that Gengshen, Jiashen, Jiawu, and Gengzi had not been. Not surprisingly, New Year’s Day in the ﬁrst year of the Republic for all but the most observant republicans still took place on regular schedule and according to the traditional dating system on February 18, 1912.61 The inertial force of Chinese time made itself felt. A week after announcement of the switch in calendars, Nanjing notiﬁed government agencies that merchants would be allowed to keep to the old calendar until the end of the Xinhai year.62 Commerce and manufacturing, planting and harvesting, the settling of debts, and selecting auspicious days for travel, business deals, and household activities all relied on the lunar calendar and almanacs.63 Faced with new political pressures and enthusiasms on the one hand and custom and convenience on the other, many people did the practical thing and celebrated both holidays.64 Changsha held New Year festivities on January 1, 1912, with a military parade accompanied by waving of the ﬁve-color striped ﬂag of the Republic that signiﬁed China’s multiethnic identity (red for Han, yellow for Manchu, blue for Mongol, white for Tibetan, and black for Muslim), trumpet blowing, and mass singing by troops.65 However, the ceremonies in Changsha were inspired more by Sun Yat-sen’s inauguration as president in Nanjing and news of battleﬁeld victories than dedication to the new calendar. In his diary of his ﬁrst year living in Beijing beginning in May 1912, Lu Xun recorded being among the celebrants on October 10, 1912, the ﬁrst anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising, joining crowds on the grounds of the Altar of Agriculture on January 1, 1913, in honor of Republic Commemoration Day, taking a stroll on “Old Calendar New Year’s Day” on February 6, and noting the passage of Unity Commemoration Day on February 12, established by Yuan Shikai to mark the anniversary of Puyi’s abdication and the Qing dynasty’s demise.66 Chinese would keep two kinds of time: the lunar calendar of festivals and agricultural rhythms and the Western calendar of the global, common era.67 For the remainder of the 1910s Lu Xun occasionally neglected to note the arrival of October’s Double Ten Day and usually ignored men-

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tion of the January 1 and February 12 holidays except as days off from his work as a Ministry of Education employee. He never failed to note the arrival of the lunar New Year. Two decades later the Nationalists would still be trying, with mixed success, to supersede what the government hopefully termed the “abolished calendar.”68 The options one now had for thinking and speaking about time had lasting political implications. In his memoir the Communist revolutionary Zhang Guotao recalled the upset he caused among striking workers he was trying to help at a cigarette factory in Shanghai a decade after the revolution when he casually referred to the year as “1921” rather than “Year Ten of the Republic.” They had concluded that I would surely have used the Republican dating system if Sun Yat-sen had sent me. I was clearly not Sun Yat-sen’s man, and I came from Peking. Who in Peking could possibly be interested in the workers unless it was the Manchu dynasty, which would no doubt like to utilize the workers to overthrow the “Republic.”69

The workers were secret society “good fellows,” and this explained to an amused Zhang why they were so keen to decode nuances of numbers and dating systems. As Henrietta Harrison explains, the new Republican China,“as it was lived,” was “layered” with seasonal, religious, civic, and political meanings.70 Although revolutions can radically simplify the world, the Chinese Revolution in general seemed destined ﬁrst to add layers of complexity. The longer the revolution, the greater this stratiﬁed complexity and the stronger the pressure for bold and simplifying strokes and measures that were, however, often blunted by the inertial force of personal and local habit and conviction. In step with overlapping regimes and competing calendars, for several months the Chinese Republic also had two presidents: Sun Yat-sen, who accepted the position on January 1 after a vote of the Nanjing revolutionary assembly, and former Qing loyalist Yuan Shikai in Beijing, whom Sun almost immediately acknowledged as the Republic’s logical choice to replace him as president. Sun Yat-sen publicly offered to resign in favor of Yuan Shikai the day after the emperor’s abdication and two days after Yuan declared that he was, after all, a republican. Yuan then conceded in a telegram to the Nanjing government that a “republic is universally recognized to be the best political system in the world.”71 Four days after Puyi’s abdication Yuan snipped off his own queue in private.72 The Republican ﬂag was raised at his ofﬁcial residence in Beijing.73 The former Qing ofﬁcial now at least looked and sounded republican. Yuan’s

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ofﬁce announced that all ofﬁcial documents would be dated according to the new calendar but with lunar month and day indicated alongside.74 Bowing to Sun’s wishes for peace and to Yuan’s military might, on February 15 the Senate in Nanjing voted Yuan in as the Republic’s second “provisional” president. On the same day Sun also organized an elaborate ceremony in honor of the ﬁrst Ming dynasty emperor at Zhu Yuanzhang’s tomb outside Nanjing, accompanied by a multitude of soldiers, ofﬁcials, and onlookers.75 In a courtyard open to the sky, Sun faced a vintage life-sized painting of the emperor and, leading the crowd behind him, bowed three times. An aide read a pronouncement written by Sun dedicated to the spirit of the Ming founder “as a great Chinese hero.” Sun then turned to face the audience. He gave an emotional speech proclaiming that after more than 260 years of Manchu domination, China had recovered her freedom. The crowd responded with three cheers raised for President Sun, repeated and passed on through the mass of participants and spectators in a rising crescendo. Before electronic ampliﬁcation or radio and ﬁlm recordings, cascading voices like these conveyed imperial orders from the throne during such rituals. Ray Huang describes an impressively ritualized late-Ming use of the technique as the emperor gave the order from his Forbidden City throne that prisoners of war be taken out and executed. The reply from the throne—“take them there; be it so ordered”—could not have been heard by all present. The order, however, was repeated by the two nobles standing immediately next to the sovereign and then echoed in succession by four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two guardsmen, until it touched off a thunderous shout of the same order by the entire battalion of soldiers, their chests inﬂated.76

Even as he celebrated the overthrow of the monarchy and his own role in the event, Sun confected a “ﬂamboyant” homage to imperial heroes and antique spectacle.77 Sun continued to preside over the Republican government while Yuan resisted the revolutionaries’ demand that he take up his duties in Nanjing, a location Yuan judged too distant from his military and bureaucratic base in the north. Yuan had considerable political support for his desire to keep the capital in Beijing, including initially a majority in the Revolutionary Alliance–dominated Nanjing Senate.78 After all, there was something to be gained by pairing the energy of the young Republic with the prestige of the old capital, not to mention the proximity to foreign legations quartered in Beijing who had diplomatic recognition and

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much-needed loans in their gift. This same juxtaposition was anathema to revolutionaries who viewed Beijing as a den of Manchu iniquity. Sun Yat-sen and his supporters had hoped to restrain Yuan’s power as president by keeping the capital in the south and tweaking the provisional constitution to make President Yuan more accountable to parliament.79 The revolutionaries held to their demand to keep Nanjing as the capital until Yuan staged a troop riot in Beijing on February 29 to demonstrate his willingness to use force if necessary to resolve the question. In the end Yuan Shikai succeeded in remaining close to his northern armies and a healthy distance from the revolutionary heartland of central and southern China. In spring 1912, instead of Yuan making the journey south to Nanjing, the Republic, including the Senate but not initially Sun Yatsen, came north to him and joined surviving elements of the Qing government in Beijing in a decidedly hybrid political construction. The Senate, an itinerant and growing body composed of provincial delegates variously appointed and elected, had begun as an ad hoc revolutionary assembly in Hankou in November 1911, moved downriver to Shanghai in December, back upriver to Nanjing at the end of the year, and north to Beijing in April 1912.80 Institutions as well as individuals would be well traveled in Republican China. Yuan waited to formally accept the ofﬁce of president until early March, and Sun did not actually relinquish his presidential powers until April 1.81 On March 10 Yuan took the oath of ofﬁce in a ceremonial hall at the new, “very spacious and handsomely furnished” Ministry of Foreign Affairs building on Shidaren Alley east of the Forbidden and Imperial Cities.82 With an audience of political delegates from Nanjing, civilian and military ofﬁcials from the capital and the provinces, representative Manchus, Mongols, and Tibetans, and the local Beijing chamber of commerce, Yuan “entered by a side door, stood facing the throng, a sturdy soldier-like ﬁgure” in uniform. Yuan then read a declaration promising “faithfully to develop the Republic” and abolish “absolute monarchy.” As Henrietta Harrison points out, Yuan did not depict the Republic as the reverse of Manchu tyranny but instead conﬁrmed the multiracial composition of China as a modern nation-state.83 The sequence of ceremonies from the Ming tombs in Nanjing to the Foreign Ministry in Beijing suggests the complexity of the moment. In Nanjing Sun drew on the republican trope of freedom against slavery. He played on popular antiManchu sentiments he would soon downplay in other settings in order to mute a racial republicanism at odds with China’s multicultural reality. Meanwhile, Yuan Shikai put the Republic, like he did himself, in the

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service of China as a modern nation-state and in a venue that represented China’s demand to be treated equally by other nations.84 His matter-offact use of the new machinery of state contrasted with Sun’s emotional claim that the Republic was heir to hundreds of years of patriotic struggle. Sun’s atavism, in pushing hard against monarchy with the help of his favorite Chinese emperor, made for a more muscular and radical form of republicanism than Yuan’s embrace of national strength unrestrained by details of political form or the emotions those details aroused. Meanwhile, and well into March, Sun in Nanjing continued to issue executive decrees, including one that required that all queues be cut within twenty days so that any man still wearing one might “cleanse the ancient stain and become a citizen of the new nation.”85 Most Republican ofﬁcials left Nanjing on April 7, a few days after Sun departed on a speaking tour of central and southern China.86 Sun’s protracted surrender of the presidency to Yuan—viewed variously as noble, foolish, or simply inevitable—spared the country an immediate civil war and Sun’s weaker military forces likely defeat. The 1911 Revolution as a struggle to overthrow the Qing was over in a few months, but the Republic it produced left unresolved the question of what kind of political system it was and whether or not the revolution had really ended. The Republic as a “people’s state or dynasty” (minguo) was radically different by design from the monarchy that preceded it. The Chinese Republic also included powerful personal and institutional elements of the old regime, Yuan Shikai and his bureaucratic and military allies and units foremost among them. Beyond the death and destruction caused by political and military conﬂict, the revolution encompassed change in areas as remote from most people’s lives as the as-yet-to-beenforced legal language of the provisional constitution promulgated on March 3 and as immediate and intimate as the arrangement of the hair on your head and the choice of calendar you used to measure the years, months, and days of your life. Expectations were high among politically conscious Chinese that the Republic in all of its dimensions would solve the country’s many problems. Where the Qing was weak, the Republic would be strong, like the newest and most powerful locomotive in Sun’s famous metaphor.87 Imperialist affronts would then be answered. Local needs would be met. Those who had risked something or everything in the revolution would be rewarded. Instead, the new regime only managed to survive rather than thrive, and on a diet of real but meager accomplishments. These included slowly gaining diplomatic recognition for the Republic and regularizing as Republican the patchwork of provincial and

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local governments left by the revolution. For many, small victories, including thwarting a return to monarchy in 1916 and giving political life a new look and language, amounted to very little indeed.

Mr. Sun Comes to Beijing Later that summer Sun Yat-sen, now living in Shanghai, traveled north to pay a visit to the new Republican capital, seated somewhat incongruously now in a Beijing where six-year-old Puyi still resided in a portion of the Forbidden City. Some revolutionaries continued to refuse to accept Beijing as a ﬁt capital for a modern republic. This had been Sun’s position as well but one he put aside in the interest of national unity. Sun had visited Beijing only once before, in summer 1894, during a failed attempt to interest prominent Qing ofﬁcials in his reform ideas and just before embarking on a lifelong career as a revolutionary. He later recalled that his main impression at the time was that the city was “ﬁlthy,” a condition he blamed on “Manchu-Qing rule.”88 Certainly the Hong Kong or Honolulu he was familiar with was more sanitary and orderly by modern standards. Sun was then an obscure, poorly credentialed provincial. Now, in summer 1912, as a result of the revolution he helped lead, there was no one in political China more prominent than he. Many regarded Sun Yat-sen as “China’s Greatest Man” (Zhongguo diyi weiren). The fragile premise of Sun’s 1912 visit to Beijing was that he and Yuan as former and current provisional presidents would negotiate the future of China. Each had qualities the other lacked. While Sun’s military and organizational resources were limited in comparison to Yuan’s, Sun’s vision of a new China was attractive if not fully persuasive to many. Within the framework of his “Three Principles of the People” (Sanmin zhuyi), Sun imagined a China that was nationalistic, enshrined in the principle of “nationalism” or “race” (minzu), participatory, stipulated by the principle of “democracy” or “people’s power” (minquan), and materially advanced in ways that met the needs of all citizens and not just the elite, imagined in the principle of “people’s livelihood” (minsheng). Sun Yat-sen was the ﬁrst Chinese political ﬁgure to fully articulate and propagandize the demand for a powerful, democratic, and wealthy China, a signal ideological contribution that buoyed him up through his many political trials and tribulations. The idea of “wealth and power” (fuqiang) predated Sun Yat-sen in the writings of Yan Fu and others.89 Kang Youwei offered a more radical and sophisticated utopian vision of China’s place in the world and in world history. Liang Qichao had long stressed the impor-

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tance of a mobilized citizenry. Sun brought these social, economic, and political elements together in a set of resonant principles that carried an aura of historical inevitability and his personal stamp. Sun Yat-sen was never able to take possession of China as descriptive conceits like “Mao’s China,”“Deng’s China,” or even Chiang Kai-shek’s “Lost China” would later have it for his successors.90 Sun did pioneer the idea that the words and will of a single leader might imprint themselves on the new age. Yuan Shikai was pleased that Sun had accepted his call to visit the capital in a fashion that supported rather than directly challenged his government. Technically, Sun accepted not Yuan’s invitation but that of his junior colleague Song Jiaoren to attend the founding of the Nationalist Party.91 Yuan Shikai, however, played host to the hilt. Yuan put Sun up at the temporary presidential residence he had requisitioned in the posh guest house quarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.92 Though to many an unconvincing republican, Yuan’s credentials as a reformer were as strong as anyone’s, and these formed the basis of his claim to represent the modern Chinese nation. He had been the key national ﬁgure in the ﬂurry of last-minute reforms undertaken by the monarchy beginning in 1901 as the New Policies (Xinzheng). Might not these reforms continue as Sun’s construction projects? As a result of his three-and-ahalf-week stay in Beijing and many meetings with Yuan, Sun agreed to highlight the task of economic development by becoming the Republic’s railway czar. Sun would temporarily leave the gritty world of parties, parliament, and cabinets to leaders like Yuan Shikai and Song Jiaoren. Men of power would pull China together by political means. Sun would build a transportation system worthy of a modern country. One might dismiss Sun’s railway-building proposals as those of a dreamer undisciplined by political realities. A number of historians, including some sympathetic to Sun’s overall vision for China, have done so.93 The early general criticism of the Republic as a “signboard” could be fairly applied to some of Sun Yat-sen’s proposals that have the air of empty sloganeering to the point of fantasy. In his “International Development of China” plan published in 1922 Sun not only proposed new ports, industries, and the Three Gorges Dam but also separate “bedroom,” “kitchen,”“bathroom,”“toilet,”“parlour,” and “library” factories capable of replacing all traditional Chinese furniture in every home with modern styles.94 However, lacking Yuan’s large armies and bureaucratic and foreign allies, Sun’s nonpartisan developmental gambit made political sense in 1912. Railway building and ownership had been a popular rallying cry for revolutionaries and reformers in the period immediately prior

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to the 1911 Revolution.95 Calling for the construction of rail lines to make China strong was viewed as a good thing in tune with the public interest. Even Sun’s seemingly outlandish furniture factories were in step with visionary contemporaries like the architect Frank Lloyd Wright whose “American System-Built Houses” relied on factory precut components and pioneering businesses like Sears, Roebuck and Co. and its “mail-orderhouse” venture.96 Sun’s political thinking drew heavily and creatively on machine-age novelties like these. Meanwhile, the new crowd of Republican politicians, including now Yuan Shikai, risked becoming damaged or unwanted goods. In the evolving political culture of the day, even necessary political competition could be condemned as a selﬁsh scramble for ofﬁce at odds with a widely shared desire for national unity. Immediately after his resignation of the presidency some Chinese compared Sun to George Washington, a national leader who refused to become king and declined a third presidential term. The move was possible in Washington’s case by dint of “the paradox of leadership in a legal system” in which he “wielded power by giving it up.”97 Sun’s situation in 1912 was closer to the Machiavellian quip that the Prince should only give away things that belong to other people. What Sun had in his possession in 1912 were the seeds of a new kind of power, not the thing itself. Sun’s chosen arena, national politics, was still a “rather special and detached realm” compared to the provinces where revolution had recently raged.98 George Washington also served two terms as president before he left political life, perhaps, in part, because there had been no American Yuan Shikai in Boston demanding that the new national government come to him, or else. Sun understood that ordinary political maneuvers directed against Yuan were bound to fail in the near term. Sun observed at the time, “For maintaining the present situation, I am not a match for Yuan. For planning the future, Yuan is no match for me.”99 The Republic by its nature was pitched toward the future, and Sun was playing for time. As his ability to spin inspiring republican dreams from unpromising materials like unlaid railway track suggests, Sun brought unusual and compelling qualities to the role of leader. He was armed with new ideas, a belief in history as a progressive and global force, and an afﬁnity for novel political techniques like speech making and whistle-stop and riverboat campaigning. At age forty-six he was already the grand old man of the anti-Qing Revolutionary Alliance he had created only seven years before as an exile in Tokyo. If China was changing only slowly in terms of economy, society and culture, its politics in 1912 seemed to be rocket-

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ing along like the locomotives Sun so admired as engines and symbols of change. Sun was not an experienced ofﬁcial like Yuan Shikai. Nor was he a celebrated scholar like Liang Qichao or Liang’s mentor and reformer Kang Youwei. Sun had written and spoken volumes about his plans for China. But despite an education that included time in a missionary school in Hawaii and a medical degree, Sun lacked the literati background of China’s best and brightest. This lack contributed to denying him in 1894 the political access he sought. However, for many contemporaries Sun in 1912 surpassed men like Kang and Liang because he was the face and voice of progress. In middle age Sun Yat-sen still cut a ﬁgure dashing enough to rivet the eyes of spectators who had read about him or seen his photograph. One witness to Sun’s celebrity, Chen Xiying, recalled going to the train station in Nanjing in April 1912 to be part of the crowd of ten thousand seeing Sun off on his lecture tour. As a military band played and the train pulled away, in the front car Chen suddenly saw “a man wearing a tidy westernstyle suit, his demeanor cultivated and erect, hair a lustrous sheen, mustache slanting. One look and I knew it was Sun Yat-sen. He was [also] wearing a high silk hat.”100 In the unsettled public culture of Republican China, appearances mattered. The popularity of the great Beijing opera star Mei Lanfang similarly hinged on the magnetic power of his “look,” recognizable instantly to any fan.101 Lu Xun recalled that his visits to photography shops in Beijing were notable for the way decorative portraits of great men “vanished in a ﬂash of light” with every change in who held power in the capital. Only Mei Lanfang’s photograph endured from year to year.102 Despite the ups and downs of his career, or perhaps because of his gift for the self-narration of a turbulent life, Sun had that kind of star power on the political stage. The shared ability to imagine a polity or society in one’s mind’s eye with the help of symbols and images is a critical dimension of any political culture. Louis Wirth observed that “a society is possible in the last analysis because individuals in it carry around in their heads some sort of picture of that society.”103 For many Chinese seeking to visualize the New China, Sun Yat-sen helped ﬁll in that picture, just as he centered the innumerable group photographs he was part of. In a photograph taken in 1912 Sun stands hatless and alone (ﬁgure 1). Sun Yat-sen was greeted as a great man when he arrived in Beijing by special train, pulled by a “gaily-decorated locomotive,” in the late afternoon of August 24.104 As a sign of the volatility of the moment, a few hours after Sun’s train rolled through Tongzhou, a transportation hub located just east of the capital, soldiers stationed there mutinied, looting

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1. Sun Yat-sen in 1912. ©Bettman/CORBIS.

and burning much of the town.105 As a Beijing editorial writer called “Cold Eye” (Leng Yan) observed, with Yuan’s earlier, February troop riot no doubt in mind,“Today Sun Yat-sen arrived in the capital and the same day there is a troop riot in Tongzhou. A mere coincidence?”106 No match for Sun’s eloquent words, Yuan Shikai was adept at communicating with carefully targeted acts of violence. Since resigning as president Sun had been traveling around China speaking to large crowds who welcomed him as a revolutionary hero. Like dynastic founders of old, Yuan Shikai took up a ﬁxed and welldefended position in Beijing as a sign of his authority. He offered China stability. Sun Yat-sen’s power was better expressed by a patented mobility that resonated with the ﬂuidity of the moment and rolling appeals for change. Sun was not discomﬁted by capitals or parliaments that moved around the map. He was conﬁdent, sometimes to the point of overconﬁdence; he could command as easily from a train station platform as from a presidential palace.

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True to form, when Sun stepped onto the platform in the capital’s central station, he wore a blue, Western-style suit and top hat. A ceremonial archway had been erected in his honor.107 Several hundred representatives of ofﬁcial, political, and civic Beijing were there to welcome him, having begun to “pour into the station” and assemble an hour earlier. They included senators, ministerial ofﬁcials, military and police ofﬁcers, political party leaders, and representatives of charities, a railway association, a Manchu and Banner welfare advocacy organization (with the end of the Qing the Manchus were naturally anxious about their status), representatives of the city’s Guangdong provincial lodge who shared Sun’s home province identity, “political discussion groups,” journalists from seventy newspapers, a hundred foreign guests (including a contingent of diplomats from the Legation Quarter located a short walk from the train station), merchants, and women’s groups.108 Many of the women present pinned their hopes on Sun as an outspoken defender of their rights as citizens. Special passes were required to join the welcoming party, and each group was assigned a speciﬁc area to “avoid disorder” and to keep “brigands from mixing in” with the crowd.109 Area numbers 1 and 2 were for foreign guests and senators, and 10, the last, was reserved for women. To reach their preeminent position foreign dignitaries could use privileged access to the train station from the Legation Quarter through a special “Water Gate” opened as a post–Boxer Uprising security measure through the wall separating the Inner and Outer Cities.110 To ﬁnd their way to the platform women had to negotiate the overwhelming male public space of central Beijing. With revolutionary violence subsiding, the only “brigand” Sun probably needed to worry about in summer 1912 was Yuan Shikai himself. Many of Sun’s supporters feared Yuan was luring their leader to Beijing in order to kill him. One warned that “Bandit Yuan negotiates at a distance and attacks when near.”111 The story is also told that on August 18 in Shanghai, as Sun waited in his ship cabin to sail north for Tianjin and train connections to Beijing, a beautiful young woman burst in, put a knife to her throat, and threatened to kill herself if Sun insisted on placing himself in the “tiger’s lair” of Yuan Shikai–controlled Beijing. An initially ﬂustered Sun managed to disarm the girl and calm her down.112 She undoubtedly had read Shanghai newspaper accounts linking Yuan to the murder in Beijing three days earlier of two Nationalist military ofﬁcers, Zhang Zhenwu and Fang Wei. Sun Yat-sen’s professed lack of interest at the moment in Yuan’s job likely was his best protection, and there was no violence or serious disturbance during his stay in Beijing.

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Upon arrival at the station on August 24, a military band played and well-wishers removed their hats to Sun in the new republican gesture of respect. The dofﬁng of hats signaled both citizen equality and respect for republican authority.113 The popularity of band music in China had been partly Yuan Shikai’s doing. Following the musical lead of foreign brass instrument enthusiasts like Inspector General of Maritime Customs Robert Hart, Yuan opened a school for the purpose in Tianjin in 1903.114 That and a study delegation to Germany led to the creation of a twentymember brass band as part of a broader music education movement. The tuba and trombone would sound the music of martial citizenship rather than the drums, gongs, and pipes customarily used in public rituals.115 Outside the station a crowd of several thousand more people stretched south and west into the city’s commercial district and onto Dazhalan Street, with its fancy silk and medicine shops. Photographs show police and troops clearing a broad path for Sun and his entourage as they exited the station amid crowds massed in the streets and leaning from the galleries of adjacent shops.116 Beijing’s main train station was located just south and east of Front Gate (Qianmen), the central passage through the wall separating the capital’s Inner and Outer Cities. The square Inner City enclosed the more ofﬁcial areas of Beijing centered on the Imperial and Forbidden Cities. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Education, and the Senate were located there. The roughly rectangular Outer City was home to a more heterogeneous mix of business, literati, and ritual centers that included the Huguang Lodge and the Temples of Heaven and Agriculture. The original railway station building with clock tower and curved platform roof still stands, preserved now as an arcade of shops and ofﬁces. In its early-twentieth-century prime the central station, like the city’s post and telegraph ofﬁces, connected the capital to the rest of urban China and the world. If railway engines symbolized modern power for Sun Yatsen and his contemporaries, the Chinese railway system functioned in a very material way to integrate the nation by shuttling people and goods from city to city. Telegraph lines did the same for government orders, personal messages, and the news of the day.117 A famous photograph of Yuan Shikai shows him in rustic repose in straw hat and raingear ﬁshing on his estate.118 Yuan also took care to equip his country home, located south of Beijing in northern Henan along the north-south rail line, with a private telegraph ofﬁce.119 Beijing, with its walls, palaces, temples, courtyard residences, and narrow alleyways, still looked very much like the old capital as revolutionary critics charged. Like Yuan Shikai’s

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estate and many other parts of “traditional” China, Beijing was wired for national and international communication. When Sun walked out of the train station on August 24 he did so in full view of a welcoming crowd and, courtesy of telegraph dispatches and print media, in the presence of a national public of newspaper readers imagining Sun and the scene hours or days later. Many of Sun’s supporters had been waiting outside the station for the former president’s train since early morning. The crowd added a friendly political demonstration to the normal bustle and congestion of Beijing’s merchant quarter. President Yuan Shikai was conspicuous by his absence, but he sent his powerful deputy Liang Shiyi as well as the military band to represent him, along with an ornate carriage that once belonged to a Manchu prince to transport Sun to the Foreign Ministry guest house, “elaborately prepared for his reception.”120 Also absent from the welcome party was Lu Zhengxiang, Yuan’s handpicked prime minister. Lu was currently in seclusion from the press and public nearby in the Legation Quarter’s French Hospital following his disastrous speech to the Senate ﬁve weeks before. Prime Minister Lu did leave his hospital room two days later to pay his respects to Sun Yat-sen and discuss foreign policy matters and then ran into Sun again for a public scolding.121 As Lu’s sudden reversal of fortune from second in command of the government to political outcast demonstrated, acclamation of the sort that Sun received at the Beijing train station might be ﬂeeting in the new Chinese Republic. The carriage Yuan Shikai sent was upholstered in imperial yellow satin, equipped with bright red wheels, drawn by white horses, and accompanied by thirty mounted escorts.122 Sun accepted the royal trappings at ﬁrst but later in his visit made a point of demurring that he was simply a “commoner” (pingmin) and not even a “former president.” Commoner was one of many terms, along with other conventional euphemisms like “hundreds of names” and “cotton clothes” and new ones like citizen and the “people” (renmin), used to describe all those who were “not ofﬁcials.”123 Deﬁning the people based on what they lacked—name recognition, decent clothes, and ofﬁcial position—rather than the authority of citizenship they now supposedly had was at odds with the republican notion that power ﬂowed from the people to the government rather than the other way around.124 Sun’s show of standing with the citizenry advertised his republicanism. Sun politely refused Yuan’s continued offer of imperial coaches.125 The lavishing of courtly courtesies by Yuan gave Sun the chance to duel a bit with Yuan on the question of whose republican commitments were gen-

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uine. Sun also asked Yuan to withdraw the tight security cordon he drew around the residence they shared. Sun had noticed that when he left his guest house there was not a soul in sight.126 His request for lighter security subtly spotlighted Yuan’s own, well-founded, fear of assassination, anxieties that contrasted sharply with Sun’s love of crowds that normally returned the affection.127 Sun broadcast to the public his ties to the people, impartiality, and devotion to the national interest. He insisted that he had no interest in the “world of political ofﬁce” and wished instead to be a “free citizen.”128 Yuan Shikai also made a habit of declaring his impartiality, but the claim was harder to assert convincingly since, unlike Sun, he had chosen to seize and hold onto political power.

Slapping Song Jiaoren Though he professed a lack of interest in politics, Sun did have important political business to do while in Beijing besides meeting with Yuan Shikai, including the next day’s Nationalist Party inaugural convention. Despite protestations about leaving the world of political ofﬁce, Sun never in his thirty-year career as a revolutionary really took himself out of political competition. However, in line with Sun’s personal commitment to the economic reconstruction of China, the actual running of the Revolutionary Alliance was now in the hands of other party leaders, especially Song Jiaoren. Over the summer Song reorganized and renamed the Alliance as the new and expanded Nationalist Party. This turned out to be a fateful change in nomenclature. Except for a switch to “Chinese Revolutionary Party” (Zhonghua geming dang) lasting from 1914 to 1919, Sun’s party would carry the name “Nationalist” into its complicated future as a political organization that by turns served as loyal opposition to Yuan’s government, a revolutionary insurgency against Yuan and his warlord successors, the ruling party in China after 1927, a leader of wartime resistance against the Japanese, the ﬂeeing remnants of a defeated mainland regime by 1949, and a dictatorial and, later, democratic actor on Taiwan. As the site for the August 25, 1912, renaming and reorganizing of the old Alliance, party leaders selected the Huguang Native-Place Lodge. A large hostel opened in the nineteenth century for visitors from Hunan and Hubei Provinces, the Huguang Lodge was located southwest of the central train station on the western edge of the Outer City commercial district. The lodge stood in the midst of Beijing’s old literati quarter south of Xuanwu Gate, Front Gate’s western companion passageway between the Inner and Outer Cities.129 Beijing lodges, numbering over four hun-

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dred, were originally built as homes-away-from-home for scholars from the provinces who came to sit for the imperial examinations. While they gathered their wits for the great literati rite of passage, they could be comforted by familiar foods and dialects and share the company of men in the same boat. The examination system ended in 1905, but provincials continued to ﬁnd reasons for visiting Beijing: attending university, working in the government, or participating in political and civic events like party conventions. That a bastion of literati privilege could be a base for republican politics was no mystery to the extent that literati politicized by late Qing crises had supported both reform and revolution. The Huguang Lodge stands today in the same location largely intact and restored as an opera house, a ﬁtting rebirth since lodges were venues for theatrical performances in their literati heyday.130 The stele recording the events of August 25, 1912, commemorates a role for the Huguang Lodge comparable in effect if not in historical notoriety to the rented monastery refectory in Paris that gave the French revolutionary Jacobins their name and the “faintly rakish”Willis’s Rooms in London where the Liberal Party was organized in 1859.131 The Huguang Lodge certainly offered a likelier setting for a public and political event than a dining hall for monks. And unlike a drinking club, there was little rakish or outré about a nativeplace lodge even with its male-sojourner traditions.132 As for the day’s event at the Huguang Lodge, Song Jiaoren was intent on transforming the Revolutionary Alliance from a violent, conspiratorial organization dedicated to overthrowing the now-defunct monarchy into an open parliamentary party suitable for a new and democratic republic. A native of Hunan, Song was a brilliant publicist and had been a frontline revolutionary ﬁghter against the Qing dynasty. As Song explained, past political struggles had been conducted “in a spirit of blood and iron.” Now the time had come to “employ political opinion.”133 Words rather than bullets and bombs would, he hoped, cut a new path to power. Sun Yat-sen’s appearance at the convention was crucially important for Song Jiaoren and his supporters. Song’s reorganization of the Revolutionary Alliance included a merger with four other parties and a watering-down of positions associated with Sun’s Three Principles of the People. He needed Sun’s blessing for the political maneuver. The Uniﬁed Republican Party (Tongyi gonghe dang) led by Wu Jinglian, currently speaker of the Senate in Beijing, represented a pivotal bloc of parliamentary votes. To close the deal with Song, the Uniﬁed Republicans insisted on elimination of Sun’s Principle of People’s Livelihood, which they

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viewed as too radical.134 In addition, the Citizens’ Party (Guomin gongdang), based in Shanghai and led by Cen Chunxuan, a former Qing ofﬁcial and bitter rival of Yuan Shikai, added the demand that the Revolutionary Alliance’s male-female equality clause be removed from the party platform.135 As governor of Sichuan, Cen in 1903 had played a leading role in implementing the dynasty’s anti-foot-binding edict by having it translated into vernacular Chinese for mass distribution.136 At the time he supported the policy on the basis of “human feeling” for the suffering of women and a need to strengthen China by addressing the physical ﬁtness of the female half of China’s Four Hundred Million.137 Now, like many other reformers and revolutionaries, Cen drew a line between improving the condition of women and fully including them in public life as voters and ofﬁcials. In early August a compromise joint manifesto was drafted, and two more parties, the Citizens Progress Society (Guomin gongjin hui) and the Republican Progress Society (Gonghe shijin hui), agreed to join the merger.138 As the prominent use of “republic” and “citizen” in political party names suggests, the signboard dimension of the new regime at least was well entrenched. Yuan Shikai’s close supporters, who were not part of Song’s merger, predictably called themselves simply “Republicans” (Gonghe dang). In the interest of unity Song accepted the demands of the smaller parties with a few modiﬁcations. Alliance members were willing to quiet the socialist overtones of “people’s livelihood” but refused to remove the term altogether.139 The resulting party charter represented a more conservative agenda. In addition to excising women’s rights, the People’s Livelihood “principle” became a “policy” and the party’s anti-imperialist demand for “international equality” for China became the less provocative commitment to “international peace.”140 Song also agreed to a collective “board of directors” approach to leadership of the party that would presumably preclude him from exercising strong personal leadership.141 Song’s innovative proposal to create a “Department of Electioneering” was “rejected on the grounds that electioneering by political parties was held in low esteem in Chinese tradition.”142 This must have been a particularly bitter pill for Song, handed to him as it was by former Qing ofﬁcials only dimly aware of, if not outright hostile to, the close connection between a republic and elections. Wu Jinglian was pleased enough with the outcome to telegraph Cen Chenxuan that “the Revolutionary Alliance sacriﬁced everything.”143 Backpedaling on People’s Livelihood earned Song Jiaoren the derisive nickname “Believer in the Two [rather than three] Principles of the People.”144

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The Nationalist Party positioned itself in summer 1912 to become the dominant political party in China by sacriﬁcing a signiﬁcant measure of the ideological distinctiveness Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary ideas had provided.145 The Nationalist message rewritten by Song offered instead the generic appeal of a catchall party hoping to gain and hold a parliamentary majority. In retrospect, pinning hopes on a legislative institution and elections as the foundation for the new Republic seems as naive as Sun Yat-sen’s willingness to trade the presidency for national director of railway development. However, in the unsettled conditions of the Republic’s ﬁrst year, who could say with certainty whether Yuan’s armies, Sun’s national rail network, or Song’s parliamentary maneuvers and electoral strategies would provide the means of securing the country’s future? Nationalism remained a powerful force, even though international conﬂict was largely limited to diplomatic sparring over territory and spheres of inﬂuence with encroaching powers like Russia, Britain, and Japan. The public did care about Russian designs on Mongolia and British moves in Tibet, but there were no mass protests at the moment or in the ofﬁng. Demands for social and economic justice remained vague despite the emergence of a ﬂedgling Socialist Party that was, however, not in position to threaten the Nationalists from the left. There were plenty of signs of local and popular unrest over issues like taxes and rents, but social turmoil and economic conﬂict had not yet found their way to nationallevel politics. Women’s rights had arrived. The issue that proved to be the lightning rod of the bundle was the demand for male-female equality and especially political suffrage for women. Given China’s patriarchal past and mostly male political elite both before and after 1911, the prominence given to women’s suffrage in 1912 is surprising. However, these same conservative cultural and social facts and the frustration they engendered made women’s rights a revolutionary issue for a revolutionary moment. As one female participant in the debate about women’s rights put it that summer, “Speaking of male-female equal rights, though we hear about this on a daily basis, it is nowhere to be seen in reality.”146 A confusing political landscape offers at least temporary advantages to those who are clear about what they stand for and envision. The question of malefemale equality vividly brought into focus the Republic as it was written on paper and the Republic as it was experienced in both public and private arenas. When the about-to-be-renamed Revolutionary Alliance convened on the morning of August 25 in the ornate central hall of Beijing’s Huguang

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Lodge to the ringing of the chairman’s bell and the strains of a military band, the ﬁrst order of business was a speech by Sun Yat-sen.147 Speech making was one of Sun’s great strengths as a public ﬁgure. His skills in this area earned him the title “Sun the Cannon” (Sun Dapao) for the power of his oratory and as a sly dig at his tendency toward bombast. Sun’s strong and well-received address on this occasion to the large crowd of party members, spectators, and the press fully endorsed Song Jiaoren’s plans to transform the party in order to compete effectively in national elections scheduled for winter 1912–13.148 Sun omitted any mention of the compromises made to achieve Song’s merger. He did stress the importance of abandoning the habit of treating outsiders as enemies. Sun’s remarks were greeted by thunderous applause, though one suspects it was as much the man as the message earning the ovation. The next speaker was Song Jiaoren, an accomplished orator in his own right. He in turn was followed by the meeting’s chairman, Zhang Ji. Before Zhang could complete his report on the party merger, Shen Peizhen, Wang Changguo, and Tang Qunying forcibly took the stage. During the melee that followed, Shen and Tang slapped Song Jiaoren.149 Senator Lin Sen, standing next to Song, tried to mediate, and Tang struck him as well.150 Wang grabbed Song by the throat and threatened to shoot him.151 All three women were Revolutionary Alliance members and leaders of the Chinese suffragist movement.152 Their dramatic intervention left many in the audience “tongue-tied and staring in anger.”153 So much for party unity! The women addressed the packed hall and denounced the newly adopted Nationalist Party constitution as a betrayal of party principles and of female party members.154 Tang Qunying had joined the Revolutionary Alliance at its founding, and Shen Peizhen and Wang Changguo became members shortly after. Each had participated in the revolution in every phase of its operations both civil and military. They were incensed that their male comrades in arms had reneged on promises to support women’s rights in order to win the backing of conservatives like Cen Chunxuan who, like Yuan Shikai, had switched to the Republican side only when it was clear the Qing dynasty was doomed. Eliminating the original clause guaranteeing women’s rights proved Song Jiaoren and his supporters had “no regard for the Revolutionary Alliance and no regard for the Chinese Republic.”155 For these women, male-female equal rights were essential to republicanism. If, to follow Sun’s favorite analogy, choosing a republic was like picking the newest and most powerful locomotive, the republic they

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wanted was not a patriarchal late-eighteenth or mid-nineteenth-century vintage model but one in which political equality of men and women was built into the machinery of government. After attempts to mediate the dispute onstage failed, convention chairman Zhang Ji declared that the morning’s meeting was not after all a plenary session and therefore not an appropriate setting for this kind of constitutional discussion. Shouting “Long live the Republic!” three times, Zhang adjourned the convention until the afternoon. The afternoon session opened with Zhang again in the chair. He gave a speech that not surprisingly appealed for unity, declaring that “in one nation there can only be one center” and the same held true for a nation’s political parties. Zhang’s appeal for party-based unity implied that just as a familial logic had governed the empire from Court out to every humble household and back again, so the Republic needed its own center to lead China, based on the new unifying principle of a mobilized citizenry. Zhang’s words and the context in which he spoke them suggested that despite the momentary surrender to patriarchy he and Song had signed on to, republicanism in China would challenge the centrality of family as the dominant metaphor for statecraft in favor of the organized body of citizens. The shift from the individual as a social self embedded in family or family-like networks to the individual as a social self who is an integral part of an organization like a political party was a subtle and fateful development. The ideal center with its fatherlike emperor and his servants who in turn acted as parents of the people would now be occupied by a martial or otherwise commanding leader and his subordinates. In both visions of an orderly world the individual was socially deﬁned, as son or wife or subject on the one hand or comrade, member, or citizen on the other. However, the nature and composition of one’s social world would be substantially different. From Zhang Ji’s point of view, with the formation of the Nationalist Party many parties would become “one great political party.” The Nationalists could hardly claim to govern China if they could not govern themselves. The original, deep-dyed family model of political life would not disappear, any more than the lunar New Year could be replaced with a new national holiday or every queue cut in twenty days. Political comrades sometimes acted like, or were seen as, fractious siblings or ﬁlial children. Sun Yat-sen, as father of the Republic, would try to parent younger politicians. The ﬁrst item of business in the afternoon was a debate about the name “Nationalist Party.” Some members expressed a preference for “Democratic Party.” Zhang settled the question rather informally by asserting

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that most people liked the name already chosen. He took the loud applause that greeted this assertion as sufﬁcient justiﬁcation for keeping “Nationalist.”156 Then several women again made speeches on the question of rights and equality, this time by prearrangement. In an afﬁrmation, however grudging, of rules transgressed in the morning, instead of storming the stage the women took their turns to speak in good order. Recognition of the right to speak may well have been part of what the women aimed to achieve with their earlier demonstration. Zhang Ji also permitted a formal resolution to restore the male-female equality clause to be brought before the convention.157 The angry tone of the meeting did not change, however. Wang Changguo harshly attacked the party’s retreat from women’s rights. Zhang Ji and other speakers responded by arguing that “inasmuch as even members of the Revolutionary Alliance are not equal, it was only natural that voting rights for men and women not be equal.”158 Not surprisingly, assignment to second-class party membership to go with second-class citizenship served to further inﬂame women’s rights advocates. “As a result, the order of the meeting became chaos.”159 As Zhang Ji attempted to restore order, a woman shouted from the gallery, “You are abolishing equal rights for men and women. Which of you was not born of [both] a father and a mother?” The heckler’s comment concisely conveyed the politically contingent and culturally rooted nature of women’s rights in China. The Revolutionary Alliance had been on record since at least the spring supporting the expansion of “male-female equal rights.”160 Sun Yat-sen himself had publicly promised his personal support. When he arrived in Beijing on August 24 and announced his “aims and opinions,” male-female equality was at the top of his list, followed by his cherished railway project, respect for legislative institutions, unifying North and South China, responsible journalism (he was annoyed by critical press coverage), and his own decision to remain a “free citizen” rather than join the political class.161 Women also believed that rights were a matter of entitlement, both in the borrowed natural rights justiﬁcations they took from Western philosophy and in the long-standing Chinese view and commonsense observation that women were, after all, indispensable in any human group or community. Female reformers drew on traditions that accorded special respect to “worthy ladies” and “women of talent” .162 In the late imperial period the assumption that “men were not ritually complete without wives” had “softened” the subordination of women.163 Women completed the act of nationhood or comradeship just as they helped to

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effect the practical and ritual completion of family life. At the same time, in a break with the past, radicals like Tang Qunying believed that the exercise of citizenship by women must take place in the public realm of parliaments, the press, and the street and not be conﬁned to the inner quarters of home and family. Moderates in the women’s movement by contrast sought to carve out a more enlightened family or “private” sphere in the spirit of Japanese reformers and their advocacy of “good wives and wise mothers” and defer entry into public life until they and society were ready.164 Seeing Song Jiaoren onstage, Tang Qunying attempted to strike him again with her fan but was prevented from doing so by Zhang Ji.165 Tang declared in her remarks that abandoning the equal rights clause “showed contempt for women.”While she spoke, sixteen-year-old Fu Wenyu stood at her side, her youth and bobbed hair making a visual statement as potent in its own way as a queue-less man. Fu would achieve fame the following year as a leader of an anti–Yuan Shikai “female assassination squad.”166 At this point those in favor of women’s rights began clapping, but they were drowned out, as if on cue, by “snorts of contempt” from the overwhelmingly male audience. Only 3 or 4 percent of the thousand people in attendance were women, and not all the female delegates present could be expected to share Tang’s more radical position on the need for immediate action on suffrage and allied political rights.167 Women could expect dismissive or rough treatment in such settings. They might be free to join a political party, but they were still banned from many public places such as teahouses and theaters.168 These customs were being contested and not just by suffragists, a fact reﬂected in a September 11, 1912, Beijing police announcement that prohibited men and women from watching opera together.169 Gardner Harding, arriving in China from Japan in 1913, noticed that with the notable exception of women in factories, the urban economy seemed overwhelmingly male: “There were no Chinese typists, no Chinese shopgirls, no Chinese ticket takers, not any women at all, except Eurasian and foreign girls, in the endless business employments that they occupy in the Western and the Japanese worlds.”170 Sex work that placed prostitutes by the thousand in urban brothels was an exception.171 Acceptance of women in public did vary by region and community. In Shanghai elite women had for decades been making inroads as teahouse and even opium parlor customers, as well as patrons of “open air dramas and events like tea-tasting, ﬂower-gazing, billiard-playing, kite-ﬂying, and dining at Western restaurants.”172 Politics as an open-air, teahouse, and theatrical event beckoned many women

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already out and about in public. The decades immediately before and after the 1911 Revolution were marked by the “growing public visibility of women” as students, workers, consumers, and activists, becoming “one of the most striking social and cultural changes of the period.”173 This visibility encouraged radical women and alarmed many men. Most of the men assembled in the Huguang Lodge that day plainly did not want a completed republic to include women as voters and elected ofﬁcials. An editorial cartoon from fall 1912 took one of the stock phrases associated with debate over the suffrage movement,“obstacles to women’s suffrage,” to caption a drawing of a woman with bobbed hair delivering an impassioned speech while nursing a baby at her breast (ﬁgure 2).174 A woman at the podium was both a logical extension of republican politics and a picture of the New China likely to elicit snorts of male contempt, an image that proved far more contentious than Sun Yat-sen in a top hat. Zhang Ji remained cool under ﬁre as the convention whipsawed from order to turmoil and back again and had showed considerable presence of mind in the morning when he sought to save the moment for Song Jiaoren with his double appeal to parliamentary rules and patriotism. That Zhang had anarchist sympathies in addition to more institutionbound roles as party member and leader may have helped to prepare him for this kind of challenge. Earlier in the year Zhang Ji had joined the new Society to Advance Morality.175 The group, dedicated to an anarchist agenda, exhorted members to progressively give up prostitutes, smoking, meat, and the quest for government ofﬁce. Though Zhang had lapsed at least in the political area by summer, he was well positioned to appreciate competing claims of order and protest, radicalism and compromise. A few years earlier, when many revolutionaries, and their rivals in the constitutional reform camp, were still in exile in Japan, Zhang had helped to disrupt at least one meeting himself. The occasion was a speech by Liang Qichao to the Chinese exile community in Tokyo in October 1907. Liang spoke for about two hours to a thousand students, about four hundred of whom were members of the Revolutionary Alliance armed with walking sticks and intent on turning Liang’s reform meeting into a revolutionary event.176 Near the end of Liang’s address about twenty of the revolutionaries led by Zhang Ji and Song Jiaoren rushed the podium, with Zhang shouting that Liang was a “horse’s fart.”177 Liang Qichao tried in vain to quiet the crowd with his “sage-like appearance and his non-stop oratory.” Once the radicals succeeded in seizing the rostrum, Song Jiaoren gave his own counterspeech advocating revolution-

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2. “Obstacles to Women’s Suffrage.” Zhongguo ribao, November 9, 1912, 7.

ary struggle.178 In 1902 in another show of radicalism Zhang Ji and the famous militant Zou Rong invaded the Tokyo residence of Yao Wenfu, the Qing ofﬁcial in charge of Chinese military students in Japan. Zhang stood by as Zou forcibly severed Yao’s queue.179 The role reversals that took place on August 25, with hecklers and invaders now the heckled and invaded and troublemakers turned into order keepers, suggest the open and experimental nature of the new republican politics. The tenor and course of the day’s events also underlined the unpredictability that resulted from the heavy reliance politicians and civic activists now placed on holding meetings that could in a moment turn against organizers and on a rhetoric of citizenship that could be wielded against anyone who sought to speak on behalf of the people. A convention dedicated to party unity offered the disgruntled a golden opportunity to showcase their dissent. To quiet the crowd Zhang rang a bell, the continental European signal for parliamentary order, and called for a show of hands on the question, the precise nature of which he underlined by holding up a sign in big characters reading “Male-Female Equality.”180 Supporters of the equal rights motion managed to muster only thirty or forty votes to hundreds

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against. Tang Qunying and other women condemned the outcome. When Sun arrived for the afternoon session, Tang was still visibly “full of anger.” Another delegate, in a gesture perhaps intended to mollify her and chasten his colleagues, declared that though the attempt to reinsert the equal rights clause had failed he intended to vote for Tang for an ofﬁcial position in the party leadership. He then took out a ballot and wrote her name on it. Not enough delegates followed suit, and Tang did not make the list of ofﬁcers. The raucous atmosphere of the convention continued during a dispute over balloting procedures. Even Zhang Ji’s composure began to wear thin. In “agonized words” Zhang appealed to the audience for calm: “If you gentlemen wish to establish a Nationalist Party, please cast aside your personal feelings and your abstract arguments.” For women like Tang, Shen, and Wang, the issues were both personal and political. By their lights they had been personally and politically betrayed. Finally, Sun Yat-sen reentered the hall to huge applause, and the audience again removed their hats in respect. Sun had this effect on most audiences and, despite vigorous and sometimes nasty attacks in print media, was rarely heckled. One of the few exceptions to his acknowledged power to move and control a crowd took place later during his visit to Beijing. At a banquet given by Yuan Shikai in Sun’s honor at the Foreign Ministry and attended by four hundred or ﬁve hundred people, including cabinet ofﬁcials and military ofﬁcers, a group of military men began cursing the Revolutionary Alliance as “thugs and trouble-makers” and Sun as a “swindler.” The soldiers also taunted him as “Sun Dapao.” This verbal sparring and abuse escalated to a great uproar in which military men banged their ceremonial swords on the ﬂoor and individuals on both sides shouted and cursed. During the commotion Sun had remained “composed as usual,” not unlike Liang Qichao during the 1907 Tokyo melee. After half an hour of continuous disturbances Sun and Yuan retired to another room.181 In the wake of hours of rancor at the Huguang Lodge among convention delegates, Sun got up and gave his second, and now far more important, speech of the day. His remarks lasted a marathon two hours and squarely addressed, among other issues, the question of women’s rights. In order to achieve party uniﬁcation, if not unity, Sun made an abrupt switch from his pro-equality statement of the day before to open support for leaving out the women’s rights clause. This was the kind of 180degree turn that gave him a reputation for both ﬂexibility and opportunism. Sun at his core was a politician willing to balance values like patriotism or rights against political reality, including the need to care

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for his own career. That he presented himself as an idealist, and certainly was a man of principle in his own mind and in the hearts of many followers, exposed him to the charge of being not only a “cannon” but a hypocrite as well. Under pressure Sun now declared that while equal rights were “still something very much to be hoped for, not even foreign countries had been able to reach this goal.”182 Since three countries—New Zealand, Australia, and Finland—had already granted the vote to women Sun was wrong on this count. That none of these was a great power was probably more to the point. Alluding to “what foreigners thought” was a common rhetorical device. The turn of phrase was normally used to spur Chinese forward, as Yang Changji had done on his return from Europe, toward bolder, more radical acts. Sun might have taken the lead from Chinese suffragists who reasoned that the vote for women would strike a blow for national pride by making China a leader in something other than poverty and weakness. However, on this occasion Sun drew a different lesson convenient to the balance of power in the audience he faced. Sun used the fact of global resistance to women’s suffrage as a reason to delay action. He did promise that “one day” these rights would be secured. After all, how could men demand freedom for themselves and not accept equality with women? Sun’s mastery of the future permitted him to use it either to inspire measures in the here and now or to defer action by putting current demands off to some later date. If women’s rights were to be part of the revolution, the struggle would need to be long indeed. Sun’s faith in the future had a perverse implication for at least some of his supporters. Without a date certain for the revolution’s end, goals like women’s rights could be indeﬁnitely postponed. A reassuring rejoinder to principled opposition can be infuriating. An unconvinced Tang Qunying, with a parting verbal shot, walked out in protest. The next day Shen Peizhen and Tang Qunying went to see Sun at his residence. According to a newspaper account, Tang wept so loudly that the sound “shook the room.” The women “stuck ﬁercely to their position” and cited the many women who had risked or lost their lives for the revolution. Sun attempted to console them and was said to be “much moved.” Shen and Tang left the meeting unsatisﬁed and furious.183 Sun later published a letter to a group of suffragists in Nanjing declaring his personal support for women’s equality and blaming the removal of the original rights plank on “the opinions of a majority of men” at the convention. He noted in his own defense that he had made a special point of including women as guests at public events he had been attending in the capital. He advised women to organize themselves more effectively

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so that “when you begin to scramble for power with men you will be able to achieve victory.”184 He also wrote Tang Qunying a personal letter of explanation with many of the same sentiments that she reportedly treasured to the end of her life.185 The letter to Tang concluded with a hint of self-criticism: “Never depend on men to act on your own behalf and never let yourself be used by men.” Despite this reasonably amicable if emotional conclusion and dénouement, the course events took on August 25, 1912, was at odds with Sun Yat-sen’s appeal for unity and his admonition not to treat outsiders as enemies. Even worse, the dispute pitted comrade against comrade with party insiders as bitter foes. Some of the conﬂict was an artifact of Song Jiaoren’s bold style of leadership. This was not the ﬁrst time he was attacked at the podium in 1912. His ﬂair for controversy and political drama made him an attractive target. Only a few months earlier Song had received a black eye from a delegate during a session of the Senate in Nanjing when Song opposed sending troops to Beijing in what would likely have been a hopeless attempt to force Yuan Shikai to cooperate with the Nanjing government.186 In mid-July a meeting of Revolutionary Alliance members in Beijing about the transformation of the Alliance into the Nationalist Party also included a pummeling of Song.187 Tang Qunying and Wang Changguo were both present, as were other female members of the Alliance. Wang strode to the podium where Song was presiding as chair and hit him. She shouted at Song, “You heap scorn on women! For what has happened this day, two hundred million female compatriots will be avenged!”188 Song, said to have reddened in anger or embarrassment, replied, “This was a decision reached by the whole body, not one made by the chair on his own.”189 Tang replied that his actions were dictatorial and that women would not recognize them. Wang roundly cursed Song and reminded him of the blood shed by female comrades. His actions, she concluded, were “insane.” Song undoubtedly saw trouble coming when his female comrades took the stage later in August. This public and well-rehearsed statement of anger and opposition suggests that despite growing disappointment among many revolutionaries, the taste and substance of the revolution was not as “ﬂat” and uninspired as Liang Qichao asserted. Hope and disappointment felt by activists continued to roil the political waters. The very public way in which women failed to win the vote in 1912 expanded the republican polity in directions that deﬁed tradition and continued the revolution. The three women who seized center stage at the Huguang Lodge acted more like angry workers in a teahouse scrap over wages or

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literati throwing ink pots and chairs at a despised scholar-ofﬁcial than women in the patriarchal grip of fathers, husbands, or male political leaders. They deﬁed conventional rules of propriety that discouraged childbearing-age women from attending this kind of public event, much less behaving in a vocal and aggressive manner. In impact and inﬂuence if not votes Tang and her sisters were the equals that day of Song Jiaoren, Zhang Ji, and even Sun Yat-sen. Perhaps the 1911 Revolution was a revolution after all.

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Chapter 2

Speaking Parts in Chinese History

More than half a dozen speeches were given at the Nationalist Party convention on August 25, 1912. There were also numerous motions and comments from the ﬂoor, an intervention from the gallery, and crowd noises of approval and disapproval of what was said and done, all to the accompaniment of bell ringing as ordered by the chair and band music. The noisy scene at the Huguang Lodge followed the cultural logic of an emerging Chinese republicanism. Republics demand political representation, and political parties are designed to transmit public opinion and the popular will. Political activists in China were reasonably well informed about the role played by political parties in the West and Japan either from study abroad or exile experiences or from reading magazine and newspaper accounts of American and European party politics.1 The rapidity with which reformers and revolutionaries banded together locally, nationally, and in exile meant that political parties in fact if not in name preceded the Qing parliamentary reforms of 1907–10 and the convening of the provisional Republican Senate in 1912.2 As Liang Qichao modestly recalled in 1911, “At the time we did not [fully] understand the so-called political parties other countries had, but we knew we wanted to reform China’s politics. We could not do without this kind of organization.”3 If there was a surprise on August 25, 1912, it was not the political form or vehicle but the uproarious contentiousness of an event originally scripted to evoke unity and calm. 52

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There were places in Chinese society and culture where public stridency and pandemonium were expected, but government and politics was not one of them. The marketplace was a noisy (renao) tumult, and opera fans were demonstrative about performances they liked, shouting “Hao!” (Good!) in support of favorite actors, such as the master of female roles Mei Lanfang, in tones that ranged from delighted connoisseurship to the “lascivious.”4 Affairs of state, in contrast, were supposed to be digniﬁed and carefully controlled. During the Qing dynasty ritual offerings by ofﬁcials and literati included impressive costumes, props, physical movement, and billowing incense but were conducted in silence except for the directions called out by the protocol chief.5 The thousand or so vocal and demonstrative individuals assembled at the Huguang Lodge represented a departure. True, they were not average citizens. They represented the most politically conscious segment of Chinese society. But the methods they used—the cut and thrust of debate, declamation of strong opinion, support of resolutions and petitions, and vigorous audience response—were becoming widely available to anyone with a reason to “get up on the stage and give a speech” (dengtai yanshuo).6 Among these individuals were men and women from many walks of life: young revolutionaries in exile in Tokyo whose nonstop discussions were open to any compatriot who dropped by, earning one group residence the nickname “ofﬁce of conversation” (tanhua jiguan);7 literati who transformed rural academies into lecture halls and forums for discussion;8 merchants who gathered to debate local and national issues and who campaigned for chamber of commerce presidencies;9 teahouse habitués who “stood on chairs and yelled in excitement” at news of the 1911 Railroad Protection Movement in Chengdu;10 teahouse patrons the following year in Beijing who were treated to lectures by anti–cigarette smoking campaigners;11 opera performers who inserted “stump speeches” on patriotic themes into plays in the 1910s;12 workers and laborers who gathered at temples and teahouses to argue over wage rates;13 professors and students at Peking University accustomed to noisy scenes where “everybody raised points and everybody had to face criticism”;14 prostitutes who not only listened to patriotic speeches but gave them as well;15 Chinese YMCA ofﬁcials who preached and lectured to the public, like Lu Yaozhen who, along with a Western colleague, in one month in 1921 gave 130 speeches against foot binding and opium smoking, sold 10,000 bibles, and gave away 4,000 tracts in rural areas near Mianyang, Sichuan;16 and even beggars who knew the streets and markets of cities intimately and on occasion participated in political and patriotic cam-

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paigns (as long as they were paid for their trouble).17 Old habits of elite and plebian collective action and solidarity merged with new forms of organization such as parties and unions; new styles of expression such as oratory, circulating telegrams, and mass petitioning; and a new language of rights, progress, and patriotism.

Silent and Vocal China Song Jiaoren led his party as promised to victory in the 1912–13 winter elections (male voters only) after a rousing speaking tour through central China. On a swing through his native Hunan he met with Changsha civic groups that provided on a smaller scale the kind of enthusiastic welcome Sun had received in Beijing and elsewhere. Song would give a speech, followed by a “free speaking” audience participation segment, and sit for the obligatory group photograph.18 In encounters like these he and other emerging national political leaders of the day met the rising civic and political groups that were also a legacy of the 1911 Revolution. Aside from the question of whether going to the country for popular acclaim and electoral support was a tenable strategy, there was now a country to go to. After results of the election were in Song gave another series of speeches in Wuchang, Shanghai, and Nanjing outlining the future of the Nationalist Party. He emphasized the need to remove by parliamentary means the “evil government” responsible for the failures of the Republic.19 Though tame in comparison to the verbal and physical blows Song had recently been on the receiving end of, President Yuan Shikai and Premier Zhao Bingjun found his “outspoken remarks” “difﬁcult to bear.”20 On March 20, 1913, Song was about to board a train in Shanghai for Beijing to reap the parliamentary fruits of the Nationalist electoral victory when assassins, acting on orders from Yuan Shikai, shot him. The coded go-ahead message from Yuan’s cabinet secretary, Hong Shuzu, to the killers read, “The most valuable thing for us is to write a violent essay on a great theme.”21 The bloody scenario feared for Sun Yat-sen in Beijing in 1912 played out instead for his young colleague. Song died two days later. Yuan’s camp made a clumsy effort to pin the killing on a mysterious “Female Assassination Group,” a subterfuge that failed immediately but likely drew inspiration from Song’s run-in with militant suffragists the year before.22 Such groups did exist as outgrowths of women’s participation in the 1911 Revolution.23 Their target in 1913, however, was Yuan Shikai’s government, not revolutionaries like Song Jiaoren.24

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The rejection of women’s rights at the Beijing party meeting in 1912 was not a factor in Yuan Shikai’s defeat of the Nationalist Party. The drama enacted by speakers and audience over that and other issues suggests the power and vulnerability of public life in this formative period of modern Chinese politics. Republicanism required publicity of a particular kind, governed by new procedures and rules, sensitive to notions of rights, nation, and citizenship, decorated by ﬂags and hats, acknowledged with respectful bows, and accompanied by stirring music. Republican politics were both abstract and concrete, an idea from abroad fully internalized by only a portion of China’s political class and a practical commitment made by millions who had attacked the Qing and now supported this new politics in lantern parades, queue-cutting campaigns, mass assemblies, and electioneering.25 Song Jiaoren’s behind-the-scenes negotiations in summer 1912 required public afﬁrmation. His commitment to a parliamentary regime and electoral politics led from backstage maneuvering to open meetings, press coverage, and public scrutiny. This opening from the subterranean to the pellucid also exposed him to attack. As political meetings and other civic gatherings became more public, partisan, and formal, the perceived need for rules to hold disorder at bay also became more acute. Sun Yat-sen, himself a veteran of uncounted meetings in his career as a revolutionary and statesman, complained about how easily political gatherings dissolved into disorder. “Go and see one of my compatriots’ so-called meetings,” he wrote. “They’re hardly more than a mob in a hall.”26 Two thousand years of monarchy had settled public ritual for emperor, court, ofﬁcialdom, and commoners within an intelligible and enforceable set of strictures. Six months of a republic and more than a decade of revolutionary politics did not offer anything comparable by way of new and binding rituals and rules. Many revolutionaries openly rejected deference and decorum. Some, like Song Jiaoren and Tang Qunying, had temperaments well suited to the blistering exchanges that resulted. Others seem to have been propelled along by the logic of intense political competition. Chinese divided then and now on how to interpret modern political tumult. Some seize on such disorders as signs of political immaturity and weakness. Americans take as evidence of progress the fact that U.S. senators no longer cane each other on the Senate ﬂoor and instead conﬁne themselves to veiled insults and the occasional vulgarity. Angry or violent gestures sometimes erupt because they cannot be contained and also because unreasonable words and deeds can be persuasive. In his study of the “tactical uses of passion,” F. G. Bailey described the power of emo-

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tional, even violent, outbursts in public debate as involving a paradox in which “reason must be trumped by emotion” even though reasoned argument “at the same time . . . is upheld as the superior mode” of discourse.27 After studying in Britain the very reasonable Yang Changji came away impressed by the way even orators in public parks managed to make an argument “without someone getting up and hurling an insult.” By contrast, “Chinese people at rallies, when they take part in discussions, often throw ink or teapots or chairs at speakers.”28 More recently, “legislative violence” (guohui baoli) in Taiwan since democratization gathered momentum in the late 1980s has persisted well past the break with oneparty rule and at times helped turn the national law-making body into a “public forum for pranks, gimmicks, shouting matches, furniture throwing, and ﬁstﬁghts.”29 Whether the presence of uncontrolled or tactically deployed passion is a sign of “robust” democracy, un-Chinese behavior, or political pathology is an open and interesting question for citizens and analysts alike.30 The beginnings in China of this contest between passionate political expression on the one hand and the effort to contain or suppress political outbursts on the other are to be found early in the twentieth century. Others believed there were worse things than turmoil and mob action. In 1919 and a few months before the May Fourth Movement noisily erupted in Beijing, Marxist-leaning Li Dazhao had assailed the city, and by implication China, not for its corrupt ways but for its “deathly stillness.”31 Lu Xun seemed to agree. He was a product of the 1911 Revolution both in the formative and radicalizing inﬂuence of his sojourn studying abroad in Japan and in his service in the Republic’s government from 1912 to 1926. He had participated in the revolution when it came to Shaoxing in December 1911. A teacher at the time, he joined students who took to the streets to lecture the population on the virtues of the new Republic.32 However, as his 1922 “The True Story of Ah Q” amply demonstrated, Lu Xun did not see the 1911 Revolution as a success. In a 1927 lecture at the Hong Kong YMCA he suggested that China’s problem was not too much political racket and uproar but too little. Intent on revitalizing his country as a modern nation, he argued that a cultural obsession with decorum and restraint perpetuated what he referred to as “Silent China” (Wusheng de Zhongguo).33 Lu Xun’s views on public life and the relationship between leaders and followers were complicated, as beﬁt a sensitive observer of postimperial China. In 1918 his breakthrough story, “Diary of a Madman,” a dark tale of China’s ancient culture consuming present-day Chinese body and

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soul, provided the kind of “psychological jolt” to his reading public Sun Yat-sen had hoped the Republic itself would supply. The story’s narrator conﬁdes to his diary the unspeakable truth about the cannibalistic nature of Chinese culture, then asks out loud to those who might listen, “Is it right?”34 According to Lu Xun, most Chinese were silent out of habit. As a language reformer he blamed the classical written language for creating a culture of reticence and quietude: too much esoteric writing by the elite and not enough speaking out by everyone else. Classical Chinese may have uniﬁed the literati, but it left most of China’s “Four Hundred Million” out of the discursive loop. Borrowing a metaphor coined by Liang Qichao and popularized by Sun Yat-sen, Lu Xun also characterized the many spoken dialects of Chinese as divisive, leaving the Chinese people “unable to understand each other[,] . . . like a great dish of loose sand.”35 Lu Xun looked to a reinvigorated vernacular tongue to “restore speech to this China which has been silent for centuries.”36 Since the turn of the century campaigns for promoting the vernacular language as a spur to literacy and national consciousness had been gaining momentum.37 One of Lu Xun’s tasks when he worked in the Ministry of Education in Beijing beginning in spring 1912 was to meet with other experts to develop a phonetic system for standardizing pronunciation.38 He believed that only modern communications and universal education in a common vernacular would allow Chinese to speak to each other as one people. Lu Xun wanted Chinese to speak out freely and forcefully not only to family and friends but also to the larger community and to the state. The image he summoned up in 1927 to convey the breaking of a culturally imposed silence was the May Fourth era student protester: “The young must transform our country into a vocal China (youshengde Zhongguo). They must speak out boldly (dadan de shuohua), advance without regard to personal gain or loss, shoving aside the ancients and giving voice to their sincere thoughts and feelings.”39 The result would be a nation that was talkative, noisy, articulate, and lively. One heard these voices in the streets of Beijing and other cities when students and their allies protested the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 and in a continuing series of protests and demonstrations in the years that followed. In 1912 Lu Xun had taken up residence in Beijing as one of many ofﬁcials who made the trip north to occupy posts in the consolidated national government headed by Yuan Shikai. He lived in the Shaoxing Lodge for natives of his hometown not far from the Huguang Lodge and worked in the Ministry of Education in the Inner City due north of the old literati

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district through Xuanwu Gate. His generally terse diary entries make little mention of party politics. He takes no note of Sun Yat-sen’s triumphal arrival at the Beijing train station on August 24. Later in October he did contribute a small donation for relief of the townspeople of Tongzhou burned out of their houses during the troop riot that narrowly missed disrupting Sun’s ﬁnal rail leg to Beijing.40 The uproar in the Huguang Lodge the day after Sun’s arrival also failed to register. Although he hoped to reach the masses through his writing, Lu Xun evinced a dislike of noisy crowds. His route to and from work passed by the famous Liulichang book and curio market, and he spent many hours browsing and shopping there. However, he had little taste for the hustle and bustle of either commerce or politics. Lu Xun brieﬂy attended the 1912 mass celebration organized by Song Jiaoren on the ﬁrst anniversary of the October 10 Wuchang Uprising at the Liulichang market. He noted, “People were teeming like ants. Could not stay long and left.”41 Lu Xun’s critique of Republican politics ran in two directions: disillusionment with the Republic as a set of governmental institutions and alarm at the irrational and destructive potential of mass politics. As a result of his own years of service in it, he found the experience of Republican government dispiriting. The revolutionary Cai Yuanpei’s resignation in 1912 as minister of education undercut Lu Xun’s hopes for reform.42 He also faced bureaucratic inefﬁciency and indifferent, sometimes nonsensical leadership. He was taken to meet Yuan Shikai in an impersonal series of audiences that had ofﬁcials delivered batch by batch to the president, subjected to “a very odd” speech by Cai Yuanpei’s replacement, made to attend endless meetings and associated receptions (which he seems to have avoided if possible), and, as section chief for novels and popular education, lectured to by a pompous senior ministry ofﬁcial on the need to make sure modern literature upheld “loyalty, ﬁlial piety, and chastity.”43 In September 1913 Confucius’s birthday commemoration fell on a Sunday, a day off for government employees. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Education ordered its staff to attend early morning ceremonies at the Hall of Classics adjacent to the Confucius Temple, a long journey by rickshaw from the Shaoxing Lodge. Some bleary-eyed ofﬁcials took their revenge. As Lu Xun described it: “At seven I went to observe it, and there were about thirty or forty people present, either kneeling or standing, and some standing on the periphery laughing. Qian Nianjing cursed loudly. In an instant, everything became an empty gesture, a real joke.”44 Lu Xun went again with a friend to the Hall of Classics in March 1914 to observe members of the Confucianism Society, a nongovernmental body whose hon-

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orary president was Kang Youwei, resurrect the old Spring Sacriﬁces. He pronounced what he saw “empty and vulgar.”45 The desultory pace of work at the ministry left an alienated Lu Xun plenty of time for his translation and antiquarian projects.46 Lu Xun also gave a public lecture series on art sponsored by the ministry in summer 1912 and attended a range of other public events, some sponsored by the government and others by civic groups of various kinds. As part of his duties he worked closely with a civic group called the China Popular Education Research Society, which he dryly noted was actually made up of men from Jiangsu Province despite the use of “China” in its name.47 He attended a “lecture society” meeting on a rainy day when neither lecturers nor audience showed up.48 He received unwelcome political solicitations in the mail, including one from the All-Zhejiang Society with a four-page statement on behalf of citizens of his home province. Lu Xun noted that he “was not acquainted” with any of the statement signatories and “intended not to reply.”49 He donated to charitable causes, including victims of the Tongzhou violence but also ﬂood, drought, and insect plague sufferers in Zhejiang, Hubei, Jiangxi, and the capital region. For an appeal for support of Woodrow Wilson’s European war recovery charity, he seems to have been ordered by his superiors to make a contribution.50 Lu Xun was intimately familiar with a range of activities that ﬁgured prominently in Republican political and civic life including reform initiatives, meetings, lectures, rallies, exhibitions, and appeals for political support and charitable contributions. He organized or took part in many of them. He participated in a remarkable national conference of language reformers aimed at standardizing the pronunciation of Chinese convened in Beijing in spring 1913.51 Delegates debated issues like the relative merits of using Roman letters, parts of Chinese characters, or signs invented for the purpose to guide the reading of characters. Delegates also voted on the correct pronunciation of 6,500 separate characters. Lu Xun, joining other disciples of Zhang Binglin, made a successful motion to adopt Zhang’s character-based phonetic system on the grounds that it was rooted in remote antiquity and reﬂected China’s cultural essence.52 Like many other assemblies of the period charged with deciding tough issues, the conference was contentious. One of the organizers, Wu Zhihui, notoriously compared the Beijing dialect favored by many delegates as a standard for a national spoken language to “ridiculous dog barking.” Parliamentary techniques like formal debate and voting and making motions were used to keep order and hammer out results.53

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Prior to his stunning debut as a literary prophet and cultural critic, Lu Xun has been said to have “retreated from public life to concentrate on the study of ancient Chinese texts and inscriptions.”54 He was, however, engaged enough to be irritated by his roles as civil servant, provincial sojourner, and public intellectual. Though public life often supplied bad lectures, boring meetings, empty rituals, arbitrary rules, and annoying solicitations rather than the truth and authenticity Lu Xun was looking for, the forms themselves could be turned by others to livelier purposes. Many of these same elements composed the repertoire of student protesters he would laud in his 1927 lecture. Lu Xun’s reﬂections on the 1911 Revolution and the Republic challenge the notion that republicanism continued to matter as a dynamic political force. At the same time, his writer’s life and political career epitomize the importance of the new citizen’s ability to participate in politics, in his case by proposing policy as well as mocking political pretense and questioning authority as well as exercising it. Liang Qichao found the mania for meetings in political China “crazy.” Lu Xun found the same phenomenon tedious. However, both Liang and Lu Xun continued to participate out of civic and professional obligation and because their publics and occupations demanded it. Lu Xun also cast a gimlet eye on the people themselves. He wanted a vocal public to expose the faults of Chinese politics, society, and culture. He was leery, however, of a politics that resembled theatergoing in which citizens acted like overexcited or jaded opera fans or a politics that mimicked the marketplace gawking he noticed on his walks in Beijing. To Lu Xun’s distress, people in Beijing would stand in front of a mutton shop “to gape, with evident enjoyment at the skinning of a sheep.”55 In this regard he shared Liang Qichao’s distaste for overenthusiastic supporters, Sun Yat-sen’s disdain of the mob, and Yang Changji’s and Zhang Ji’s separate but allied worries about the degeneration of public life into chaos and turmoil. One diary entry recorded the kind of convergence of political and social tyranny that Lu Xun was troubled by. February 8, 1913.—Clear. Windy. Went to the ministry in the morning. The rickshaw man accidentally severed a rubber water-hose that was placed on the street. What appeared to be a policeman and a number of people in civilian clothes suddenly appeared and began pummeling him at random. In a decadent age human beings behave like wild dogs.56

Just as words from the classics like benevolence and righteousness “snarl and growl” at Lu Xun’s ﬁctional “madman,” the real-life crowd savagely

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falls upon an innocent individual. As someone attuned to the “darker shades of the human psyche,” Lu Xun believed that brutality could arise from any direction, including from the masses.57 The incident apparently inspired his 1919 story,“An Unimportant Affair,” in which a rickshaw man accidentally runs into an old woman, except in the ﬁctional version the rickshaw puller takes the old woman to the local police station to make sure she is cared for. The passenger-narrator marvels that this gesture, far from empty, impressed him more than the classics he “had to memorize as a youth.”58 This is the kind of altruism Yang Changji insisted on as a response to Western individualism and national crisis, and a value Lu Xun seems to have derived from his sojourner experience in the capital of the Republic as he pivoted away from tradition in its classical and everyday manifestations toward a modern politics. Mirroring Republican politics, Lu Xun’s ﬁction offered choices for individuals and for the nation. In his most famous essay, published in the Beijing Morning Post in 1923, Lu Xun imagined China as a doorless and windowless iron house of sleepers who will soon suffocate.59 Since they have no apparent means of escape, should one wake them or let them die in peace? He also allows in some hope. Though there is no exit from the room, the one who is already awake can rouse the others. Despite his discomfort with crowds and their irrational impulses, Lu Xun does not want to die alone, or, as a writer, alone with his insights. His consequent decision to “awaken” the people, and his public, followed a common Republican era trope for actions taken to rouse Chinese to turn the tide, open the door, or throw the switch in the direction of activism and unfettered political speech.60 The modern spectacle of political expression, inspiring and disturbing by turns, was far from the whole story of Chinese politics. The less audible world of institutions and the mostly invisible realm of networking and conspiracy also mattered. The fury of protest movements was often directed at decisions taken behind the scenes by old and new political operators, making these quieter or silent forces seem sinister and contrapuntal to authentic and exclamatory moments of political expression. The 1919 May Fourth Movement itself was triggered by press revelations about secret treaties, negotiated by Lu Zhengxiang in his continuing role as the Republic’s chief foreign policy expert, that weakened China’s position at the Versailles peace conference. Publicity and propaganda created an air of expectancy among the elite and ordinary citizens alike that was difﬁcult to ignore and easy to awaken. A Nationalist Party leader, Hu

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Hanmin, observed in a 1919 article on mass psychology that some participants in negotiations he had joined to try to avert civil war made a special point of demanding a “closed-door meeting” to avoid being inﬂuenced by the pressures of public opinion.61 Doors can only be closed in this sense once they have been opened. The Chinese Republic offered an alternative to the opaque practices of autocracy. Secrecy and publicity joined to form a new hinge in the exercise of power that linked conspiracy to the possibility of exposure. The ad hoc nature of the new citizenship resulted from the fact that there was no precise standard for a mobilized citizenry beyond standing up and speaking up for China and other causes. Widening participation from the 1890s on included armed rebellions and terrorist attacks against the Qing authorities but also voting in the limited elections the monarchy offered, meetings, petitions delivered by hand and telegram, membership in patriotic and issue-focused organizations, and composing and reading political writings in magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets. The scale of political activities was striking even if only a small fraction of the total population was involved. Elected local assemblies began to meet in 1907, and by 1909 the electorate had grown to two million voters.62 The national legislative elections in winter 1912–13 that Song Jiaoren and the renamed Nationalist Party won drew 10 percent of China’s population to the polls.63 The single issue of opium suppression inspired the founding of thousands of societies for the purpose, with more than three hundred Opium Abstaining Societies in Shandong Province alone by 1909.64 Political events also had a second life as news reports inspired further action. Perhaps two million to four million Chinese regularly read newspapers and magazines on the eve of the 1911 Revolution.65 During the Republican period newspaper readership likely doubled every ten years until 1937.66 Mao Zedong recalled spending about a third of his ﬁnancial outlay during his teacher college years on newspaper subscriptions. He told the American journalist Edgar Snow that from 1911 until he escaped into the mountains to ﬁght on as a guerrilla revolutionary in 1927 he “never stopped reading the daily papers of Peking, Shanghai and Hunan.”67 Newspaper reading during this era was a highly social affair in which copies were passed from person to person and read and discussed with intense interest.68 If Hegel viewed newspaper reading as a modern person’s “substitute for morning prayers,” with head bowed over the daily news, keeping up with the headlines was a more congregational practice in China.69

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Oratory was one of the most visible and widespread elements in the leader’s and citizen’s repertoire. Aside from putting up wall posters and an epidemic of vote buying, speech making was the principal campaign tactic used during the national elections of 1912–13.70 As Di Wang notes in his study of the 1911 Revolution and its aftermath in the city of Chengdu, “public lectures became a symbol of political mobilization.”71 Lu Xun’s boldly eloquent, patriotic youths embodied the same infectious, performative spirit. By 1912 getting up and giving a speech was something that was expected whenever civic or political groups gathered for meetings. In this respect the burst of political expressiveness that attended the founding of the Republic was as much a matter of giving the public what it expected and wanted as imposing a new political form.

Was Confucius a Public Speaker? Early advocates of oratory as a breakthrough mode of political communication agreed with Lu Xun that less silence and more talk was good for individuals and for the country. In his preface to a 1946 guide to public speaking, Sun Qimeng recounted prejudices against being too talkative he encountered while growing up: “When I was a small child, I studied the Analects and had great respect for Old Master Kong. But when I read the part that says ‘The gentleman is slow in speech but quick in action,’ I was not inclined in my own mind to consider that natural.”72 Sun could understand why a gentleman must act quickly in the face of injustice or wrongdoing. This was an apt lesson for any child of the Republican era. Righting the wrongs of imperialism, warlordism, and other ills and injuries ﬁlled nearly every political agenda. But the injunction to be slow of speech or suspicious of “ﬁne words” (qiaoyan) made little sense to him. Nor was he convinced when his teacher offered the familiar warning that “if a man only talks and does not act he will become a purveyor of empty talk (kongtan jia).” Sun recalled that the very village elders who supported such Confucian strictures against glibness with admonitions like “Don’t use careless speech or needlessly giggle” actually “said quite a lot and spoke quite well.”73 Besides, if Confucius was so dead set against the spoken word, why do the Analects contain the continual refrain “The Master said”? How could he have communicated with his seventy-two disciples and three thousand followers if he had not been adept at public speaking? By Sun’s reckoning, public speaking already existed as an integral, if unrecognized, part of teaching and community life. In his preface to a translated American textbook on the subject, Mu

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Jinyuan presented essentially the same facts with a very different emphasis: “In the whole history of our literature there is not a single page of public speaking (yanshuo). In four thousand years our literary circles have not produced a single public speaker (yanshuo jia).”74 Mu, like Sun Qimeng, acknowledged that people do of course speak in Chinese history. “But these are only conversations and not public speaking, only speech (shuo) and not public speech (gongkai de shuo).” The public nature of a speech, or lack thereof, made the difference. Mu conceded that the historical record contained numerous examples of speech suggestive of the rhetoric of a Demosthenes or an Edmund Burke. He noted the presence of roving propagandists of the Warring States period who “crisscrossed [China] making trouble and settling disputes,” generals who “harangued troops” before battle, and outspoken scholars. One could add to Mu’s list religious preachers in the Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, and Christian traditions in China. Despite early examples of lecturing, oral persuasion, and preaching, Mu argued, state oppression had effectively blocked the development of these professions and practices from becoming a settled and legitimate tradition of oratory. The dangers of speaking out publicly were legendary. The upright minister Bi Gan spoke out against the evil deeds of the last Shang dynasty ruler and was punished by disembowelment and by having his remains “minced and pickled.”75 The verdict on this forthright minister at the time was, “To speak, knowing [one’s words] will not be put to use, is stupid.” Since any emperor’s word and the pronouncements issued in his name were supposed to be ﬁnal, all political speech was in principle severely inhibited.76 Such inhibitions are common to all imperial systems that prize information and punish dissent.77 When the throne commands, genuine dialogue recedes. At the same time, the Chinese imperial system was far from a complete or thorough system of surveillance and control. The reward for the uninhibited speaker might be death, some less severe sanction, or, more rarely, fame as an upright ofﬁcial or rebel hero. The road to that moment of reckoning was paved with opportunities to speak out, even if warning signs along the way were also clear. In the Republican era new signs demanded a vocal citizenry since the people rather than the ruler now were supposed to have the last word. Advocates of public speaking continued to cite and bemoan the proverbial teahouse placard “Don’t Talk Politics” (motan guoshi) but also noted with satisfaction that by the 1940s “even in the corner of a [remote] village we ﬁnd traces of a lecture or a propaganda brigade.”78

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An Audience of One Prejudices against public speaking as intemperate, seditious, or foolhardy were real enough, but Chinese rhetorical traditions offer ample precedents and support for modern oratory. J. I. Crump, covering some of the same ground treated by Mu Jinyuan, observed that while “we know of no early oratorical tradition in China” one can ﬁnd “numberless examples of the adviser exhorting a single person (a ruler) to undertake actions, to revise or adopt certain attitudes.”79 China lacked a Pericles or a Cicero; but there was no shortage of rhetoricians able and willing to direct arguments upward to the ruler or out to a small circle of students and disciples. There is “little doubt that the art of disputation and persuasion was part of the Confucian’s equipment.”80 These verbal encounters could be as dramatic as debates in the Athenian agora or the Roman senate and, in their own way, public as well. Since the royal audience necessarily included aides and advisers, dialogue between adviser and ruler was played out before a considerable ofﬁcial crowd. During the Han dynasty, magistrate Zhu Yun’s remonstrance to the emperor against corruption at court, during which he broke the balustrade he clung to as guards tried to remove him for execution, was defended by a general standing nearby. The soldier’s appeal to the emperor—take my head instead of his—saved Zhu’s life and chastened the emperor.81 Zhu Yun’s victory was also attributed to a “voice that shook . . . onlookers” at court and his skill as a ﬁerce debater.82 The balustrade was left unrepaired by the emperor as a reminder of his own responsibility to listen as well as instruct. The canonical record of the past found in sources like the Shiji (Records of the Historian) offered many inspirational examples of oratory as a good and necessary thing for the same scholars who were instructed by their teachers to be suspicious of ﬁne words and who were wary of offending the sovereign. There is also little evidence of speech making as a political art comparable to the well-established and heavily valorized written memorial or edict, or other ritual and symbolic representations of power and authority found in everything from the construction of walls built to impress the traveler to court ceremonies designed to awe the supplicant.83 Even so, classical Chinese histories were in no small part composed of speech after speech.84 Whatever constraints speakers faced in life were loosened or abandoned in historical retelling.85 In a striking corollary to the primacy of writing, political actors were more likely to give speeches in texts than in real-life. The prudent reti-

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cence of most serving scholar-ofﬁcials contrasted with the critical and contrary voices pouring out from the classical texts they studied and drew inspiration from. The ancient art of oral persuasion could stir emotions and challenge an adversary as surely as that of a contemporary or Western orator.86 Such encounters might leave a ruler struggling to recover from a stinging rebuke, such as the one Sun Yat-sen endured when the weeping of Tang Qunying and Shen Peizhen “shook the room” where the three met in the aftermath of the Nationalist Party convention. Ancient arguments between sovereign and critic reverberated down the centuries. Mencius, above all, was revered for putting rulers on the spot in the presence of witnesses. When he trapped King Xuan of Qi into admitting in effect that the king, as ruler, would be as culpable for bad government as a faithless friend or a corrupt ofﬁcial would be for his failings, the sovereign reacted the way modern leaders sometimes do in response to a tough question: he tried to change the subject. “The king looked to the left and the right and spoke of other matters.”87 King Xuan’s use of royal decorum as an evasive maneuver to deﬂect Mencius’s pointed comments resembles Zhang Ji’s ruling that the Nationalist convention session disrupted by suffragists was “not a plenary session.” Ritualized gestures and parliamentary rules could have comparable diversionary or silencing effects. The rhetorical nature of the state— the political need to persuade or propitiate—is a feature of both ancient and modern regimes in China and elsewhere. The perceived need to persuade those one might otherwise simply order about creates advantages for authority as the one or ones who do most of the talking. At the same time, there are openings for the critic. The king could not easily dismiss Mencius, the philosopher adorning his court, any more than Zhang Ji could command the silence of female critics and comrades who took advantage of the new Republic’s permissive political atmosphere and parliamentary setting to press the cause of women’s rights. The king could dodge the question of moral culpability by looking to his loyal courtiers, just as Zhang could shout “Long Live the Republic!” as a means of navigating around unruly citizens. Who lost and who gained in the process depended on the reactions of both actors and audience. The prick of Mencius’s tactical intervention became a strategic blow against autocrats everywhere as the ground shifted in the philosopher’s favor with centuries of rereading and retelling.88 By republican convention and principle such shifts now occurred in real time in a radically expansive public arena. A ruler’s reaction to such verbal sallies might be respectful silence, po-

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lite queries, sullen evasion, or something more direct and brutal. Early in his climb to power, the Han dynasty founder Liu Bang took to urinating in the hats of Confucian scholars as they approached and before they could lecture him about his moral obligations. As Sima Qian recorded, “Whenever a visitor wearing a Confucian hat comes to see him, he immediately snatches the hat from the visitor’s head and pisses in it, and when he talks to other people he always curses them up and down.”89 Liu Bang eventually mended his ways. It remained the case that, as an audience of one, rulers were in a position to heckle, harass, or even kill those who appeared before them. Zhu Di, the Ming dynasty Yongle emperor, responded to vice-censor Lian Zining’s forthright criticism of Zhu Di’s violent coup against his nephew, the previous emperor, by having Lian’s tongue cut out in his presence.90 The prerogative of the autocrat to cut off speech continued well into the twentieth century. In 1953 Mao responded to the noted intellectual Liang Shuming’s critique of Soviet-style development with spoken vulgarities that came close to Liu Bang’s gesture in word if not in deed. “I think you stink!” Chairman Mao had wrenched the microphone away from the speaker and burst forth in a stream of technicolor invective. A taut hush fell over Peking’s cavernous Hall of Benevolence. The several hundred people convened there that Saturday afternoon in 1953 blinked in astonished wonder at the speaker’s platform. Almost none of them had seen the Chairman in such an unbridled fury.91

The rants of rulers from Liu Bang to Mao and the outbursts of dissenters from Zhu Yun to Tang Qunying indicate the power of words to challenge authority as well as the risks to all parties involved. Oratory in China’s past was not so much rare as devalued by the prominence of other forms of political communication, not so much absent in the historical record as expressed in ways meant to explain the action rather than be the cause of that action or outcome. A legacy of rhetoric and wordplay continued to shape twentieth-century political language in ways that suggest that modern political actors like Mao drew vital and selective support from the past. When a sudden rainstorm threw a May Fourth Movement anniversary commemoration at Yunnan University in Kunming in 1945 into disarray, professor and critic Wen Yiduo appeared onstage and launched into a speech with “Heaven washes the troops”(tian xi bing) as its central image, referring to the story of the Zhou king Wu who nearly canceled an attack on account of rain until assured by one of his ofﬁcers that the rain was a good omen and Heaven’s blessing on

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their enterprise.92 Wen had the stage presence to extemporize and the erudition to place an event in deeper historical and cultural context. Sadly, like Song Jiaoren, Wen was rewarded for his eloquence and his criticism of those in power with assassination. The most signiﬁcant modern change in the structure of political rhetoric involved the rerouting and redirecting of speech making. Instead of an adviser speaking to the king or emperor, the new republican model had the leader as orator addressing the many or the one people. Instead of, or perhaps in addition to, gaining power by seeking an audience with the ruler, a political actor was obliged to ﬁnd, reach, and persuade his audience, the “people.” The motivating force behind political speech in the past tended to be either desperation on the part of a ﬁgure like a beleaguered general or cornered rebel or the moralizing, sometimes celebritydriven compulsions of a scholar-ofﬁcial. By the late nineteenth century the nationalism that ﬂooded into public settings and agitated the private feelings of citizens gave nearly everyone a compelling reason for speaking out if he or she wished or dared to.

Literati Speak to Each Other and to the People The state did encourage some forms of oratory in its own service. Literati were pressed to perform as public lecturers in order to explain the imperial edicts that formed the content of the “village covenant” (xiangyue) institution established in the Qing. A portion of the Kangxi emperor’s “Sacred Edict” was supposed to be read and explicated in every community twice a month. While allowing that “charismatic preachers were undoubtedly rare” among the scholars who made presentations, Patricia Ebrey believes that “these lectures must have had some effect on popular thinking, . . . comparable to that of civics instructions in public schools in the twentieth century.”93 Instructions issued by the government detailed how to prepare the lecture site, including where musicians providing accompaniment should be positioned and the proper sequence of kneeling, bowing, and kowtowing by members of the audience.94 Local ofﬁcials supervised, although the actual lecturing was typically done by nonofﬁcial local gentry. In this preegalitarian age, lectures given might address those gathered as “You masses of the people” or even “stupid” or “dullard.”95 The idealized stability of the literati-led Confucian community masked a more contentious, noisier reality that still fell well short of a genuinely vocal China. In James Polachek’s study of midcentury literati politics we

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ﬁnd disgraced Opium War commander Yao Ying reﬁghting old battles on a kind of literati lecture circuit in the capital. Yao Ying was “invited to proper literati gatherings and his story recited at length. Hardly adverse to such celebrity status, Yao seems to have relished the opportunity to lecture at these affairs.”96 His after-banquet speeches, with speaker and audience in their cups, elicited a powerful response from those present. As early as the 1820s and 1830s some poetry clubs and other literati gatherings began to evolve from circles connected to ofﬁcial patrons to groups deﬁned by their own sense of solidarity and common frustration with the state of public affairs.97 Once the Treaty Port milieu emerged as conduit and haven for Western-style lecture societies and public events, the prospects for a more robust, hybrid public life brightened further. Toward the end of the Qing oratory in the Western mode that was also redolent of older literati habits of debate and lecturing became common enough to be satirized. Particularly vivid descriptions of the varieties of old and new literati speech making appear in Li Boyuan’s 1906 novel, A History of Modern Times.98 In early scenes set in rural Hunan residents come to grips with Western inﬂuences in the persons of a bumbling, reform-minded prefect and foreign mining company ofﬁcials who hope to exploit the remote area’s mineral wealth. Local people fear ofﬁcials are conspiring to “sell [their] land to foreigners who will [then] exterminate the common people.”99 When the prefect, who has published a circular explaining that no such action is contemplated, complains about being the victim of a misunderstanding, a local teacher reminds him, “Those who can read are few while those who engage in empty talk are numerous.”100 Meanwhile four thousand or ﬁve thousand people have congregated at a local school to hear a local degree holder named Huang, of whom it was said that “in the prefectural capital there was not one who was not afraid of him.” Huang, very much a local version of Yao Ying, enters the school compound, parts the crowd, and climbs up on a table to deliver a hair-raising speech on the need to defend to the death land that belongs to the emperor and to “us.”101 Unlike ofﬁcial reformers and more like a rebel, he calls for the closing of shops and the killing of foreigners. Huang’s local status and reputation equip him to speak directly and spontaneously to and for his community, putting to ﬂight in comic disarray the well-intentioned, bookish prefect. Not a few literati were equally well equipped to speak in public, despite Confucian doubts about the propriety of speech making. New conditions provided by reformist and revolutionary politics quickly broadened the range of speakers available and the size and diversity of audiences. When

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the action in Li Boyuan’s novel shifts to Shanghai, his provincial characters encounter public speaking in the newly created settings of reform clubs and political meetings. Invited to attend a rally at a Protect the Country and Strengthen the Race Anti-Footbinding Society, one enthuses, “Great! I’ve often heard people talk of this kind of public-speaking society. I imagine this is one.”102 However, Li Boyuan’s ﬁctional visitors to Shanghai are surprised and disappointed by a lack of spontaneity in the speeches. Expecting something novel and exotic, they hear instead “nothing but the talk you read in newspapers, nothing strange or out-of-theordinary.” As soon as the speaker ﬁnishes, a draft of his remarks is sent off to be published in a local newspaper.103 Why bother to attend a speech if you can read it the next day in the paper? The real thing seems no more vivid than news accounts of it. Vicarious participation in an event, as a newspaper reader experienced it, rivaled being there in person. This in and of itself constituted a breakthrough in political communication. When events witnessed in person appear to be copies of what one has already read about and imagined, the foundations of the nation as “imagined community” have been truly laid.104 As the scene in Shanghai unfolds, Wei Bangxian, the patron of the antifoot-binding society, steps up to give his address on the subject. In a promising opening to his talk Wei compares in graphic terms embattled China to his own body, an analogy more successfully made in print by famous contemporaries like Yan Fu and later used by proponents of nationalism like Liang Qichao and He Luzhi.105 Wei then pauses suddenly, shuts his eyes, and, to calm his nerves, takes two deep breaths. The audience, sensing a high point in Wei’s speech, applauds and settles in for more. Wei discovers to his horror that he has misplaced his notes. He “suddenly began groping at his body for some considerable length of time, and searching the ﬂoor as if he had lost something there. He searched for a long time and found nothing. In his anxiousness, beads of sweat dripped from his head [and] his whole body was seized with turmoil and he could not speak one word.”106 A speaker could summon up authority with a few apt words and gestures in one moment and in the next lose his or her place, and dignity. Such was the promise and peril of vocal China.

“Target the Soul of the Nation” The last decades of the Qing witnessed growth in the kind of civic activism that sparked meetings, speeches, and civic life. Members of politically oriented groups engaged in “revolutionary harangues” (gaotan

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geming) in old venues such as schools or academies and new ones such as parks or gardens open to the public.107 In Shanghai one could count on made-to-order audiences assembled in halls built for the purpose, as well as access to print media geared to amplifying one’s remarks.108 By the late nineteenth century the relatively small (about 25,000 men) community of politically engaged literati that Polachek identiﬁes as the basis of informal political discourse during the Opium War era expanded to include other segments of the million or so strong degree-holding class.109 This leap was signiﬁcant not only in terms of numbers but also because the ordinary degree holders now involved were really a category of “scholar-commoners” in comparison to the top elite.110 After this broadening of activism within the elite, the next move to a popular audience and constituency would bridge a smaller social distance. Lecturing and debate, always present to a degree in literati circles, took on new urgency and prominence. Mary Rankin notes that circles of gentry activists dating to the 1880s increasingly gave their discussions of public issues an institutional locus in provincial anti-foot-binding associations, schools, and debating societies.111 At these meetings issues were discussed, leaders chosen, and decisions made, all in public.112 A strong emotional chord was struck time and again. In the early 1890s at Kang Youwei’s famous academy in Guangzhou, Kang and followers delivered lectures in the form of “straight talk” (changyan), “harshly ridiculing the old learning” and carrying on debates late into the night.113 For Kang, especially after China’s defeat in the 1884 Sino-French War, the need to speak out was urgent: “At present, above us we have blockheads while below bribery is rampant. . . . [S]cholars cover their mouths with their hands and the channel by which words reach the throne (yanlu) becomes tongue-tied.”114 Kang Youwei could be frightening in his intensity, especially when speaking to scholars and students he regarded as “complacent and ignorant.” Like Sun Yat-sen’s a few years later, Kang’s goal was to shock his listeners. “His tough, rapid-ﬁre delivery was intended to rouse them from their stupidity.”115 Lecturers from Kang’s academy made visits in the evening to schools around the city and spoke to several hundred or even a thousand people in discussions that would sometimes “shake the trees” and “scare the crows from the branches.”116 These propaganda efforts relied on a social or group dynamic to seed and spread the message. Liang Qichao lectured to forty students at his academy in Hunan for four hours each day. Under his inspired leadership the school became a hothouse of reformist and radical thinking.

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At that time, all the students lived in dormitories and had no contact with the outside world; but the atmosphere within the school became more radical day by day[,] . . . [though] the outside world had no way of knowing this. Then, when the new year vacation arrived and the students went home, they showed their notes to relatives and friends, causing a great stir throughout the entire Hunan province.117

Liang envisioned teaching as part of a larger social process whereby discussion within a “small group” (xiaoqun) of friends, teachers, and students would expand to “discourse on the whole world” and thereby reach the larger society. Small groups that already existed as the natural outgrowths of literati culture would now be linked together, expanded, and formalized in a “big group” (daqun), Liang’s initial rendering of the Western notion of “society.” In part under Liang’s inﬂuence and in part because grouping together made so much sense compared to the immediate alternatives of individual self-reliance, inaction, or direct state control, practically everyone who thought seriously about expanding the social bases of politics advocated a collective response that began small and progressed to enfold the entire population.118 Sun Yat-sen hoped to discipline and guide individuals, families, and clans from what he judged to be their current weakened condition as an unorganized “plate of sand” into “one great Chinese Republican national body.”119 In 1919 Mao Zedong, drawing on his own freewheeling experiences of organizing and being organized in Changsha, called for little organizations to band together in a great social unity: a “Grand Alliance of the Masses.”120 Still in his pre-Communist phase, Mao was open to the inclusion of traditional and elite bodies like guilds and native-place associations as well as popular and progressive organizations like labor unions and student societies. Mao argued that human beings had a native genius for “uniting,”“grouping” (qun), and organizing.121 The new society that resulted was not always polite, civil, or broadly civic-minded, despite Liang Qichao’s pleas for “mutual tolerance.”122 However, this society of societies deﬁnitely had, in Bryna Goodman’s apt description, an “expansive” quality that encouraged activism to root locally, spread geographically, and climb administratively.123 Liang and Kang imagined a China energetically committed to civic pursuits and drew on their practical experiences as teachers, activists, and public ﬁgures to realize this ideal world in part if not yet in whole. Kang accordingly emphasized the importance of social solidarity or “sociability” (hequn) as a civic and political resource. For example, in teaching Kang preferred classroom instruction to the old tutorial method because

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he saw it as a bridge to broader political action. “He thought that teaching should be done in [a context of] sociability where students would be able to share ideas. This would encourage habits of collective intimacy. He believed that recent prohibitions against forming associations had demoralized scholars and weakened China.”124 Liang Qichao cited the Book of Changes injunction for “Gentlemen to discourse with friends” to justify the expansive discussion and group-based pedagogy he used in his own progressive school in Changsha in 1897.125 This socializing or grouping with friends, classmates, and teachers for new civic purposes resembled in form and function the modern French notion of sociabilitè. In the French case, one of the signs that a new style of thinking had emerged was the rise of a new vocabulary. The term sociabilitè was coined in the early eighteenth century and became the slogan of the moderate literati who idealized private life and saw reciprocity as the bond among humans in “society.”126

Like their French counterparts, Chinese literati accepted the state as a central fact of political life while at the same time acting in ways that gained a degree of autonomy. In the Chinese case the elite did not need to idealize private life as a separate sphere to realize a measure of independence. Instead literati valorized and expanded norms of friendship and community to cement an emerging political sociability. Liang Qichao extended this impulse far more broadly and directly, aided by his eloquence and personal magnetism. As Liang’s reputation grew, “scholars in various places competed with each other to invite him to lecture.”127 If little societies of publicly minded scholars could act on behalf of the common good, why could this principle not extend to other groups in an all-inclusive society and “intimately connected” nation? The potential for extending a politically charged elite sociability onto a national stage erupted dramatically in Kang Youwei’s brilliant May 1, 1895, speech to examination candidates in Beijing. The trigger for the speech was news of the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki that concluded the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 on April 17. Aspiring scholar-ofﬁcials in the capital, numbering about three thousand, had been in an excited state for weeks. On April 22 literati from Guangdong and Hunan Provinces went to the Court of Censors (Duchayuan) to remonstrate.128 The Court of Censors was a logical point of approach as an ofﬁcial conduit for the notional “pathway for words” (yanlu) leading to the emperor and his court, a route Kang had earlier declared to be “tongue-tied.”129 Over the next week the gate to the ofﬁce was choked with candidates,

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angry and upset over the terms of the treaty.130 A total of thirty-two petitions were submitted by provincial groups in the capital. As Richard Belsky has explained, this kind of bundling of opinion by hometown and home province showed the vital role of native-place lodges as informal channels of elite opinion.131 On April 30 and May 1, at Kang’s urging, scholars assembled at Songyun’an, a temple compound located in the literati district outside Xuanwu Gate, to continue discussions and draw up a joint petition. Sympathetic ofﬁcials also attended the meetings. Hostile ofﬁcials sent followers to lodges where examination candidates resided to post anti-petition propaganda in the form of slogans and couplets.132 An examination candidate was not yet an ofﬁcial, but neither was he really outside the state once he reached the highest level of the credentialing system. By the same token ofﬁcials had close contacts with candidates, especially their fellow provincials. The divide between ofﬁcials directly representing state and emperor and scholars as a social group was real but also drawn through the common world of literati sociability Kang and Liang now saw as an engine for political change. Kang selected the Songyun’an site in part because it had been the home of the upright Ming scholar Yang Jisheng who was famous for his own petition to the throne opposing appeasement of the Mongols.133 Yang had been outspoken to the end, reciting a poem afﬁrming loyalty to the emperor on the way to his execution.134 Beijing’s walls and palaces symbolized unassailable imperial authority. Kang and his supporters ﬁnessed this fact by artfully selecting protest sites and gathering places such as Songyun’an and the ofﬁce of the Court of Censors in tune with their intention to speak directly to the government and the emperor as scholars and prospective ofﬁcials. Their base in the literati district and native-place lodges provided a springboard for this strategy.135 Kang himself resided at the Nanhai Lodge’s Hall of Seven Trees during the events of 1895.136 Denied ofﬁcial public venues or formal approval for political gatherings, literati inscribed a bold political colophon on the political landscape of the capital. Kang Youwei’s impeccable credentials and the social prestige of his supporters made possible an emphatic statement of concern that was both politically disruptive and conventionally eloquent. Introduced by Liang Qichao, Kang spoke on May 1 at Songyun’an to the crowd of his elite peers. Kang was known to many in the crowd not by sight but by reputation. His physical appearance was judged unremarkable “save for the two mustaches at the corners of his mouth.”137 Kang spoke ﬂuently in “Southern” Mandarin (nanfang guanhua), a Ming dynasty vintage but

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still current pronunciation of the language of ofﬁcialdom distinct from but intelligible to speakers of the later Beijing dialect–based standard Mandarin.138 Kang asked those assembled to sign his “10,000 Word Petition.” Many in the crowd cried out and wept, and thirteen hundred did sign.139 Like the ﬁctional local scholar Huang in Li Boyuan’s novel, Kang Youwei had a gift for oratory. That ability might have remained conﬁned to Kang’s academy in Guangzhou or to elite banqueting had it not been for the national crisis—and the timing of the examination schedule— that gave him an immediate audience in the thousands and many times that number in the broader political class. The degree of political compression achieved in Beijing in spring 1895 through the concentrated effects of oratory and petitioning and the energy and speed with which Kang’s ideas exploded outward from the capital along old and new communications pathways signaled a new style and tempo of politics. Fusing the roles of rebellious outsider and clubbable insider stimulated political innovation. Literati were at ﬁrst reluctant to speak to the broader populace because of the bad and rebellious connotations associated with “inciting” the people.140 In the growing duel between the Qing regime and reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao and revolutionaries like Sun Yatsen, a competitive political logic pried literati loose from political dependency on the Qing state. In the next crisis, the abortive One Hundred Days of Reform in 1898, ideas developed in speeches and memorials became the basis of imperial edicts and government policies, before being canceled out by violent conservative reaction at Court. Defeat in 1898 also forced Kang, Liang, and other reformers to join Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries in foreign exile, driving a deeper wedge between state and elite dissidents and opening up new possibilities for leaders willing and able to speak to the people at home or abroad. The events of 1895 and 1898 demonstrated the power of the capital to capture the political imagination of the country with a few deft gestures and bold proposals by literati activists. That the new politics was made of words—written and spoken—and symbolic actions articulated to and through networks of like-minded individuals meant that conﬁning this vocal activism to Beijing was neither possible nor necessary. If the new China of reform and revolution could be produced and reproduced by Chinese in a particular frame of mind and with a common political language, then the political site might be Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, rural Hunan, or anywhere else where citizens gathered. The Qing government at ﬁrst actively prohibited public speaking as

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a dangerous threat to order.141 The ban was gradually rescinded after the proclamation of the Qing “New Policies” in January 1901. The New Policies, essentially the 1898 reforms without the original reformers, who remained in exile, and without the Guangxu emperor, who was still under palace arrest, assumed a need for local elite and popular support of initiatives in areas like education, commerce, and social reform. Government sought ways to reach those who were to participate in chambers of commerce, new schools, and local assemblies. When the Qing Court invited suggestions for constitutional reform beginning in 1907, political associations and lobbying efforts directed at the imperial Court acquired a tentative legitimacy.142 Local gentry in Zhili Province were recruited to lecture villagers not on Kangxi’s Sacred Edict but on the nature of self-government.143 An end to a formal ban on independent political organizations came only with the outbreak of revolution in 1911.144 The popular mandate to discuss the issues of the day was entrenched long before that.145 Hundreds of study societies dedicated to constitutional and other public issues were founded in the last decade of the Qing.146 As the scholarship of Mary Rankin, Min Jie, and Li Hsiao-t’i documents, speech making and a culture of meetings and publicity spread far beyond the exile community and high-level literati. The spectacle of speaker and crowd afﬁrming their patriotic commitment was widely recognized as a central piece in the puzzle of how a beleaguered China might respond to crisis. By 1902 newspaper editorialists were calling for more speech making as a way to strengthen China. The Impartial Daily (Dagong bao) declared, “Nowadays if one wishes to raise morale high and low and target the soul of the nation, a dead language [classical, written Chinese] certainly cannot rival the immediacy of the living language [vernacular, spoken Chinese]. Henceforth and in order to rouse patriotic worthies, we must pay close attention to the art of public speaking.”147 A photograph from a 1905 anti-American boycott rally against restrictive U.S. immigration policies captures a speaker, wearing a long queue, standing on a box high enough to put him just above a large crowd wearing military caps and straw boaters. He is gesturing, and all faces are turned toward him.148 The original meanings of the word commonly used for oratory, yanshuo, included the act of explaining something orally or in writing and, alternatively, the practice of storytelling.149 Although storytellers in the teahouse or marketplace shared content with the classical tradition of morality tales, imperial edicts, and lessons from history, professional

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raconteurs and performers also “provided channels of expression that had little or nothing to do with elite inﬂuence” and reﬂected the less orthodox concerns of the common people.150 Li Hsiao-t’i’s analysis of popular education in the last decade of the Qing stresses the importance of the storytelling connections of yanshuo to explain how the practice of public speaking spread so quickly.151 Stories traditionally performed were typically based on novels like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin but also unofﬁcial histories or even legal cases.152 As Di Wang notes, public speaking “was similar to traditional storytelling, but the contents were changed from historical events, legends, and romances to current issues of society.”153 A marketplace context offered an expansive, commoner sociability attractive to activists interested in selling their political ideas and generating political excitement. After the turn of the century, the term yanshuo increasingly became equated with lectures on topics of concern to the nation without losing its original associations of popular entertainment and literati didacticism. Even if the new raconteurs of reform and revolution did not model themselves directly on storytellers, they shared a common urban audience and some of the same theatrical techniques. The separate identity of yanshuo as oratory, as opposed to telling a story or reading a text in classical or vernacular Chinese, also owed something to modern Japanese inﬂuences through translated books and articles about public speaking and the experiences of returned students from Japan.154 Yanshuo was the Chinese word selected in the 1870s by none other than Fukuzawa Yukichi, the great Japanese interpreter of Western culture, to translate into Chinese characters the English for a “speech” or spoken address. The term, enzetsu in Japanese, later traveled back to China as a loanword.155 Fukuzawa believed it was crucial that Japanese be able to hold forth on the issues of the day to a small group or a large crowd. Many Chinese who witnessed the ﬂowering of oratory in Japan or, like Yang Changji, its further democratization in Britain agreed. As reform movements gathered momentum, activists fanned out from larger urban centers to the countryside giving speeches, winning support, and seeding the countryside with new public institutions. In 1903 itinerant lecturers passing through market towns in Zhejiang “inspired a father and son in Puyuan town to found a girls’ school.”156 Lecturing was part of a package of new institutions and practices ﬁelded by reformers that included reform societies, reading rooms, and lessons in debate and public speaking.157 Reformers suggested that oratory be taught as a school subject as a means of quickening the pace of change. Cai Yuanpei edi-

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torialized in 1901, “From now on a learned person, in order to lead society and enlighten the masses, must advance his knowledge of speech.”158 Cai translated Japanese textbooks on public speaking to bolster school curricula and founded a public speaking society.159 The rhetorical state, traditionally constituted from the emperor down to the literati and ﬁnally to the commoners expected to follow their betters’ lead, underwent a revolution in content and style of performance. Continuities, like the familiar practice of regaling a crowd with an exciting and informative message, helped thread these changes into the fabric of local society. Matched unevenly and sometimes violently to the rhetorical state was a rhetorical society dotted with people and places able to copy, revise, and pass on messages of reform and revolution.

Performing in Public on the Political Stage Changes in public life stimulated reﬂection on the aggressively vocal nature of China’s new political world. In August 1912, two weeks before the Nationalist Party convention, an editorialist for the Beijing Patriotic Post, the pseudonymous “E E Sheng” (literally,“Honest Voice,” and companion to the same paper’s “Cold Eye”), published a two-part article under the title “Lecturing Is a Most Important Kind of Study.”160 His aim was to explain why public speaking or lecturing as a political and civic activity had become so important and how one might begin to learn the technique. Unlike Lu Xun, E E Sheng saw a positive connection between classical Chinese and the spoken word. There are two kinds of lecturing (yanshuo). One is to take brush to paper to write. Another is to take one’s mouth, face everyone, and speak. To write a lecture is not hard. To speak a lecture is not easy. While what is written down is something a person reads—if a person can read—what is spoken is for everyone to hear. Chinese education is not yet fully developed. Those who cannot read are myriad. Therefore, skill at speaking is an essential, though extremely complicated, form of learning. China has no shortage of talent. But those who actually use their talent to develop lecturing are rare indeed.

The common ingredient in the arts of the “brush” and “mouth” is didactic. The remarkable departure in the view of the writer is the act of facing an audience and saying “for everyone to hear” what one might otherwise commit to paper. Like Lu Xun’s madman, one asks the question or gives an answer out loud and for all to hear and bears the consequences. The ﬁgure of a gesturing, erect, and emotional orator soon became part of the message being conveyed. Being a woman or worker or farmer

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in that pose made an even more dramatic statement. The older and stereotypical scholar had been celebrated as a distracted bookworm who “affected a slightly hunched round-shouldered posture.”161 The slouching, distracted literati elite now gave way to a citizenry marching, in the words of writer Ye Shengtao, with “every head held high and every chest ﬂung out.”162 In that posture one was well positioned to chant or sing, applaud, heckle, or, like Lu Xun’s colleague, curse. In a single set of physical motions the aesthetic nature of Chinese politics was revolutionized from one of bowed hierarchy to individual deﬁance and shoulder-toshoulder solidarity. Contemporaries agreed that the way people and things looked counted for a great deal in politics. E E Sheng wrote that while the content of a speech was important, public speaking was also a spectacle in which “words, tone, and looks” all mattered. In this sense, despite its novelty, public speaking was really “no different from singing Beijing opera onstage,” a discipline also requiring a studied and vigorous stage presence. Except, one might add, ordinary citizens would stand like emperors, generals, and ofﬁcials on the stage of politics. As Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom have pointed out, China’s modern political language relies heavily on the metaphor of politics as theater. A suddenly unpopular ofﬁcial might be urged to “get off the stage” (xiatai), while the visible portion of some other political event might be explained by the unseen presence of an expert “backstage” (houtai) manager.163 The physical settings of Republican politics encouraged this analogy. The Huguang Lodge’s central hall where operas as well as political meetings took place, painted in brilliant reds and yellows and illuminated by large lanterns hanging from the ceiling, was designed to achieve dramatic effects.164 With one of the largest seating capacities among lodges in Beijing, the main ﬂoor provided space for either opera fans or political delegates and a gallery for spectators perched overhead.165 Political audiences could be forgiven for occasionally confusing the roles of citizens and theatergoers and credited for their insight into the connection between mass politics and opera. Writing in the 1930s, Lin Yutang complained how pervasive the “political life as opera” perspective was. For Lin, like Lu Xun, this was the problem with modern Chinese politics: all show and little substance, and performances that induced audience passivity: “We really look upon life as a stage, and the kind of theatrical show we like best is always high comedy, whether that comedy be a new constitution, or a bill of rights, or an anti-opium bureau, or a [military] disbandment conference.”166

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Nonetheless, just as a talented theatrical performer or storyteller can bring a character to life, a skilled political actor can bring an issue to life. Such rhetorical feats are accomplished by “bringing into being the condition to which [he or she] refers.”167 A suffragist makes (or undermines) her case for the rights of women to participate in politics by the act of participating. She cannot grant herself legal rights simply by claiming them, but she can justify her belief in those rights by openly defying prejudices against women who enter public life and speak out. She may be outvoted by men, but their hostility also proves her point. Through the rhetorical device of “enactment,”“the speaker incarnates the argument, is the proof of what is said.”168 Naturally, it was easier to recover from a poor performance or exploit a good one if one had an army, party, or patron to fall back on. Suffragists tended toward the dramatic not because they were emotional women so much as because their cause might well live or die on the public stage. Some political actors became more like “actors” out of necessity. Symbolic, decisional, and agonistic features of Republican politics shared the stage in events like the Nationalist Party convention. Sun Yatsen acted like the statesman he might have been had not Yuan Shikai appropriated power for himself. Song Jiaoren performed his role as party leader as if he were about to institute parliamentary democracy. In the cause of parliamentary decorum, he took a blow or two. Tang Qunying and her sister suffragists showed in highly colored ways what a female citizen could say and do. Even Yuan Shikai, who had other options to fall back on, tricked out his emergent dictatorship in republican costume, voice, and ceremony. As Lin Yutang’s sarcasm suggests, not everyone appreciated the value of political playacting. Lu Xun complained that in such performances “the Masses, especially in China, are always spectators” rather than actors themselves.169 Words alone, however artful, could not by themselves solve a problem or save the nation. Judith Butler notes, “A speech act can be an act without necessarily being an efﬁcacious act.”170 Once they began talking about politics in new ways, many Chinese republicans came to believe that there were too many words and not enough action, or action of the wrong kind. By the early 1920s one critic, Hua Lu, had enough of political theatrics. Too many people busied themselves writing “scripts” with ﬁnesounding phrases or “cutting a ﬁgure” (chufengtou) for the audience.171 A writer in the 1930s compared the fulminations of intellectuals to scholars of old who earned money writing couplets to be pasted on doorways

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for the New Year calling for prosperity even though there was nothing they could do to help clients realize this hopeful prognostication.172 The retired industrialist and civic leader Nie Qijie, in the midst of the May Thirtieth Movement in June 1925, likewise declared his opposition to rhetoric unmatched by action in a scatological essay titled “Shit-ism” (dafen zhuyi). Nowadays politicians and educators of necessity preach some kind of doctrine [zhuyi, or “ism”]. These doctrines are expressed in lofty terms pleasing to the ear. However, while these doctrines strain to govern and preach, the country’s affairs are still in an extraordinary mess. As a result, some people have come to question whether such doctrines should be preached at all.173

While such sentiments reﬂected growing pressure on leaders and government to account for what was said, written, and done in public, even skeptical accounts of public life conﬁrmed the growing importance of the visible and vocal front stage of politics. Nie Qijie’s remedy for “lofty, distant, abstract, and ﬂowery” doctrines and the elitism that produced them was to require every national leader to clean public toilets once a week. Recognizing that passersby might be puzzled, Nie proposed stationing lecturers on the scene to “explain why the head of state and leading ofﬁcials are carrying out the basest sort of job in order to serve the people as an expression of their sincerity.”174 “An enema is what is needed to get rid of” the poisons the country’s political elite have “accumulated.” Scathing about the ritual “pageantry” formerly practiced by the emperor and his ofﬁcials, and likewise critical of an imported “Western elitist hygiene” remote from social realities like composted night soil, Nie offered a new spectacle of public exposure he guaranteed would cut through the crap.

Language Barriers Even if not everyone was what he or she pretended to be, there was no denying the potential of the new politics to include many more people onstage and in the audience. Political performances that were public and inclusive promised to reach beyond the minority who were literate enough to read an essay or a pamphlet and draw in the ordinary citizen as actor or audience member. Of course, if you were Cantonese and the fellow citizens you hoped to communicate with were natives of Beijing, departing from the common written language was fraught with difﬁculties. Were it just the two of you, and you both were highly literate, a “brush [or pen] conversation” (bi-

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tan) of written comments and responses might sufﬁce. The revolutionary He Xiangning recalled her experiences as a sojourning student: “I am Cantonese. At that time I still couldn’t speak Mandarin. I and comrades from other provinces used brush conversations.”175 However, two or even ten such correspondents were hardly enough if you had the catchphrase Four Hundred Million fellow Chinese in mind. This gigantic number mesmerized reformers and revolutionaries convinced that nothing short of total mobilization would do. Literacy rate estimates for the late imperial period range as high as 45 percent for men and 10 percent for women.176 However, patriotic Chinese wanted everyone involved in the effort to save China, not merely a literate minority. An exciting part of oral political communications was also the ability of crowds in the thousands to stand in for unseen millions. Supporters of public speaking were well aware of the challenge that China’s numerous spoken languages and dialects presented. A Cantonese speaker could read an essay written by a Mandarin speaker, but what would happen when they met for speeches or a debate? E E Sheng advocated using “the universal [vehicle of] Mandarin (guanhua)” to overcome the fact that “most of those who come to hear a lecture are necessarily from a particular province” and therefore separated from each other by accent, dialect, or spoken language. Even so, the immediate effect of promoting a vocal public life might be to localize and limit political discourse. In cities like Shanghai or even smaller urban hubs with large sojourner populations from all over the country, there might not be an obvious common tongue to reach the assembled thousands. Linguistic obstacles were not insurmountable. Despite the fact that Cantonese, Hunanese with their own accented Mandarin, and northerners all spoke on August 25 at the Huguang Lodge, there were no recorded complaints about the participants not making themselves understood. Gestures such as slapping Song Jiaoren with a fan telegraphed intent and meaning clearly enough. Performative gestures subtitled what was being said. An educated and well-traveled woman like Tang Qunying would naturally set aside the patois of her native southeastern Hunan and gear her language to a diverse audience. On occasion, speakers did forget where they were and plowed ahead in a dialect or with a vocabulary their audiences found incomprehensible. As May Fourth Movement students discovered in the suburbs of Beijing in 1919 on their patriotic speaking tours, even in North China there was no guarantee that standard Mandarin, much less southern Mandarin, would be understandable to locals. Students came to recognize that their

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provincial dialects and accents, together with “a mouthful of new words” taken from the new political language of nationalism and democracy, made “those listening feel uncomfortable.”177 Adding an array of literature, props, and theatrical presentations could help get the message across. Students took to playing phonograph records before set-piece presentations on such topics as “How Big is the Sun?,” “Republic and Citizen,” “Comparing the President and a Rickshaw Puller,” and “Who Are ‘We’?” They attracted crowds by raising banners and ringing bells, the nowstandard signal for beginning a meeting used by Zhang Ji at the Nationalist Party convention.178 Students learned the storyteller’s skill of identifying the most commercially lively locations to give lectures.179 By giving speeches where crowds of onlookers were the norm, they also gained a bit of temporary cover for their politicking.180 In two books on public speaking published in 1928 and 1934, Yu Nanqiu attributed the success of both the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925 to the spread of oratory.181 Most Chinese today cannot recognize a character much less read. However, with their ears they can hear. If we are to imagine stirring the great majority of Chinese to get on the right track we must ﬁrst persuade them. Therefore, orators must recognize this as their purpose and carry this burden on their shoulders: to reform society, rectify the evils of politics, struggle to overcome diplomatic defeats, awaken citizens from their slumber, and cause everyone to have a national way of thinking.182

As Ren Biming, a public-speaking advocate, argued in the late 1920s, with proper training one could “with a few breaths” reach the “ears of the masses” and move millions.183 While recognizing that a national spoken vernacular was needed, Ren also advised orators who wanted to be understood to learn and use local dialects, a strategy missionaries had long before come to accept.184 Otherwise, as Ren caustically observed, the common language Chinese would ﬁnally end up speaking would be not Mandarin but Japanese. One advantage of public speaking as a propaganda and educational tool was the immediate feedback speakers received from the audience. Listeners who ﬂed in embarrassment, dozed off, or heckled the speaker could not easily be ignored. If mass politics involved a steep learning curve, direct encounters with the people in whose name republicans spoke and acted quickened the ascent. A stubborn solipsism was hard to sustain when you faced farmers or townspeople who acted or reacted differently than you imagined “peasants” or “citizens” would. By contrast, the authors of written propaganda might have to wait for letters to the

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editor or subscription ﬁgures to gain the same insight. A letter to the Guide Weekly in 1926 claimed that residents of the village the correspondent lived in cared more about the price of bean curd than any of the indigestible jargon contained in the radical periodical. As far as villagers were concerned, newspaper and magazine pages studded with terms like Lenin, Feudalism, and Marx had little value except as wrappers for fried crullers (youtiao).185

“Getting Up and Giving a Speech Isn’t Easy” On September 11, 1912, a little more than two weeks after the Nationalist Party convention, another Beijing newspaper weighed in on the subject with an essay titled “Getting Up [on the Stage] and Giving a Speech Isn’t Easy” (Dengtai yanshuo buyi).186 Writing a month shy of the ﬁrst anniversary of the Wuchang troop mutiny that sparked the 1911 Republican Revolution, the author, Zhang Jianyuan, was intrigued by the wave of speech making going on in Beijing and other cities. Zhang noted with approval the power and ubiquity of the spoken word, even as he, like E E Sheng, admitted the challenges in moving from written to spoken discourse. If getting up and giving a lecture at a public event was now necessary and commonplace, it also looked, even to many educated Chinese, difﬁcult to do. Why would this be so? After all, writing Chinese, even in the vernacular style that was becoming popular, was surely more demanding than giving a speech. To write a good essay one had to be not only literate but also learned. To give a speech one might only need to be angry or concerned enough to face an audience and speak out. This animated presence registered in a photograph of Zhang Ji speaking to a convention of Chinese students in Tokyo sometime between 1913 and 1916, in the aftermath of the failure of the Second Revolution when Zhang and other revolutionaries were forced again into exile (ﬁgure 3). The main decoration in the hall is the ﬁve-color ﬂag of the Republic. A banner behind the speaker’s rostrum hopefully proclaims,“Long Live the Great Chinese Republic!” Hanging from the podium is a simple placard naming the speaker, “Mr. Zhang Ji.” The audience appears to be all-male and the gathering organized in the formal legislative style characteristic of both governmental and nongovernmental bodies of the era. Zhang, dressed in white, defeats the photographer’s art and his ﬁlm’s required exposure time with active gestures that turn the speaker’s face and hands into blurs.

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3. Chinese students in Tokyo. Bain News Service/ courtesy of the Library of Congress LC-B2–097–10.

For Zhang Jianyuan, it was precisely the frenetic and emotional nature of oratory and public life that created opportunity and risk for a speaker. As E E Sheng had also claimed, “The written word is projected into the iris of the eye, and one can then know its meaning. Sound shakes the membrane of the ear and also stirs the emotions. Lecturers wail and shout with anger. Emotional excitement causes them to make sounds in choked voices.”187 Li Hsiao-t’i’s exhaustive survey of popular movements in the decade before the 1911 Revolution conﬁrms that the biggest impact of political lectures, no matter where they were given, was emotional.188 Because public speaking was an emotionally powerful medium it also seemed to demand disciplined use to be effective and avoid harm. An orator relies on passion as well as reason to inspire and mobilize others. Zhang believed that if an audience is to be “moved,” a speaker’s “outward demeanor must exhibit vigor (jingshen).” At the same time, one’s

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inner self must remain “composed” in the necessary moment of exposure. How else could one wield the tool of oratory wisely and well? Accomplished speakers like Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen knew well the importance of composure when facing an excited or restive crowd. Students of oratory saw unique challenges in the mass setting of the modern lecture or speech. Han Li, another exponent, warned potential speakers that if they thought they could get by on natural talent or speaking as if a lecture was a private conversation, they were in for trouble: “If you haven’t researched the principles of lecturing, when you get up to give a speech, you will hardly avoid being scared and seized with fear and trembling to the point that your face and ears will turn red. How will you then be able to speak or make the [proper] gestures with your hands?”189 This of course was an understandable fear. The most markedup section of Yu Nanqiu’s 1934 Outline of the Science of Public Speaking currently in the Tsinghua University Library is the one on “stage fright,” especially the passage that assures the reader that “most people” in an audience will be naturally sympathetic to a speaker.190 Remaining composed might not be easy considering the pitfalls one encountered on the stage or at the podium. In performing a play or an opera one needs to know one’s lines and take cues from other actors. One does not have to contend with characters from another play storming the stage and stopping or redirecting your performance. Politics resembles a theatrical production but ﬁnally is about the power to hold a stage and keep to a chosen script. This can be difﬁcult and sometimes impossible, even if you know what you want to say. Zhang Jinyuan provided a short list of things that might rob a speaker of composure. He imagines choosing to discuss the popular topic of patriotism and waiting for his turn only to realize that the previous orator has “already said everything I wished to say.” In an era of continuous national crisis it must have seemed at times that everyone was giving the same speech. While good for fostering a common, patriotic perspective, this kind of repetition might trip up an individual. Political meetings often included a series of speakers. If you lacked the fame or seniority of a Sun Yat-sen, you might have to wait for others to go ﬁrst and then hear something like your own words preceding you to the stage. Worse, Zhang feared that in a “densely packed” hall a restive or unhappy audience might begin “muttering and jeering.”Without the requisite talent or training a speaker could end up in a “cringing attitude, choosing the wrong words, or speaking in a dull-witted fashion.”191 Power in the infant Chinese Republic might not come directly or re-

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liably from the people in the form of votes. Even who the “people” were was a matter of debate.192 Meetings and rallies offered opportunities to gain or lose the support of some representative fraction of the citizenry. In the absence of a functioning democracy, “losing a speech” because an audience grumbled, booed, fell asleep, or left the scene constituted a rough sort of democratic accountability.193 While the prospect provided incentives to speakers to hone their craft, Mu Jinyuan for one worried about what he saw as the prevalence of poor public performances. We often see a speaker bounding up on stage and then announcing, “I have basically nothing to say.” He leaves the stage by saying, “I’m ﬁnished.” If you didn’t have anything to say, why did you get up in the ﬁrst place! And of course if you leave the stage everyone knows you are ﬁnished. If you don’t prepare a draft of your speech, you won’t have a proper climax. All you will have is idle talk like that of some old ladies from the countryside. And that’s called public speaking!194

Alternatively, an overwrought, overly dramatic speaker might “look to those below the stage like a madman escaped from a lunatic asylum.”195 It would be some years before political authorities could reliably deliver audiences that clapped on cue for boring lectures and speeches. Until this was possible, leaders and followers held each other captive. Although the lively and open politics of the early Republic can be misread as democracy, the failure to create a stable parliamentary system in the 1910s did not prevent civic life from continuing to develop. In a discussion of the role of word and deed in public life, the political theorist Hannah Arendt proposed a classiﬁcatory continuum of regimes from the most “talkative” and democratic to the most silent and totalitarian.196 By her lights, totalitarian spectacle did not qualify as political conversation. The value at stake for Arendt—the free exercise of politics for the sake of a common world shared by free individuals—is different from the kind of national unity envisioned by Lu Xun. However, Arendt’s “talkative” regime and Lu Xun’s “Vocal China” represent kindred values. Both took very seriously the importance of speaking out as an individual and for the community. Even as democratic institutions were undermined by Yuan Shikai and others in the 1910s and 1920s, the Chinese polity became more talkative and vocal as E E Sheng, Zhang Jianyuan, Han Li, Mu Jinyuan, and many others noticed and applauded. Despite the challenges posed by public speaking, Zhang Jianyuan believed the potential rewards for both speaker and audience were great. Other commentators agreed. The Shanghai newspaper Shenbao in 1905 had declared, “The vernacular! Public speaking (Yanshuo)! They are the

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raw materials for minting new citizens.”197 An editorial in fall 1912 in Hunan Province’s Changsha Daily claimed that “the results of public speaking are widely recognized in society” as aids to “political progress,” “social education,” and “justice under a republic.”198 According to E E Sheng, “Everyone knows that public speaking is a quicker way of inciting people than reading.”199 Properly trained, claimed Mu Jinyuan, one would be able to control one’s audience: “You instruct him to laugh and he’ll laugh. You instruct him to cry and he’ll cry. When the audience leaves the site of the speech, they won’t forget the points you have made. After one, ten, and twenty years, they still won’t forget.”200 As Zhang Jianyuan surmised, placing political struggles in the public arena was bound to foster expressions of great emotion. Chinese had taken note early on of the emotional nature of foreign oratory and not always with approval. The seemingly “wild talk” of Western politicians conﬁrmed Confucian warnings about glibness and popular perceptions of speech making as something that rebels and other desperate characters would do.201 Now wild talk animated by Chinese patriotic fervor found a home in public discourse. The emotional content of Chinese citizenship is one of the strongest political legacies of the early twentieth century. Tears, militant postures, gesturing hands, and reddened faces were much prized by performers and spectators.202 Late Qing popular novels of modern and premodern heroes and heroines were written in a style “soaked in tears,” and with scenes like one in which a star-crossed lover dies in battle on the revolutionary side in 1911 “clutching a bundle of love epistles and diaries.”203 Beijing students protesting the Versailles treaty in 1919 stood outside the ofﬁce of the president “two days and two nights weeping and remonstrating without sleep.204 Deng Yingchao recalled that she and other female students gave their maiden speeches as “tears streamed down our cheeks.” Not surprisingly, “our listeners were often visibly moved.”205 While some advocates of public speaking believed techniques existed that were capable of eliciting such emotions on demand, others imagined a more direct, artless transfer of feeling from speaker to listener in which the latter would, as E E Sheng put it, “also feel enthusiasm surging, bubbling up inside.” The connection between radicalism and emotion was central to the proﬁle of the republican revolutionary.206 As Haiyan Lee argues, such emotions might spring from “structures of feeling” as diverse as Confucian ethics, radical individualism, or revolutionary solidarity.207 Gestures, tears, and emotion-laden words that connected the body of the nation or a common humanity to bodies of men

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and women onstage or in the audience in graphic ways generated special and continuous electricity. Liang Qichao was one of his era’s greatest practitioners of both the political essay and the political speech. Known for his trenchant, innovate style of writing, Liang could also hold a crowd or, if need be, parry an insult.208 He gave a lecture in 1921 to the Beijing Higher Normal College’s Society for Popular Education on a favorite theme of the day: the nation as a living body in need of strengthening through active exercise. Unlike the hapless ﬁctional character Wei Bangxian, Liang plucked images with ease from the lives of his listeners to illustrate and animate his talk. He praised the value of movements that got the nation’s blood, composed of individuals as cells, moving. He mocked those who, “squarecollared and short of step, dressed in scholar clothes and showing reﬁned manners, watch students play a ball game. The students line up in two sides and kick away until covered with stinking sweat. [The old scholars] can only wonder why[.] They have no idea that kicking a ball on a regular basis is an outstanding way to protect the body’s health and is many times more potent that eating ginseng or deer antlers.”209 The new look of sports and the new look of politics shared a vigor that made a sweating athlete kicking a ball or an upright, gesturing, and weeping orator making an energetic speech illustrative of a deeper set of commitments to self and nation. Better this than the old, now impotent, politics of silent approbation. The public sported a look, a sound, and even—following Liang Qichao—a smell to be reckoned with. The publicist Tom Paine observed with approval during an earlier age of revolution in Europe and America that oppressive governments “have provoked people to think, by making them feel.”210 Perhaps coming to one’s senses politically happens in a revolutionary era through a more complete use of one’s senses and emotions. As Henry David Thoreau advised, “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole inﬂuence.”211 Denying Chinese citizens the vote did not prevent them from casting their vocal and bodily inﬂuence in public. Once emotions were aroused, a speaker or an organizer had the additional challenge of controlling what had been unleashed. Experience showed that many things, including deliberate mischief by hecklers, could throw a well-planned event into chaos. Ren Biming suggested that a lecturer could use his or her unspeciﬁed “invisible powers” (wuxing quanli) to “control the meeting place.”212 However, there was always the chance that one or two “wise guys” (qiaopi fenzi) would disrupt things and even

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“infect” the rest of the audience. In addition to hostile questions, a speaker needed to be ready for audience members who “caused a din, made weird noises, and whispered or murmured.” Ren suggested quieting a heckler with a forceful stare, rallying the audience to intimidate persistent challengers, or encouraging those who interrupted a lecture to wait until a question period. The ideal lecture for Yu Nanqiu was “one person talking.” In his view, “The speaker should not let listeners open their mouths.”213 Yu’s understandable desire to eliminate the uncertainty that is part of most public events suggests a tendency, detected by Roland Barthes, for a determined lecturer to play “the role of Authority,” a turn that “makes every speaker a kind of policeman.”214 In a sense composure and discipline relied on raw emotion to conﬁrm their opposing value, with feeling often more effectively supplied by young and female citizens than by middle-aged and elderly men. However, such postures and tactics were not necessarily sorted by sex or age. Sun Yatsen, famous for his calm demeanor and grace under pressure, occasionally wore his heart on his sleeve. When forced to defend his marriage to the young Song Qingling, Sun responded with an angry protestation of devotion to her.215 “I love my country. I love my wife. I am a revolutionary. I cannot bear being controlled by evil social customs. I am not a god but a man.” In lectures Sun could become “nearly hysterical about China’s peril.”216 This was part of his appeal. The educator Jiang Menglian recalled his student days before the 1911 Revolution: “While we got our mental food from Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, we drew our emotional nourishment from Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Generally speaking, it is emotion that leads to action when a decisive hour comes.”217 In rebuttal, Liang claimed that while Sun could elicit laughter from an audience he, Liang, could move them emotionally.218 There was no doubt that Liang’s new and vigorous style of writing found its wide audience in part because it was “suffused with emotion.”219 Sun Yat-sen could hate as deeply as he loved. Toward the end of his life his animus was often ﬁxed on Chen Jiongming, the Guangdong revolutionary who carried out a military coup against Sun in 1922. “The sound of Chen’s name transformed Sun Yat-sen’s kindly expression to a murderous glare, and he had to be restrained from lunging at the throat of any who came to Chen’s defense.”220 A speaker or leader could also exploit popular emotions to the point of demagoguery. With the stammering, round-shouldered scholar, there was at least little chance he would rouse the rabble. Yu Jiaju, in a book on the “art of leadership,” argued that successful leadership techniques tend to take unfortunate advantage of human weaknesses. With more

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than a touch of sarcasm and echoing Lu Xun’s concerns about the bestial potential of the crowd, Yu laid out the appalling consequences of “pandering to popular psychology.” If the people like violence, then rely on violence. If the people are clamoring for something, devote all your energies to clamoring. In every case run with the majority and follow the fashion. Don’t be obstinate with them. Outdo the crowd. Then, as a leader, you will be successful. You mention the new literature; I talk of eliminating Chinese characters. You speak of the new culture; I talk of burning stitched [old-style bindings] books. You talk of overthrowing idols; I say overthrow the Confucius Family Shop. You speak of free love; I of brothers and sisters marrying. You speak of family revolution; I come and kill your mother and father. With these kinds of actions we express our own feelings. We express them thoroughly and on the battle line. The masses see it and naturally are incited, cry out, and laud our courage. Your fame will be imprinted deep in their hearts, and everyone will look to you as his bright star in the heavens. People with brains will naturally criticize you, but they will only dare to do so in secret behind closed doors.221

Yu Jiaju feared that the “big talk” and “boasting” that Sun Yat-sen was often criticized for were ripe for violent and radical use. Just as individuals succeed by pufﬁng up their resumes and qualiﬁcations to get a job or ﬁnd a mate, leaders can “pour” grandiose schemes into a follower’s ear from where it will “ﬂow into his heart, making his weak spirit lie prostrate in fear, numbed so that he won’t even think of resisting you.”222 Yu Jiaju, against the grain of most reformist and revolutionary thinking, preferred an old-fashioned “family-style” leadership because it would, he believed, preserve a uniﬁed community from “elder parent to the youngest female.”223 The warp and weft or yang and yin of politics drew on both the selfpossession of Sun Yat-sen, Liang Qichao, or Yuan Shikai and the highly expressive emotionalism of radical young people and others inclined to weep and act out their feelings. These differing faces of politics enriched the political repertoire of individuals and groups. Depending on circumstances, Tang Qunying could weep in dramatic fashion or exhibit a calm and commanding persona. The young had an especially important role to play in these dramas. Sometimes youths upstaged their elders, not necessarily with eloquent words, but because of the way they threw their “whole inﬂuence” into the fray. In Ba Jin’s Family, a novel of social and cultural change during the May Fourth Movement in Chengdu, young students, brimming with patriotic zeal, win attention and applause when they “go out to make speeches” and “bring packed suitcases with them— ready to go to jail.”224 In an actual example, the principal of the Beijing

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Girls Normal School locked the compound gates when he heard the young women were planning to join male student lecturers on the streets of the city.225 He assembled the students to “sternly” lecture them about the matter, but they became so angry they “broke through the back gate and swarmed out into the streets, lecturing as they marched.” Reaching the place where arrested male students were being held, the women collected coins in handkerchiefs, including from soldiers on guard, for the aid of the imprisoned students. One can see how Lu Xun would come to admire students who reacted authentically to the kinds of pomposity and arbitrary exercises of authority he had also endured, and without immediate protest. Symbolic actions like these rivaled in eloquence any written text and resonated with elite and popular notions of political morality. The upright Ming ofﬁcial Hai Rui, before submitting a memorial critical of the emperor, “bought a cofﬁn and said goodbye to his family.”226 Hai Rui’s target audience was the emperor who, upon hearing of the gesture, “sighed, picked up the paper, read and reread it.” The audience for principled actions was now the many rather than the one or the few. Readers of novels and newspapers and audiences at lectures and protests read and reread and heard and reheard the political messages of the day addressed to them as fellow citizens. As they wept or sighed or fumed or shouted, their reactions helped forge the new political conventions of Republican China, including a new style of public and emotional communication between leaders and the led. Even Sun’s taciturn successor and rival, Provisional President Yuan Shikai, felt obliged to give an occasional public address in grudging conﬁrmation that some kind of “public” now existed as a fact of political life. After capital and government moved to Beijing in spring 1912, Yuan attended the inaugural Beijing session of the Senate on April 29 and gave a speech of welcome.227 He traveled from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs guest house residence to the modern-style Senate building, located inside and to the east of Xuanwu Gate, along streets lined with soldiers with ﬁxed bayonets, in a carriage surrounded by a hundred or more cavalry. As he entered senators and guests enthusiastically applauded. The hall was bedecked in ﬂags, and a military band performed. Senators were seated beneath an elevated rostrum occupied by current Speaker of the Senate Lin Sen. Yuan took his place behind Lin, with Premier Tang Shaoyi and other cabinet ministers to the left and lesser ofﬁcials arrayed below them. Speaker Lin began the proceedings by reading out the names of the senators who were present. Then, dressed in a gray military uniform,

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Yuan walked to the podium, removed a copy of his remarks from his coat pocket like any American or European dignitary, and read his address “in a voice that was not very loud or clear.” The two hundred listeners in the audience had to strain to hear him. A reporter present noted that without an advance copy to follow along with it was almost impossible to understand what Yuan was saying. Nonetheless, the same friendly observer insisted that the “manliness of the man shown out at every point of the address.”228 The gist of the speech was that the ﬁnancial and military challenges faced by the Republic required “practical” measures of the same kind Yuan had been pursuing for the past ten years, an emphasis on the Qing New Policies likely to offend many revolutionaries. Nonetheless, Speaker Lin, in a brief spoken response of his own, assured everyone that the Senate had complete conﬁdence in President Yuan. One newspaper reported that the spectators included “foreign guests, reporters, ordinary people, and two women.”229 Another counted seven women.230 The “most unique” of the females present sported bobbed hair. The story that day was not only the speaker, but the audience. The men present were noticed for being “90 percent” queue-less and dressed in Western clothes. Given the wide currency of hair as political statement— with or without queue for men and long or short for women—one could make your point in public without even opening your mouth. After the Senate meeting adjourned a group photo of senators and Yuan Shikai’s retinue was taken outside the building, with Yuan seated in the center, ﬂanked by Tang Shaoyi and Lin Sen.231 A note of discord sounded when a senator present disputed the credentials of some senators recently arrived from Nanjing. The issue ﬂared up in the days that followed and contributed to Lin Sen’s resignation as speaker.232 Outside the Senate building a small group of “female citizens,” not invited to the Senate or for the group photo, struck a second chord of dissent by openly demanding the vote for women. Although a press account described the protesting women’s demeanor as “timid,” considering the number of bayonet-wielding and mounted soldiers present their determination in inserting themselves unbidden into the ceremony is striking. One sign that a movement has entered a militant phase is when the timid make their appearance. Yuan Shikai doled out his public words sparingly, mufﬂed by layers of ceremony and edged with a barely concealed potential for violence. Unlike Yuan, most public ﬁgures seemed to have craved the spotlight and seized any chance to give a speech or appear in public. Sun Yat-sen’s ap-

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petite for oratory was boundless. On a visit to Shanghai in 1912 Sun went missing from his entourage one day and later laughingly told a waiting colleague that he had been to give a lecture at an elementary school and stayed on to make friends with the children.233 As Sun’s appreciative and irreverent nickname “Sun the Cannon” suggested, it was hard to say whether frequent public appeals to citizens of all ages and an active presence in meeting halls and other such open venues were signs of power or weakness. On the one hand, in 1912 Yuan Shikai’s spiderlike mastery of armies and bureaucracies, and the intrigues that set men and arms in motion, seemed to trump Sun Yat-sen’s visionary eloquence. Fine words strongly delivered sometimes could win the day politically, as they had on August 25, but not so far the year or the political game in its entirety. Some scholars have argued that Chinese political culture encourages leaders to remain hidden the better to manipulate and control the situation.234 Public ceremonies mask the real exercise of power. Still, if mastery of the public realm through speeches, manifestos, rallies, meetings, and marches was not sufﬁcient to gain and hold power, it did seem that this kind of active, visible, and audible presence was a necessary complement to the machinations of strong men like Yuan Shikai, as well as a daring means of challenging that power.

Women as Public Speakers That anyone could get up and speak, even if one was illiterate or failed to produce the proper social credentials, gave public speaking and public life in general an air of possibility and radicalism. Political speech was well suited to the entry into public life of women who lacked the easier admittance granted educated males. One male advocate for women’s rights, Jin Tianhe, imagined women using everything they had—“brain, tongue, writing brush, tears, blood, sword and gun”—to advance their cause.235 Women’s rights activists saw speaking out in public as both a means of achieving goals like the vote for women and an opportunity to demolish traditions that relegated women to silence and the inner quarters of family life. In the September 1912 edition of the Women’s Times, Jiang Renlan argued that when women “get up in a hall and speak they excel at stringing words together, possess clever tongues, and can make an audience pour out its heart.”236 The public lives of women such as Tang Qunying, Shen Peizhen, and Wang Changguo offer proof of this facility. A pioneering essay on oratory as a political tool was written by Tang’s

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friend Qiu Jin, a woman later immortalized for her deﬁance of convention and her revolutionary martyr’s death in 1907. Published in 1904 when Qiu Jin was studying and beginning her political career in Japan, “The Advantages of Public Speaking” took Chinese to task for “regarding public speaking too lightly.”237 Much of the essay is an attack on newspapers for publishing trivial, humorous, and sensational material and for appealing too narrowly to businessmen or politicians. She takes the opportunity to lampoon Qing ofﬁcials, who she claims have no time even to read newspapers because they are so busy “ﬂattering those who have money, cavorting with female entertainers and visiting brothels, and hoping to be promoted.”238 As later events would prove, a woman like Qiu Jin or Tang Qunying was especially vulnerable to gossip and personal attacks of the kind found in tabloids. Having judged the print media stale and superﬁcial, the beckoning frontier of oratory held contrasting appeal for Qui Jin. Advancing an argument made often by proponents of public speaking, she complained that too few Chinese could read well enough to make buying a paper worthwhile. By conveying the “knowledge [held by] enlightened people” through public speaking, “everyone can understand, even illiterate women and children.” According to Qiu Jin,“one can give a speech any time any place” without elaborate preparations or ﬁnancial resources. For exiles and anyone keen to spread the political word throughout China, low overhead and portability of technique were essential. Since no admission to a lecture need be charged, audiences could be huge. Here, it seemed, was the ideal mode of propaganda. Qiu Jin hazarded that armed only with an “eloquent and honest tongue” mobilization of military and ﬁnancial resources would prove unnecessary. Given the still-formidable power of Qing police and military assets, public speaking had some of the “asymmetrical warfare” allure of today’s Internet as a tactic that in the right hands might yield a new political strategy based on popular mobilization and appeals to public opinion. Beginning with the overseas students in Tokyo who were her immediate audience in 1904, Qiu Jin proposed a training society to prepare her fellow revolutionaries for using oratory in the struggle to “awaken the citizenry.”239 She published the Vernacular Post, which promoted the value of public speaking even as it attempted to make newspapers more readable for the ordinary person.240 We know that her public-speaking training society was up and running partly because in his diary Song Jiaoren, also resident in Tokyo, records participating several times in meetings that featured a monthly lecture.241

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Qiu Jin eventually chose armed rebellion rather than oratory alone as a means of carrying out revolution. Her actions sprang directly from her demeanor at the podium. As Kenneth Burke observed, rhetorical turns by individuals and communities normally involve action as well as words.242 After her return to China in 1906, at a meeting of students in Zhejiang, Qiu Jin “thrust the dagger she always carried on her person into the podium” and advised her audience to “stab [her] with this dagger” if she ever betrayed China.243 Her absorption in the staging of revolutionary political theater may have hurried her to the bloody conclusion of her life as a radical publicist. Self-identiﬁcation with knight-errant heroes of the past displayed in gestures like the dagger thrust suggested that she, like martial heroes of legend, would make sure bold words were matched by action.244 Ever skeptical of leaders who play to the crowd and crowds that inﬂict their emotional needs on individuals who face them, Lu Xun famously wrote that Qiu Jin had been “clapped to death.”245 To her admirers, Qiu Jin had simply been true in life and death to the old knighterrant ideal and her new, revolutionary convictions.246 Qiu Jin was seen as saying the right thing because she later did the right thing. The dagger in the podium was as much a promise as a prop.

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Chapter 3

A Woman’s Republic

Qiu Jin’s outspoken radicalism was not an anomaly. The 1911 Revolution and the founding of the Republic stimulated the entry of thousands of women into national and local politics. In the immediate aftermath of the 1911 Revolution suffragist and women’s organizations were prominent and numerous, rivaled only by Manchus and Bannermen in their zest for getting organized and expressing their political views.1 Perhaps this was because women felt they had the most to gain under the Republic, Manchus the most to lose. Government reforms during the last ten years of the Qing dynasty in areas like education had raised expectations among elite women in particular that their progress as women was directly tied to the fate of the Chinese nation.2 As a contemporary account of women’s participation in politics explained,“Women are carried away by revolutionary currents and the more open general mood. They participate in all manner of military, philanthropic, fund-raising and other concrete revolutionary work and increase their understanding of what the status and responsibilities of a citizen are.”3 Women who joined suffrage groups were described as acting“as if awakened from their illusions.”Embracing the ﬂuid moment, they took to republican revolution “like ﬁsh to water.”4 The slaps delivered to Song Jiaoren carried the force of these women’s idealism and frustration.

Willow Catkin Feminists That women like Tang Qunying were equally at home on the battleﬁeld and in the lecture hall and among women and men suggests that quali97

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ties like mobility and mutability accruing to Republican politics as a system could also be personiﬁed by individuals who might turn up anywhere during these years—Tokyo or Beijing, coastal city, provincial capital, or remote village—and in a bewildering assortment of roles, as reporter or politician, poet or warrior, as themselves or in disguise. Tang Qunying was born in 1871 in Xinqiao, Hengshan County, a picturesque village forty kilometers west of the county seat set amid the rolling hills, forested mountains, and neatly laid out ﬁelds of southern Hunan.5 It is possible to provide the details of Tang Qunying’s remarkable life thanks in good part to writings of her grandson Tang Cunzheng that draw on family records and oral histories.6 Tang Qunying grew up in the Confucian heartland that supported the last-ditch and successful literati defense of the Qing dynasty against Taiping rebels. Her father, General Tang Xingzhao, joined the military as a boy of ten.7 His impressive physique and martial spirit and the sterling careers of his brothers as soldiers and ofﬁcials made him an attractive recruit for the Hunanese statesman Zeng Guofan’s anti-Taiping Xiang Army. Tang Xingzhao rose in the ranks to provincial commander.8 Disillusioned by government corruption and intrigues of ofﬁce, he resigned from his posts in 1863 at the age of forty, citing the illness of his mother. With the end of his ofﬁcial career Tang Xingzhao found time for other pursuits, including personally supervising the education of his three sons and four daughters. He built a home in Xinqiao, notable locally for prize horses, a household well staffed with servants, and a front gate guarded by seven or eight dogs.9 Not the Bennets of Hertfordshire to be sure but an equally colorful Chinese gentry family, complete with benevolent patriarch, worried mother, and bright daughters as well as sons. The main buildings of the Tang mansion, nestled at the foot of small hills on the edge of modern Xinqiao, survive as a museum dedicated to Tang Qunying. Adorned with a garden and adjacent study, the General’s Hall of Three Good Fortunes (Sanji tang) also included guest rooms and a stylish hall designed for hosting government ofﬁcials. Tang accepted the responsibilities of a leading member of the local gentry, ﬁnancing the repair of a stone bridge and building a tea pavilion for travelers among other philanthropic and charitable works.10 He arranged for well-known scholars to lecture and instruct his sons and daughters in his home.11 Tang Xingzhao’s relationship with his third daughter, Qunying, was especially close, conforming to the willow catkin (liuxu) ideal of the young female aesthete and her doting father.12 Girls like Qunying “were

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renowned for upstaging their male friends and relatives in verbal combat and poetry contests.” Following the custom in many elite households, Qunying and her sisters were educated with their brothers. Qunying was an excellent student and at a young age read the standard classics and became an accomplished poet. She learned to write the standard “eightlegged” essay, even though as a female she could never take the imperial examination that required it. Qunying also developed an early fascination with the Mulan story of a daughter who dresses as a man and takes the place of her father as a soldier. Tang Qunying engaged in clever, sometimes impish conversation with relatives and visitors in ways that added to the family and local legend of her talent. At ﬁfteen she wrote a poem titled “Getting Up at Dawn” that delighted with its simple beauty.13 Clear waters thread the village. Green trees line red cliffs. Morning smoke rises with the mist. Mountain birds ﬂy fair to me.

Her father praised the poem in a conventional but heartfelt way in an exchange that preﬁgured her career as an advocate for women’s rights:14 “You write good poems. Your talent really is catkin-like. If you were a boy, you would honor your household as a successful examination candidate.”15 Qunying was said to have boldly replied, “If one is a girl, why cannot the household also be so honored?”The proud father made no reply. Tang Xingzhao’s reaction was close to that of the father of the nineteenthcentury American suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton when as a young girl Elizabeth won academic honors normally accorded boys at her local school.16 Daniel Cady, a lawyer and an affectionate father whose sons had all died young, lacked the compensatory solace offered by a willow catkin tradition. He could only sigh and declare, “Ah, you should have been a boy!” In both cases family devotion cast a light in the direction of possibilities not yet visible to either father or daughter. Qunying’s childhood, with its “atmosphere of reﬁned talk, poetry, and books,” encouraged outspokenness.17 Qunying was also something of a tomboy. Citing the Mulan story to her father, she persuaded him to teach her swordsmanship and permit her to ride the family’s horses despite inevitable tumbles.18 All of this earned her the father’s jesting though prescient compliment that she was a “female knight-errant” (nü xiake) and her mother’s complaint that she was wild and like a monkey.19 Such seem-

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ingly unconventional behavior had a place in elite and popular culture. As Wang Zheng notes, a boy or girl could be either martial (wu) or literary (wen) in inclination without the boy being “feminized” by literary pursuits or a girl “masculinized” by emulating Mulan.20 Qunying’s interests in martial arts and the classics permitted her general-father to see his gifted daughter—and Qunying to see herself—as both warrior and poet without Amazonian baggage.21 Nonetheless, even a tomboy and aspiring female knight-errant could be forced to have her feet bound. As a young child, perplexed and angry that her brothers were spared this crippling torment, Qunying tore the cloth wrappings off and tried to persuade her elder sisters to do the same. Her mother ordered a servant to rebind Qunying’s feet.22 Qunying kept on unwrapping them so that her feet ended up being“medium large”rather than small and, as a result, not as disabling as those of other women like her suffragist comrade Shen Peizhen who as an adult noticeably limped.23 Despite her sex and because of her status as girl prodigy, Tang Qunying had much in common with other revolutionary ﬁrebrands-in-themaking like her later friend and nemesis Song Jiaoren. Song reveled in the role of rascal and gadﬂy to the point that, at seventeen, he shocked guests at his wedding banquet by calling for the overthrow of the emperor.24 Rectitude and propriety became foils for brash young men and women with the requisite literary skills and self-conﬁdence to challenge them. The reﬁned insolence that resulted might delight or horrify depending on the audience. Confucian patriarchy gave educated young women and men something to ﬁght against. The same culture gave them many weapons—literary, martial, and social—to ﬁght with. Tang’s literary training and talents would later be put to good use in journalism and propaganda. The spirited conversation and argument that animated her home life seems to have prepared her for the verbal dueling of her revolutionary years. When her elder brother once cursed and beat a servant, Qunying, at age thirteen, was quick with criticism and a quote from Mencius about the importance of a compassionate heart and mind. This riposte earned the praise of the children’s tutor.25 Her brother’s reaction, while not recorded, can be imagined. Tang Qunying later in life would not hesitate to “get up and give a speech” in response to injustice or box the ears of select adversaries like her revolutionary younger brother-in-arms Song Jiaoren. No matter how many civic obligations and organizational duties she later took on, her identities as an intellectual talent and a formidable sister were indelible. In spring 1890 Tang Xingzhao died. In fall 1891, at the age of nine-

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teen, and in accord with her mother’s wishes, Qunying was married to Zeng Zhuangang, a younger cousin of the local and dynastic hero Zeng Guofan.26 Her husband’s family lived in the nearby village of Heye (Lotus Leaf) northwest of Xinqiao, ancestral home of the Zeng clan. Intermarriage between Xinqiao and Heye families was quite common.27 The sprawling Zeng compound, preserved now as a museum dedicated to Zeng Guofan, overlooks a small valley and a community isolated enough to boast its own Heye dialect.28 The move from Three Good Fortunes Hall was eased by the fact that her new home was only twenty kilometers away and one of her sisters had also married a Zeng and preceded Qunying to Heye. Qunying got along well with her mother-in-law in a household that was moderately prosperous and presided over by her husband’s father, a rather strict patriarch. Finally, the relationship between Qunying and her husband developed into one of genuine affection. The Tang sisters made the acquaintance in Heye of another educated young woman, Ge Jianhao, who had married into a local family of scholar-ofﬁcials at sixteen. Ge later won renown as a modern-minded mother who pawned her jewels to enable her son to pursue revolutionary politics and supported her daughter’s refusal to accept an arranged marriage.29 The three young women, all in their twenties, often got together to drink wine, compose poetry, play chess, “play the lute to the moon,” and conﬁde in one another.30 Fortuitously for the women, the future revolutionary Qiu Jin also had a family connection to Heye; her husband, Wang Tingjun, was a second cousin to Zeng Guofan, and the Wang family had long been shopkeepers in Heye. Although she lived with her husband in Xiangtan, near Changsha, Qiu Jin began visiting the Wang family in Heye in the mid1890s.31 Qiu Jin was already well known as a progressively minded woman, who was also skilled in scholarship, horseback riding, and the sword dance.32 Through Ge Jianhao and Qiu Jin, Tang Qiuying was exposed to new political thinking and the burning issues of the day.33 Rather than severing ties to her natal home, Qunying’s marriage was an expression of her family’s wider connections to elite circles and a welcome opportunity to establish friendships with other women of her generation and interests. But marriage did represent potentially severe restrictions. In the conventional text on women’s obligations,“Admonitions for Women,” one of the seven reasons justifying a divorce was a woman “talking too much,” a fault Tang had long since made into a virtue.34 Instead of marriage ending her intellectual pursuits, Tang’s life of books and passionate, reﬁned conversation traveled with her. Elite mobility,

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through visits of the kind Qunying was accustomed to at home, and marriages arranged among allied, literary (“book-fragrant”; shuxiang) families made a village like Heye a locus if not a hub of broader social and cultural interactions. The Xiang River, running north to Changsha past Hengshan, lay a journey of a day or two east from Heye. The bustling city of Hengyang to the south was only twenty kilometers farther. Xinqiao and Heye were deep in the countryside but not cut off from the movement of people, ideas, and goods through Hunan and points south and north. Two personal tragedies transformed circumstances that might have kept Tang Qunying in Heye indeﬁnitely. In 1896 Qunying and Zhuangang’s only child, a daughter, died suddenly of fever before her third year.35 The following year Zhuangang also died.36 Tang Qunying might have remained in Heye as a twenty-six-year-old widow. The Zeng clan was famous for the conservative application of such strictures. Zeng Guofan, who had died the year after Tang Qunying was born, had been a stickler for decorum and household rules.37 However, Tang Qunying had allies in her friends Qiu Jin and Ge Jianhao, and they and her family supported her decision to return home to Three Good Fortunes Hall. The tug of home and friendship, and the imperative of self-cultivation, elided dictates of patriarchy and clan control. The kind of elite “sociability” among scholars praised and promoted at the time by Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei also enabled women like Tang Qunying to act independently and with a sense of shared purpose. In a letter Qiu Jin later wrote from Japan to a new women’s college in Hunan, she insisted that “if we wish to escape the dominion of men, we must establish our own independence, educate ourselves, and [foster] sociability (hequn).”38 Qiu Jin, the Tang sisters, and Ge Jianhao applied these principles in Xinqiao, Heye, and places beyond. Back home in Xinqiao, Tang Qunying cared for her mother and brothers. Childless, she later became the foster mother of her younger brother Qianyi’s son.39 Tang corresponded with Qiu Jin and Ge Jianhao and worked in the family study cataloging her father’s library and writing poetry.40 Qiu Jin mailed Tang books and articles from Beijing where she was living prior to her departure to Japan in 1904.41 Tang read widely in the reform literature of Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao, becoming conversant in evolution and other Western ideas ﬂooding into China.42 She was especially attracted to writings that advocated the emancipation of women.43 The text that Tang Qunying found most riveting was Kang Youwei’s comments on the condition of women in his Book

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of the Great Unity (Datong shu).44 According to Kang, men (and not just Chinese men) have callously and unscrupulously repressed [women], restrained them, deceived them, shut them up, imprisoned them, bound them, caused them not to be independent, to be unable to hold public ofﬁce, to be unable to be ofﬁcials, to be unable to be citizens, to be unable to enjoy [participation in] public meetings; still worse, [men have caused them] to be unable to study, to be unable to hold discussions, to be unable to advance their names, to be unable to enjoy entertainments, to be unable to go sightseeing, to be unable to leave the house.45

Kang’s Book of the Great Unity was published while he was living in exile in India in 1901–2.46 When Tang Qunying read the passage she was said to have struck the table with her ﬁst and said, “Good!” In a poem titled “My Thoughts on Reading Datong shu,” Tang Qunying answered Kang in conﬁdent fashion. In a small room I warm the wine. Who will shape the heavens and change the world? From the depths of oceanic darkness I vow to be the one who treads the waves.47

Tang’s life had not been as grim or constricted as that of the female victims in Kang’s litany. Still, her ability to converse, study, write, travel, and debate the issues of the day made her keenly aware of the many things that were still beyond her reach. Like Lu Xun, she transformed what irritated and angered her about the world into new ideas and commitments as part of the sea change in thinking taking place more generally in China.

“Beacon Fires Flare on All Sides” In 1904, at the urging of Qiu Jin who had just broken with her husband and gone to study in Japan, Tang Qunying, at the age of thirty-three, left Xinqiao to join her friend to study at Shimoda Utako’s Practical Women’s School in Tokyo.48 Shimoda promoted a conservative blend of reformism, Confucian values, and pan-Asian solidarity designed to produce “good wives and wise mothers” for a modern nation.49 Tang would later reject this moderate position in favor of full citizenship for women. Her family supported her educational venture and her brother Qianyi accompanied her to Shanghai for the trip to Japan.50 Fellow Hunanese like the male revolutionary and Hengshan native Zhao Hengti formed the initial circle of Tang Qunying’s friends and associates.51 Since Hunanese in Japan in-

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cluded prominent revolutionaries like Song Jiaoren and Huang Xing, native-place ties gave her natural entrée to the new political class forming among students and exiles in Tokyo. Huang Xing, who was sympathetic to women’s issues, recruited Tang to his Awaken China Society (Huaxing hui) rebel organization and later introduced her to Sun Yat-sen.52 Tang attended organizing meetings of the Revolutionary Alliance in summer 1905 as Sun, with the help of Huang and other revolutionaries, cobbled together a single political party from many smaller societies and factions. Tang became one of the ﬁrst female members of the Alliance and later recalled that she was the only woman among sixty or seventy participants at its founding.53 Her pioneering role and the fact that she was older than most other female and many male activists earned the young widow the sobriquet “Elder Sister Tang,” an honoriﬁc Song Jiaoren also addressed her by.54 Other women joined the revolutionary organization at this time, in part because it was openly accepting of both male and female members.55 Later in 1905 Tang enlisted, along with a number of other women including Qiu Jin and He Xiangning, in a program in Yokohama to learn weapons and bomb-making techniques in classes given by a Russian “anarchist professor.”56 Despite the dangerous nature of the instruction, Tang was, as always, an apt pupil. A number of key ﬁgures in the suffrage movement of 1911–13, like Tang, Lin Zongsu, Zhang Hanying, and Wang Changguo, joined the Revolutionary Alliance while studying in Japan.57 Of these four, all save Lin (from Fujian) were Hunan natives. Provincial ties enabled young women and men to make the arrangements needed to study in Japan and, once arrived, sustain themselves socially and emotionally. The number of women involved in these linked processes of foreign study and political recruitment was relatively small. Those engaged in revolutionary activities in the years before the 1911 Revolution, both in China and abroad, numbered about two hundred.58 Their novelty in political groups and crowds and the intensity of their commitments gave political women a special prominence and notoriety. Reﬂecting the literary backgrounds of many female activists, women like Tang were disproportionately involved in the ﬂowering of political journalism within the exile community.59 Tang Qunying remained in Japan when Qiu Jin returned to China in 1906. Tang read about Qiu Jin’s July 1907 failed uprising and execution in the newspapers.60 She was so devastated by the news that Song Jiaoren arranged for her to be hospitalized. Tang resolved to return to China to continue Qiu Jin’s work. When these plans materialized later that winter Sun Yat-sen, who was in northern Vietnam directing revolutionary

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uprisings on the border with China, was inspired to write a poem about and for Tang. Waves billow to the heavens. It’s good to know you are on a boat. When you return to the deep-running Xiang River Greet Crazy Chen for me.61

“Crazy Chen” (Chen Dian) was the alias of Chen Jing, a Hunan native of Xiangxiang, a town located on the Lian River, an east-ﬂowing tributary of the Xiang River north of Hengshan. Chen had studied in cavalry school in Japan in 1902 and was also an early member of the Revolutionary Alliance. He had a network of supporters in Changsha, a small rebel force, and a cache of weapons.62 Tang Qunying returned to China in February 1908. After visiting her mother in Xinqiao she and her friend and fellow Hunanese Zhang Hanying sought out Crazy Chen in Changsha.63 Zhang Hanying was a native of Liling on the Lu River, which fed into the Xiang north of Hengshan. Communities along tributaries like the Lian and Lu—and the Xiang River itself—supplied the revolution with many young recruits. In South China, revolutionary politics, like commerce, tended to be water borne. Zhang Hanying had joined the Revolutionary Alliance while studying in Japan at the same school with Tang.64 Like Tang, Zhang had been a willow catkin favored by her degree-holding father.65 Zhang worked with Tang on so many occasions that the two friends inspired the jingle “One country two [Qun and Han] ying’s.” The two together made a lasting impression on those they met. Tang was short, a bit plump, lively, and self-possessed. Zhang was physically more robust, with a willful personality.66 Both were said to be typical Hunanese in their stubborn, unyielding attitudes. From 1908 until June 1910 and when she returned to Japan, Tang, along with Zhang and their confederates, pursued a series of propaganda and conspiratorial actions in Hunan and neighboring Jiangxi.67 In tune with the prevailing Revolutionary Alliance strategy, they made common cause with local secret society branches. In one instance, using a contact in the local Qing garrison, Zhang, dressed as a peasant woman, managed to persuade a local commander that she knew where a group of bandits or rebels was hiding out. The ruse succeeded in drawing a government unit into an ambush, a stratagem aided by Tang in tea picker disguise misdirecting the troops. Disguise and deception ﬁgured in roles women played in the revolution. Revolutionaries sometimes pretended to be married couples in order to establish cells and on occasion trans-

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ported weapons in the sedan chairs of the “bride.”68 The martyred Russian regicide Soﬁa Perovskaya, with “her skill at disguises and at outwitting the Tsarist police” offered inspiration for such deception.69 For a classically educated woman, assassin-retainers celebrated in the Shiji might have done the same as they took on the roles of convict laborer, butcher, beggar, or musician to get close to their targets.70 Tang’s choice of a tea picker disguise was suitable both because tea picking by women entailed a daily journey from home to hills and therefore made a woman out on a road or footpath plausible and because female tea pickers were a favorite subject of literati poems.71 Perhaps Tang Qunying recited one from memory as she waited for her quarry. Years later Zhang Ji, who had the challenging job of keeping Tang’s radicalism in check at the Nationalist Party convention in 1912, recalled the contributions of women to the 1911 Revolution: “In every uprising there were female comrades participating: playing the roles of brides, sitting in sedan chairs carrying bombs, or carrying small children to transport bombs, or protect [male] comrades. How great was their courage!”72 To the degree that many Chinese assumed women were apolitical, gender itself offered a disguise. Aided by Tang Qunying and Zhang Hanying, rebels won a victory and acquired new weapons. The larger Hunan campaign ended in defeat. Tang journeyed home to Hengshan and in June 1910, with the help of Huang Xing, returned to Japan.73 Back in Tokyo, Tang Qunying, who carried a jade ﬂute to keep her company on her travels, studied music, at least in part as a cover for her political work.74 She also helped lead the Chinese Female Students in Japan Society (Liu Ri nü xuesheng hui).75 The group demanded full equality for women as well as the education needed to win “justice” and cease living “like slaves and like sand.”76 The simple formula put forward in 1898 of “male-female equality” (nannü pingdeng) came into wider currency.77 Chinese feminists and their supporters basically had four goals: expanded educational opportunities, freedom of marriage, economic independence, and participation in politics.78 By 1911 the transit from the inner quarters of family and kin to the outer, public realm was fully imagined if far from complete for most women. As in other revolutions and movements, the “inner logic” of rights took hold among politically minded women and their allies. A “conceivability or thinkability scale” made what had once been unimaginable now seem inevitable.79 Indicative of her growth as a political thinker and activist, Tang Qunying’s writings of the time suggest impatience with the elite sociability and rariﬁed cultural milieu that had originally helped her to a political

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role in the clubs and societies of Tokyo. In a 1911 manifesto for the journal arm of the Chinese Female Students in Japan Society Tang referred to her fellow students and exiles as “a bunch of refugees who spend idle days recalling past suffering. We make a toast with a glass of wine and pour out familiar grievances, all the while looking out on unfamiliar scenery and enjoying the natural beauty. Studying, traveling, singing, chanting we form a company of shadows and scented clothes.”80 The foreign landscape that helped accelerate Tang’s opening to new ideas now drove her to think of home and China. In part this urgency was patriotism at work. According to Tang, “Cries of ‘cut the melon’ [dismember China] . . . deafen ears and tear the curtain.” Conceding that in the past Chinese women “did not know what a nation is or . . . the relationship between the nation and women,” Tang argued that women as “a source of education and the basis of modern civilization” were needed to save China from disaster. Permit us to soar throughout East Asia with women’s journals everywhere, catching every ear in the name of progress, raising a great cry with the mountains echoing in support. . . . Female citizens! Bravely and honestly stride forward, countenances shining, heir to Mulan and the mother of Mencius.81

Liang Qichao had declared in 1902, “We must have citizens!”82 On the eve of the 1911 Revolution Tang and her sisters took up that challenge as “female citizens” equal to men. Obstacles to rights for women as citizens remained profound. One need look no further than late Qing constitutional reforms that by 1909 included elections based on limited franchise for provincial assemblies.83 This was a fateful move on the part of the struggling Qing dynasty since the assemblies would become one of the engines for revolutionary action against the Manchu monarchy in 1911. For women, however, the reforms meant that disabilities enshrined in tradition were now being codiﬁed into modern law. In Tang Qunying’s home province of Hunan rules on self-government and voting rights published in 1910 made no apology for treating women differently from men. The intelligence and talents of women do not reach the level of men. Furthermore Chinese women typically cannot read or even recognize characters. They do not know about what is going on in the wider world. How then can they ﬁll the role of electors who must be able to manage public affairs?84

Despite the many examples suffragists could cite of educated and patriotic women, from the mother of Mencius and Mulan to more recent history, to prove the value of a female role in public life, self-government

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regulations in Hunan claimed otherwise. Since exiles and sojourners kept in touch with developments back home, it is safe to assume political women from Hunan were aware of such statements. To be judged to have little understanding of the world while studying abroad and to be denied the vote on the grounds of illiteracy after having mastered both classical Chinese and a foreign language was impossible to accept without protest. The blunt force of nationalism seemed to offer a way for women to defeat such manifold and entangling limitations. According to Louise Edwards, the women’s suffrage movement initially beneﬁted from embracing a racially tinged Chinese unity against the Manchu oppressor.85 In a ﬁght to the ﬁnish with the Manchus, every Chinese was needed. Anyone willing to make a bomb, write a manifesto, plot against the enemy, or shoulder a riﬂe was welcome as a comrade. George Orwell noticed a similar phenomenon on the Republican side in the ﬁrst days of the Spanish Civil War.86 Everyone was wanted at the front without regard to party, faction, or sex. “It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution,” Orwell wrote.87 This changed in Spain once organized revolution began to replace spontaneous uprisings. In the Republican Revolution in China the leveling effects of terror and combat were real but more intermittent. Women like Qiu Jin sacriﬁced their lives in uprisings against the Manchu monarchy.88 In exile communities and new institutions like women’s schools and newspaper ofﬁces the grip of patriarchy loosened but did not disappear. Writing in 1911 on the eve of revolution in China, Tang Qunying had an answer for those worried about how women’s rights ﬁt into the drive for national development. Last year in England at a meeting of women, women from all over the country demanded the right to vote in both houses of parliament. This grand and imposing regard for human rights can also be seen in books and newspapers. The land of China is not second to England or America in importance. Nor are our women inferior to the women of England and America.89

Although limited suffrage for women in Britain waited until 1918 and full suffrage came only in 1928, 1910 did witness intense and widely reported struggles for the vote in and out of parliament by British women and their allies.90 Tang and her colleagues also proposed an ambitious social reform agenda that would give women more economic, educational, vocational, and political opportunities.91 They demanded an end to foot binding and also called for the provision of medical services to women. Although the issue of foot binding was an important one among

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progressive women and their allies, female and male, it was by no means the only or most important focus for women like Tang, whose own feet bore the marks of the custom as well as her precocious resistance to it.92 Tang could not resist a jab at her Zeng clan relations and their repressive rules and philosophy. She singled out Zeng Guofan’s comment that “if a husband was bad, a wife must still submit” as an especially egregious example of the “intellectual poison of corrupt Song Confucianism.”93 Tang’s critique entwined the personal and the political. When she took the stage at the Huguang Lodge on August 25, 1912, she may well have known that Zeng Guofan had preceded her there. Decades before Zeng had been in the audience for opera performances and read the poetry of Du Fu in the lodge’s library.94 Women were now becoming public ﬁgures in their own right. It was harder for men to speculate at their leisure or in their studies about womanly virtue, much less what women wanted or needed, when females like Tang Qunying read their work, sat within earshot, and publicly reacted to what they saw and heard by giving speeches or writing letters to the editor. When they worked as bomb makers for the Revolutionary Alliance, Tang and her female comrades achieved a breakthrough by an equal sharing of dangers. From another angle, they were still relegated to an inner gunpowder “kitchen” of the revolution. Tang Qunying returned to China in early September 1911 and, like other female revolutionaries, helped organize women’s military and political units.95 Although the number of women involved in such organizations was small, branches and networks of activists could be found in nearly every major city. At Wuchang in October, Tang Qunying was in the thick of the ﬁghting as troops under Huang Xing fought an action to prevent—delay, as it turned out—the city from falling back into Qing hands. Tang became a captain in the Women’s Northern Expedition Brigade and participated in the revolutionaries’ capture of Nanjing, a bloody struggle that lasted twenty-ﬁve days in November.96 In the battle for Nanjing Tang Qunying, wearing a military uniform and introduced on a school drill ground by her friend Zhang Hanying, gave a speech to the troops with a grimly determined message: “If we do not succeed we will die for a righteous cause.”97 In an account given to an American visitor to Nanjing in 1912, female soldiers rushed Qing lines and threw bombs of their own making into the ranks of the enemy.98 Several women were killed in the ﬁghting. Tang was an effective and courageous battleﬁeld commander. Zhang Ji described her role in the ﬁght for Nanjing in a poem.

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Beacon ﬁres ﬂare on all sides. Sleeves ﬂicked back, You lead troops forward.99

On horseback and carrying a gun, Tang led several hundred lightly armed women toward Nanjing. When news reached the unit that about a thousand Qing troops ahead of them were withdrawing, some of the women wanted to attack immediately to show their mettle. Instead, citing the limited training and weaponry of her brigade, Tang ordered an advance that avoided contact with the superior government force. That night the revolutionaries linked up with a contingent of rebel troops under the command of Crazy Chen in a nearby county seat. Tang suggested that the women’s brigade be used to fake an attack on the Qing forces and then withdraw in order to lure the enemy into an ambush by Chen’s soldiers hiding along the road. The plan succeeded, and the Qing forces were defeated.100 After the victory Tang assembled her “women warriors” and gave a speech calling for the “extermination” of the Manchus and urging her troops to ﬁght “like Ban Chao plunging into the tiger’s lair.” Ban Chao, brother of the celebrated Han historian and female role model Ban Zhao, was famed for his military exploits and for his belief that “only he who penetrates the tiger’s lair can carry off the cubs.”101 Certainly Tang’s strategy of tricking Qing troops into attacking what they thought was only a small force of helpless women was in the spirit of Ban Chao’s legendary stratagems. The satisfaction these actions gave Tang Qunying and her comrades must have been profound, representing as they did the joining of Mulan-like heroism, classical statecraft, revolutionary ideology, and the demolition of male stereotypes about the weaknesses of women. The military role of women in the 1911 Revolution underscores the importance of a martial identity as part of the package of ideas that helped radicalize Tang Qunying and women like her. Unlike liberal ideas about women as free individuals, the woman warrior role was indigenous and liberating.102 Tang on the battleﬁelds of Central China was not only a modern, undisguised Mulan and knight-errant but also a citizen-soldier.

“We Must First Have the Right to Vote and Be Elected” Military campaigns, as they churned across the landscape, afforded excellent opportunities for forging connections with other women’s orga-

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nizations and leaders.103 After the war phase of the revolution subsided in December, the Nanjing government disbanded the women’s brigades.104 Female combatants went their various ways. Some returned to their studies or married, including to ofﬁcials in the new Republican government. Others, like Tang Qunying, continued their involvement in revolutionary and women’s politics.105 Many joined the nationwide movement for women’s suffrage.106 One of the long-term consequences of the 1911 Revolution was that a nationwide scale of political operations took on new weight and meaning. Women like Tang sought to exploit this fact. Tang Qunying, typical of the radical wing of the women’s movement, demanded full citizenship for women even before the provisional Republican government formed at the end of 1911. She later petitioned both the new government in Nanjing and Sun Yat-sen to that effect.107 Happily, China has been revived in glory with dictatorship now transformed into a republic. With political revolution comes social revolution. If we wish to end the social tragedy, we must seek social equality. If we wish social equality, we must ﬁrst have equal rights for men and women. We must ﬁrst have the right to vote and be elected.108

Many calls for social reform were pinned to the standard of Republican revolution, including the popular literacy movement, the anti-opium campaign, and Sun Yat-sen’s still vaguely deﬁned notion of “people’s livelihood,” with its hint of social leveling. There was nothing vague about the plans militant women had for achieving political rights and progressing rapidly toward social and cultural transformation. Much of Tang Qunying’s political energy in early 1912 was directed at inﬂuencing Sun Yat-sen, both before and after his resignation as provisional president. Sun clearly appreciated Tang’s contributions to the revolution. She met with Sun on February 2, 1912, to be recognized as a “Hero of Womankind” (Jin’guo yingxiong), a traditional title for “women who fulﬁlled their obligations to the ruler or their kin with remarkable deeds in warfare.”109 Sun also presented Tang with the presidential “Second Class Commendation Medal.” Tang proudly wore the medal when she had her photographic portrait taken in 1912 (ﬁgure 4).110 Baskets of ﬂowers partially obscure her bound feet. From a suffragist standpoint, Sun Yat-sen’s views on women’s rights were appealing. His initial support in 1912 for full suffrage demonstrated the extent of his commitments. When the Revolutionary Alliance issued its “Nine Point” party platform on March 3, male-female equality was featured as a basic principle.111 Moreover, Sun had long been open to

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4. Tang Qunying. From Gardner L. Harding, PresentDay China: A Narrative of a Nation’s Advance (New York: The Century Company, 1916), plate opposite p. 42.

the recruitment of women as revolutionary ﬁghters. He also led a complicated personal life. His marriage to Lu Muzhen, which resulted in the three children Sun acknowledged, was of the traditional, arranged kind.112 On his travels he had many affairs, including one in Japan that produced a daughter. Sun’s wandering eye for women exposed him to politically motivated charges of consorting with prostitutes and keeping a concubine.113 In 1915, in the throes of his struggle with “the mid-life demon,” Sun wed twenty-three-year-old Song Qingling without formally divorcing his ﬁrst wife, creating a scandal among his missionary and Christian supporters.114

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Sun Yat-sen presented himself as an emancipator of the Chinese people from enslavement. In his brief presidency he issued more than thirty administrative edicts designed to end injustices. He ordered the abolition of corporal punishment, including beatings with a bamboo stick and wearing the cangue around one’s neck.115 He decreed that hereditarily “debased” people be given rights as citizens. He ordered the same improvement of condition for occupational groups suffering discrimination, including barbers, actors, prostitutes, and servants.116 He reiterated the recent Qing edict banning foot binding and seemed poised to act decisively on behalf of women.117 Lin Zongsu, a female journalist, suffragist, and early supporter of the Revolutionary Alliance in Japan, paid a call on President Sun in Nanjing on January 5, 1912, to discuss women’s rights.118 Lin reported to her readers that Sun told her that he fully backed women’s suffrage. In response to the published interview, Zhang Binglin and Zhang Jian angrily objected to giving women the vote and to Sun’s support for the idea.119 This talk of women’s suffrage, isn’t it a rejection of sound social customs? Though we do not dare to say ourselves whether it [suffrage] should be accepted or rejected, it must at least be subject to public opinion. As a result, when one hears of a certain woman making a demand, and the President in a few words simply agrees, even though not in an explicit decree, this is a case of frivolous discussion running rampant. This act of approval seems a case of self-indulgence. The ancients had a saying: “Be careful how you speak.” We hope the President will consider this admonition.120

The classical reference in this article is to the ﬁrst section of the Analects describing how the “superior man” (junzi) practices ﬁlial piety and propriety and is “earnest in what he is doing, and careful in his speech (shen yu yan).”121 Zhang Binglin a few years before had complained that “the present generation is stupid and does not speak its mind.”122 Ever alert to threats to China’s cultural essence, he now recoiled from the idea of women speaking out in public and voting. Zhang Jian, a dedicated reformer, nonetheless favored a gradual and disciplined program of social change that precluded anything that might disturb social hierarchy.123 Sun immediately backed down, agreeing with his critics: Women’s suffrage is best decided by public opinion. The day before yesterday a certain woman came to see me. And our private conversation was then printed in the newspaper. How can this be said to be approval? By now this situation is difﬁcult to correct or rectify. I approve of the saying about being careful with your words.124

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Lin Zongsu denied that her conversation with Sun was merely a private “chat” and accused Zhang Binglin of obstructing women’s suffrage.125 Sun knew Lin as a Revolutionary Alliance member and could not help but be aware of her status as a pioneer female reporter.126 The incident underlines the potency and the ambiguity of “public opinion” at this juncture. All parties now accepted the idea that in postimperial China matters of state should be “subject to public opinion.” What the public wanted—indeed, who the public were—was open to interpretation. Sun Yat-sen’s relationship with the suffrage movement in China offers parallels with Woodrow Wilson’s evolving stance on women’s suffrage at about the same time. As a graduate student, a year before his ﬁrst marriage, Wilson attended a suffrage meeting and admitted a “chilled, scandalized feeling that always overcomes me when I see and hear women speak in public.”127 In the ﬁrst year of his presidency Wilson met with Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), who asked him to lobby Congress on behalf of suffrage. He responded, in a fashion Zhang Binglin and Zhang Jian might have approved of: “I am not a free man. I am not at liberty until I speak for somebody beside myself.”128 Later, in his second term in ofﬁce, when suffrage presented Wilson with a different political calculus, he found he was free to support the vote for women after all.129 While Wilson’s late move to support women’s suffrage was not without conviction, Sun’s position on the issue was likely more heartfelt, perhaps because Sun did not need to overcome Victorian attitudes toward women but only a few Confucian ones.130 Sun could be traditional after his own fashion in his personal and political life. He sometimes criticized women and young people for being too individualistic. However, his republicanism, greener in spirit than Wilson’s, embraced the universal logic of women’s rights. The same could not be said of most of Sun’s male colleagues. Women participated in the Chinese debate over suffrage and not always on the side of an immediate granting of the vote. In the process they also served as symbols of what was right and wrong about Republican China. Once the politics of Han identity lost its anti-Manchu focus, instead of being rewarded for their racial solidarity, women were advised by fellow revolutionaries like Zhang Binglin and reformers like Zhang Jian to go back to being “good Han women.”131 In a preface to a book of Qiu Jin’s poems published after her death, Zhang Binglin had praised her courage and virtue but also criticized her fondness for oratory. She had, he said, a weakness for being “garrulous.”132 A woman

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dying for the cause was one thing. A woman speaking up in public for that cause or any other was quite another. Suffragists would not be put off. Many came from elite families, and a sense of privilege undergirded their claim of rights. Social position gave suffrage campaigners good information about the political scene, access to top leaders such as Sun, and a strong feeling of entitlement to a hearing in the court of public opinion, especially when the jury was composed of their revolutionary peers. They were willing to be subject to public opinion but only if women were recognized as part of that public. In early February 1912 suffragists discussed how to ensure that the Republic’s new constitution would include guarantees of women’s rights.133 Later that month Tang Qunying persuaded ﬁve women’s organizations to merge into the Republic of China Women’s Suffrage Alliance, with the name of the body clearly cementing women’s rights to the new regime and to republicanism.134 Two hundred representatives met in Nanjing, with Tang serving as chair, and heard speeches bristling with declarations such as “A Republic is by its nature a Republic for women, not a Republic for men alone.”135 The position of women in the debate over rights was complicated by divisions among suffrage supporters on questions of tactics and strategy. Lin Zongsu and Tang Qunying represented a radical group that wanted immediate male-female equality.136 Tang justiﬁed her demands on the basis of the performance of women in the revolution and on natural rights grounds: “All private and public rights [come from] the original rights of human beings in nature. No matter whether one is a man or woman, everyone has them.”137 Moderates led by Zhang (Sophia) Zhaohan (also known by her pen name, Zhang Mojun) favored improvements in women’s education leading to a higher cultural level as a prelude to emancipation.138 Zhang Zhaohan’s background resembled Tang Qunying’s. Born to a “bookfragrant” ofﬁcial family from Xiangxiang, Hunan (Crazy Chen’s hometown), Zhang was conversant in the classical tradition and in Westerninspired learning.139 Recruited by Huang Xing to Revolutionary Alliance activities, she was active in journalism and educational reform. During the Revolution, in Shanghai Zhang Zhaohan helped raise money at rallies where “hundreds of women poured their jewels on the platform for the Republican cause.”140 Zhang also recruited seventy students for a military “dare-to-die brigade.”141 In the Revolution’s aftermath she produced a theatrical “cycle of the Three Revolutions, including ‘George Washington, or the American Revolution,’ ‘The French Revolution and the Life

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of Napoleon,’ and the climax of the three, ‘The Heroes of the Chinese Revolution.’ ”142 The American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, who visited China in 1912, described Zhang as “young, handsome, an eloquent speaker with a grasp of the whole subject of woman’s relation to society.”143 Gardner Harding, who covered the suffrage movement in England for London newspapers, found her “large and grave” and “a typical Chinese girl of the middle classes, not a Christian, not under any foreign inﬂuence, indeed known to very few foreigners, missionaries or otherwise, throughout the city.”144 Zhang Zhaohan’s Chinese Republican Women’s Cooperative Society (Shenzhou nüjie gonghe xieji she) called for a women’s law school, a women’s newspaper, and the right to monitor the political world by, for example, sitting in the Senate’s public galleries.145 For the time being moderates accepted the more constricted role of “mothers of citizens” instead of pressing for the radicals’ expansive notion of “female citizens.”146 They also criticized militant suffragists for being “radicals.”147 Many militant women, including Tang Qunying, participated in Zhang’s organization and its educational and cultural activities. Sun Yat-sen gave the group his strong endorsement and a cash gift of 5,000 yuan.148 Sun promised that “women in the future will have suffrage” and praised moderates for “not hurriedly seeking suffrage” but rather working to prepare women for their new role as citizens.149 At the group’s meetings sentiments expressed were often more radical than these stated aims, with speakers demanding immediate suffrage while afﬁrming a peaceful course of action. A delicate balance was achieved by Sun Yat-sen with his cautious support for women’s rights, restrained by male critics within his own party, and the women’s movements, with moderates and militants arguing and working together simultaneously. The split between moderate and radical political women in China mirrored divisions in European and American suffrage circles. Differences between Zhang Zhaohan and Tang Qunying were similar to those between Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who was at the forefront of militant action both in Britain and in her native United States. Catt, a founder of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, was a leader of a movement of “suffragists” who favored moderate, nonviolent tactics, in contrast to the more confrontational methods used by “suffragettes” led by the English Pankhursts (Emmeline and daughters, Sylvia and Christabel) and Americans like Paul.150 Competition between the two sides did not preclude common cause.151 In 1908 Catt praised English militants at an International Women’s Suffrage Association meeting in

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Amsterdam.152 Catt and Paul, after Catt succeeded Anna Shaw as NAWSA president in 1915, worked the moderate and militant political angles in tandem in winning Woodrow Wilson’s support for federal suffrage in the United States. How quickly women’s rights could and should be advanced was a divisive but also politically productive dimension of the suffrage movement internationally. In March 1912 conﬂict over women’s rights in China broke into the open as a result of two developments: a refusal by the Senate in Nanjing to afﬁrm the importance of male-female equality as constitutional fact and an escalating conﬂict between moderates and militants. In the provisional constitution promulgated by the Senate in early March and written by Song Jiaoren, the ﬁrst article stated,“The Republic of China is composed of the Chinese people.”153 Women might reasonably assume that this statement granted them equal status as members of the Chinese people. However, in Article 5 citizenship passively excluded women by making no reference to sex: “Citizens of the Chinese Republic are all equal, and there shall be no racial, class, or religious distinctions.” An earlier draft, distributed in January, had simply read, “The people are all equal,” and left it at that.154 Suffragists reacted indignantly to new language that seemed to deny women a basic guarantee of equality. Once aware of plans to amend the simpler, all-inclusive language, women had marched to the Senate on February 26 demanding either the inclusion of “male-female” (nannü) in Article 5 or the dropping of references to any distinctions.155 When a majority of senators refused to accept either demand, protesters warned that the next offering they would make would be in the form of bombs.156 Additional petitions yielded only a statement from the Senate on March 18 that the issue would be deferred until a permanent parliament was elected.157 Tang met personally with Sun Yat-sen but to no avail. In any case, by this time Sun had resigned in favor of Yuan Shikai and was bidding his long good-bye to the presidency. Suffragists turned their attention to the Senate, still in session in Nanjing prior to its removal to Beijing in April.158 Lin Sen, Jiangxi delegate and Sun Yat-sen loyalist, presided as speaker over forty-two senators from seventeen provinces in a Western-style building on Hunan Street originally built to house the Jiangsu provincial assembly. The hall where the Senate convened was of “graceful proportions” and simply decorated.159 Architectural details included glass windows that ﬂooded the chamber with light and seemed to promise political transparency.160 Seats and desks were arranged in a semicircle facing a railed enclosure for clerks as well as Speaker Lin’s elevated desk. A visitor’s gallery surrounded the

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Senate ﬂoor. Senate business was conducted with senators at their desks sipping tea and smoking.161 One foreign reporter was struck by the youthful nature of the senators themselves. Counting heads from the gallery, he found “among them not one bald or grey as the large majority would be in a similar convocation in the West.”162 A photograph of the Nanjing Senate in session with Sun Yat-sen seated above Lin as presiding ofﬁcer conﬁrms full heads of hair, with some thinning here and there, to be expected perhaps considering the political pressures delegates labored under (ﬁgure 5). On March 19 at 8:00 a.m. Tang Qunying, wielding a pistol as a token of her militancy (she did not ﬁre it), led a group of women into the building to protest the refusal of representatives to make women’s equality and suffrage explicit in the new constitution.163 Speaker Lin ordered aides to escort the women to the gallery.164 The women refused to be led away or accept the observer status moderates like Zhang Zhaohan had proposed. Instead they seated themselves as they pleased among the delegates. The women waited for the debate over suffrage to begin and then “jeered so loudly that the proceedings could not continue.” One delegate complained, “When we observe women behaving in the present manner, we see that there are all sorts of women, and we may resolve to oppose you.”165 Another man proceeded to give a potted history of the women’s movement in Europe, alleging that the “barbarous and illegal behavior” displayed by Tang and her comrades could not be found in “civilized countries.” Of course, anyone who read the newspapers carefully would know that suffragettes in England were at that very moment carrying out an even more radical and violent campaign. At one point senators, led by Lin Sen, appear to have conceded women’s suffrage in principle.166 When pressed for details of when and how this would happen, however, it became clear that the Senate would not budge from its decision to defer the question until the convening of a nationally elected parliament, a body women would have no ballot for. For their part, the protesters seem to have concluded that, consonant with the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s observation about such moments, “well-behaved women seldom make history.”167 Echoing statements about women made in Qing self-government and voting regulations, one senator “spoke insolently” as he argued, “Women have no national consciousness and no political ability.” They are ﬁt only for managing the home and bearing children. This was too much for Shen Peizhen, also present as a leader of the protest, who responded with a deﬁant speech that “caused the hall to erupt.”

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5. Sun Yat-sen presiding in the Nanjing Senate. ©Bettman/CORBIS.

On the front line of battle, the ones in the vanguard were we women. In the rear areas making propaganda and carrying out relief were we women. Where were women not in the thick of things? As for you senators and “great men,” some of you spend the night playing mahjong and the day going to meetings and taking naps. You speak in bureaucratic jargon. How many of you have any idea of how to save the country? How dare you make such comments about us women?!168

Through the efforts of mediators, the women were persuaded to leave the chamber. They returned for the afternoon session. As the bell rang to summon the delegates inside, the women pulled on the jackets of the men entering, engaged them in debate, and obstructed their progress.169 Lin Sen ordered guards to bar the women from the chamber and the public galleries, but the protesters resisted. When the Senate ﬁnally convened members conﬁrmed their earlier decision to defer consideration of the equal rights issue until a permanent parliament convened. In subsequent days confrontations between suffragists and the authorities escalated. On March 20 the women protesters formed up and marched again on the Senate.170 Discovering that the body was in recess, they smashed windows,“drenching their hands in blood.”171 They broke

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the teacups senators sipped from and scattered their papers.172 They kicked and pushed to the ground guards who admonished them to leave. They also searched the sleeves of delegates they happened upon in an effort to discover legislative documents they suspected had been concealed there. The next day, sixty women, carrying weapons and shouting slogans, converged once again on the Senate. The crowd intimidated the delegates, who then ﬂed. One woman, a veteran of the battle of Nanjing, was said to have repeated the earlier threat, “We know how to make bombs and we know how to throw them.”173 Speaker Lin, a normally mild and digniﬁed man, in a panic sought security reinforcements. He phoned Sun Yat-sen, imploring the president to dispatch troops. By this time Tang Qunying and the other women, unable to enter the Senate building, had marched on the Presidential Mansion to deliver a petition to Sun asking him to change the constitution.174 Sun greeted them and gently persuaded the women to disband. He also warned them “not to by rioting unintentionally make yourselves out to be the enemy.”175 The ruckus at the Senate received considerable attention in the print media at the time and in later historical renderings, much of it unfavorable.176 Writing two decades later, Chen Dongyuan noted,“After the news spread, the whole country was quite shocked. Such a strange occurrence had never been witnessed from ancient times to the present; even in foreign countries such an event would be surprising.”177 One female teacher who hoped to expand educational opportunities for women later criticized Tang and her supporters for allowing their “pent-up energies” to get the better of them and following “the wrong path of thinking.”178 Tang Qunying asked Sun to “strengthen the law and expound women’s rights.” He did intercede with Senate leaders to allow women the privilege of regular admission to the Senate galleries. This concession—though not small considering the damage to parliamentary order and member dignity the women had inﬂicted—aptly summarized the current position of political women. They could watch but not fully participate. It is hard to imagine a vantage point more likely to stimulate further opposition and anger. The violence of the protests reﬂected the fact that many of the women were accustomed to using force in politics and on the battleﬁeld. Direct and sometimes violent action was also the norm for militant suffragists abroad, especially in England. The historian Ono Kazuko saw actions like those of March 19 and 20, 1912, as examples of the “conscious emulation” of English suffragettes, noting that “Chinese newspapers and magazines reported almost hourly on the British suffrage movement.”179 Lin

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Zongsu’s journal, Women’s Times, for example, reported in detail on the international suffrage movement.180 European and American tactics such as marches, speech making, hunger strikes, breaking shop windows, and pouring acid in mailboxes inﬂuenced and inspired political women in China.181 Early March in particular was an intense period for suffragette protests in England and these actions, including the news that “Mrs. Pankhurst motored to [Prime Minister] Mr. Asquith’s residence and broke the windows with stones.”182 The attention given such actions in China was reciprocated in England vis-à-vis Chinese militants. In early April after the violent protests in Nanjing, Chinese suffragists received a telegram of support from English counterparts in the radical Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).183 The WSPU praised their courage and predicted that in the future Chinese suffragists “will become the model for the civilized world.”184 “Civilization” (wenming), translatable now in Chinese as “modern,” was a vigorously contested idea that included values like order and progress but also emancipation and liberation. Invading parliament and accosting male politicians appealed to suffragettes in Europe and America, who also faced intransigent politicians and indifferent and hostile publics. Alice Paul was arrested in London in November 1909 “for throwing stones through a window at the Guildhall while the Lord Mayor’s banquet was in progress” while inside a fellow suffragette dressed in an evening gown inﬁltrated the event in order to deliver a “personal remonstrance” to Winston Churchill. She showed her displeasure peacefully but pointedly by “waving a tiny banner in his face.”185 Churchill, although his views on suffrage were relatively moderate, had declared while campaigning in 1906 in Manchester, the hometown of the suffragette Pankhurst family,“I am not going to be henpecked on a question of such grave importance.”186 The women’s actions in China carried obvious and subtler symbolic meanings. Women in public who acted like citizens were liable to be stared at and made a spectacle of. Actions like brandishing weapons, shouting slogans, and laying hands on male delegates broke conventional taboos about the proper behavior of females. That must have been the point. Instead of submitting to stares and jeers, Tang Qunying and her colleagues took their ﬁght into male preserves and actually pushed and grabbed the men. They brandished things that men tended to use, like revolvers and cigarettes. Their behavior was appalling by design. Sun managed to defuse their anger with a show of sympathy and the unwelcome advice to be patient and pragmatic, counsel he did not always follow himself. Shortly before the women challenged male preserves of power in Nan-

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jing, they became entangled in their own public debate over goals and tactics.187 An editorial by a pseudonymous writer, “Empty Seas” (Konghai), in the Shanghai paper Minli bao challenged the wisdom of immediate women’s suffrage from a standpoint that also expressed sympathy for women’s problems.188 The editorial claimed differences between men and women properly gave women a greater role in the inner realm of the home. These differences were the product of “evolution” and could not be set aside without harmful consequences to society. Not only did women lack the intellect and education to vote, their role in sustaining the family as the foundation of the nation was so important that granting women suffrage and a place in the “outer” world would lead to the collapse of social order. “Humanity will be extinguished.” The editorial attracted many letters, both pro and con. A woman named Zhang Renlan mocked Shanghai suffragists and their “imposing torrent of oratory” for “speaking in their odd-looking way, [as] apparitions neither Chinese nor foreign, male nor female, monk nor nun.”189 Why should women, busy at home in fruitful ways, “compete with carnivores in the jungle of politics?” Zhang supported the proverbial division of labor in which “men rule the outer and women the inner realms.” Other supporters of the original editorial railed against the suffragists’ “unrestricted private morality” that supposedly supported “anti-husbandism” and other outlandish ideas. Among critics of the “Empty Seas” editorial and supporters of women’s suffrage were several professional women, such as Yang Liwei, head of the Shenzhou Girls Academy in Shanghai; Chen Huanxing, a doctor who had studied in the United States; and Tang Qunying’s friend Zhang Hanying. The three insisted that the rights women demanded were theirs by gift of nature. Natural rights trumped social stability. Appealing to the logic of history and echoing Tang, Zhang declared that “China’s political revolution is already in the past; the social revolution lies ahead of us.”190 The inaugural convention of the Women’s Suffrage Alliance Tang Qunying had organized in late February met in Nanjing on April 8, 1912, the day after the Senate set off for Beijing, with three thousand women in attendance. The meeting was held at the Xiang Army ofﬁce in Nanjing.191 Selection of the venue, one suspects, had something to do with Tang Qunying’s father’s Qing military service in that body. Participants were still indignant after the rebuff to women’s rights delivered by the Senate.192 By now the few hundred women who had joined the revolution prior to 1911 were reinforced by thousands of suffragists throughout China. Given that Chinese Communist Party membership remained in the hun-

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dreds from the founding of the party in 1921 to the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925, this rapid expansion in a matter of months in 1911 and 1912 is impressive.193 Once the parliament and the rest of the national government moved to Beijing, the Women’s Suffrage Alliance followed and kept up a steady ﬂow of petitions directed at Yuan Shikai and his government.194 Song Jiaoren and later Sun Yat-sen took their agendas north, and so did the suffragists. In April Yuan Shikai speciﬁcally instructed his prime minister, Tang Shaoyi, to limit the number of suffragists heading to Beijing to “one or two” in order “to avoid all manner of obstructions.”195 Yuan undoubtedly had been reading the news from Nanjing but also had a poor idea of who he was up against. Tang Qunying brought along not a few close comrades to Beijing but a contingent of over one hundred.196 If momentum was shifting against women’s suffrage, political logic counseled resistance rather than capitulation. Success in organizing military units, suffrage organizations, and a national convention meant that women could bring the battle to male preserves of power from their own institutional base. The more they were excluded, the less likely they could be bought off. They continued to meet throughout the summer as a kind of women’s caucus of the Revolutionary Alliance. A gathering described in the press as a “women’s meeting” took place on August 4 in the Hunan Lodge in Beijing with ﬁfty-nine women and twenty-eight men in attendance.197 Women led by Tang Qunying, Wang Changguo, and others attacked Song Jiaoren’s conservative turn against women’s rights. The Women’s Suffrage Association lobbied the Senate in Beijing by repeatedly appearing at the chamber entrance and making the case that without women’s suffrage China could not be considered “civilized.”198

A “New Dream of the Red Chamber” The conﬂict over women’s rights led to much comment in the media, some of it obscene.“Unofﬁcial histories” written for popular consumption and analyzed by Madeleine Yue Dong include one remarkable tale in which the ﬁctitious suffragist “Sun Beizhen” is featured as a composite of Tang Qunying, Shen Peizhen, and Wang Changguo.199 Physically, Sun Beizhen resembles Tang by way of being “articulate and lively” and somewhat heavyset compared to the tall and digniﬁed Shen. At one point the ﬁctional Sun Beizhen slaps Song Jiaoren’s stand-in, a male politician with the homophonic name “Zhong Xiaorun,” when he dares disparage a political role for women on the ﬂoor of the Senate.200 The satire depicts Sun

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Beizhen as a vulgar slut who thinks nothing of urinating into a chamber pot in her hotel room while chatting with male colleagues. A loud voice, ﬁlthy habits, big (natural) feet, eyeglasses, and Western clothes round out a character whose commitment to equality for women is made to look ridiculous. Willow catkin prodigies and female tea pickers might be given a pass in the popular imagination, but radical women neither sought nor received such dispensation. Other editorial writers weighed in with milder forms of mockery.201 Educated young women in particular, in what amounted to a media obsession, were criticized for behaving in “inappropriate” and “unseemly” fashion.202 Lin Zongsu’s Women’s Times complained in September 1912 in a response to such attacks that “public opinion is chaotic and unrestrained. When our compatriots in women’s circles express their important opinions, they are opposed in wild language in newspaper articles.”203 The physical and verbal attack on Song Jiaoren on August 25 also inspired a more appreciative satirical piece in the Shanghai newspaper Shibao four days later that titled the confrontation a “New Dream of the Red Chamber” in which the righteous anger of women throws men into hapless confusion.204 Tang is given the role of Tanchun, the wronged and deﬁant daughter of a concubine in Cao Xueqin’s great eighteenthcentury novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Song Jiaoren plays “Wang Shanbao’s wife,” the unctuous and scheming servant to the matriarch, Lady Xing. Depicting Song as a female servant was as grave an insult as saddling suffragists with “Sun Beizhen.” According to a story carried in our newspaper, Miss Tang Qunying struck Song Jiaoren, making a loud, sharp sound that shook the roof tiles. One couldn’t help but think of Tanchun and Wang Shanbao’s wife in Dream of the Red Chamber. The smack there was also loud and clear. After the blow was struck, Wang Shanbao’s wife said, “This is the ﬁrst time anyone has hit me. Tomorrow I’ll go to Lady Xing and ask to return to my home.” I imagine that for Song Jiaoren this was also “the ﬁrst time anyone hit” him and he had to “see her Ladyship and ask to return home.” Earlier, he had to resign as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry and now this blow. For Song Jiaoren the stars of misfortune are myriad. How can he hope to become President now? 205

For the record, Song had been struck before, by a fellow senator and by Wang Changguo, though not by Tang until Song and she met on the stage of the Huguang Lodge on August 25. The Dream of the Red Chamber, a saga of life and love played out in the inner quarters of a sprawling elite mansion in Beijing, might seem an

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odd vehicle for interpreting the “outer” public behavior of Republican politicians. However, if politics is a struggle for ascendancy and advantage, the machinations of the Jia family of Grand View Garden were nothing if not political. As the novel explains, the Jia mansion is home to “more than three hundred souls, who produced between them a dozen or more incidents in a single day,” a fair description of the Nationalist political family at the Huguang Lodge on August 25, 1912.206 The Chinese Revolution not only turned the world upside down by empowering workers, farmers, women, and the young, it turned the inner realms of family and social life inside out by politicizing personal relationships. China’s new revolutionary elite operated in a context of generational, gender, and personal tensions that made family-like relationships inevitable, even as revolutionaries sought to escape the old family model of authority and power. Aside from Song Jiaoren being the target of a loud “smack,” why would a reader of the essay take him to be “Wang Shanbao’s wife”? Song had had a busy year: he helped found the Republic in Nanjing, drafted a constitution, negotiated with Yuan Shikai over transfer of the capital to Beijing, joined the ﬁrst Beijing cabinet as agriculture and forestry minister, and then resigned as part of the Alliance’s effort to outmaneuver Yuan Shikai in parliament. Song had a knack for exciting controversy, and Wang Shanbao’s wife is portrayed in Cao Xueqin’s novel as “a most notorious stirrer-up of trouble.”207 Song had competition in this regard from many other public ﬁgures, like the brilliant and erratic Zhang Binglin, who in May, as a “bad joke,” inspired perhaps by Tang Qunying’s actions in the Senate, reportedly pulled a pistol on Prime Minister Tang Shaoyi.208 However, Wang Shanbao’s wife is also rather stupid and displays a “total lack of judgment.”209 Song Jiaoren by contrast was exceedingly intelligent. Song imagined as a troublemaking servant works best in terms of his relationships to his political patrons and superiors and to the upright Tang Qunying. According to Louise Edwards, Wang Shanbao’s wife’s employer and patron, Lady Xing, is portrayed as “mindless, selﬁsh and stupid” as beﬁts a representative of the “imperfect and poorly managed ‘maternal patriarchy’ ” that precipitates so much trouble and distress in the novel.210 Stand-ins for Lady Xing among Song’s set could be Revolutionary Alliance elders like Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing. Mocking Sun and Huang as old ladies is not beyond the reach of modern Chinese political satire. During the 1989 democracy movement a wall poster depicted Deng Xiaoping as the Empress Dowager Cixi ruling from behind the screen, inspiring the protest slogan “Let Cixi Retire!”211 Since Song

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had supplanted his elders for the moment as active leaders of the Revolutionary Alliance/Nationalist Party, it was unclear who his patron was in summer 1912. Lady Xing’s name is a homonym for xing, connoting “to follow,” and so she does as a stand-in for her husband, Jia She.212 This makes Lady Xing and Wang Shanbao’s wife power holders once and twice removed. If Song Jiaoren’s “Lady Xing” was Sun Yat-sen, Sun’s puppet master that summer arguably was Yuan Shikai as he played the Jia She role by holding most of the strings of political intrigue. No one comes off well in this clever analogy except Tang Qunying as the principled and volatile Tanchun. The Shibao satirist deftly captured the precarious nature of Song Jiaoren’s hold on power in the new world of parliaments and party conventions, a set of structures he was attempting to climb even as he helped build them. Tang Qunying’s connection to the novel is clear, and not only because of the blow struck. She resembled Tanchun in her intelligence and quick temper.213 During a search carried out by a team of women dispatched by the household matriarchs for evidence of an illicit love affair in the form of erotic embroidery, servant Wang Shanbao’s wife goes too far in challenging Tanchun. Imagining she can exploit Tanchun’s status as a lowly concubine’s daughter, the servant decides to subject the young woman to “a little horseplay.” She pretends to search Tan Chun by ﬁddling with her jacket, and then pronounces with a grin, “Now I’ve even searched Miss Tan, and there’s nothing on her either!”214 With only a moment’s hesitation, Tan Chun gives the old woman “a resounding smack” that marks her face. In a “towering rage,” Tan Chun declares: Who do you think you are? How dare you touch me? It seems that the respect that I show you, even though it is only for Her Ladyship’s sake and out of consideration for your age, merely encourages you to make mischief for us and abuse your borrowed powers. But now, to lay hands on me—that is really too much! If you have reckoned on my being a poor, timid creature . . . whom you can bully and impose upon at your pleasure, you have made a very big mistake.215

The offense meriting a resounding slap from Tang Qunying was Song’s betrayal of women’s rights. However, as in the novel, matters of status and personal feelings were also involved. Tang was a suffragist and revolutionary. She was also, presumably, a virtuous and chaste widow and an elder sister to younger female and male comrades. Song’s actions constituted an unwelcome policy reversal but also a personal affront by a younger man to an older, sisterly comrade. Tang had chastised badly behaved brothers before.

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Suffragists like Tang Qunying were complicated creations and self-creations. They looked at times like the “bad girls” of the Chinese Revolution and counterparts in other movements where women acted without regard to social convention or good manners.216 Chinese suffragists also tapped older values of a more conventional kind. Ulrich adds nuance to her portrait of misbehaving and history-making women by noting that being prim and proper could sometimes be an asset for militants. Respectable-looking white women active as American abolitionists unsettled opponents with their conﬁdent and “righteous” demeanor.217 Radical women in China had not so much broken neatly with tradition by choosing entirely new personae as reshaped convention and values to novel purposes. Being suffragists unleashed their anger but did not free them from the expectations of friends, family, and community or deny them the moral and material resources embedded in these relationships. Certainly, no one would mistake Tang Qunying for the fragile and imperiled heroine of the Dream of the Red Chamber, Lin Daiyu. Modernminded Chinese were coming to expect that women, like men, would be physically more active, assertive, and even vulgar in the role of citizen.218 Like Tanchun in Grand View Garden, Tang Qunying’s position in the Revolutionary Alliance was politically ambiguous. Sex, as well as age, hometown, and relative closeness to major ﬁgures like Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing, mattered in the calculus of inﬂuence and vulnerability. In 1912 Tang was forty-one, somewhat younger than Sun (forty-six) and signiﬁcantly older than enfant terrible Song Jiaoren (thirty). Like Song and Huang Xing, Tang was from politically pivotal Hunan and had joined the Alliance the year of its founding. Parallels with the “girls’ kingdom” in Grand View Garden are suggestive.219 As Edwards, in her analysis of “sexual ideology” in The Dream of the Red Chamber, explains, Cao Xueqin’s unmarried female characters, like Tanchun, tend to be formidable because they are virtuous, whereas married women like Lady Xing are “vicious, power hungry and jealous.”220 Republican male politicians were liable to be thought similarly unscrupulous and married to power. By contrast, and like Tanchun, in political terms Tang Qunying was inside the political household by dint of her Revolutionary Alliance membership and connections and outside the core of the party leadership. Tang lacked the wherewithal to be corrupt since she held no government position and was married to no one. Slandering her as a woman was an option but risked her wrath as chaste widow. In the “family romance” of the Chinese Revolution, Tang was elder sister to many in the suffrage movement besides Song Jiaoren.221 Tang ac-

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cepted Sun Yat-sen’s authority as leader but not necessarily as patriarch. He was not old enough for one thing, and she was not young enough to animate Sun’s midlife demon. In the family romance of the French Revolution, analyzed by Lynn Hunt and conceived as “the collective, unconscious images of the familial order that underlie revolutionary politics,” the powerful twin impulses were freedom from discredited “political parents” and freedom for a new family of autonomous children, “especially the brothers.”222 In the 1911 Revolution the deposed political parents were conveniently, and perhaps confusingly, “foreigners” (Manchus) in the process of being naturalized as compatriots, and power was to be shared among friends and comrades who were also brothers and sisters. These younger political actors were waiting for new parents to emerge, or more precisely for the young to grow into parental authority under the benign supervision of good father Sun Yat-sen. This waiting game was one instance in which protracted revolution was a help rather than a point of frustration for revolutionaries. Older myths also informed the story, especially those featuring the virtuous outspoken woman of legend who “violated the rites, but in the end preserved them by upright conduct,” to the beneﬁt of family and state.223 Acting on behalf of a community of women who were citizens as well as daughters, sisters, friends, and wives redeﬁned the meaning of right conduct even as the slap in response to violation and the appeal to virtue struck older and deeper chords.224 Tang Qunying stayed on in Beijing after the August convention. In a lengthy manifesto, issued on September 4, she continued to justify a militant, combative stance: “If women do not rise up in protest, why would men pay us any attention?”225 In a blast at the current political scene, Tang claimed that “political parties are like horse tracks, the legislature a tea party, and ofﬁcials dirty gangsters.”As a result “the rights of women are hanging by a thread.” Earlier, when the Republic was just established in Nanjing, two or three other comrades and I united women’s circles, organized the Suffrage Alliance, petitioned President Sun, explained our position in the Senate, and publicized our Revolutionary Alliance goals in the press. Now it has been some time since we came north. We have been going around appealing for help and fearlessly making trouble. How is it that we still have not reached the level of attainment of England and America? . . . By oppressing us, everyone’s rights are being infringed on.226

Tang opened the headquarters of the Women’s Revolutionary Alliance and also helped found the Women’s Vernacular Daily and a more literary companion publication.227 The newspapers reported on the women’s

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movement and editorialized against the Senate for its “dark plots” and for “trampling human rights.” Tang Qunying had plenty of reasons to go public with her ideas and feelings and in a manner that carried her inner personal and social life along into battle. Excluded from top leadership positions by her sex as well as by her ideological commitments,Tang demanded loyalty from comrades in recognition of the purity of her intentions. Complicating her position was the fact that she was neither unmarried like Tanchun nor married like Wang Shanbao’s wife but a widow who refused to remarry. She remained chaste and principled and, as such, dangerous. A politics of virtue permitted Tang to turn the tables on stronger powers representing patronage, patriarchy, and national patrimony.

Carrie Chapman Catt Goes to China In fall 1912 divisions between moderates and radicals in the women’s movement were both reﬂected in and exacerbated by reactions to the visit to China of Carrie Chapman Catt from August 21 through September 27. Between her two tenures as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1900–1904 and 1915–20), Catt was also active in the international suffrage movement.228 Declaring, “Women must unite in something greater than national or race loyalty, and that is the motherhood of the whole world,” Catt in 1911 began a round-the-world trip accompanied by the Dutch feminist Aletta Jacobs. She and Jacobs reached China the following year and visited Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, and Beijing, giving speeches and drumming up support for the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). A powerful stump speaker who relied on both tightly reasoned arguments and heartrending stories to win over audiences, Catt was easily as well traveled for her cause as Sun Yat-sen was for his.229 On behalf of the suffrage movement she spoke in great convention halls in world capitals and in freezing grain elevators and prairie homes in suffrage battleground states of the American West.230 Arriving in China from the Middle East and South Asia, Catt noted with satisfaction in her diary,“Now I have shaken the hands of Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian suffragists.”231 While in Guangzhou Catt and Jacobs paid a visit to the Guangdong provincial assembly to observe its female legislators. As in the United States where women’s suffrage came ﬁrst to western states such as Utah and Wyoming, in China the southern cradle of the Chinese Revolution pioneered women’s participation in politics with ten women appointed

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to the provincial legislature.232 They were there because female revolutionaries, supported by the Revolutionary Alliance leader Hu Hanmin, demanded it.233 Catt noted good order in the assembly achieved without apparent resort to formal procedures. As someone who insisted on Robert’s Rules as a guide to running meetings, the seemingly natural cohesion impressed her.234 The members did not address the chair to gain the ﬂoor, but simply rose and began to talk. Just what would happen if the spirit would move two or more to put forth their wisdom at the same time, as with us, I did not learn, as each speaker was listened to politely till he ﬁnished. The vote was taken by rising and we noticed that the lady members did not always vote the same way.235

Coincidentally, considering events in Beijing three days later, Catt noted that in the intense August heat “every member carried a fan, the men waved theirs diligently, the women rarely used theirs.”236 Catt conﬁded to her diary, “This has been the most wonderful day of my life.”237 One purpose of her trip was to bring news of the advanced state of the women’s movement in the West. Here in the distant East was a glimpse of the political future Western suffragists were trying to create. As she later told a reporter in Shanghai, “It looked perfectly right to see them there. It is just where they ought to be.”238 Based on her experiences in Guangzhou, Catt was able to announce on her return to the United States in November that in addition to the stirrings of a suffrage movement in the Middle East,“women are voting to-day in parts of China and Burmah.”239 In Shanghai Catt met with Zhang Zhaohan and became aware of the distinction between Zhang’s Chinese Republican Women’s Cooperative Society and Tang’s Women’s Suffrage Alliance, though not, apparently, of disagreements between them.240 Not that any effort was made to conceal the disputes. On the occasion of Catt’s speech to the American Woman’s Club at the Palace Hotel on September 3 a member of the Women’s Cooperative Society told a reporter that her group and the Women’s Suffrage Alliance shared the common goal of winning the vote for women but that the Cooperative Society stressed educational work whereas the Suffrage Alliance, led by “Mrs. Tong” (Tang Qunying), was conducting an active political campaign to achieve this purpose immediately. As a sign of their intention to participate in the next International Woman Suffrage Alliance conference in Budapest, women in the Cooperative Society gave Catt a silk banner embroidered with the slogan “Helping Each Other, All of One Mind.”241

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While in Shanghai Catt also addressed on September 4 a meeting of the more radical Women’s Suffrage Alliance held at Zhang Garden, a major public venue for lectures.242 The crowded hall had “men sitting on one side, women on the other, with a long table down the middle between them from which tea, fruits and melon seeds were served before the speeches.”243 In her remarks Catt made a point of criticizing the militant tactics of English suffragettes. While supporting petitions to the government for women’s rights, she stressed the value of education to prepare women for the future and held out the prospect of a hundred-year-long struggle to reach the goal of equality. Unaware of recent clashes between suffragists and the Republican political elite, Catt advised the women to join political parties and “ask the leaders of parties to educate you [about] political and public affairs.”244 Ironically, her comments came on the very day that Tang issued her broadside in Beijing against the corrupt and selfinterested behavior of party politicians. At this point Catt was still under the impression that no truly nationwide suffrage organization existed in China, an absence she attributed to the difﬁculties of communicating from city to city and town to town.245 Catt did declare that, based on what she had already observed and experienced during her visit, the impression commonplace abroad that Chinese women are “illiterate, childish, and weak” was plainly wrong. In its report on Catt’s speech, the Shibao described the scene as one in which “foreign women got up on stage and spoke energetically to thunderous applause.” Afterward, as was customary, a group photograph was taken. During or after Catt’s talk someone in the audience objected to portions of her speech on the grounds that “Chinese people should not have to tolerate this kind of censure.” The remark stirred anger in the crowd, but in the end “civility prevailed.”246 Zhang Zhaohan took Catt’s visit and remarks as proof of the value of a gradualist approach to women’s rights. She translated some of Catt’s articles for a monthly magazine she edited.247 She also gave what Catt referred to as “national or race loyalty” higher priority than Catt did in her brand of feminist internationalism. Speaking at a subsequent Women’s Cooperative Society meeting at Zhang Garden, Zhang emphasized the need to rally to China’s profound national needs even if that meant putting off suffrage.“China’s territory cannot even be protected,” she said. “Even if everyone had the right to vote, that [fact alone] would have no effect.”248 Catt’s internationalism assumed a predictable pantheon of stereotypes among participant cultures at odds with much of what she found in China. She was certainly aware of Chinese culture as a source of suffer-

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ing for women. One of Catt’s ﬁrst public lectures, given in the late 1880s, recounted the story of a Chinese girl sold into prostitution in China and sent to America. The girl later commits suicide rather than return to a San Francisco brothel.249 Catt seems to have been reassured by politically active women who appeared “Confucian” in dress and manner and was put off by Western or hybrid fashions and personalities. Sounding a bit like Americans bowled over by the public charms of Mao’s China during the Nixon visit sixty years later, Catt was particularly affected by “dear little maids with long braids down their backs” who served as ushers for some of the meetings she attended.250 In contrast, her second meeting in Nanjing with a battle-hardened ofﬁcial of the Women’s Revolutionary Alliance was unsettling. Wu Mulan (“Wu Mohlan”), along with a number of other female militants, had taken “Mulan” as her nom de guerre. Like Tang Qunying, she had been a member of the Revolutionary Alliance since 1905 and knew how to make bombs.251 Miss Wu astonished us by appearing in European dress. A pongee [silk] skirt wobbled about her feet, clad in European shoes, a waist and jacket to match, and a big broad-brimmed white hat with nodding feathers completed this costume. We had liked her the day before in her Chinese dress. She was bright, spirited. Now she looked like a caricature. A style of the hair now worn is to cut the front locks short and then hang straight on each side like uncurled bangs. In her case the hair was short, as she had been a military lady and most of them had worn their hair short.252

In Catt’s progressive and Western worldview mixed costuming may have been too close for comfort to an unwonted mingling of races and cultures.253 What Wu Mulan was wearing was actually the preferred dress of many young women in the aftermath of the revolution who were keen to “present a modernizing appearance” with “a jacket and ﬂared skirt often of black silk damask.”254 Wu also struck Catt as frenetic in the extreme (“We thought she was crazy”). When it turned out that Wu had been tapped to give a speech to the assembly arranged in her honor, Catt understood the cause of her emotional state: “Her insanity we now recognized as the feeling international in character which precedes speech making.” In Beijing arrangements for Catt’s principal speech, held on September 26 on the eve of her departure from China in a Henan native-place lodge, followed the same segregated format she had observed in the south. In Beijing, however, women were given pride of place. Female audience members, “many of them with bound feet,” sat in the main ground ﬂoor part of the hall while men were relegated to the gallery.255 The audience

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numbered over a thousand, and Tang Qunying and Shen Peizhen spoke as well.256 Shen Peizhen in particular impressed Catt, who described Shen as “the most interesting personality I ever met” and a “fanatical military lady.” Shen, a Zhejiang native, had served as a leader of the Women’s Northern Expedition Brigade.257 Described elsewhere as “physically robust,” Shen also suffered from the debilitating effects of bound feet. Once she unbound them, she endured, in the distressing idiom of the day, “cucumber feet” (huanggua jiao).258 She limped, walked in fact like a club footed person, but far better than women with bound feet. She was quite the greatest emotional orator I ever heard. She spoke that day to a mixed audience of men and women. She made them laugh and she made them cry. They were like so many children in her hands. . . . But more interesting by far than her oratorical gifts was the completeness of her vision of woman’s opportunity for service in the world. She saw it all—equality of the sexes, the need for education and industrial opportunity for women, one standard of sex morality, one law, one vote for all under the ideal Republic.259

In her diary Catt noted that the men in the audience, though civil, were less receptive to Shen’s appeal, and some greeted her remarks with “supercilious” looks.260 Despite her oft-stated preference for moderate tactics, clearly articulated in the Shanghai speeches, Catt by the end of her visit to China professed sympathy with the more radical ideas of the Chinese women she met. The women of Nanking and Peking talk calmly about resorting to bombs. They say the men of New China have done nothing for them. When men talk about education, they mean education for men. . . . [T]hey have done nothing about concubinage, and Yuan Shih-k’ai himself keeps concubines, the President of the Republic! The new government proposes to give the vote to men who have never asked for it, some of whom do not know there has been a revolution.261

True, Yuan Shikai had nine concubines and preferred women with bound feet as sexual partners.262 He had as many as thirty children, half of whom were daughters.263 The girls received modern educations and learned foreign languages even as he arranged their marriages. As a result of her visit to Beijing, Catt learned of the deal making preceding the formation of the Nationalist Party and the removal of the malefemale equality clause.“In other words,” she related,“the Chinese women have been ‘sold out,’ as the women of the West have been many times.”264 Catt reported without criticism a possibly apocryphal story told to her in

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Shanghai of a group of suffragists sent to see Yuan Shikai in Beijing to warn him that “they had not forgotten how to make and use bombs.” Yuan replied—and the bluntness seems in character for him—“All right, go ahead. Blow me up!” Catt was also given to believe that four women, presumably members of the type of all-female assassination teams led by women like Fu Wenyu, were sent to Beijing to kill Yuan Shikai for being a counterrevolutionary but “were never heard from again.”265 Catt’s perspective on China and the rest of the non-Western world showed Orientalist features in that she took customs like veiling in the Middle East and bound feet in China to conﬁrm the strength and superiority of her own Western ideas and way of life. However, her “feminist Orientalism” also yielded insights that cut across cultural divisions in good part because she recognized that Western and non-Western women were burdened by a common patriarchy.266 Catt may have lacked an understanding of Chinese cultural nuance, but she recognized a “supercilious” male look when she saw it. She also shed a measure of national chauvinism as a result of her round-the-world trip, noting in a 1913 speech in New Jersey, “Once I was a regular jingo but that was before I visited other countries. I had thought America had a monopoly on all that stands for progress, but I had a sad awakening.”267 Considering that Catt had resorted in her career to racist and nativist attacks on Indian men as “savages” and immigrant European men as unqualiﬁed when it came to voting, compared with “civilized” white women, these were signiﬁcant concessions.268 In a letter to a New York newspaper early in 1913, Catt informed her readers that Chinese suffragists held “the same vision which is arousing the women of all the Nations of the Earth.”269 Although Catt is associated with the moderate wing of the suffrage movement, her global and China experiences seem to have pushed her in a more radical direction judging by an unpublished essay she composed in spring 1913 in which she justiﬁed militant and even violent tactics under certain circumstances.270 She compared Sylvia Pankhurst favorably to the abolitionist John Brown. Perhaps in making the comparison she was also thinking of Shen Peizhen, Tang Qunying, and Wu Mulan. In her memoir of their world tour Aletta Jacobs afﬁrmed her opposition to suffragette radicalism but also noted that “in the most remote corners of Africa and Asia, we were confronted again and again by the inﬂuence of the suffragettes.” She and Catt “were forced to admit that radical action certainly makes the world sit up and notice.”271 As early as 1908 in her IAWS speech in Amsterdam, Catt had acknowledged with approval the role militants can play in promoting the cause.

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When dispatches ﬂashed the news to the remotest corners of the globe that English Cabinet Ministers were protected in the street by bodyguards from unarmed women, when the vision was presented of the Premier of England hiding behind locked doors, skulking along the streets and guarded everywhere by ofﬁcers lest an encounter with a feminine interrogation point should put him to rout[,] . . . from that moment [the world] conceded the victory to the suffragists.272

The suffragette ﬂair for the sensational attracted considerable attention in China. The anarchist Tianmin Post in Changsha ran a story in February 1913 about how the “English Women’s Rights Party” (i.e, the WSPU) had disrupted a London court where one of their number was being tried, while the more conservative Changsha Daily News carried news in early March 1913 of suffragettes burning down a Kew Garden tea pavilion.273 When Gardner Harding visited schools sponsored by Tang Qunying’s organization in Beijing,“the ﬁrst question invariably was,‘Tell us about the suffragettes of England.’ ”274 The Catt and Jacobs visit may have strengthened Zhang Zhaohan’s moderate position. However, Shen Peizhen, who Catt so admired and found persuasive on the question of radicalism versus moderation, disputed her message of patience and gradualism. Shen seems to have been unaware of her own impact in nudging Catt in a more radical direction. To be sure, Shen’s target was not so much Catt or Jacobs but Zhang Zhaohan, other moderates, and, even more, the men who stood in the way of full citizenship for women. Shen agreed with Catt’s (and Zhang’s) emphasis on the value of education and personal and professional advancement.275 This was the common ground that permitted radicals and moderates to work together. Shen, however, insisted that the advent of a republic made full suffrage imperative. That was the promise of 1911 made to women “as revolutionary comrades.”Women should also enjoy the “fruits of the republic.” If men refused to support full suffrage, Shen Peizhen argued, women must take direct action in their personal lives. In a more decorous analogue to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in which Greek women deny sex to their husbands in order to put a stop to a war, Shen proposed that Chinese women “who have not yet married, refuse to marry men for a period of ten years. Those already married, should refuse for ten years to speak with men.”276 If men want silence from women, let them have it, and with a vengeance. Beginning about the time Shen Peizhen made her noncooperation proposal suffragists in the United States and Britain began using performances of Lysistrata as a propaganda and fund-raising de-

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vice.277 A few years earlier in their frustration over male intransigence to suffrage some feminists in the West had proposed a “female strike,” including a refusal to marry, until full rights were granted.278 Precedent also existed in Chinese history for this kind of heroic domestic resistance. Shen may have also been inspired by the famous story in the Zuozhuan of Lady Gui of Xi whose beauty caused King Zhuang of the state of Chu (r. 740– 690) to attack Xi, kill the king, and bring Lady Gui back to Chu as his prize. In due course Lady Gui bore King Zhuang two sons. The king is ﬁnally moved to ask why in all the time Lady Gui has been his consort she has never spoken a word to him. Breaking her silence, she replied, “I am a wife and yet I must serve two husbands. Though kept alive, how can I bring myself to speak?”279 Much affected by Lady Gui’s declaration, King Zhuang, in the spirit of his age, then invaded the state of Cai to take revenge on the lord who had maliciously put the idea of stealing away the righteous Lady Gui in the ﬁrst place. Perhaps Shen Peizhen considered Lady Gui’s predicament not unlike the one women of her own time faced in being forced to serve a republic of men rather than the republic of men and women they had originally sworn loyalty to. Shen Peizhen drew a grim lesson from the visit of Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs. If women of this caliber and intellect can campaign for suffrage for twenty years using moderate methods without result, what hope is there for Chinese women? In China women are offered their own law school instead of a vote. At the same time they are told, “If women still haven’t the right to vote, how can they go to law school?” If we follow this path, Shen said, “we women will never have the right to vote. . . . That is why I am an activist.” Suffragists in China and the West looked to each other for signs of progress. For much of spring and summer 1912 garbled news reports from China about the politics of women’s suffrage gave American suffragists the misapprehension that Chinese women had already won the right to vote. The New York Times reported on March 22 that the Senate in Nanjing had approved suffrage for women two days earlier, even though the only concession wrung by protesting women on that occasion was the freedom to sit in the gallery and watch the proceedings.280 It may have been the case that willingness by some senators including Lin Sen to support women’s suffrage in principle but postpone acting contributed to the confusion.281 A rally sponsored by the Women’s Political Union at New York’s Cooper Union on March 21 passed a resolution congratulating China on giving women the vote. Anna Shaw of the NAWSA, famous for her exuberant speaking style and ﬁerce skills as a

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debater, seconded the motion and exclaimed,“How I wish I had a queue! How I wish my feet had been bound that they might be loosened instead of my head which cannot be loosened.”282 Another New York rights activist invited China to send missionaries to assist American women in their struggle for the vote.283 In her history and memoir of the suffragette movement, Sylvia Pankhurst recalled the same reaction in England: “The news played its part in stirring up British indignation: the unchanging East had given votes to its women, whilst the women of Britain, who had worked for the vote for half a century, were denied.”284 Although the reports were erroneous, they did include the accurate information that Chinese women had fought in the revolution. A willingness to risk their lives on the battleﬁeld had universal currency in debates about the vote for women. A spokeswoman for the National Press Bureau of Woman Suffragists in New York declared: The Chinese have not only enfranchised their women but they have answered practically one question which has not troubled the suffragists, but upon which the anti-suffragists have laid great stress—that of woman’s inability to protect her country and therefore her inability to help govern it. The Chinese have formed a regiment of young women and the pictures show them to be bright and intelligent [and] . . . modest and self-respecting although they have laid aside their loose garments for trim military uniforms.285

In a giant pro-suffrage march and rally in New York City on May 4, 1912, American women held banners reading, “Catching Up with China” and “Women in China vote, but are classed with criminals and paupers in New York.”286 Shaw told the crowd of women, a few of whom dressed up in Chinese costume in honor of comrades in China, that “America had had the chance to lead the world in enfranchising women but that now the oldest nation in the world has beaten us.”287 When Catt returned to New York City in November she displayed the silk banner given her in Shanghai and gave reporters a corrected version of the earlier claims of women winning the vote in China: “The Chinese women have not the vote[,] . . . but they have a ﬂourishing suffrage society, and if the franchise does not come to them soon they may be the next militant vote getters.”288 Unlike the Comintern in the late 1910s and 1920s, which also carried out political missionary work in China, the IWSA did not try to impose its will on politically active Chinese women. Nor were Chinese women merely imitating their counterparts in the West. This was not a simple case of a Western model based on women’s rights spreading to China, leaving Chinese merely to respond and adapt to what they had been sent. The connection was reciprocal in nature and a matter of shared values and

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6. Carrie Chapman Catt. Courtesy of the Library of Congress LCUSZ62–109793.

shared circumstances complicated by the exchange of information and misinformation and cultural understanding and misunderstanding in both directions. Catt recognized Chinese suffragists as activists committed to the cause, not amateur enthusiasts or slavish imitators. Despite Anna Shaw’s rhetorical ﬂourish about physical deformities being preferable to a crippled psyche, women in the West found foot binding appalling. At the same time they were intrigued by what they regarded as other, positive elements of Chinese culture. Catt’s attention to Chinese styles of dress and disapproval of Miss Wu’s hybrid outﬁt represented more than an afﬁnity for the Oriental exotic. When she returned from China Catt spoke out on the need for women to abandon corsets and tight clothes for “loose garments” like those Chinese women wore.289 Chinese women’s clothes offered a model that conﬁrmed the views of both Catt and Jacobs on the need for “health reform dress” as part of the feminist agenda.290 By this point feminist-inspired “bloomers” had gone out of favor with

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American women.291 Chinese clothes offered an opportunity to return to the debate about the political meanings of conﬁning clothing if not to the actual adoption of Chinese dress. A photograph of Catt taken not long after her world tour, and capturing a level of conﬁdence and self-possession to match that of Tang Qunying and Shen Peizhen, also shows her wearing a silk jacket of Chinese design (ﬁgure 6). Chinese women appropriated the idea of natural rights from the West. Inspired by the direct action tactics of suffragettes, many as a result also embraced the demand for immediate suffrage. For their part, European and North American women, including moderates like Catt, found inspiration in the real and imagined achievements of Chinese radicals, including their striking role as republican women warriors on the battleﬁeld. If women’s suffrage was a universal value, evidence of this would have to be found in places like China. Catt needed Chinese women as suffragists to conﬁrm the universal value of equal rights for women as much as Tang and Shen relied on a progressive international context for their own efforts to continue the revolution in China.

“Surely the Word ‘Republic’ Cannot Mean Cutting Out Women and Leaving Only Men” Suffragists in China in 1912 did not immediately give up on the possibility that the Senate in Beijing might reverse its position and extend voting rights to women in advance of the winter elections. However, as Tang Qunying complained in her September 4 manifesto, concerted attempts by suffragists and their allies to achieve this purpose nationally had foundered over the summer. Election rules issued in August stipulated that in order to vote a citizen must be male, at least twenty-ﬁve years old, must have lived in his voting district at least two years, and must meet one of the following qualiﬁcations: he must have paid $2 of tax the previous year, possess $500 in wealth, or have a primary school education (or comparable educational standard).292 The resulting electorate entirely excluded women as electors or representatives. Several politicians, including the gentlemanly Lin Sen who had been terrorized by suffragists in the Nanjing Senate in March, agreed to continue to place the demand for women’s suffrage as a motion before the Senate.293 The maneuver received scant attention in the Beijing Senate, and no action was taken. After three more petitions, supported by the female representatives from the Guangdong provincial assembly who had so impressed Catt, a debate on the question was ﬁnally held in the Sen-

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ate on November 6, 1912. Most of the senators who spoke for the extension of voting rights to women were from Tang Qunying’s home province of Hunan. These men argued that nothing in the constitution prohibited extending voting rights to women. Opponents responded that the matter had been settled in Nanjing the previous spring with a deferral of the question until the convening of a full national legislature after the coming elections. They also complained about the “insulting language” used by women to refer to the Senate in the petitions placed before them.294 Petitions, manifestos, and speeches depicting senators as mah-jongg-playing, dissolute, and cowardly opportunists appear to have taken a toll. The debate was characteristically heated and twice dissolved into mayhem (and twice returned to parliamentary order). In the ﬁnal vote only six senators voted for women’s rights, a decisive defeat for the suffrage movement after a year of setbacks. In a stinging response Tang Qunying declared, “Since Yuan Shikai does not recognize that women have the right to vote, we need not recognize Yuan Shikai as president.”295 Shortly before she left Beijing to return to Hunan, Tang visited the Senate gallery on December 9, waited until members who had voted against suffrage rights entered, and then roundly cursed them for betraying women who had fought in the revolution.296 Through the fall in Beijing suffragists also continued to place pressure on the Nationalist Party to return to its former position on male-female equality. At an election committee meeting at Nationalist Party headquarters on September 8, described in the press as a “real-life drama” (da huoju), Shen Peizhen and Wang Changguo demanded to be heard but were initially denied on the grounds they were not listed as speakers.297 Female party members present cursed this rebuff. As one might expect, Shen got up on the stage anyway, and her remarks in the end produced “thunderous applause” from the hundred people present. At a suffrage meeting in October in Beijing Shen and Wang played the card of universalism in referring to the Catt-Jacobs visit as a reason to “try and try again” to win the vote for women. “Surely the word ‘“Republic’ cannot mean cutting out women and leaving only men.”298 Despite setbacks and frustrations on the national level and the return of many women to their provincial homes, suffragists maintained a presence in the capital thanks to Shen Peizhen and others. Whenever the Senate met, ten or so women were dispatched to the public galleries to observe the proceedings. When they were dissatisﬁed with what they heard, they would sometimes throw empty metal cigarette canisters at the senators.299 Such objects were big enough to do damage if they hit their tar-

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get.300 The Alliance also maintained branches in several cities and sent representatives out to make speeches on behalf of women’s issues. Meanwhile female legislators in Guangzhou were expelled from the provincial assembly based on a new national law promulgated on September 4 stipulating that only men were qualiﬁed to vote and hold ofﬁce.301 The Guangdong Province Women’s Rights Research Society protested that according to the national provisional constitution the “people [of China] are all equal” and the “people” obviously included women.302 The women and their supporters did not accept defeat quietly. At a September 18 meeting of the Guangdong assembly, nine of the female legislators and ﬁfteen male colleagues tried to nullify the expulsion order by vote and failed.303 A female member angrily denounced the male majority for suppressing women’s rights. Late in 1912 Tang Qunying returned home to Hunan. Although she had considered attending the IWSA congress in Budapest the next summer, Tang now announced the journey was neither economically nor politically feasible.304 As a sign of her inﬂuence and popularity Tang was given a welcoming ceremony by Changsha women’s circles that drew ﬁve thousand participants.305 This was a very large political crowd for any city in China at the time. Despite Hunan being home to many revolutionaries, Changsha remained a culturally conservative city in which political women remained vulnerable to criticism and ridicule for the way they looked and acted.306 Tang was embarrassed in February by a story about her in the Changsha Daily, a newspaper closely linked to the Nationalist Party and local government ofﬁcials.307 The article reported her imminent marriage to a journalist colleague named Zheng Shidao. The virtuous widow and suffragist would remarry! It is hard to imagine a more wounding piece of political gossip. Despite her liberated political life, Tang was said to “scrupulously abide by the ideal of chaste widowhood.”308 Whenever friends like Zhang Hanying broached the subject of Tang remarrying, they met with “I won’t discuss it.”Though she was said to have had many suitors, with “the great and good, heroes and gifted scholars, foreign classmates and local comrades-in-arms” offering her gifts of “fresh ﬂowers, red autumnal leaves, and paper for writing poetry,” she refused them all. Tang and fellow suffragists saw the news report as politically motivated and an attempt to hold her and the suffrage movement up to ridicule.309 Indeed, the incident and Tang’s relationship with Zheng later gave birth to published stories and “unofﬁcial histories” about Tang’s love life, or lack thereof.310 In keeping with her penchant for direct action and con-

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sistent with her image as a Tanchun who brooked no insult, Tang led a group of her fellow activists, including her close friend Zhang Hanying, to the ofﬁces of the newspaper to demand a retraction. Rebuffed, mocked, and manhandled by the editor and staff, they fought back by rallying supporters to attack the newspaper ofﬁce. This riotous action, which left the ofﬁce badly damaged, provoked a lawsuit by the newspaper and, eventually, mediation efforts by the provincial leader and reformer Tan Yankai, whose family home was just south of Tang’s home village.311 Tan also employed Zhao Hengti on his staff, Tang’s young friend from Hengshan County and future governor of Hunan.312 Later the women decided to start their own newspaper, the Women’s Rights Daily.313 The Changsha Daily continued its attacks in a more oblique direction by publishing its sensational articles about rampaging suffragettes abroad.314 Two years later, in July 1915, in an echo of Tang’s Changsha conﬂict with the press, Shen Peizhen responded in Beijing to a scurrilous newspaper article about her in a similar fashion but with very different results. Shen continued to live and work in Beijing where, among other civic activities, she collaborated with the actress Liu Xikui to mount dramatic productions like those produced on revolutionary themes by Zhang Zhaohan in Shanghai but with a message that included feminism.315 In the 1915 incident Shen led a group of comrades to the offending newspaper’s ofﬁce where an altercation broke out. The row led to a court case in which she was accused of sexual improprieties unrelated to her quarrel with the newspaper.316 Without a patron or an ally like Tan Yankai to lend support and in the hostile atmosphere that often greeted female militancy, Shen was given a jail sentence. Clearly, it was better to be viewed as an upright if volatile “Tanchun” than a morally suspect “Sun Beizhen.” Hunan, with its network of aging, sometimes quarrelsome comrades, could be a more supportive environment for political women than Beijing, with its concentration of tabloid media and corruptible Republican institutions. Tang Qunying quickly patched up her differences with Song Jiaoren. She sought out Song while still in Beijing in fall 1912, and also Lin Sen, who she had not only tangled with in the Nanjing Senate the previous spring but also slapped on the Huguang stage on August 25.317 Tang acknowledged to them her “breach of etiquette,” and, by her account, both Song and Lin “understood her very well and did not make a big fuss about it.” Tang’s belated remorse over such actions never seemed to discourage her from future radical words and deeds. Her comrades by and large accepted this aspect of her character. Sun Yat-sen had written his letter to

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Tang in which he blamed men for what had happened at the Nationalist Party convention.318 Tang could hardly disagree. Song Jiaoren contributed a congratulatory and republican-spirited statement for the inaugural issue of Tang’s Women’s Vernacular Daily in which he stated, “To treat women as slaves and men as masters is to throw the natural order into chaos.”319 Tang Qunying responded to Song’s murder in spring 1913 with a eulogy that praised him, bitterly attacked Yuan Shikai, and offered a mea culpa for her own, earlier public quarrel with Song.320 Titled “Qunying’s Grief and Society’s Misfortune,” the impassioned statement noted that Song Jiaoren’s “heart beat only to strengthen China” and depicted his revolutionary career as the unleashing of a natural force, “a rising ﬂood of purity.” “Unyielding and true to his course,” Song was opposed by “traitors and dissolute ofﬁcials” who feared and ﬁnally murdered him. Tang also wrote, “Unfortunately, Miss Tang, in marshaling her attention and energies, did not ﬁnd common cause with” Song in his efforts to unite the country against Yuan Shikai. If Tang overstates the potential of the women’s movement to unite or divide the Nationalist Party and the purity of Song’s motives, the comment is remarkably generous at her own expense in praising a fallen comrade. Her subsequent attacks on Yuan Shikai in the women’s publications she edited as corrupt and a traitor to the Republic led the Beijing government to offer a 10,000 yuan reward for her arrest.321 Unlike other Nationalist leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, Tang did not ﬂee the country but sought refuge ﬁrst in Shanghai and then returned home to Hengshan by a circuitous route via Hanoi and Kunming.322 Along with her notoriety on Yuan Shikai’s enemies list, Tang Qunying had achieved national prominence and a well-earned reputation for tenacity and militancy. Harding’s 1913 proﬁle captured the range of her activities as revolutionary and suffragist. Her personality was of the type that could freshen every page on which she wrote. It was she who introduced the spectacle of a body of women demanding the vote from the national legislature at Nanking. . . . She was a frequent and vigorous platform speaker in Peking and Tientsin. . . . Every Chinese revolutionary knows of her though they do not all . . . approve of her. But she has come as near, I believe, as the Revolution has allowed any Chinese woman to become a national ﬁgure.323

Her image was based on actions reported in the national press, a personal legend among her network of supporters and adversaries, and a vocal presence in major urban centers as publicist, organizer, and politician.

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Militancy of views, broad social connections, a cosmopolitan sensibility, and an appetite for travel made Tang Qunying a national ﬁgure. Tang explained herself in more prosaic and traditional terms: “Insofar as the goals I decided for myself or was engaged in pursuing, no matter what difﬁculties I encountered, I never wavered. I refused to give up halfway. That is the only way to accomplish something, like Liu Bei [of the Three Kingdoms era, third century c.e.] who in so doing gained the service of the capable and the virtuous by showing utmost sincerity and eagerness.”324 The popular view of Liu Bei was that while certainly virtuous and clearly successful in founding the kingdom of Shu, he prized and practiced virtues such as loyalty to a fault. Fortunate in winning the fealty of the brilliant strategist Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei also permitted his desire to avenge the death of his friend Guan Yu to cloud his political judgment.325 Unlike Liu Bei, Tang Qunying’s consistent loyalty was to a cause rather than to friends or patrons. Like other modern intellectuals, this single-minded ideological focus was the most modern and radical dimension of her political personality.326 The events of 1911 and 1912 showed how deeply involved in public life a small and growing minority of women had become and how open and receptive the Republic could be to dissent and other forms of political expression. Although suffrage depended on male support that was not yet forthcoming, the expansive structure of newspapers, schools, clubs, and associations so typical of the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century promised a continuing base for mobilization. The Shenzhou Women’s Journal noted with disappointment and indignation, “Today our country is not the Republic of China, but the Republic of Chinese Men. If this is not so, then why haven’t women obtained the vote.”327 However, a kind of “Republic of Chinese Women” did exist in the smaller initiatives and organizations that survived the disappointments of 1912, a social and institutional base that permitted women to pursue expansive national and international strategies rather than rely solely on defensive tactics and weapons of the weak.328 When the “Republic of Chinese Men” stumbled, one could hardly blame women. A famous photograph of Tang Qunying’s friend Qiu Jin shows her dressed as a man.329 But a female citizen dressed like a woman was just as provocative, even without the aggressive tactics sometimes pursued by Tang Qunying or with distinctive marks such as bobbed hair, a ﬂamboyant hat, or a lighted cigarette. A woman speaking in public was a violation of Confucian strictures that “women’s speech not be heard outside of women’s quarters.”330 At the same time, as Susan Mann has

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pointed out, even these conservative ideas about a strictly limited role for women in public assumed that a woman’s voice at home or “behind the screen” was “public” in that it articulated a moral view of general signiﬁcance.331 Although feminists like Tang openly deﬁed traditional norms, to the extent that for Confucianists “the authentic woman’s voice was a moral voice” the righteous anger of women on the suffrage issue had deep roots, in the “mother of Mencius and Mulan” among other homegrown exemplars.332 Political women also had to contend with the counterargument that if a woman was indeed like Mulan she should go back to the family and inner quarters once service in the revolution was complete.333 When Carrie Chapman Catt commented to longtime Beijing resident and Chinese speaker Rose S. Williams, wife of the American Legation secretary E. T. Williams, on Shen Peizhen’s skills as an orator, Williams replied that “no Chinese would think an unmarried woman who spoke in public was virtuous.”334 Since what a woman had to say now in public likely took the form of a moral message about nation or self, the message and the public spectacle that surrounded it was hard to dismiss out of hand simply because a woman said it. Winning battles in back rooms and in male-dominated institutions like the Senate or the Nationalist Party proved a tougher slog. Tang Qunying and her sisters-in-arms failed to win full constitutional rights in the early Republic. They did succeed in feminizing a portion of public life by speaking as well as or better than men, to both the chagrin of cultural conservatives and male comrades and the sometimes grim, sometimes delighted satisfaction of the women themselves. The activism of women proved that republicanism could appeal not only to those who stood to inherit power from the remains of the Qing dynasty but also to those, like women, who required the creation of new institutions like suffrage societies, new practices like voting, and new forms of leadership in order to be empowered as citizens. The response of women like Tang Qunying and Shen Peizhen to the gaze of men was to look back as citizens.

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Chapter 4

Seeing Like a Citizen

Political contention produced many, competing images of China. The cohabitation of dynasty and republic in winter 1911–12, followed by twin Presidents Sun and Yuan in spring set a pattern for multiple sovereignties and rival loyalties that continued for decades in civil war and revolution. It was hardly surprising then that Tang Qunying and her sister revolutionaries also sometimes saw double in the form of competing male and female republics. As for the entire panorama of what Chinese leaders and their fellow citizens saw in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, one can list emblematic events such as warlord conﬂict, civil war and other forms of political violence, protests and demonstrations, and periodic efforts to rebuild localities, institutions, and the country. Documenting how these events registered cognitively and emotionally is more difﬁcult. If one saw the Republic as a citizen rather than a subject, the act of looking itself, combined with the emotional impact of what you saw, might serve as a prelude to political participation. Although patriotism was the most common way to frame such political perceptions and reactions, other identities and agendas mattered as well. Suffragists struggled to force their government to add sexual difference to the constitutional bans on discrimination based on ethnicity, class, or religion or, alternatively, leave the commitment to the “equality of the people” alone and unqualiﬁed. To their fury in 1912 women were allowed neither protection against discrimination nor unqualiﬁed inclusion. And yet, as a result of the ef146

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forts of women like Tang Qunying, the “female citizen” had become an active presence in cities as large as Shanghai and communities as small as Xinqiao, exercising rights of citizenship on behalf of their sex and their country. Comparable combinations and permutations of citizenship and class, locality, or other ideological and cultural points of view developed apace. There was plenty of evidence that one could be patriotic and Cantonese at the same time (or patriotic and feminist, proletarian, capitalist, Communist, or even warlord). The notion that unity could be achieved despite divisions of language, occupation, ideology, or sex was part of the appeal of nationalism. Whether consciousness of difference, reinforced by membership in political parties, societies, and unions, would pave the way to national unity, or keep China in a divided, sandlike condition, was less clear.

A Duckweed Republic Seeing China clearly and acting on that vision challenged both the leaders and the led. Neither the nation as state nor the nation as a self-conscious people could be realized without some form of public recognition and active reciprocity between leaders and followers. Political consent was no longer to be measured passively by the absence of rebellion. The people needed to be present. This is not to say that the patriotic and political sentiments of Chinese citizens were immune to capture and control by the state but rather that while the government of China struggled to get its act together as locus of authority, the burden of adding substance to words like China and Republic fell heavily on citizens new to the role. This burden also created political opportunities. With a few words and gestures, the Republic could be quickly summoned up for political use. Who could say those who did so were not Chinese, or what they invoked was not a Republic? An example of how the Republic could be performed on the ﬂy, with a few words and gestures and without the aid of massive institutional resources, was glimpsed in Beijing one evening in 1913 by Gardner Harding.1 When Harding arrived in Beijing in May 1913, less than two months after the murder of Song Jiaoren, he found an escalating and open conﬂict between Yuan Shikai and the Nationalists. During a walk near Chongwen Gate, an opening through the wall dividing the Inner and Outer Cities east of Front Gate, Harding and a Chinese-speaking companion came upon a crowd of ﬁfty surrounding a young man holding forth in an animated voice. Suddenly, the word republic rang out.2

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We came to a little lane down which the chief things noticeable were a lot of ﬂickering lights among a silent crowd—and a Voice. The lights belonged to rickshaws of which there were a dozen or so along the wall and through the crowd, and the Voice belonged to an earnest, clean-shaven, attractive looking rickshaw man who was standing between the shafts of his old iron-tied rickshaw in the center of the crowd.

The young orator claimed to be the unhappy product of a déclassé family now forced to pull a rickshaw on the streets. Rickshaw pulling was a common occupation in Beijing and other large Chinese cities and also a potent symbol of China’s poverty, backwardness, and exploitation. Rickshaw men often surprised pundits and other intellectuals with their political sophistication, a quality that owed something to the number of down-on-their-luck individuals like clerks, students, and other literate folk forced into the trade.3 Rickshaw men, like pedicab men and taxicab drivers of later eras, were in a position to gauge the public mood and pick up gossip from passengers and each other. Despite the language barrier and with his friend translating, Harding, who had been manager of Harvard’s debate team as well as a prize-winning orator, recognized the youth as an effective speaker.4 The young man’s remarks were eloquent and biting. He pointed the moral with rhetorical questions in ﬁnished street orator style. “But why should we be robbed with this bribery and squeeze now?” he said. “What is the use of a republic if they still want money for only taking in your card to some fat ofﬁcial? Shouldn’t we have all the more under a republic a preference for character and merit instead of corruption? Don’t forget it, the people are powerful now. Why should we let these crooked ofﬁcials do anything they please? . . . We have no more kings now, no more emperors. We have a president [Yuan Shikai] who is supposed to do what we, the people, want him to do, and yet this president issues decrees just as the Manchus did; and he says, ‘I decree, I proclaim,’ and he expects you to say ‘we tremble and obey.’ But this man is not a God, he is not even a scholar, but is only an ambitious soldier, and unless we watch him and make him fear us, he will deceive and betray the people just as the Manchus did before him.”5

The speech interwove phrasings from the socialist “Internationale” (“no more kings, no more emperors” and “this man is not a God”) with the “tremble and obey” words of obeisance owed Chinese emperors. To Harding the crowd appeared spellbound but also reserved. From a police and security standpoint, Beijing in spring 1913 was Yuan Shikai’s city and growing more so with each passing week.The young man declared to those gathered around him that he would be back again, same place same time, the next day, an indication—along with his tidy appearance—that he may

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have been a political agitator employing rickshaw puller cover.6 Rickshaw puller garb and equipment was as good a disguise for a political agent out and about in a city as the tea picker costume had been for Tang Qunying in rural Hunan. The man was also overheard mentioning the “Nationalist Party” as he left. Harding’s companion excitedly declared, after translating the speech, “That places him, and he isn’t the only rickshaw man, real or pretended, who has been heard of (though I never believed it myself) working up people’s minds in the alleys and dark corners of Peking.”7 “That’s the new China,” he continued.“I’ve lived here almost thirty years, and I never saw it so vividly as to-night.”8 If the rickshaw man was a Nationalist Party agent, his street corner oratory might be construed as the product of an organized campaign against Yuan Shikai and for a resurgent republic. The Second Revolution, with Nationalist forces arrayed against Yuan Shikai’s, would erupt in open war in summer 1913. However, in the 1910s political parties, including the Nationalist Party, often lacked the strength to mobilize supporters in any systematic way.9 About the time Harding was visiting Beijing, the Changsha Daily editorialized that “in China political parties have sprouted up, but their power and organizational level are inadequate.”10 This pessimism was felt in Changsha, a center of revolution, despite the fact that the Revolutionary Alliance had dispatched ﬁve agents from Nanjing nearly a year earlier to open a party outpost there.11 Prior to its reorganization as the Nationalist Party, the Revolutionary Alliance claimed 550,000 members with branches in many provincial capitals besides Changsha.12 Alliance branches mainly focused on propaganda, including publishing party newspapers such as the Changsha Daily.13 Creating branch organizations in as many cities as possible was a goal of other parties as well. The leader of Liang Qichao’s Democratic Party, Tang Daiyu, campaigned in the 1912–13 election by sailing upriver from Shanghai and giving lectures and opening up party branches at ports along the way.14 The smaller Chinese Socialist Party had 5,000 members on its rolls in 130 local chapters.15 Since parties sometimes mailed out unsolicited party cards to likely supporters, the signiﬁcance of such membership ﬁgures is hard to gauge.16 One observer of the new political scene conﬁrmed that people “are meeting and forming associations like crazy and the names of political parties are sprouting and ﬂourishing.”17 Within a month of the Republic’s founding, eighty-ﬁve parties and political societies had registered with the provisional government in Nanjing.18 By one count over 300 political groups of various sizes and complexions, most newly formed, were

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active in the ﬁrst two years of the Republic.19 By another estimate there were nearly 700 “public organizations.”20 Zhang Yufa notes that of 370 political organizations he identiﬁed, the greatest concentrations were found in Shanghai (132), Beijing (78), and Guangzhou (25), with handfuls each in provincial cities like Changsha, Chengdu, and Fuzhou.21 Some were as ephemeral as the onetime sponsor of a manifesto published in a newspaper. Others left only cryptic references like one called “Number Twelve of Thirteenth Street,” a name seemingly chosen for its lucky number associations.22 A few like the Revolutionary Alliance/Nationalist Party had longer lives and more lasting inﬂuence. Smaller, ideologically motivated groups like the Chinese Socialist Party and the Liberal or Freedom Party (Ziyou dang) pressed their agendas on anyone who listened.23 The socialists, in addition to strongly supporting women’s rights, insisted that “social revolution is the root of everything” and promised to “ceaselessly [promote] public discussion” of socialism.24 Liberals declared that “natural rights, present since birth, give us the joy of complete freedom.” In an echo of Mencius’s distinction between those who work with their minds and rule and those who labor with their hands and are ruled, Chinese liberals pledged “a lifetime of mental effort and strong wrists [needed to wield writing brushes]” in order to help free their fellow citizens. The main emphasis was on publicizing the cause rather than immediate transformation of China. While agents were deployed, party branches opened, principles declared, and mailings sent out, political and ideological commitments were often ill-deﬁned and shallow. One reason an organization like the Women’s Suffrage Alliance was able to maintain such a commanding presence in public life was that it was better organized and more competently led than most political parties at the time. Women had been organizing themselves for political purposes since the 1898 Reform movement.25 Six months before the 1911 Revolution’s outbreak in Wuchang they participated in a women’s general assembly in Tokyo attended by one hundred activists who elected Tang Qunying their president.26 By contrast, in 1912 most political parties functioned more as “elite alliances” than organized bodies.27 It was not uncommon for individuals to join more than one political party.28 The Nationalist Party leader Huang Xing at one time belonged to eleven.29 The diplomat and legal expert Wu Tingfang, who brieﬂy served in the Nanjing provisional government, accepted honorary memberships in an equal number without regard to ideological hue.30 Though Zhang Binglin rarely lasted long in any party, including those he founded, even he belonged to ﬁve in 1912.31 In spring 1912 both Sun

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Yat-sen and Huang Xing agreed to assume leadership positions in the Liberal Party at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future in a show of support and patronage.32 In his classic study of the period, Li Jiannong, who joined the Revolutionary Alliance in 1906 and participated in the 1911 Revolution, characterized all such political organizations during the early Republic as ﬂoating“like duckweed, without ﬁrm roots”(shuishang wugende fuping).33 Li concluded that the principles espoused by political parties “amounted to no more than trademarks or slogans.”34 Slogans can sometimes have a great inﬂuence. Political bodies like the Liberal Party, with a popular newspaper at its core, offered detailed political arguments and editorial opinions to an avid readership.35 A lack of ﬁrm roots in local society can be corrected over time. However, most parties, including the Liberals, suppressed in summer 1913 by Yuan Shikai, did not last long enough to accomplish this feat.36 If certain kinds of public events were being replicated all over the country and words and phrases like republic and the people were ringing out on street corners, the explanation for the rickshaw orator Harding and his friend encountered may be close to the simple and social one Karl Marx offered for the liveliness of mid-nineteenth-century French political life. Open political discussion can be contagious. The parliamentary regime lives by discussion; how shall it forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as ideas; how shall any interest, and institution, sustain itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The struggle of orators on the platform evokes the struggle of the scribblers of the press; the debating club in the parliament is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs in the salons and the pothouses; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the ﬁddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?37

As Jürgen Habermas explains in a commentary on this passage in his study of the European public sphere, Marx believed that the dance of the public presaged the eventual collapse of parliamentary regimes, as a vocal and revolutionary civil society ﬁnally overwhelmed and dissolved state power. For his part, Habermas saw in this kind of exuberant staging of mass politics the loss of what he describes as the “public sphere’s original political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it

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made public to the control of a critical public.”38 Publicity exposed the details and dimensions of private life for purposes of ﬁnancial gain and political control, while affairs of state were increasingly shrouded in secrecy. Oratory became the special province of the demagogue, an activity made more potent and manipulative by the invention and cynical use of the print and electronic media. The stakes and circumstances in China in the early twentieth century were somewhat different. In August 1912 China had a parliament, a president, and a prime minister (in seclusion), and none of these decisively deﬁned the nature of the regime. Neither capital nor the provinces controlled the country. The Chinese Republic was, beyond doubt, a talkative regime in which debate and rhetoric often overshadowed policy. Debate and turmoil in parliament formed one corner of an extended network of activists and activism that promoted spontaneity and engagement in relation to the great issues of the day. Harding adds a description of the Nationalist Party headquarters in Beijing in 1913 that captures the vitality of a critical Chinese public that was part organization and part movement, part reasoned argument and part emotional outburst. The party ofﬁce was located in one of the city’s characteristic walled courtyard complexes. The Kuo Ming Tang [Guomindang] was more than a political party; it was a national movement, a great social agitation. In Peking its headquarters suggested the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. Everyday a meeting was held here, everyday the policy of the moment was discussed in the presence of several hundred members and ﬁxed according to the ﬁercest consensus of opinion, a characteristic Chinese revolutionary practice. I remember . . . a sunny courtyard set back from the street in the center of a cool, wide, low-roofed Chinese building. Crossing and re-crossing slantwise through the front passage and standing about in groups in this courtyard were scores of young Chinese, talking in informal, animated groups. The general impression was one of great color and spirit. Directly ahead was the big discussion room, crowded with Chinese ﬂags and strings of foreign bunting, and here over a hundred members were already seated, waiting for the day’s meeting. Youth had a striking majority in this gathering, and the number wearing European dress was more than one half, the rest being in the typical long gray gown of the well-to-do. . . . The buzz of continual conversation ﬁlled the place; and it was noticeable how many of the men present, often the most boyish looking of all, wore the gold and silver stars which betokened membership in parliament. Newspapers were also considerably to the fore; a big ﬁle representing a liberal selection from the thousand and one journals that had recently sprung up all over the country was kept in one of a little row of ofﬁces on one side, and in the center of almost every group someone held a newspaper as a brief for an argument.39

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The crush of politicians, newspapers in hand, and the “buzz” of conversation conjure up the intensity of the Chinese Republic at its pinnacle and sloping down into the new political class of revolutionaries and their supporters. This was the site and milieu Shen Peizhen had entered on September 8, 1912, when she laid her case before fellow party members on the Nationalist Party election committee. One can understand why Shen might be ﬁrst refused the right to speak by ofﬁcious male comrades and then, in a demonstration of the ﬂuid nature of “debate-based” politics intrinsic to republics, be given a loud round of applause when she deﬁantly gave one of her signature rousing speeches.40 Harding was joined on his spring 1913 visit by none other than Zhang Ji, who Harding described as “young and vigorous.” Harding and Zhang watched as a “tall young Chinese in a European suit of light brown silk was speaking from the platform, under the crossed ﬁve-colored ﬂags.”41 His “good, closepacked Chinese oratory” was greeted by “sharp bursts of clapping. . . . every minute or two from his keen, attentive audience.” The speech stimulated further discussion notable for condemnations of Yuan Shikai, resulting in “a ﬁerce chorus of assent . . . intensiﬁed tenfold when one passionate voice called out: ‘Who killed Sung [Song Jiaoren]?’ ”42 Marx’s image of France as a multilevel polity where political fashion and forms replicate and reverberate up and down administrative and social hierarchies and from Paris to the provinces is close to the picture many Chinese had of their own struggling Republic. Even a poorly organized republic, backlit with the afterimage of empire, offered a blueprint for extending political and social organization from top to bottom and center to periphery. The lack of a strong postimperial state had important consequences for the ways in which public life and political participation spread and developed. Had the early Republic succeeded in ﬁghting off foreign challengers and imposing its will on the population, political and social development might well have followed the command-and-control pattern associated with modern rationalization and bureaucratization. This had been the goal of the Qing New Policies in promoting government-registered “professional” or “legal” associations (fatuan) like chambers of commerce charged with supporting and implementing state policy. Building on the New Policies reforms of the Qing dynasty’s last decade, Yuan Shikai anticipated the top-down methods of Chiang Kai-shek, the bureaucratic thrust of China’s state socialism, and the policies of post–World War II “neo-authoritarians” in other countries such as South Korea’s Park Chung-hee. By fall 1913, with Nationalist armies defeated,Yuan shut down

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ofﬁces of the Nationalist Party, including of course the one Harding visited in Beijing, and banned similarly constituted political organizations, clubs, and suffrage organizations. Yuan aimed to create a clear and quiet ﬁeld of operations for goals that amounted to incipient nation building.43 As Liao Dawei has observed,Yuan “liked the political efﬁciency and order of Western politics but was unreceptive to legislatures and constitutions.”44 His attempt to pull China together by the force of his will and with the help of military, police, and bureaucratic power still earns Yuan Shikai credit for his “pioneering” policies, initiatives that made him appear during his ascendancy like “a crane standing among chickens.”45 However, with the political failure of Yuan’s presidential and imperial gambits and continued public and popular pressure to solve China’s crises, other integrative but nonbureaucratic possibilities of necessity came to the fore. These developments were just as pioneering in their own ways, producing and sustaining a ﬂock of political cranes like Sun Yat-sen and Tang Qunying and articulating more dynamic relationships between these elevated ﬁgures and the public at large. In a more fully articulated republic even chickens are called to leadership roles. In the absence of an efﬁcient and thoroughgoing bureaucratic order, what other forces or institutions were available to press for political change? Max Weber posited charismatic leadership as the characteristic revolutionary alternative to bureaucracy and tradition. However, in 1912 Mao Zedong, the singular candidate for the role in the Chinese Revolution, was still a student with only a brief and desultory stint as a soldier in the revolutionary army to his credit. Mao’s apotheosis as charismatic national leader was two decades and more in the future. Movement politics of the kind represented by the 1919 May Fourth protests arose in part in response to the failure of government institutions and leaders alike. However, the unsteady advance of the state and the episodic power of protest movements alone fail to account for the breadth and depth of public engagement witnessed in the Republican era, including all the meetings and speechifying that piled up along with the “thousand and one” newspapers and magazines written and read by activists. Political chatter was ubiquitous. By winter 1918–19, months before the May Fourth protests, the popularity of political talk at Peking University gave the faculty lounge the nickname “Crowd of Speakers Hall.”46 Student dormitories and faculty lounges as well as native-place lodges and party branches, infused with debate and discussion, became staging areas for public protest. Two other drivers of political and social integration and innovation

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contributed to the epidemic of activism that ran through the early-twentieth-century Chinese political experience and shaped both leaders and followers.47 One is the deceptively simple fact that people under pressure will copy things that promise some measure of success in meeting the challenges that face them. A contemporary American example is the corporate and academic administrative fashion for adopting “best practices” to solve vexing social and economic problems in gambits that are more like “best guesses.”48 This mimetic behavior can begin with an orator observed in Hyde Park in London, a shop window broken by a suffragette in Manchester, or a bell rung at a meeting in Paris and lead in due course to a public lecture in Changsha, broken windows at the Senate building in Nanjing, or ringing to order a session of the Nationalist Party convention in Beijing. Something glimpsed on a trip to Tokyo or Shanghai or read in a magazine or newspaper travels and materializes without a complicated plan or a supervising agency. Isomorphism, or the replication of images, forms, and behaviors from institution to institution or individual to individual, can take place as a result of mimicry in which an apparently beneﬁcial model of political, business, or cultural organization is quickly appropriated by other actors without them being ordered, trained, or paid to do so.49 Bobbed hair and Western clothes were fashions that spread throughout urban China and beyond. So were public speaking, study societies, and political meetings. Ideas like “China” and “democracy” likewise moved across the landscape in ﬂuid fashion, as Liang Qichao, the author, interpreter, and dispenser of so many of them, explained for the ﬁrst years of the twentieth century. New ideas swept in like a raging ﬁre . . . introduced in the so-called “Liang Ch’ich’ao style”—disorganized, unselected, incomplete, ignorant of the various schools and with an overemphasis on quantity. . . . [S]till, society welcomed these ideas just as people in an area ridden by disaster will gulp down grass roots, tree bark, frozen birds, and putrescent rats, ravenously and indiscriminately.50

Liang captures almost perfectly the mixture of desperation, hope, and zeal that typiﬁes this rapid-ﬁre process, punctuated by moments that in China came to be called “fevers” (re). Mimetic movements tend to ﬂourish “when goals are ambiguous, or when the environment creates symbolic uncertainty,” conditions that dominated early-twentieth-century China in place of a single ﬂag, leader, ideology, constitution, legal order, calendar, or regime.51

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The second nonbureaucratic, noncharismatic engine of change is a deeper one intellectually and emotionally. It depends on internalizing an ethos or set of standards aimed at perfecting a new skill or role like that of politician, businessman, student, physician, or diplomat. Devotion to vocation or “professionalism” that results from “normative pressures” can include the odds and ends that spread and take hold as a fashion or craze, like short hair for women or top hats for men, but also relies more fundamentally on loyalty to a set of principles.52 Oratory was all the rage beginning around 1900 in China, but some academics, editorialists, and politicians became convinced that if rhetoric and propaganda were keys to progress for self and nation they needed to be perfected rather than mimicked. For these experts oratory was an art or science (xue) and the basis for training students and cadres to meet a professional standard. Dressing for the part of a modern man or woman was one thing; being modern in the role of suffragist, banker, or journalist pinned down change in more permanent, personal, and, ﬁnally, institutional ways. Neither the mimetic and fashion-conscious nor the epistemic, knowledge-driven and normative pattern is necessarily dependent on stable, intrusive government. Both can contribute to republican political development in which the citizen as actor plays a crucial role by way of sharing an enthusiasm or fear, or building a whole new way of life out of novel ideas and techniques. The former helps explain how change could spread so quickly with the help of an appealing posture or riveting slogan. The latter points the way toward diverse ideological and ideational streams that led to an altered political consciousness. Mimetic integration contributed to the rapid growth of parties, and other civic bodies, spreading rapidly across the surface of political China. The Qing government originally chartered chambers of commerce as a means to guide and control local merchant communities from the top down. However, these bodies quickly established their independence and materialized across the country at the provincial, city, and even county levels.53 There were 1,000 chambers in 1912 and more than 1,500 by 1919.54 Some were well organized and generously funded; others were little more than “signboards” that gestured toward a new approach to commercial and civic life. In contrast, Japan’s chambers of commerce closely followed the state’s lead and grew in more deliberate fashion to 56 in 1900 and only ﬁve more by the end of the 1920s. It was not that chambers of commerce were less important in China than in Japan because the latter were carefully established and regulated and the former spread by hit and miss, albeit in far greater numbers. The hit-and-miss

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process itself, with its “overemphasis on quantity,” in Liang Qichao’s words, stretched public life and civic commitments over China’s impossibly large territorial and demographic expanse. This degree of coverage in and of itself was as important as the inevitable gaps, tears, and weaknesses were troubling to those who took the science of commerce or “commercial learning” (shangxue) seriously.55 While government as a developmental or regulatory state can step in to ﬁll gaps and reform substandard practices, individuals and groups can themselves take this kind of remedial action if they have the necessary inner reserves and normative compass. Studies of social movements conﬁrm that the spread of new ideas and tactics need not rely exclusively on the kind of “strong” or formal connections a bureaucrat or Leninist would favor.56 “Weak” or informal ties like common residence in a provincial lodge, a school dormitory, or a political club can also increase levels of political participation simply by enabling the word to get out about what issues are current and which methods are or seem effective. Public life of the open-ended, sometimes incoherent kind witnessed in early-twentieth-century China is conducive to mimetic integration. An apparently shallow devotion to a form or a “look” offers hidden strengths in terms of ﬂexibility and adaptability. The strength of protest politics, for example, depended on informal ties among students or workers to ignite and expand movements of immediate force and long-term inﬂuence. Just as a state can be surprisingly weak if it lacks leadership, revenues, and legitimacy, a movement composed largely of amateurs can be exceedingly strong if it sounds the right revolutionary note of equality or patriotism or hits the right target—like the Bastille stormed by the revolutionary crowd in Paris on July 14, 1789, or the pro-Japanese ofﬁcial Cao Rulin’s Beijing mansion burned by student demonstrators on May 4, 1919. At some later point the ideological and organizational bill may come due, and the ideologues, professionals, and bureaucrats will have their hour, or era. The resulting pattern of development in China of parties and civic groups in the 1910s was not stately and deeply rooted. The polity was multilevel without being tightly pyramidal. Following the botanical metaphors offered by the social theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the Republic was not “arborescent,” or treelike, but rather opportunistic, unpredictable, and “rhizomatic,” or tuberlike.57 In a culture that privileged the carefully nurtured family, village, and agriculturally based empire, such profusions of growth would look a mess even if they were not held to a modern bureaucratic standard. They might be recognizable,

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however, to anyone familiar with the ponds, lakes, and plant life of central and southern China, like the Hunan native Li Jiannong. Republican politics was, as Li brilliantly intuited, duckweed-like in its relentless advance and unregimented and weakly rooted nature. Not everyone was sure how political parties worked, but they seemed essential to modern politics and therefore worthy of emulation. Others opposed political parties without having any idea what they were or how they worked.58 Huang Xing explained his multiple party memberships by admitting, “I basically couldn’t decide what party to call myself,” and so he agreeably joined when asked, without resigning his other afﬁliations.59 In summer 1912 his suggestion for resolving a deadlock between the Revolutionary Alliance and Yuan Shikai was for Yuan to pick the cabinet and then have all the ministers join the Alliance.60 Huang acknowledged the vital importance of the political party as a modern organization by joining as many as possible and encouraging others to do the same. In the process he and his public prominence contributed to their growing popularity and force. When Sun Yat-sen returned to China in 1911 he allegedly told leftist Jiang Kanghu, “I too am a member of the Socialist Party.”61

How to Be a Good Communist, Suffragist, Banker, Accountant, or Nurse Huang Xing’s views stood in stark contrast to the singular loyalty to party later preached by Liu Shaoqi in his 1939 Yan’an lecture, “How to Be a Good Communist” (literally, “On the Training and Self-Cultivation of Communist Party Members”).62 Liu complained that some party members “have a lot of old junk accumulated in their heads” and need to replace this mess of notions with “a clear-cut, ﬁrm proletarian stand and a correct, purely proletarian ideology.”63 Given the kind of indiscriminate consumption of ideas described by Liang Qichao, the need to reorder and refurnish one’s mental house was persuasive. Standards that link values to competence can do this. Internalizing the Communist ethos in systematic, action-oriented form as Liu demanded prepared one for the challenges of a long, expansive, and loose-linked revolution. Liu writes, “Even when he [a party member] is working on his own without supervision and therefore has the opportunity to do something bad, he is just as ‘watchful over himself when he is alone’ and does not do anything harmful.”64 And as he indicates in a note, the charge to be “watchful” comes not from a Marxist text or the kind of “scientiﬁc adminis-

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tration” Lenin was attracted to but from the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean.65 Despite his interest in organizational discipline, Liu saw the problem as one of instilling virtue as the remedy for greed, sloth, or stupidity, not installing a command-and-control model alone.66 According to The Four Books, “There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.”67 Soviet agents had demonstrated to Chinese Communists early on what well-trained and motivated professional cadres could do on their own. Members of the Soviet mission in Beijing in 1923 were strikingly efﬁcient and focused in this regard. Most of the novice “Red Diplomats” as they were called, could deliver an impromptu speech before an audience at any political occasion. They could speak for an hour or more, logically and expressively without a prepared text, and in a most persuasive manner.68

Professionalism of this kind also had its limits. Lacking a residue of aristocratic, much less Confucian social graces, many of these young Russians were also socially inept in dealings with their Chinese counterparts. In the turbulent and emotive environment of Republican China, ideas alone without such internal or external discipline created ﬁrebrands who burned out quickly and political bodies that evaporated or died off. Beginning with admission to the Revolutionary Alliance in 1906 and his subsequent defection in 1911, the quintessential big idea man, Zhang Binglin, in less than two years organized or joined and then broke with the Uniﬁcation Party, the Republican Party, and the Uniﬁcation Party again, ﬂirted with rejoining old Revolutionary Alliance comrades opposed to Yuan Shikai, and then made exploratory moves to revitalize Yuan’s Republican Party (at which point in 1913 a worried Yuan “placed him under house arrest”).69 Both Huang Xing’s casual afﬁliations and Zhang Binglin’s serial enthusiasms favored transience over ideological or institutional coherence. In sharp contrast, in 1912 Song Jiaoren planned to create a more coherent and responsive Nationalist Party based on his deep understanding of how a modern political party functioned. Tang Qunying had the same kind of comprehensive plan for the suffrage movement. Song, Tang, and Liu Shaoqi imagined radically different political paths: parliamentary democracy for Song, civil society for Tang, and Leninism for Liu. But they all stressed the importance of a guiding ethos and clear professional identity. By comparison, Huang Xing’s offhand approach to

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party membership was naive and Zhang Binglin’s reckless. Zhang’s sudden retirement from active politics in 1918 must have been greeted in some quarters—and not just in those of his enemies—with relief. The differing approaches to the use of political parties and civic bodies by Song, Liu, Tang, Huang, and Zhang can also be understood in the light of the challenge of building a republic in a ﬂuid environment that put a premium on quick responses to the latest enthusiasms while recognizing the hard fact of a long and continuing revolution in which an organized life in tune with those of one’s collaborators was critical for success and survival. The importance attached to shared vocation by Liu Shaoqi and his comrades in the 1930s and before that by China’s suffragists and many other reformers and revolutionaries conforms to what Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell characterize as the modern, professional impulse of men and women in any ﬁeld of endeavor to “deﬁne the conditions and methods of their work.”70 Suffragists in England and in Hunan were deﬁned by what they believed in—equality for women and men—but also by their methods of operation: founding journals and newspapers, lobbying government, providing educational and social services, giving speeches, and organizing protests. Devotion to the cause made them militants. Mastery of the repertoire of skills and strategies needed to advance the cause made them professionals rather than amateurs. When Gardner Harding visited one of Tang Qunying’s schools for girls in Beijing he found himself quizzed by one young woman who asked him detailed “questions about military and hunger strikes, and processions, and ﬁring letter boxes and other precise points innumerable.”71 For women like this female activist, ever watchful of self and her circle of comrades in China, and comrades in England for that matter, politics was a vocation keyed to both the goal of achieving gender equality and the conduct best suited for success in that endeavor. A vital concern for many Chinese in the early twentieth century, facing a collapsed old order and an incomplete and imperfect republic, was how to be good at what they did in both an ethical and a technical sense. One’s line of work might be business, government, or issue-based advocacy. Professionalism in any of these demanded that the work in question be done well and on the basis of recognized standards. Although such principles can be determined by law or government mandate, professionals also generate codes and norms within communities of practitioners. They decide what is useful and what is not in the performance of their duties and then codify and theorize the result.

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This kind of vocational commitment was a new and powerfully integrative force in modern Chinese politics, economy, and society that likely owed something to the importance attached to a binding social ethos among the earlier literati elite and the totalizing mission of the sage. The scholar-ofﬁcial was supposed to be a generalist, not a specialist, given the myriad challenges one might face as an administrator. Even so, magistrates compiled handbooks to guide others in the moral requirements and technical details of ofﬁce.72 An ofﬁcial might acquire specialized knowledge in order to carry out a task, like the Qing ofﬁcial Wu Qijun who wrote a treatise on mining as a result of the importance of copper smelting and reﬁning in Yunnan where he was governor. Wu, in effect, became a “scholar-technologist.”73 That many pioneer early-twentiethcentury politicians and professionals were classically educated or came from literati families favored hybrid values and doctrines as well as strong commitments to those values and doctrines as expressions of social solidarity among colleagues and comrades. Liu Shaoqi’s footnote to Confucius was no more an accident or window dressing than Tang Qunying’s invoking the mother of Mencius and Mulan. Like scholar-ofﬁcials, professional revolutionaries confronted a broad range of challenges, from publishing a newspaper to covert operations. Circumstances encouraged generalists to add one or more specialized area of hyphenated knowledge as needed: diplomat-linguist, cadre-soldier, student-organizer, suffragist-lawyer, suffragist-journalist. The emerging professional standards of a modern banker in Tianjin, the global consciousness of a feminist in Hunan, or, the revolutionary dedication of a Communist cadre in Shanghai or Yan’an stimulated organizational innovation and emulation as the expression of deeply felt and shared beliefs. Brett Sheehan’s study of the Tianjin banker Bian Baimei tells the story of Bian’s epic struggles to apply sound loan practices during the warlord period.74 Patchy and divided government during the 1910s and 1920s created headaches for lenders but also allowed for a measure of professional autonomy. If the state would not or could not effectively regulate banking transactions, then bankers would have to do so themselves. Bankers coped reasonably well with political uncertainty by “using their expert knowledge, and following certain rules of the game,” like lending to government agencies that had a decent shelf life rather than to individual militarists who might take ﬂight with the cash.75 Like Liu Shaoqi, Bian Baimei constructed his sense of a good banker out of diverse Chinese and foreign, ancient and modern elements. His loyalty was to “the ethos of Chinese scholar-ofﬁcials who served the state

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on behalf of the people, tenets of Buddhism obliging one to save living beings, and a modern vocation committed to building society through economic prosperity.”76 Though the knowledge base of a political cadre and a professional banker varied greatly, both had a stake in knowing and judging what made each good at what he or she did. Both, in Liu Shaoqi’s words, hewed to a “course of righteous conviction,” Liu’s representing the “awakened vanguard ﬁghters of the proletariat” and Bian Baimei’s the vanguard of banking and ﬁnance. Bian, inﬂuenced by the social Darwinist teachings of Herbert Spencer, also described himself quite seriously as “the monk who pulls the masses up from hardship.”77 Like Tang Qunying the suffragist, Bian Baimei the committed modern banker was a complicated creation and self-creation. Consciousness of shared values and the network-oriented nature of these groups of like-minded individuals suggest a version of the “epistemic communities” that have played an increasingly important role in modern and transnational politics.78 While it may seem to be stretching a point to place expertise in areas like public speaking and labor organizing in the same category as knowledge of the law, commerce, or medical science, contemporary Chinese approached any new technique in exactly these terms, as new kinds of “learning” (xue) to be mastered, shared, and reﬁned. Other examples of knowledge-driven ﬁelds of endeavor that spun off heroes, models, and civic organizations were jurisprudence (faluxue) and modern medicine (yixue). Similarly, the art or science of public speaking was yanshuo xue, and what senators did in the legislature was “parliamentary science” (yixue). Bian Baimei’s banking professionalism was one example of a broader effort to ﬁnd and promote proper standards for business activity based on “commercial learning.”79 If Liu Shaoqi theorized the revolution even as he became one of its heroes and models, Bian Baimei did the same for banking. Shanghai’s premier accountant in the Republican era, Pan Xulun, was likewise a hero to his fellow accountants. Pan, who had earned an M.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in commercial economics from Columbia, served on the executive board of the Chinese Accounting Society and routinely gave public lectures in both Chinese and English.80 He was so good at what he did that he also gained recognition by the popular Shenghuo Weekly as a “model of success” for all modern-minded individuals, not just accountants or businessmen.81 Every new social and political role could be imagined as a project of reform and self-cultivation. Professional advancement would also, it was

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assumed, lead to progress for China. As Evelyn Lin, president of the China Nursing Association, predicted in the late 1930s, “Nursing in our country will advance more and more and stand high in the professional world.”82 Lin’s national and international ambitions for her profession were of a piece with Tang Qunying’s for suffragists, Pan Xulun’s for accountants, and Liu Shaoqi’s for Communists. Setting a single standard could also stir controversy and contention. Suffragists had their moderate-militant divide and Communists no end of “erroneous lines,” incorrect tendencies, and ideological deviations. The nursing profession also split over standards. President Lin complained that some nursing schools run by Christian missions had refused to register with the government because the new Chinese standards did not require Bible study. With a hint of exasperation felt by a professional with her eye on the ball of medical progress, Lin wrote, “I wish our foreign friends would understand that while China is not a Christian country, there is no regulation prohibiting these schools from continuing the study of the Bible.” As the conﬂict over Bible study in nursing schools highlights, one could differ in small and large ways over what the correct protocol for a ﬁeld should be. Given China’s physical enormity and huge population, the ﬁelding of all three general forms of integration—imposed by the state or a statelike organization, infected by fashion and enthusiasm, or networked through the truly committed—was essential to any national project. Each competed with and sometimes reinforced or displaced the others. For a time charismatic authority, bureaucracy, or the collective force of a social movement might bind together or override all three. Chinese chambers of commerce began as an extension of state power, spread like duckweed, and ultimately gave voice to an independent merchant and business ethos until the party-state began to reestablish political authority over them.83 A citizen or a civic body, conﬁdent of its own identity within national and global culture, need not buckle before state power. Bryna Goodman has fairly characterized democratic ideas during the Republican era as “free-ﬂoating” and without secure foundations in law and government.84 Nonetheless, these same ideas, because they were in the air that political actors breathed, might suddenly stiffen a spine or strengthen a claim. According to Zhang Jian, with the spread of chambers of commerce, merchants “have gradually acquired the mentality of not putting up with the obstructions and extortion of customs ofﬁcials. When confronted with these old injuries, they now cry out at the injustice instead of keeping silent and bearing them like they did before.”85 The combination of lack of government control, growing cultural uncertainty, in-

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tense ideological commitments, new areas of knowledge, and pervasive networking among activists encouraged political expressiveness and organizational innovation. The later successes of the Nationalists and the Communists resulted from the fusion of professional and ideological commitments with systems of top-down command and control. Mimetic elements took the form of highly structured models and exemplary ﬁgures rather than spontaneous imitation of the latest fashion or cultivation of an autonomous ethos. Long before the Maoist regime ﬁelded the model soldier and worker Lei Feng as part of a well-organized mass campaign, Shanghai produced the model accountant Pan Xulun as an expression of a professionally oriented commercial culture and a larger quest for a distinctively Chinese modernity. All of these elements formed the complex discursive, performative, and institutional presence of a Chinese republicanism that painted the surface and plumbed the depths of the country’s new body politic.

Selling and Being Sold on the Revolution The chaotic appearance of Republican political culture masked a manifold and creative impulse to seed the country with actors and organizations capable of putting down deeper roots and eventually growing toward or into the state. When citizens protested old and new injuries using the expressive and organizational tools of a citizen’s political repertoire they gave substance to the republican political form. Having to explain to constituents and followers what you were doing in speeches, manifestos, essays, and circular telegrams set a minimum standard for accountability. Permitting (or not being able to stop) dissenters from having their say raised the bar of transparency a bit higher. Pressures in 1912 to convert voice into votes, votes into policy, and policy into results brought China close enough to institutionalized democracy to excite and embolden Song Jiaoren and many if not all of the forty million Chinese who cast their ballots. How democratic or authoritarian the result was depended both on circumstances and on the individuals or groups involved. When push came to shove Chinese merchants tended to support order over democracy, whereas suffragists like Tang Qunying chose the opposite. They and other actors and organizations shared a public arena in which issues such as high taxes and male oppression were grist for the mills of advocacy, activism, and public opinion.

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In 1911–13 China missed a democracy of national institutions by a considerable margin. Chinese in the process also became more talkative in ways that involved genuine debate about the great issues of the day. Although it is easy to write off the kind of loose political sociability practiced by Huang Xing and many others as shallow, the polity that resulted was more than simply ornamental to some or unsightly to others. Parties and associations of many stripes and many degrees of organization and incoherence inducted more than one generation of Chinese into political life by providing opportunities to speak and be heard, establish journals and societies, join together around an issue or a cause, and gain practice leading anyone who would follow. Mao Zedong’s ironic account of his own political coming-of-age in Changsha in the 1910s, written after he had decided to not only become a Good Communist but also help comrades like Liu Shaoqi create the standard for what good and bad meant, describes his earnest, sometimes fumbling attempts to place himself in tune with a volatile age. Long before he manifested charisma or found the levers of power suitable for expressing that gift, Mao was a child of political fashion and a seeker after the best path for him and for China. The idea that one should and could align one’s personal fortunes with the country’s future was increasingly attractive. Mao devoured and imitated the writing style of Liang Qichao, the patriotism of Sun Yat-sen, the political ideas found in the radical magazine New Youth, and the “study society” (xuehui) vogue prevalent among the educated young all the while building a network of supporters and allies by carrying on a “wide correspondence with many students and friends in other towns and cities.”86 The net effect, Mao recalled, somewhat ruefully, was to furnish his mind with a “curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism, and utopian socialism,” as well as “somewhat vague passions about ‘nineteenth-century democracy,’ utopianism, and old-fashioned liberalism” together with a stance that was “antimilitarist and anti-imperialist.”87 Mao was not the only one with what Liu Shaoqi later less charitably called a head full of “junk.” Their Nationalist contemporary, Chen Guofu, took a hiatus from politics in 1916 and “devoted himself to the study of local history and to such avocations as the study of Chinese medicine, telepathy, and public speaking,” as well as the question of whether or not ghosts existed.88 In a jumbled, creative, and competitive political culture, spreading the word about women’s rights, setting up shop as a political activist, or trying out the role of orator put a premium on making an immediate visual and vocal impact on potential recruits like the young Mao. The multi-

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plying of vocational, educational, and ideological paths ensured competition. Competition rewarded clarity or urgency of message. A critical resource for all political actors of the period was the capacity to imitate and reproduce images and ideas that sold or persuaded as the means to gain a quick payoff or a ﬁrst step toward seeding deeper values. Stephen Greenblatt, in a literary and historical variation on the theme of social and cultural mimicry, terms this critical ingredient “mimetic capital.”89 As either fashion statement or deep-dyed commitment,“China” sold well once the term was recognizable, and so, perhaps more surprisingly, did “republic,” “rights,” “public speaking,” “male-female equality,” “chamber of commerce,”“people’s livelihood,”“meeting,”“study society,” and the ideologies listed by Mao. The merchandising of politics and culture sometimes took work. When lecturers attempted to spread the message of political reform in a town south of Suzhou in 1903 members of the audience became “frightened when they heard the words democracy and freedom and astonished when they heard the word revolution.”90 In 1906 while competing for supporters with Sun’s Revolutionary Alliance, Liang Qichao in Tokyo wrote Kang Youwei pressing him to change the name of their reform group from the Protect the Emperor Society to the Constitutional Monarchy Society.91 As things stood, and especially with the Qing Court’s plan to call provincial assemblies and draft a constitution, the current name “made it difﬁcult to expand” membership rolls. As a political marketing tactic, Liang suggested using the old name in overseas Chinese communities where it had a proven track record and the new one in China where it would have greater competitive appeal. The ﬂedgling ﬁelds of political propaganda and commercial advertisement overlapped as China’s quests for wealth and power became intertwined.92 Mao recalled being a hard sell when he scanned newspaper advertisements in the Changsha newspapers for a school to attend. Before settling on a teacher’s college he considered and rejected a police academy, a patriotic soap-making school (“It told of the great social beneﬁts of soap making, how it would enrich the country and enrich the people”), a law school that guaranteed a future as a “jurist and a mandarin,” and a business college.93 Writing in the 1930s, Lin Yutang complained that a “mania” for infusing all public statements, political, commercial, and otherwise, with the rhetoric of a violated sovereignty had been taken to “stupid extremes as when a commercial advertisement for silk stockings takes the form of a long ﬁve-hundred-word essay, beginning with ‘Since the Manchurian provinces have been lost . . . ”94

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Serious political entrepreneurs like Sun Yat-sen mined world, national, and local culture for a phrase or word picture that might excite or reassure such an impressionable and interested audience. In his studies of how businessmen took a variety of Western images—Chinese women riding bicycles or wearing revealing clothing—to sell their products, Sherman Cochran ﬁnds in modern Chinese business elements of Michel de Certeau’s concept “poaching” as a defensive strategy employed to cope with an avalanche of symbol-laden products.95 Cochran also shows that, once in hand, such representations, on cigarette packs or patent medicine bottles, could be popularized to proﬁtable effect. Copying culture would normally make scant sense to businessmen unless they could make money with the results. The same was true for politicians who offered what they had borrowed, adapted, or invented to potential supporters in order to gain power. When pressed to explain his third “principle of the people,” the socialist-tinged People’s Livelihood (minsheng) policy Song Jiaoren had been obliged to water down in the 1912 Nationalist Party merger, Sun Yat-sen, no longer in his “I too am a member of the Socialist Party” mode, reassured his supporters that the notion really amounted to nothing more than the conventional New Year’s greeting,“Get Rich!” (facai).96 Except that now, everyone, and the nation as a whole, would facai. The luck or privileges of the few would be extended to the many. Conveniently for Sun, the abortive plan for the end of the lunar New Year also failed to erase the folk wisdom embedded in the customary end of year salutation, which, now, could be slipped into the new political rhetoric. From Sun’s point of view, there was little point in referring to intellectual inﬂuences like Henry George or Karl Marx until some more popular and recognizable chord was struck. Sun as a modern leader was a master of such overtures performed with a view to set off a series of echoing responses throughout the country. He understood that one advantage that politics has over commerce is that you can sometimes sell people what they already have or do not know they have. Some Chinese were surprised to discover that they were socialists because they believed in sharing wealth or that they were public speakers because they were able to get up and give a speech. The rickshaw puller orator noticed by Harding may have been a Nationalist Party operative. He might also have been an avid reader of political pamphlets, a returned student from Japan or Europe, or a member of the circle of political activists who hung about the Nationalist Party headquarters in Beijing. He could also have been what he claimed to be: a rickshaw puller whose views were informed by the tabloid newspapers he read, the gos-

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sip he overheard, and the experiences of his workaday life on the streets of Beijing. Part of being a professional politician in Republican China included appearing to be a common citizen. Part of being a citizen might involve pocketing or poaching the words and copying the gestures of a Sun Yat-sen or Tang Qunying. To reach as many individuals, groups, and communities as possible, the presentation of political ideas needed to be portable as well as comprehensible and appealing. One could not count on the weakened state or its agents alone to produce, store, and deliver the political goods. For ideas, and the practices associated with them, to adhere to language and culture, according to Greenblatt, they not only need to be persuasively disseminated, but they also have to be put and kept somewhere, “accumulated, ‘banked,’ as it were, in books, archives, collections, [or] cultural storehouses,” in the same way that wealth might be stored in a ﬁnancial institution or soldiers held at the ready in a camp or fort.97 In the journey an idea, image, or event found in a news article, editorial, or advertisement took, from point of origin in a reporter’s or writer’s craft to publication, distribution, consumption by readers, and, perhaps, its end point of use as youtiao wrappers, the cultural product might reproduce itself many times over as it was displayed, used, and stored along the way.98 One illustrative new stop in this cultural transit was the newspaper reading room (yuebao chu). Japanese scholars in a 1907 study of Beijing society and culture were both impressed and alarmed by the mimetic and transformative power of what went on there. Anyone may go there and read newspapers. Also, there are qualiﬁed people there to explain the newspapers, discuss the news, and so on. . . . [Unfortunately] they are also organs for preaching anti-foreignism and other political fevers (zhengzhi re). Although the Qing has banned political gatherings and societies for the discussion of politics, these reading rooms, though [technically] not places of assembly, do unintentionally foster assemblies and speech making. As a result, those who wish to discuss politics have a good opportunity.99

Rapid proliferation of newspapers and magazines moved ideas and images in an efﬁcient manner throughout much of urban and rural China. So did other makeshift and established institutions, such as political cells exploiting gaps in state surveillance and publishing companies alert to consumer preferences. Students in Wuchang in 1903 circulated revolutionary materials under cover of a phony commercial ofﬁce they opened.100 They also raised money to acquire a movie projector to show ﬁlms accompanied by lectures as part of their propaganda effort in Wuchang and neighboring Hankou. After the revolution, as a sign of its support

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for the new Republic, the Commercial Press of Shanghai published thirteen volumes of photographs of the event and printed three hundred commemorative postcards. Mimesis as a “social relation” materialized among newspaper readers collectively coached and encouraged into political discussion, ﬁlmgoers excited by the novelty of cinema in a provincial city while being guided toward revolutionary politics, or residents in Shanghai sending political postcards to acquaintances in the interior of the country. In the process political and social change took on a second or third life as the original text, slogan, or image moved across the map. Newspapers, ﬁlms, political tracts, and private correspondence became “not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being.”101 The Republic was still to be found in government institutions of course, though sometimes in what Lin Yutang called the “comic” form of an opium suppression bureau that sold drugs, but also on the streets, in musical and theatrical performances, in the mail on postage stamps, on currency, and in the press in what added up to a panorama of images, ideas, and sounds. Experiments in “social education” like newspaper reading rooms joined a growing set of institutions dedicated to supporting civic education and discussion. The infrastructure needed to produce, disseminate, and store images and ideas continued to expand throughout the Republican era. A 1931 educational survey in Kunming documented the city’s cultural resources, including modern schools, of course, but also “a circulating library, traveling lecturers, a women’s public speaking bureau, a book and newspaper reading room, a patriotic memorial museum, a municipal library, and a public athletic ground.”102 Modern schools dispensed knowledge about the wider world, if unevenly. They also powerfully pressed the value of citizenship on teachers and students alike.103 By the 1930s the curricula for middle school children included the writings of Lu Xun and Hu Shi as well translations of Henrik Ibsen plays.104 The paths new political ideas took often led from coast to the interior. Where and how they were read, discussed, and “archived” varied considerably. A few years before the Qing was toppled a wealthy degree holder from Anhui Province came upon Zou Rong’s incendiary anti-Manchu pamphlet, Revolutionary Army, in Shanghai. He was so excited by what he read that he bought a hundred copies of the banned book to bring home and distribute to everyone he met and knew. Since his way of life included drinking, gambling, and visiting prostitutes, he did not neglect to bring copies to the local brothel he patronized where he lectured the young women on the virtues of patriotism.105

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Peripatetic leaders like Sun Yat-sen also helped spread political ideas in more systematic ways, through “campaign” tours and speech making. Sun was particularly adept at making his ideas register and stick with the groups and localities he visited. On a visit to Wuchang in spring 1912, Sun surprised hosting Revolutionary Alliance members with his pointed questions about who the big real estate tycoons in town were. Sun, who wanted to illustrate a point about his land tax policy, asked in an amused tone, “Don’t you want me to speak to the people? [If so] I ﬁrst need to understand a bit about the situation in this place.”106 Mao later encouraged a comparable, though far more regimented strategy, of initiating a back-and-forth with the people on terms they understood “over and over again in an endless spiral.” He formalized this process of giving ideas, taking opinions, and giving them back as policy in 1943 in his directive on the “mass line.”107 Sun’s efforts to root his ideas locally in meaningful ways were of necessity more episodic but equally geared to achieving genuine communication and consequent commitments of popular support. The format of public speaking and open meetings encouraged the kind of dialogue that kept ideas alive as they were transplanted from place to place. The value of engagement with local and popular social forces was recognized by students active in the May Fourth Movement. Chinese who read newspapers knew what the students had accomplished in Beijing in 1919. Many had followed suit with demonstrations of their own. Students saw themselves as political actors on a national stage and were also eager to take their message on the road. As part of the annual rhythm of modern education, that path would take them home for the summer break, just as Liang Qichao’s students had done on a much smaller scale in the 1890s at New Year. A notice to student lecture brigade participants who planned to return home for the summer advised them to seek out every opportunity to continue to talk up patriotic and progressive themes. 1. Engage whoever you meet, no matter how many or how few, in conversation using the Socratic Method, 2. If a place has a lecture hall, take advantage of the opportunity and go and lecture there, and 3. If the locale does not have [a hall] link up with area students and comparatively decent gentry [to start one].108

Of course, “decent gentry” had been engaged in this kind of public discussion and propaganda on progressive themes for twenty years or more. And Socratic dialogues were not so different from the sort of interlocutions favored by Mencius, and also by local teachers who continued to

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pass on elements of the old learning as ways to understand new circumstances. In a modern Chinese political culture spread out all over the map, one could pioneer a role without being its inventor or even necessarily being conscious of the fact that what you were doing as a May Fourth student to spread the word of national crisis was nearly identical to what a high-living,“indecent” gentry reformer had done at the turn of the century. Repetition and revivals, conscious and unconscious, were part of what sustained the long Chinese Revolution over a vast landscape. Political leadership as an original act depended on massive efforts at copying and sharing national questions to be debated and then editing in local facts needed to make a compelling case for Sun’s, Chiang’s, or Mao’s revolution. Young Deng Xiaoping spent so much time as a Party member in France copying by hand for machine reproduction the theories and facts relevant to the struggle he was waging for China abroad that his comrades gave him the nickname “Doctor of Mimeography,” or, as one might dub him in retrospect, “Comrade Mimesis.”109 If, as Tetsuo Najita has suggested, the late imperial polity was absorbed in the “massive memorization” of classical texts as a key to the reproduction of its political culture, a massive project of handwritten or machine copying, and written and oral rephrasing and recasting, undergirded the construction of Republican China.110 Depending on the size of one’s entourage and the important factor of political permissibility, the leader as public speaker could pop up anywhere accessible by train, boat, cart, bus, or foot. Communities bent on joining a movement could of their own accord copy and reproduce a distant political event with relative ease by investing a few resources and borrowing others. China’s highly articulated system of national, regional, and local markets left few places beyond the reach of marketable ideas and products, including of the political kind. No wonder Sun himself was sometimes mocked as a “traveling political herbalist, a fast-talking quack.”111 In Bergère’s considered judgment, Sun was indeed a “traveling salesman of the revolution.”112 By the early twentieth century business as “commercial learning” and as the nuts and bolts of moving ideas, goods, and people around China were unavoidable social facts. Even a clear Communist counterpoint to the Nationalist Party and urban capitalism like the New Fourth Army base in rural central China in the late 1930s relied on the commercial Shanghai press to advertise its appeal to potential supporters and Shanghai itself as a place to recruit technically skilled “human capital” for the revolutionary war it was ﬁghting in the countryside.113 If political organizers were not mistaken for tax collec-

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tors they might be lampooned in a knowing way as salesmen. And so they were in their roles as political entrepreneurs.

“All for the Public Good and Nothing for the Self” Despite the violence that roiled urban and rural China in 1911 and 1912, with a death toll as high as two million, many if not a majority of supporters of revolution in China, like Sun, engaged in publicity, propaganda, and other nonviolent actions in addition to or instead of military operations.114 This was not a “velvet” revolution, but neither was it the protracted war that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s. Hope for peace and unity, naive in retrospect, was widely shared by revolutionaries and, not least, by Sun Yat-sen. A mobilized, vocal, and emotive China, in the absence of state control and direction, also fostered division. Chinese not surprisingly disagreed among themselves about what to do and who should do it once the Qing monarchy was gone. The idea of public opinion (gonglun or yulun) as it emerged in the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century favored unity to the point of unanimity, a “public opinion of the whole people” as one commentator proposed in 1913.115 Based on her detailed study of local elite opinion in the last years of the Qing, Rankin argues that the “general idea that the polity and social order should be uniﬁed remained strong in theory even while it was being eroded in practice.”116 Differences of opinion, among diverse groups of men and women, Manchus and Han Chinese, and northerners and southerners, for example, complicated and undercut the realization of demands for a fully united Chinese people. In the recent past unifying an imperial polity composed of a single monarch, thousands of ofﬁcials, and millions of members of elite families angling for ofﬁcial recognition and rewards presented an enormous challenge. There were also built-in advantages to a model in which activism dropped off precipitously as authority rippled out from the imperial center. Rebellions and other mass uprisings were the exceptions to harmonious rule. Such disturbances were cited as proof of what happens when a stable moral order is violated. The modern republican ideal of unity achieved through continuous and broad, if not universal, activism placed great strains on both unity and activism in modern China. Unity would prove elusive in such a vast and diverse country. Activism often came under suspicion for wrecking the prospects of one China. This was, and still is, a central contradiction in

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modern Chinese political and public life. As Joan Judge notes in her study of modern Chinese political rhetoric, constitutional reformers before the 1911 Revolution had ﬁrst addressed this problem by ﬁxating on the “people as the foundation” (minben) tradition. They continued to promote this “ideal of perfect concord between ‘those above and those below’ ” even as they “virtually exploded it, by demanding an activist role for the public which far exceeded the old ideal of the min (“people”) as compliant ‘foundation’ of the nation.”117 Revolutionaries like Sun Yatsen embraced this explosive activism while retaining faith in an ideal and absolute unity. Local and regional leaders thereafter might object—even to the point of advocating federalism—and accuse national leaders and governments of “mistaking unity for uniformity.”118 But as a political imperative, the lure of one China (da yitong), or “a Great Systemic Whole,” was nearly irresistible.119 All the while, competing political parties, groups, and factions proliferated. In a single day at the Huguang Lodge, political activists could celebrate and tip their hats to the great and impartial unity called for by Sun Yat-sen, dig into partisan political warfare with relish and skill, and by late afternoon allow themselves to be (mostly) brought back to a state of unity by Sun’s eloquence. That such twists and turns are typical of modern political life did not make the exercise any less challenging for those charged with managing the controlled mayhem like Zhang Ji, whose urgent appeals for unity punctuated incendiary suffragist speeches and male heckling, or for those determined to defy the majority like Tang Qunying, who demanded unity predicated on an as-yet-unrealized gender equality. President Yuan Shikai made a vigorous attempt to unify public opinion around his top-down leadership and failed. His forays into speech making show he did try at ﬁrst to act like the president of the Republic. He asked that he be referred to as “Mr. Yuan” as proof of republican modesty.120 More ambiguously, a Republican postage stamp was issued in 1912 with Yuan’s portrait on it.121 In 1912 in a speech to military ofﬁcials two days after he helped inaugurate the Beijing parliament, Yuan played the traditionalist “people as the foundation” card by quoting the conventional catchphrase: “All for the public good and nothing for the self” (dagong wuwo).122 This much-repeated call to selﬂessness is one of the signal Confucian contributions to modern Chinese political discourse,123 and one productive of both good works and rank hypocrisy. Yuan’s stock response to political opposition included appeals to unity and covert campaigns of intimidation and violence. When he could not rally the people to his cause he chose the pragmatic stopgap of hiring paid substitutes. In fall 1913

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Yuan deployed a thousand plainclothes policemen poorly disguised as a “citizens’ corps” to bolster his bid to be reelected president by what was left of the national legislature in Beijing.124 If a revolutionary could pretend to be a tea picker or rickshaw puller, a secret police agent could try to act like an ordinary citizen, and Yuan a democrat. When Yuan decided to enthrone himself as emperor two years later, he took great care to make it seem that this change in regime was blessed by citizens and their representatives, a doomed effort at “manufacturing the will of the people,” in Hu Shi’s precise and prescient phrase.125 Saddled with the need to attract popular support, leaders were tempted to ﬁnd shortcuts. When students in Guangzhou in 1923 asked Sun Yatsen how the government could know what China “wanted,” Sun replied with a degree of intensity his audience found alarming: “Ask me. What I think China thinks. Look at the reception the people give me. They know I am their true leader.”126 Perhaps Sun knew or suspected that the only real test for political legitimacy in the modern age was to be found in the observable reactions of citizens, even if only in actively conﬁrming the wisdom of the leader. Suspicion of the counterfeit and the contrived in politics was also fed by words and deeds that rang truer than Yuan’s restoration fantasy or Sun’s solipsism. The path to political legitimacy led through public life and to the people. It was unclear whether passage across the political stage could be accomplished with only a wink and a nod to the audience of citizens or whether some more genuine relationship needed to be struck. Ideally all public acts, by ofﬁcials or persons outside of government, were also impartial rather than partisan, another, related meaning of gong. Should an emperor, ofﬁcial, or any other public ﬁgure violate this trust by taking a narrow or small view, the resulting behavior could be judged “selﬁsh” or “private-regarding” (si, in contrast to gong). In 1912 opinion makers concerned about the fate of the Republic argued that “what China needs most are persons of talent who are impartial, unselﬁsh (gongzheng wusi) and patriotic.”127 This did not mean that everything that was not public was bad by dint of being selﬁsh or self-interested. Rather, as Judge helpfully puts it, a continuum existed that ran “from the particular to the public.”128 Yuan Shikai claimed to be acting for the public good and not for himself and his family when he engineered his metamorphosis from president to emperor in 1915. The politically vocal portion of the country not in his gun sights or his patronage pocket disagreed. Newspaper editorialists, orators, politicians, and public ﬁgures great and small vociferously denounced Yuan’s move as a selﬁsh act and a betrayal of the Republic.

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Politics in the best sense assumed moral development toward a higher purpose in the old sense, the politics of the “superior man” rather than the “small man” (xiaoren). An acute taste for political irony— consciousness of the inevitable distance that opened up between the ideal and the real in public life—had long been part of Chinese perceptions of political and cultural life, from servants who lampooned their masters’ Confucian pretensions in late imperial dramas to hecklers who mock public ﬁgures in modern Chinese politics.129 This perspective offered good reason for carefully scrutinizing public life and for being disillusioned with the results. Lin Yutang recalled how surprised a visiting American lecturer was when his “perfectly serious reference” to Chiang Kai-shek’s “New Life Movement,” a largely ineffectual effort in the 1930s to impose public virtue in areas like bad habits of cutting in line or spitting in public through a mix of Confucian ethics and fascist regimentation, was met by a spontaneous “burst of laughter among the student audience.”130 Cranelike leaders who claimed to be serving the public might be sized up as chickenlike after all. Vocal China relied on a vernacular culture alert to the comic and the corrupt. At the same time, the ideal of the superior leader who puts aside personal interest in favor of the general interest retained its hold on the public. In a bizarre and revealing variation on this theme, one essayist in the 1930s praised Adolph Hitler on the grounds that his bachelor status and ascetic personal habits meant he could be trusted to conscientiously represent the German public.131 Writing in the 1940s after decades of attempts by Republican revolutionaries, former Qing bureaucrats, warlords, Nationalists, and Communists to ﬁnd national unity in pursuit of the public good, the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong bemoaned the fact that the ideal of the “public” had become almost hopelessly degraded. The small view had become pervasive. He illustrated this with a homely example. The people of Suzhou, the famous beauty spot of canals, gardens, melodious speech, and pretty women, dumped human waste into the same waterways they and their neighbors used to wash clothes and vegetables. Why is this so? The reason is that such canals belong to the public (gongjia). Once you mention something as belonging to the public, it is almost like saying that everyone can take advantage of it. Thus, one can have rights (quanli) without obligations (yiwu).132

If both the canals of Suzhou and the politics of the Republic came to resemble cesspools this was, at least in part, because of the unrestrained

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pursuit of particular interests, now justiﬁed by “rights.”As Nie Qijie might have added, unlike human waste, political corruption cannot be so easily composted and recycled, except as a renewed commitment to public virtue. Fei Xiaotong offered an elegant theoretical explanation for how Chinese could simultaneously prize and degrade the public and derogate and favor the private and particular. He described human relationships (renlun) as a pattern of concentric circles that “spread out from the self,” enabling individuals to select the locus of the common good and gauge how far to go in extending their own commitments.133 Accordingly, the focal point of one’s loyalties at a given moment might be the state rather than the family, the family rather than the state, or even the individual rather than the family (against or in alliance with the state). The good ofﬁcial neglects his own family. The ﬁlial son shields his father from the consequences of wrongdoing and thus upholds public virtue. The modern son or daughter chooses political values and personal freedom over the interests of family. In this sense, the tension was not between private interests and the public but among competing public goods rooted in circumstances that might range from individual or family needs to the general condition of the nation or the world. The new ideas of a shared “society” and an imperiled “nation” put added pressure on individuals and groups to justify their actions in the expanded court of public opinion. The advent of individual rights in China was accompanied by a tightening and conﬂicting sense of social obligations. As Liang Qichao had complained, “In China there are duties of individuals to individuals. There are not duties of individuals to society.”134 Partly as a result of Liang’s urging, an enlarged sense of social obligation materialized. Signal events of the era, like unbinding bound feet or cutting a man’s queue, took place within public, corporate, and family settings and against crosscurrents formed by the demands of public and particular interests. The meanings attached to events varied, depending on where one was on the political stage, how well and for whom one performed, and who was watching. In a story that made the Beijing newspapers in August 1912, police in Nanjing seized a farmer coming to market through a city gate and summarily cut his queue. As Harrison has shown, queue cutting was one of the characteristic mass and public actions of the 1911 Revolution and its aftermath.135 In this case the man did not remain silent. He became vocally upset, complaining, “How can I go home now and face my family?” Everyone present, and probably many newspaper readers as well, had a good laugh at the man’s expense.136 Did this bumpkin

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not realize that China was now a republic and he was a citizen? For the farmer, though, the cutting of his queue was not a blow against Manchu domination or for the Republic and progress but an affront to his dignity as a Chinese man.137 He had become a trophy of someone else’s republican revolution and a disgrace to the most relevant audience for him: his family and village. When Yuan Shikai ordered units under his command to cut their queues, some of them “wept uncontrollably” and had to be given a dollar each to quiet their anguish.138 A new topography of politics, shaped by police at city gates or reporters gathering and composing the news of the day, extended the domain of public life into home and village, family and community. Great and galvanizing issues like imperialism and republicanism drew and thrust men and women from all corners of state and society into the glare of publicity. If some men and women were wounded by such events, others experienced a feeling of emancipation and solidarity. During the same summer in Beijing groups of shop clerks and craftsmen went en masse by trade to the barber to have their queues cut.139 Groups, if not always individuals (surely some of the men whose hair was cut in this manner had qualms about such a drastic change in their appearance), chose the paths of republicanism and nationalism. The parades to the barber were covered in the press as “Haircut Chronicles.” The personal meanings of such gestures undoubtedly varied. As the narrator in Lu Xun’s “The Story of Hair” explained, “If the truth be known, we were simply sick of wearing those queues.”140 In a sign of how powerful the inertial force of the particular could be, getting rid of millions of queues took much longer than dethroning the emperor. As late as 1928 a zealous Republican police chief in a county near Beijing unleashed a “haircutting brigade” on local citizens and ﬁlled dozens of boxes with queues.141 Countless acts, and refusals to act, like these contributed to the cacophony and pageantry of the Chinese Revolution and the quieter hum and subtler shift of individuals and communities adjusting to the new regime and a new politics in both superﬁcial and deeper ways. A politics that was noticeably freewheeling, open, contentious, and unpredictable would later become in the hands of Nationalists and Communists more bureaucratic, militarized, and controlled. However, like the cutting of queues, this process would take decades. The year 1912 and the era that surrounds the founding of the Republic did not represent the golden age of oratory, press freedom, street politics, and public life so much as a bimetallic one, like the silver and copper coins that still circulated in the face of poorly secured paper currency. Brilliant and leaden at the same

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time, the new Republic produced soaring rhetoric and endless bickering and sniping, visionary plans on paper for a new China and also determined efforts to make sure that new ideas like women’s suffrage or democratic elections left old and new power holders in place. Fei Xiaotong’s explication of the meanings of the public, and by extension the private or the unofﬁcial, admits the importance of the state in determining the public interest while allowing for legitimate social and political resistance. A home or a family-like institution such as a ﬁrm or a secret society may not be one’s castle in China. There was no right to privacy or autonomy in the strong sense a rights tradition bestows. But one’s home or hometown could plausibly serve as an expansive empire, or “independent kingdom.” Such prerogatives derived as much from one’s responsibilities as from one’s rights. After all, from a certain angle the entire empire had been the emperor’s family, and this was a good thing when imperial fatherhood inspired him to govern well. Yuan Shikai’s failings in the area of public morality partly lay in his jettisoning of his republican “Mr. Yuan” persona at a time when more and more Chinese saw themselves and their leaders as citizens. On an older political front, his sudden and spectacular claim to be the new patriarch of the Chinese family may have been persuasive to some but also scandalous to others who objected to the private beneﬁts his son and heir and other family members would now receive. Battles worth winning in this era were fought along new fronts like rights against tyranny and old ones like the public good against selﬁshness.142 Yuan favored his son rather than his “children,” who in any case now, like Tang Qunying and Song Jiaoren, chose to identify themselves as citizens. Times had changed even if ways of looking at the political world showed signiﬁcant continuity. Kenneth Burke remarked that “it is the moral impulse that motivates perception, giving it both intensity and direction, suggesting what to look for and what to look out for.”143 Old ways of seeing based on moral impulse schooled Chinese to look out for authorities indifferent to the public good. The problem of what to look for, by way of a new China and one’s place in it, was a challenge that encouraged new ways of seeing the wider political world.

“What Does a Citizen See?” The ﬂexibility of the new frames of reference created both opportunities and headaches for rulers and subjects, leaders and citizens. Nationalist leaders fretted that citizens would fail to see the big picture and the bril-

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liant future about to be delivered and instead follow their particular and private interests and visions. An editorialist in the Beijing newspaper the Chinese Daily pressed the point in a December 1912 essay,“What Does a Citizen See?”144 In a tone as exasperated as Fei Xiaotong’s later comments on the unhygienic habits of Suzhou residents, the editorial warned against public complacency about Russian encroachments into Mongolia and British designs on Xinjiang and Tibet. Throughout 1912 the Russian empire advanced its commercial and geopolitical interests by supporting an independent Mongolian state with a capital in Kulun (Urga) while the British made similar moves in China’s Far West from their colonial base in India.145 During the 1911 Revolution Chinese were expelled from Tibet because China lacked the strength to enforce its claims even while protesting that Tibet was sovereign Chinese territory. Earlier in fall 1912, not long after Russia recognized an independent Mongolia, the Chinese Daily published a cartoon showing the “ﬁve-colored” ﬂag of the Republic emblazoned with “Remember” and strips representing China’s ﬁve nationalities: Mongol, Han, Manchu, Muslim, and Tibetan (ﬁgure 7).146 A “Russian” hand can be seen ripping away the Mongol strip and an “English” hand doing the same to Tibet. Lamenting the fact that the “Kulun question,” as far as Chinese citizens were concerned, “blew hot and cold,” the Chinese Daily writer wanted to “inform the citizenry” in order to make this a “visible” or “tangible” (youxing) issue. For this to happen, Chinese would have to alter the way they looked at things: “Would it not be better if China’s citizens changed their line of vision a bit and cut back on their mentality of personal rights (siren quanli sixiang)?”147 The more graphic the picture, the stronger the message. Maps of China took on a rhetorical as well as cartographic value by showing a country of impressive size but imperiled sovereignty.148 To drive home the point, school textbook geography lessons employed a “rhetoric of loss,” embellished with imagery like the map of China as a mulberry leaf being “nibbled away” by imperialist worms.149 The increasingly familiar outline of China looped an irregular circle of national borders around Chinese citizens as a reminder of pressing and higher duties and loyalties. Lu Xun’s Ministry of Education in Beijing in 1913 commissioned a volume titled Lectures on the National Territory of the Chinese Republic intended to help educators see and teach Chinese geography from a patriotic viewpoint.150 The enclosed map, with a mulberry leaf helpfully positioned beside it, shows both Tibet and Outer Mongolia as parts of

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7. “Remember.” From Zhongguo ribao, October 23, 1912, 7.

Chinese territory, as well as Taiwan marked as, at the moment,“Japan’s.” Lecture guides included separate sections on foreign threats to Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and the Three Eastern Provinces (Manchuria). With this exercise in “social education,” the author, Ni Danzhuan, aimed to “awaken” Chinese from their “delusions” so that they might “set out together on the correct path of citizenship, and enjoy the happiness that belongs to a republic.” Could hundreds of millions of Chinese, or even the tens of millions on the coast and in major cities, see and feel the same thing in time, given the many groups, regions, and standpoints they represented? Sun Yatsen and Liang Qichao were not the only ones who worried about the prospects for reaching this kind of unity and uniﬁed vision. He Luzhi, using the ever popular nation-as-body analogy, likened China to an “incompletely evolved social organization” without a fully functioning nervous system. As a result, foreign powers could grab Chinese territory, and citizens in other parts of the country felt nothing even though the

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attacks were akin to “slicing off” its arms and legs, an apparent allusion to the slow “death by slicing” punishment of imperial times for crimes like sedition.151 One part of society is smashed, but the other parts feel nothing. In China, although the Northeastern provinces are lost [to Japan in 1931], many ofﬁcials and ordinary people are undisturbed. . . . The Japanese revile us for not being a nation. Although we are angry we must calm down and think. Have we created the necessary conditions for a modern nation or not?

According to He Luzhi, the conditions essential for a country capable of feeling collective pain are “elections so that people may participate in politics, a free press to disseminate accurate news, various kinds of free associations so that that the feelings of parts of the people might be combined, and modes of communication so that the life of the whole nation might be more intimately connected.” He Luzhi anticipated elements of Benedict Anderson’s theory of the nation as an “imagined community.” The resulting social and political intimacy and “nervous” awareness called for by He Luzhi resembles what Anderson describes as a patriot’s “deep horizontal comradeship.”152 Nationalism as a mentality required a political infrastructure and a civil society supportive of patriotic feelings, thoughts, words, and deeds. From this perspective, political expression was as much a necessity for the nation as a right for the individual. These lessons in political cartography and anatomy might lead to conﬂicting priorities. When Beijing students went on strike in 1921 to pressure the government to resume ﬁnancial support of their educations, they argued that “losing Shandong would be like losing our hands and feet, whereas the destruction of education would be akin to lopping off our brain. It’s possible to live without hands and feet, but not without a brain.”153 As Fei Xiaotong’s theory predicts, protecting one’s own interests might appear the greater good, even among intensely patriotic students. Consciousness of China as touchstone for the public interest made it more likely, but not inevitable, that individual citizens regardless of their social backgrounds or roles would take the larger view. The larger circle of patriotic loyalty, with its invitation to self-sacriﬁce, continued to enclose other and competing loyalties, or in some cases undermine internationalist commitments. Fei Xiaotong used the analogy of a diplomat who fervently believes in world peace but sacriﬁces that higher value on the grounds of national interest. Women’s rights advocates like Zhang Zhaohan were ready to make that kind of sacriﬁce, but others, like Shen

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Peizhen, resisted, in part because they saw rights as operating on many levels: personal, local, national, and international. Visiting China made Carrie Chapman Catt less of a “jingo.” Being or becoming Chinese offered a different set of pressures without eliminating the option of taking what some might see as an unpatriotic view. As Fei Xiaotong explained, “When one sacriﬁces the nation-state for the smaller group, usurping its interests and disputing its rights, one is still gong [public or, better, “just”] because of the smaller group’s gong or justice claims.”154 Much depended on where one saw oneself and with whom. Public opinion and the public were unitary concepts that covered but did not always suppress a multitude of ﬁssures, fractures, and apparent contradictions. To wit, you might dump your chamber pot into the canals of Suzhou and still consider yourself a good patriot, unless a critic like Fei could persuade you otherwise by enlarging your sense of public obligation and by altering your “line of vision.” The nature of the Chinese Republic was such that this kind of conversation did take place. Men who believed they were good republicans when they denied women the ballot faced critics like Tang Qunying who fought to change the way their adversaries and the public saw the matter with a spoken or written retort, a fan to the face, or a cigarette tin to the head. The new capacity of public opinion to evaluate, celebrate, and denounce what was visible in person or in print was palpable in the early twentieth century, especially to foreigners who had previously viewed China through their own Western lens as a polity without a public. If the evidence for independent public opinion in China in 1912 is mixed, by the end of the 1910s the existence of a self-organized public was a fact of great and growing political signiﬁcance. In 1919, faced with May Fourth student protests spreading nationwide in reaction to news of secret treaties accepted at Versailles that gave German concessions in Shandong to Japan, Minister Auguste Boppe of the French legation in Beijing exclaimed, “We are in the presence of the most astounding and important thing that has ever happened—the organization of a national public opinion in China for positive action.”155 Idealism keyed to the nation and society was paradoxically fueled by deepening cynicism. The year 1912 saw many Chinese growing skeptical of the Republic’s ability to govern the country and represent the public interest. In a battle between idealism and cynicism, political authority under attack or in-the-making is better understood, as Bruce Lincoln has argued, as an effect rather than as an abstract, disembodied entity.156 Having assumed an old or new public good as part of one’s political calculations,

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one still had to ﬁnd a basis in fact for that authority in rational deliberation, patriotic feeling, interest politics, or a combination of all three. Lincoln uses speech making as one example, and a model, of how authority is actually produced or, alternatively,“corroded” on the ground and in the moment. His approach is consistent with studies of political development that stress the “everyday” presence of the state in people’s lives as the foundation of legitimate authority.157 There are many other tests of authority in politics just as telling, like the regular payment of taxes, reasonable levels of turnout on election day, or the willingness of timid souls to face Yuan Shikai’s riﬂes and bayonets. Oratory, placed in social and cultural context, offers a summary picture of how state and society, leader and followers, are brought together to decide the question of legitimacy in large and small ways that can add up. Authority so tested will endure at a favorable “conjuncture.” It all depends, according to Lincoln, on “the right speaker, the right speech and delivery, the right staging and props, the right time and place, and an audience, the historically and culturally conditioned expectations of which establish the parameters of what is judged ‘right.’ ”158 Under other, less favorable conditions, commonplace in early-twentiethcentury China, the effect can be quite different: “gossip, rumor, jokes, invective; curses, catcalls, nicknames, taunts; caricatures, grafﬁti, lampoon, satire; sarcasm, mockery, rude noise, obscene gestures, and everything else that deﬂates puffery and degrades the exalted.”159 The political hopes of 1912 were quickly recast by many as a complaint that the Republic’s promises of democracy, riches, and strength were nothing but empty. This is a fair criticism for a talkative regime like the early Republic. A decade later Yun Daiying, Communist, educator, and in 1927 a leader of the Guangzhou Uprising (he was killed by the Nationalists in 1931), could write that the revolutionaries of 1911 “broke the idols of imperial authority and then only managed to hang up the signboard of democratic politics. Beneath the broken idols of empire and the signboard of democracy they have created a state of affairs where the heroes [of the revolution] do nothing but ﬁght among themselves.”160 How then did the Republic withstand Yuan Shikai’s attempt to overthrow it in 1915–16? Yuan tried to “manufacture the will of the people” but failed to produce authority in the face of press denunciations, public telegrams from rebellious political and military ﬁgures, and popular demonstrations. Yuan’s wishful thinking about the national character favoring monarchy, aided and abetted by his adviser, the eminent American political scientist Frank Goodnow, was shattered by the actual effects of what he said and did.161 Yuan began dressed for the part with solemn im-

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8. “Current Affairs.” From Minguo ribao, February 8, 1916

perial ceremonies at the Temple of Heaven and ended by being mocked as a monkey for the way he scratched his head when he was worried or perplexed and because his name could be punned to mean “ape” (yuan).162 A cartoon from the Nationalist Party Republican Daily published in Shanghai in February 1916, a little more than a month after Yuan Shikai’s declaration of a new “Chinese empire,” shows the Republic playing weiqi (in Japanese, goˉ), a form of chess, against Yuan under the caption “Current Affairs” (ﬁgure 8).163 Weiqi, with its expansive board compared to the tighter compass of Western chess, and its goal of controlling territory rather than taking the most enemy pieces (black or white pieces or stones), offers a ﬁtting analogy for the lengthy and sprawling Chinese Revolution.164 In the game an unseen Yuan is playing with white stones against a Republic personiﬁed by a man reaching across the board to pick up a white stone bearing the word emperor (di). The Republican player has just put one of his black stones, inscribed with the people (min), in position to completely surround Yuan’s linked group of four stones.Three of the stones Yuan had put down read vertically, from top to bottom and left to right, in Scrabble fashion, the selﬁsh and anti-republican sentiment

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“self-selected emperor” or “manufactured monarch” (dizhi ziwei). In the conventions of the game, Yuan’s stones, lacking the two “eyes” necessary to prevent capture in the required single move, are no longer “living” (huoqi) but “dead” and ready to be taken by the Republic. Yuan has no move left visible on the board. The cartoon is a piece of anti-Yuan propaganda that mirrored political reality. The success of republicanism as the new principle of authority, however vaguely deﬁned, left little room in political China to make a play for monarchy. The Republic may have been missing ﬁrm roots, but it had spread, ﬂowered, and drawn support from a ﬂuid political culture in which speaking out was now a citizen’s right and obligation. The Republic lacked a knockout punch, but it covered the board. Yuan for all his substantial bureaucratic and military assets was defeated by the scattered pieces of a signboard and duckweed Republic. The Republic and its allied army of words and catchphrases, backed up by actual armies and political organizations, was a weak force that under the right circumstances could challenge and defeat a strongman like Yuan Shikai. In his landmark book, Seeing like a State, James C. Scott documents modern government’s impulse to make society and citizenry “legible” enough to administer.165 Early-twentieth-century China was a severe challenge in this regard. Scott also shows the damage the accompanying tendency by government to simplify and oversimplify complex realities can do to communities and individuals. He admits that good things like public health initiatives require legibility in mapping the causes and courses of disease.166 However, seeing like a state does not mean one will see the problem of disease as a sick person experiences ill health. Therein lays the potential for “cures” that damage or even kill. National citizenship, as the individual and collective obligation to support the nation-state, can damage and kill too. Scott concedes that national citizenship carries with it the potential beneﬁts of rule of law and the emancipation of persecuted groups. The cost comes in the form of increased vulnerability to arbitrary and senseless state action, a price Scott gauges to be very high indeed.167 In early-twentieth-century many Chinese citizens, impatient for action, altered their line of vision to see China like a strong state and uniﬁed nation might. Chinese citizens embraced the idea of modern government before they felt its full weight. As long as the Chinese state was more rhetorical than real in administrative or social engineering terms, what could be the harm?

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Chapter 5

Losing a Speech

One sign of Sun Yat-sen’s success as an orator was that he rarely lost a speech. One result of a suffragist’s more challenging role as a female orator was that she met with a mix of victories and defeats, applause and heckling. Sun’s performance at the August 25, 1912, Nationalist Party convention displayed his skill in talking his way out of a shambles, a fortunate talent considering that his political career was studded with many disasters and near-disasters. Not everyone had Sun’s facility with words and presence of mind in public. We know a political device such as public speaking is vital not only when it becomes widespread and a source of power and inﬂuence but also when misuse or poor execution contributes to defeat. The need to persuade one’s followers of a course of action, sell one’s agenda, and, in the bargain, explain oneself pushed and pulled a wide range of political actors to the podium. What men and women then said and did was often revealing, not only of positions taken but also of the inner lives of individuals under enormous political and public pressure.

“Do Not Be Afraid to Become Over-Europeanized” At 11:00 a.m. on July 18, 1912, Prime Minister Lu Zhengxiang arrived at the Senate building prepared to present the names of six new cabinet members for a vote. According to the 1912 constitution, ratiﬁed by the Senate when the capital was still in Nanjing, cabinet ministers were nom186

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inated by the president, the position provisionally held by Yuan Shikai, and “concurrently approved” by the parliament.1 Lu had passed his own test of legislative consent on June 29 when his appointment as prime minister had been ratiﬁed by the Senate on the strength of his achievements as a leading Qing diplomat and his brief and continuing tenure as foreign minister of the new Republic. However, within an hour on the morning of July 18 Lu Zhengxiang’s seemingly unassailable position as a public ﬁgure would be breached and his personal authority to all appearances shattered. The criticism was so relentless and wounding that Lu eventually went to a hospital to shield himself from the political din. What had Lu Zhengxiang said or done to achieve this dramatic reversal of fortune? He had confessed something like his true feelings about the nature of political life. Lu lamented the corruption and favoritism that riddled the new Republic. He also asserted his goodwill and purity of intentions. Lu’s reasons for giving this kind of speech, the fury his views provoked in his audience, and the various political factors that contributed to his sudden if momentary fall from grace reveal how turbulent and disorienting public life in the young Republic could be. National politics resembled a “political whirlpool,” according to one observer.2 Such circumstances opened up opportunities for politicians and activists but also made public life slick with potential for missteps. The famous ups and downs of leaders like Sun Yat-sen and organizations like the Nationalist Party mirrored a more general tendency in the world of Republican politics. Words and the reactions they elicited mattered, as did the way political performances played out in public. Lu Zhengxiang at forty-one, the same age as Tang Qunying, cut a dapper ﬁgure with his long waxed mustaches and elegant European clothes (ﬁgure 9). If this was the new face of Chinese government perhaps the Republic did constitute a dramatic departure as men in morning coats and top hats replaced long-gowned imperial ofﬁcials wearing jeweled and peacock-feathered caps. Beyond his striking looks, Lu represented the new class of professionally trained ofﬁcials and experts rising to the fore in Chinese politics, business, and academics. Lu tailored his appearance to match his mission and résumé, as well as to meet global expectations of how a diplomat acted on the world stage. Lu was born in 1871 to a Protestant Christian family in Shanghai. His father, employed by the London Missionary Society, arranged for Lu to be tutored at home in the Chinese classics and later learn French at the Jiangnan Arsenal’s language school.3 In 1890 Lu was sent to the language institute attached to the Zongli Yamen in Beijing, from which he gradu-

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9. Lu Zhengxiang. Courtesy of the Library of Congress LC-USZ62138906.

ated in 1892.4 During his diplomatic training abroad he also learned Russian and English.5 Lu’s mastery of French smoothed his reception among fellow diplomats throughout his career.6 Until World War I French was the principal medium of international diplomacy, even though other languages, including English, gradually gained acceptance.7 By the end of the nineteenth century the seating of nations at international meetings had been democratized so that countries were placed by alphabetical order in French.8 This rule positioned “Chine” at the front of the hall, an arrangement Lu Zhengxiang strongly supported as an equalizing measure during his years as a diplomat.9

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Lu Zhengxiang made his mark as a linguist and diplomat in Europe through vocational preparation radically different from that of classically educated scholar-ofﬁcials. He was not a classicist who later acquired ﬂuency in French and knowledge of modern diplomacy but rather a foreign affairs expert who could read classical Chinese. As Lu’s career commenced many scholar-ofﬁcials continued to agonize about reconciling China’s “essence” (ti) with Western technologies and cultural principles. In contrast, Lu had leaned toward the West with all his might. Lu’s ﬁrst posting was as an interpreter at the Chinese embassy in St. Petersburg.10 He took to heart the advice of his mentor, Ambassador to Russia Xu Jingcheng, who told his young protégé,“Do not be afraid to become overEuropeanized, only be afraid that what is quintessential in Europe is not grasped.”11 Xu’s exposure to Western powers heightened his sense of the dangers China faced on the eve of the “scramble for concessions” in 1897–98.12 Ambassador Xu told Lu, “I am going to try to make a diplomatist out of you,” and by all accounts he succeeded.13 Lu dutifully embraced Western ways, from his dress and manners to his ﬂuent French, Belgian wife, devout Catholicism, and holiday villa in Switzerland. Lu compiled an impressive record of European diplomatic posts and assignments as Qing envoy to bilateral and international meetings, including both Hague peace conferences in 1899 and 1907. At The Hague in 1899, and still in his twenties, Lu gave in French the only recorded speech by a member of the Chinese delegation, a ﬂowery defense of China’s interests and an earnest statement of his country’s willingness to cooperate with the international community under certain conditions.14 The remarks earned Lu a round of applause from fellow delegates. In 1907, as head of China’s delegation to the second Hague conference, gowned rather than wearing Western clothes as he had in 1899, Lu launched a spirited and successful attack on an attempt by the British and French to exempt “extraterritorial rights” from international arbitration.15 In a soft salvo of diplomatic understatement, Lu called the protection of extraterritorial rights in China or elsewhere “awkward in a world convention.” He then more bluntly demanded the offending clause’s “suppression, pure and simple.”16 The vote went in China’s favor, 32 to 2, with the United States in support and imperial France and Britain against. Despite these skirmish victories, Lu also remembered the Hague conference for the way Western powers without exception, and despite the seating arrangements and other symbols of equality, treated China as “a country of the lowest rank.”17 The Chinese delegation in 1907, excepting two American advisers, John W. Foster and his grandson and fu-

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ture foreign policy titan John Foster Dulles, stood out in their imperial Qing costume. The Chinese in their “subdued colors” and the Turks wearing the fez were notable exceptions to the conventional Western diplomatic dress worn by other delegates.18 In his memoirs Foster praised Lu Zhengxiang for being an “accomplished French scholar” and noted that “the ﬁrst delegate, Mr. Lu, and his European wife, as well as other members of the delegation, were untiring in their social courtesies.”19 The elite connections of Lu’s wife, Berthe Bovy, which included the Belgian royal family, proved helpful to the young diplomat.20 Lu Zhengxiang could also be tough and confrontational. He asked Beijing to recall him from The Hague in protest in 1908 when his efforts to negotiate the establishment of Chinese consular ofﬁces in Dutch colonies, a critically important device for protecting members of the far-ﬂung and vulnerable Chinese diaspora, were frustrated.21 Yuan Shikai, who was in charge of foreign affairs at the time, praised the oratorical skills Lu displayed at The Hague and urged that he be renominated as minister to the Netherlands.22 Lu returned to Europe and after concluding successful negotiations with the Dutch was appointed ambassador to Russia. Lu’s record as a diplomat and a political ﬁgure included a willingness to risk controversy. A progressive ﬁgure during the Qing reform era, Lu, by his own account, led the way in winter 1911–12 as he and fellow Chinese diplomats in Europe cabled Beijing demanding abdication of the last Qing emperor.23 The action came late enough in the brief season of the 1911 Revolution so that the initiative seems as much a timely shift in loyalties as a bold move on the part of the Qing government’s diplomatic wing in Europe. During the early Republic, Lu’s reputation as statesman and expert on world affairs won him posts as foreign minister and prime minister in 1912 and as foreign minister three more times—late in 1912, in 1915, and in 1917. But he also came to be viewed as a pawn of Yuan Shikai. This subservience was painfully visible during Yuan’s attempt to make himself emperor in 1915 and 1916. Though Lu claimed to have opposed Yuan’s imperial ambitions, “after long and melancholy consideration” he agreed to play the role of impresario in the ragged, and ultimately failed, political spectacle.24 In his memoir Lu recalled the debacle as “one of the saddest periods of my public life.”25 Lu was also obliged by Yuan to negotiate agreement to many of the humiliating “Twenty-one Demands” made by the Japanese government in 1915 and was tarnished by that experience as well, despite the fact that his tenacious negotiating style helped parry some thrusts of the Japan’s diplomatic assault.26 Lu’s

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version of events was as follows: “The head of the State appealed to me. . . . I believed it was my duty to sacriﬁce myself.”27 Lu’s shining republican and patriotic moment came in 1919 when, as head of the Chinese delegation to the Versailles peace conference, he joined his colleagues in Paris in refusing to sign the ﬁnal treaty when it became evident that the transfer of German concessions in Shandong to Japan would be conﬁrmed by peacemakers. Historians have questioned Lu’s heroic account of his own behavior in this episode and suggested he was simply swept along by events.28 More junior diplomats like Gu Weijun (Wellington Koo) played a far stronger public leadership role at Versailles.29 Tellingly, Japanese diplomats perceived Lu as pliable and in agreement with Japanese positions on the Shandong question, in contrast to Gu, who subjected Japanese representatives to an eloquent and blistering defense of China’s rights early in the conference proceedings.30 A diplomatic star for China at The Hague in 1907, Lu Zhengxiang seemed eclipsed as a public ﬁgure by the end of the 1910s. Being swept along by events was the fate of many political ﬁgures of the period. Lu was certainly not alone in making large claims for lastminute changes of course. His patron, Yuan Shikai, was a sudden and (and temporary) convert to republicanism in February 1912. After the death of his wife in 1926 Lu entered holy orders and in 1935 became a Benedictine monk, living the rest of his life in a Belgian monastery. He explained that he had at last given in to his “secret desire to renounce political life.”31 This ﬁnal act of self-abnegation, though consistent with his religiosity and ambivalence toward politics, adds another layer of complexity to Lu’s public career and reinforces a perception of Lu Zhengxiang as a man with sincere but also uncertain commitments to public and ofﬁcial life. He was a paradoxical ﬁgure in an era when seeming contradictions abounded. Lives like his extended across a wide geographic and cultural landscape and invariably traversed deep social and cultural fault lines. Tang Qunying’s willow catkin feminism or Sun Yat-sen’s aggressive commerce in political altruism took shape on the same challenging terrain. Deeply committed to the reform of China by political means, Lu Zhengxiang, unlike Sun Yat-sen and more like Lu Xun in summer 1912, developed a powerful animus against politics, judging much of the political world a dangerous and unsavory place. Sun Yat-sen took time off from politics in 1912 to plan railroads and give speeches without really leaving the political stage. He might temporarily disavow an interest in power, but he did so in a manner that demonstrated political calculation

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and a desire to reposition himself for a comeback. Lu Zhengxiang’s views and professional role more resembled those of moderate feminists who sought to maintain the inner quarters of domestic life as a refuge and from there chart a gradual path to reform. Politics for Lu was also a jungle to be avoided if possible in favor, in his case, of the quieter, inner precincts of professional service. These sentiments can be traced in part to the fate of his early patron and guide in the diplomatic service, Xu Jingcheng. Xu was recalled from his diplomatic post as ambassador to Russia in 1897 while Lu remained in St. Petersburg. Appointed dean of the new Imperial University in Beijing, Xu soon found himself presiding over the school’s temporary collapse in 1900 in the face of ofﬁcial scorn directed at an institution alleged to be full of “foreigners and traitors” and in the midst of Boxer turmoil, including violence against his own faculty.32 In summer 1900 Xu was executed along with four other ofﬁcials for opposing the Court’s doomed alliance with the rural insurgents who had marched on Beijing to save the Qing dynasty.33 In despair over the killing of Xu Jingcheng, Lu considered leaving public service but ﬁnally resolved to stay on, determined, he later wrote, to secure Xu’s legacy of reform.34 He took to heart Xu Jingcheng’s advice about not tying his own fate to that of the dynasty.35 Like other reformminded ofﬁcials he detached himself from absolute loyalty to the Manchu monarchy in favor of the Qing state as a step toward later abandoning the dynasty in favor of the Republic.36 After the suppression of the Boxers, Xu Jingcheng was exonerated and in 1909 granted posthumous honors by the Qing government.37 As foreign minister, Lu later dedicated a shrine on ministry grounds to Xu Jingcheng and his fellow martyred reformers.38 He also privately printed Xu’s collected works and diplomatic correspondence and had a medal struck in Europe that bore Xu’s proﬁle to give as a gift to favored colleagues and foreign and Chinese dignitaries.39 Lu Zhengxiang’s mentor thus joined the long list of upright ofﬁcials rewarded for their outspoken advice ﬁrst with death and later with honor for their political virtue. The death of Xu Jingcheng fused Lu’s commitment to the modernization of China with a distrust of political intrigues.40 He remained scrupulous in the performance of his duties while at the same time displaying a degree of independence occasionally bordering on deﬁance. Lu’s decision to marry Berthe Bovy in St. Petersburg in 1899, though in keeping with Xu Jingcheng’s counsel to Europeanize, did not sit well with other diplomats.41 As a sign of his unorthodox and at times impetuous

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temperament, Lu cut off his queue in 1902, shortly before his ﬁrst, brief home leave the following year.42 Berthe, to whom Lu was deeply devoted, encouraged him in this.43 This was a potent and impolitic act of symbolism, especially for someone still in government service. Many Chinese, and not just political radicals, began cutting their queues around this time, including athletes who found competing in international sporting events difﬁcult with the queue hanging down their backs.44 Soldiers were also permitted short hair so that they could drill like their Western counterparts. However, by Qing law queue cutting did not even become optional until December 1911.45 On visits back to China Lu wore a hairpiece until ﬁnally rejecting even that subterfuge. He encouraged other diplomats to follow suit, and the mission he led in Holland from 1906 to 1911 came to be known as the “queue-less embassy.”46 In 1907 when he made his queue-less condition visible to a visiting Qing delegation in Paris during a banquet sponsored by Chinese students, Lu recalled with typical delicacy of feeling that “the Viceroy of Nanking contented himself with a smile, the Minister of Public Instruction with a frown.”47 Chinese students resident in Europe, no doubt relishing this kind of political statement on the part of a high-ranking ambassador, gave Lu the appreciative title “president of the Buddhist monk society” in ironic recognition of his tonsorial gesture and in uncanny anticipation of his future (Christian) religious vocation. Cutting one’s queue was becoming less and less a radical act as the end of the Qing approached. By 1910 even the head of the army had removed his.48 Ambassador Lu also met and befriended Kang Youwei on the latter’s visit to Holland. He warned Kang not to make a planned visit to Russia, conﬁding that the Empress Dowager had secretly asked the Russians to arrest her old enemy.49 Kang later wrote an inscription for the tomb Lu constructed in Beijing in 1920 for the reburial of his parents and grandmother.50 Lu signaled his reformist views in more formal ways as well. In the decade before the 1911 Revolution he advised the Qing government to proceed with constitutional reforms as a means to protect China from the kind of encroachments Korea was suffering at the hands of Japan.51 A telegram Lu sent from The Hague to Beijing during the revolution urging the rapid installation of a national assembly indicated constitutional if not republican sympathies and paved the way for his demand that the emperor abdicate.52 Under Xu’s prompting Lu had developed the view that Western monarchs like the Russian tsar were more progressive than their Chinese counterparts in part because they had more regular, inti-

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mate contacts with members of their courts, a style of interaction among the Russian political elite Lu witnessed in St. Petersburg.53 Going a step further than his mentor, Lu became convinced that one of China’s weaknesses in foreign affairs was the absence of representative institutions through which popular anger over diplomatic defeats, like the French loss of Alsace-Lorraine, could be forcefully articulated. The option of appealing to the public had been sadly lacking in Lu’s view in the case of the forced ceding of Taiwan to Japan in 1895.54 Like many Qing ofﬁcials who operated increasingly in the public eye at home or abroad, Lu Zhengxiang was drawn to public opinion as a means to defend his own actions and match the propaganda initiatives of other nations. Lu’s vantage point in Europe, comparable in some ways to that of a student studying abroad or of an overseas merchant, enabled him to see the Chinese public as a political resource, even though at the time he had scant personal experience of its operations in China. Lu’s quest for an apolitical and yet vocal public was another exercise in the paradoxical but also one that resonated with the Chinese ideal of national unity. Lu’s Westernized outlook, early decision as a serving ofﬁcial to cut off his queue, association with modernizing elements among Qing ofﬁcialdom from Xu Jingcheng to Yuan Shikai, willingness to aid a dissident like Kang Youwei, and liberal sympathies, at least insofar as accepting the utility of representative institutions in strengthening China’s position in world politics, made him a likely supporter of the new Republic.55 In this regard he was little different from most reformist ofﬁcials on the eve of the revolution, especially those with ties to Yuan Shikai.56 Lu was not much of a rebel, except in certain aspects of his private life. In a memoir written in the 1940s Lu pictured himself as cut off from both Chinese and foreign society by his choice of profession. In China, I had known neither the world of ofﬁcialdom nor society. [Xu Jingcheng] gave me as a ﬁrst rule that of not attaching myself to the declining régime; neither to enter into it nor to condemn it, but to conﬁne myself to doing my duty and, while studying the most distinguished servants of the European countries, to make a programme of life and action for myself. And for that, to learn to hold my tongue, whatever might be the humiliations and the insults inevitably inﬂicted on me by, on the one hand, Chinese dignitaries despising everyone who did not ﬂatter them, and, on the other, European ofﬁcials and European society calling the whole Chinese state “the sick man” and considering every Chinese an inferior being.57

Like many Chinese of his era, Lu faced the challenge of deciding how to perform the part he had chosen to play. He held his tongue but made his

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point in the way he negotiated the complexities of costume and his professional conduct. Lu Zhengxiang’s growing commitment to Catholicism (he formally converted from his family’s Protestant faith in fall 1911) may have also emboldened public and political expression of private convictions. The connection between Christianity and dissent in modern Chinese history is an intriguing one. It suggests in Lu’s case a mixture of isolation and autonomy accompanied by a profound respect for authority. Under some circumstances personal religious faith like Lu’s seems to have strengthened the resolve of individuals to go against the political tide.58 At the same time, the hierarchical and paternal nature of the Counter-Reformation Catholic faith Lu Zhengxiang embraced favored duty and obedience to authority, values that supported Lu Zhengxiang’s determination to hold his tongue and follow instructions.59 “It was from the standpoint of the man of government,” he wrote,“that I drew closer to the Catholic Church. . . . I found in it constancy of government, doctrine and moral guidance.”60 That these religious values could be aligned with Confucian devotion to hierarchy helps explain the cult of duty Lu fostered in memory of Xu Jingcheng and his enduring, at times tortured, loyalty to Yuan Shikai. Devotion to God, country, and Confucius all pointed toward an ethos of service. Lu ﬁnally concluded, like many other ofﬁcials of his generation and background, that the Qing monarchy was expendable. Perhaps he also knew that in the new Republic a man of his skills and experience would be indispensable. When Lu joined fellow diplomats in their January 1912 call for abdication he was serving as ambassador to Russia. In March he accepted Yuan Shikai’s invitation to become minister of foreign affairs, arriving in the capital in May to take up his duties. He later recalled his elation: “How wonderful was that return to Pekin after twenty years residence abroad.”61 Like Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen, Lu Zhengxiang knew ﬁrsthand about the larger world that contributed so mightily to the 1911 Revolution by supplying ideas, models, and alternatives to late imperial policies and ways of life. His diplomatic career required long absences from China, punctuated to be sure by rotations back home unavailable to most political exiles. Chinese in China struggled to adjust to the import of new ideas and technologies Lu was already intimately familiar with as a native of Shanghai and longtime resident of European capitals. Yet Lu Zhengxiang faced his own challenges of adjustment when he returned to Beijing in spring 1912. Like others who left an imperial China and returned to a republic, Lu’s homecoming proved to be a complicated business.

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“With Briefcase in Hand” Events would soon demonstrate that the more technocratic role of foreign minister was far more suited to Lu’s talents and interests than that of a politician. Conﬁned to a bureaucratic institution turned toward the wider world, Lu proved reasonably surefooted. He had expert credentials for the position as well as solid personal ties to the new president, Yuan Shikai. When Lu ﬁrst met Yuan while in China on leave in 1908, Yuan thought highly enough of the young diplomat to offer him a position on his personal staff, an opportunity Lu declined.62 However, Lu retained and beneﬁted from Yuan Shikai’s patronage and, in effect, joined what Ernest Young has termed “Yuan’s Group,” a set of promising officials within the regime handpicked and positioned to follow Yuan Shikai’s lead.63 In Lu’s telling of the story of his renewed connection to Yuan in 1912, the president was highly solicitous of his new foreign minister. In an early interview in the company of Prime Minister Tang Shaoyi, Yuan graciously observed, “Mr. Lu has been abroad for many years and has certainly learned many good things. Having now returned, he will share a great deal of useful knowledge with us.”64 Lu replied by offering a deceptively modest picture of what he hoped to accomplish as a government minister: “I did not bring back anything good except for one thing: each day I will open my ofﬁce door and go in with briefcase in hand; and each day when the ofﬁce closes I will return home [with my] briefcase.” Lu intended to impose modern and European standards of bureaucratic discipline on the management of foreign affairs, including a strict regime of ofﬁce hours and a train of document-laden briefcases that would, he hoped, achieve a quiet revolution in the conduct of governmental affairs. Since Yuan himself was a workaholic who in his days as a Qing ofﬁcial was at his job from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Lu’s remarks likely struck a positive chord.65 Lu wryly noted decades later that early attempts to persuade his subordinates to arrive at work on time (10:00 a.m.) met resistance.66 In a typical moralizing aside, he blamed these “bad habits” on the disordered home lives of his staff and wives who refused to get up and make breakfast for their husbands. The new foreign minister pressed ahead with a series of needed repairs and reforms, from draining puddles in front of the ministry ofﬁces that foreign diplomats complained soaked their shoes and dampened their dignity to raising the ofﬁcial status of ministry ofﬁcials, insisting on secrecy in sending and receiving cables, and making an effort to recruit

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young men of talent to the diplomatic corps.67 A fellow diplomat, Yan Huiqing, credited Lu with instilling a new “business-like” approach to diplomacy and discouraging foreign diplomats from “pounding on tables,” using “discourteous language[,] and getting red in the face.” He also ended the practice of free meals for ministry employees.68 Lu made Yuan Shikai promise that the Foreign Ministry would be free of outside interference, including in the ﬁlling of ofﬁcial posts, and that Lu be permitted a vice-minister ﬂuent in English to complement his own facility in French.69 He demonstrated his resolve on the issue of noninterference in appointments by dismissing a nephew of Yuan.70 Lu’s response to political and social pressures at home and abroad amounted to a distinctive brand of professionalism as diplomat and civil servant. Experts in new areas of knowledge acquired in Japan and the West like Lu Zhengxiang were both held at a premium and regarded with suspicion. The existing elite culture certainly valued talent but also relied on a form of political sociability that placed friendship and social connections on the same plane as technical ability. The preeminent organizer of ofﬁcial talent through the medium of friendship had been the self-strengthener Li Hongzhang, who cited the Analects on this point: “Raise to ofﬁce men of virtue and talents. Raise to ofﬁce those whom you know.”71 The commonplace American distinction between “what you know” and “who you know” made little sense in a Chinese political culture where who you knew provided the framework within which talent might be exercised. Devotion to personal connections, however helpful in promoting the talented and greasing the wheels of government, also opened the door to corruption and nepotism, conduct Lu regarded as immoral and unprofessional. His attitudes were akin to Sun Yat-sen’s advocacy of “a new style of personal self-management” in response to colonial and racist criticism of Chinese culture and character or Liu Shaoqi’s insistence that a Communist cadre be self-possessed enough to function “on his own without supervision.”72 If anything Lu Zhengxiang was more dedicated than either Sun or Liu to meritocracy based on professional competence. Whereas Sun’s and Liu’s devotion to technical competence was governed by sharp ideological commitments—“red and expert” in Liu’s case and the Three Principles of the People in Sun’s—Lu saw himself as free of any political creed other than patriotism. Lu was adamant about the value of Western models in reforming Chinese diplomacy. He spent time in both Paris and Brussels before his return to China in 1912 “in order to examine and to study on the spot the workings” of the French and Belgian foreign ministries.73 Lu’s vision for

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reforming Chinese diplomacy had little in common with undisciplined mimetic patterns of change common to political parties and other elements of Republican political, social, and cultural life. His worldview was based on new knowledge and membership in the epistemic community of foreign diplomats who were both potential adversaries when he sought to advance China’s national interest and allies in setting standards for professional conduct, standards he insisted on, including in confrontations with red-faced, table-pounding Westerners. In Beijing’s ofﬁcial world Lu saw himself as a specialist in foreign languages and the art of diplomacy, not a member of one political faction or another, even though Yuan Shikai was to all intents and purposes his patron. When not in his ofﬁce or performing ofﬁcial duties, he was home with his wife and his Catholicism. In a political tradition in which afterhour poetry readings, banquets, and genteel carousing were as important as ofﬁcial proceedings in the actual conduct of politics and government, Lu’s remark about punctuality and carrying his papers to and from work in a Western-style, leather satchel hinted at a degree of cultural and social distance that contributed to the jeremiad he would deliver to the Senate in July. As a metaphor for professional obligations, Lu Zhengxiang’s briefcase can take its place as a companion piece to other symbolic East Asian hand luggage. The bland, tormented jurist Honda Shigekuni in Yukio Mishima’s historical novel of 1930s Japan, Runaway Horses, bears crushing karmic and emotional burdens as he carries to and from the ofﬁce a traditional cloth furoshiki wrapper ﬁlled with the dreary paperwork that dominates his life as a modern man.74 In the novel Honda’s furoshiki, purchased at a modern department store, is an empty relic of a dying culture. Lu Zhengxiang offered his satchel to Yuan Shikai as a token of service and a salute to a rational and business-like approach to government. Were there a museum dedicated to Lu Zhengxiang in Shanghai or Beijing as there is to Li Fuchun in Changsha, Lu’s briefcase would be as apt an artifact of his career in diplomacy as Li’s document case is for the Communist ofﬁcial’s years as an economic planner. For his part, Yuan Shikai was happy to exploit Lu’s devotion to duty and professionalism for his own political purposes.75 Given his deep suspicion of political intrigue, Lu was as unlikely to seek alliances with Yuan’s enemies as he was scrupulous about carrying out lawful instructions from his superior. This stance suited Yuan’s purposes and his intriguing quite well. In a highly politicized environment professional autonomy absent corporate solidarity or legal protections made someone like Lu more

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rather than less dependent on Yuan Shikai. Of course, Lu could resign. Until he balked at signing the Paris peace accords in 1919 and, perhaps, only with his ﬁnal departure to church and monastery, this was not an option he chose to take. Patriotism and professionalism counseled against abandoning ofﬁcial responsibilities even when those duties ﬂew in the face of patriotic opinion. He followed Xu Jingcheng’s conventional Confucian advice to choose his words carefully. At times even Yuan professed frustration with Lu’s extreme reluctance to be drawn into what Lu regarded as political questions. On one occasion Lu’s difﬁdence and plea of ill health when asked to state his view on some matter led Yuan to insist that Lu speak and thereby “carry out [his] responsibilities.”76 Lu may have sensed that conﬁding his views to Yuan, as opposed simply to carrying out his instructions, increased his own vulnerability. To the extent that Lu valued power—and it is hard to imagine indifference to power in a man whose entire career had been spent in ofﬁcial life—he must have hoped that being a reformer within Yuan’s orbit would garner political and material support for his plans.77 Encouragingly for Lu Zhengxiang, the cabinet he joined in Beijing in spring 1912 was ﬁlled with other reformist luminaries, for example, the educator Cai Yuanpei and the constitutional theorist Song Jiaoren. The political lineup seemed consistent with one of Yuan Shikai’s favorite expressions: “Don’t ask whether someone is a party member or not. Ask whether he has talent.”78 The government, in fact, was deeply divided by party and personal loyalties, and the cabinet would soon be shaken by the kind of resignations Lu was allergic to.

Prime Minister Lu When Lu Zhengxiang took up his post as foreign minister, the cabinet was led by Prime Minister Tang Shaoyi, a politician who seemed well suited to bridging ideological and factional divisions. A longtime protégé and ally of Yuan Shikai, Tang had helped negotiate peace between Yuan’s northern group of bureaucrats and generals and southern revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen. In the process Tang took advantage of relaxed attitudes toward multiple party memberships and joined the Revolutionary Alliance, a maneuver that gave him a leg in both camps.79 It was Tang, with his connections to the revolutionaries in the south, whom Yuan Shikai had turned to in his fruitless attempt to keep suffragists from ﬂooding into Beijing. Tang Shaoyi, however, failed in his effort to balance the goals of Yuan Shikai, who was busy consolidating his power in

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Beijing and the provinces, with the aspirations of revolutionaries, who were attempting to gain a meaningful role within the regime in the capital. Yuan, adept at divide and rule tactics, had taken care to create a “mixed” cabinet headed by Tang that included associates, allies, and adversaries.80 He selected his own men to run the military and police organs of the Republic and assigned Revolutionary Alliance members like Cai Yuanpei and Song Jiaoren to less strategic departments such as the Education and Agriculture and Forestry Ministries. Tang Shaoyi traveled in the spring to Nanjing to present Yuan Shikai’s list of cabinet appointees to the Senate still resident there. Late in the afternoon on April 1, Tang, accompanied by Sun Yat-sen and other cabinet ofﬁcials and military ofﬁcers, arrived at the same modern building where senators and suffragists had recently tangled. While Sun, Tang, and the others ﬁled in, the senators remained in their seats “in dead silence.”81 Sun was ushered to his customary seat immediately behind and above Speaker Lin Sen’s elevated desk while Tang and other ofﬁcials took their places to Speaker Lin’s left. Huang Xing and a group of military ofﬁcers sat to Lin’s right. Lin then invited Tang to the podium and the premierdesignate, dressed in a frock coat, received a round of loud applause. The audience, to the surprise of a foreign observer, did not stand or bow in his honor.82 Tang’s speech lasted only ﬁve minutes and was delivered “in a quiet, and unassuming voice, with no attempt at rhetoric.” He began by deprecating his own qualiﬁcations for ofﬁce and then provided a summary of issues facing the country. After emphasizing the gravity of the Republic’s ﬁnancial crisis and the need to borrow to meet current expenses, Tang “read out the names of the Cabinet, one by one, saying something in regard to the special qualiﬁcations of each for the post to which he was appointed.” Tang then asked for the Senate’s consent to the appointments. Lin formally put the question to the body, and a lively debate ensued over whether a delay was needed to deliberate, which included referring the appointments to a committee, or whether a vote could be taken that day. By a show of hands the senators agreed to go immediately into closed session for a debate and vote. The chamber was cleared of spectators. Tang, Sun, and other invited ofﬁcials departed as well. In the end all appointees save one were approved. Four days later, on April 5, the Senate in Nanjing passed a ﬁnal resolution authorizing the move to Beijing. The nature of Tang’s appearance and the behavior of the senators suggest how seriously all concerned took the body as a republican institution. The strain of months of shuttle diplomacy between north and south

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took a toll on Tang Shaoyi. When he arrived back in Beijing on April 20 to assume his new duties as government leader, Premier Tang, observed leaving the train,“looked like a weary, depressed man.”83 He immediately left for a meeting with Yuan Shikai, with whom relations were increasingly tense. From the outset Tang resisted Yuan’s efforts to dictate policy and attempted to preserve the constitutional authority of the cabinet. Tang went so far as to send back documents issued by Yuan’s ofﬁce that he disagreed with. He refused to give way on certain issues even when personally challenged by Yuan or his lieutenants.84 This kind of political independence gave reformers like Song Jiaoren hope that the Republic’s constitutional order would develop in a democratic direction. Yuan’s continuous manipulation of cabinet government was cause for disquiet. The cabinet picked by Yuan and led by Tang Shaoyi ran into difﬁculties almost immediately. Meetings were acrimonious. At a June 8 session Minister of Education and Revolutionary Alliance leader Cai Yuanpei, in a departure from his normally calm demeanor and high-minded attitude, loudly objected to a statement by Republican Party member Xiong Xiling.85 Yuan’s man at the Ministry of Interior, Zhao Bingjun, never bothered to attend cabinet meetings since he simply took his orders from the president.86 In principle, institutions such as cabinet and parliament are designed to contain and channel conﬂicting passions, interests, and ideas. Common ground certainly existed among the political elite in support of a strong Chinese state and a bold response to the national crises seizing the country. However, if a strong state meant an autocratic Yuan Shikai, or party-government run by the Revolutionary Alliance, the other of the contending parties saw less point in working together. The peace between Yuan Shikai and the revolutionaries negotiated by Tang Shaoyi promised some kind of power sharing or checks and balances, with Yuan in control of the presidency and political parties free to build a base of support in parliament. The political parties, including the Revolutionary Alliance, were willing to accept this division of power as long as elections gave them a chance to make gains at Yuan’s expense. Larger social, economic, and cultural issues were also at stake. Powerful national and provincial actors allied with Yuan opposed extending the political revolution raised against the Manchus into areas of social and economic reform. Progressives like Song Jiaoren were so keen to build a winning coalition in parliament that they too catered to conservative sentiments in their effort to transform the Revolutionary Alliance into a politically dominant Nationalist Party. By summer 1912 questions of power rather than ideology dictated the conduct of most political leaders in Bei-

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jing, to the anguish of the suffragists and other reformers. This same partisan atmosphere ironically made an ideologically neutral ﬁgure like Lu Zhengxiang an appealing alternative. On June 17, 1912, Premier Tang Shaoyi resigned, citing “ill health,” and Yuan Shikai announced the formation of a nonpartisan, “transcendentalist” (chaoran zhuyi) government with Lu Zhengxiang at its head.87 Revolutionary Alliance members in the cabinet resigned to underline their support for an openly party-based, parliamentary government rather than one controlled by Yuan.88 The real cause of Tang’s resignation was widely known to be ongoing conﬂicts with Yuan over matters of power and policy. The trigger for Tang’s departure was Yuan’s interference in the selection of provincial military governors.89 The Revolutionary Alliance wanted one of their own, Wang Zhixiang, to command troops in Zhili Province surrounding the capital. Yuan’s military supporters, not surprisingly, opposed the appointment, and Yuan took their side.90 A major reason for Yuan’s recent and successful effort to shift the capital from Nanjing had been to prevent the Alliance from neutralizing his military advantage in Beijing and northern China. Tang was also angry about personal attacks orchestrated by supporters of Yuan Shikai in the Beijing Senate. During a closed session of the body on May 20, a senator from Yuan’s Republican Party had referred to Tang as the “Premier Who ‘Destroys the Nation’ (wangguo),” a potent insult at a time when the ﬁnancially strapped Republic was under pressure from the major powers to accept an onerous “Reorganization Loan” package.91 Tang was also sharply questioned by the Senate about a report that Sun Yat-sen had been given $1 million in government funds to win his support for the move from Nanjing to Beijing.92 The choice of Lu Zhengxiang as Tang Shaoyi’s successor stemmed from Lu’s expertise in foreign affairs, his nonpartisan reputation, and his willingness to carry out directives from above. President Yuan Shikai wanted a prime minister who was both capable and compliant. His ﬁrst choice was his close supporter and a former Qing ofﬁcial, Xu Shichang, who had resigned his posts when Puyi abdicated. Xu was living in retirement in the German concession of Qingdao. The Revolutionary Alliance objected and hurled the epithet “Destroying the Nation” back at Xu Shichang.93 One senator joked that if Xu was being considered “they might as well appoint” Prince Qing, the powerful and notoriously corrupt Manchu head of government from 1903 to 1911.94 Yuan then picked Lu Zhengxiang, who also met his standard of competence and personal loyalty. At ﬁrst the gambit seemed to work. On the strength of Lu’s credentials

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and reputation he was easily approved by the Senate in open session “amid great enthusiasm” in an impressive 74 to 10 vote.95 Leading Alliance ﬁgures like Huang Xing saw supporting Lu as a way to avoid an open ﬁght with Yuan Shikai.96 Lu’s lopsided victory was only possible because many Revolutionary Alliance senators voted for him as well. Lu Zhengxiang’s appointment also beneﬁted from foreign policy pressures on China. The international press reported on June 10 that former Japanese Prime Minister Katsura Taroˉ, who had commanded a division in the Sino-Japanese War and headed the government during the RussoJapanese War, was planning a “sightseeing trip” in Europe for July. His rumored purpose was to visit St. Petersburg for consultations with the Russians.97 Taking advantage of Chinese weakness, Japan and Russia had already negotiated two secret agreements, in 1907 and 1910, related to their shared interests in Outer Mongolia. The suspicion, which proved correct, was that a third was in the ofﬁng.98 In the public mind the hand of Russia, aided by Japan, was ripping the Mongols and Mongolia from the ﬂag and map of China, even as the British made moves to force the Republic to withdraw its troops from Tibet.99 Yuan Shikai beat the drum of foreign threat, reinforcing the feeling that foreign affairs expert Lu Zhengxiang was a timely choice for prime minister.100 As it turned out, Yuan’s play for nonpartisan government was an early move in what became a protracted struggle to outmaneuver and defeat Revolutionary Alliance/Nationalist Party forces by any means possible. As Liao Dawei points out, Yuan Shikai was adept at “attacking as one lures [the enemy] in” (youda youla).101 Lu Zhengxiang was the lure in this particular maneuver representing, as he did for many, unity and nonpartisanship. Within the next year and a half Yuan also attacked his foes, substantially freeing himself from the constraints of constitutional government through a campaign of political co-optation, terror, and military suppression. The moves prepared the way for Yuan’s imperial gambit two years later. However, in summer 1912 the votes and opinions of politicians in the national assembly or Senate still affected the political fortunes of China’s leaders. Song Jiaoren’s efforts to turn the insurrectionary Revolutionary Alliance into a Nationalist Party capable of winning elections and governing the country was predicated on the survival of parliamentary government. Even Yuan assumed that he required parliamentary support to approve foreign loan packages to fund his ministries and armies. No foreign country had yet formally recognized the Chinese Republic, and several, including the United States, professed a desire ﬁrst to see China establish

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and maintain what the French government stipulated as a “regularly constituted parliamentary regime.”102 The Western powers pressed their imperialist agenda in the name of constitutional democracy. As Lu Zhengxiang had himself argued as a Qing diplomat, constitutionalism offered a measure of deterrent value in dealing with foreign powers. Yuan also needed the votes of a majority of senators to remove the “provisional” qualiﬁer from his presidency and consolidate his authority as China’s paramount political leader.103 The United States, led by newly elected President Wilson, waited until the following year, May 2, 1913, to recognize the Chinese Republic. When Yuan ﬁnally engineered his own election as full president by a tame parliament on October 10, 1913, other nations with interests in China followed suit.104 By then constitutional forms were ancillary to foreign hopes that Yuan Shikai as strongman would maintain political order. In summer 1912 parliamentary politics remained central to the political process.

The Senate in Session in Nanjing and Beijing The actual prospects for a democratic and constitutional regime may have been dim, but there was no way to know that for certain at the time. If one could no longer look up to an emperor as the source of political authority, the people and their representatives would have to serve as the foundation of the state. Unfortunately for democrats, even with extensive popular participation in the revolution of 1911, the people in 1912 remained an abstraction only weakly connected to China’s central political processes. The Senate in Beijing, made up in most cases of representatives appointed by provincial governments rather than directly elected, at least leaned in the direction of popular authority. As a result the Senate as institution was a source of legitimacy few seemed willing to cast aside. A senator had roots in a province, city, or region, and this local identity brought to the capital with him an air of representing “popular feeling” (minyi).105 The practice of convening local and later provincial assemblies began in 1907 and had by 1910 produced China’s ﬁrst National Assembly (Zizheng yuan) in Beijing, with half its members elected and half designated by the throne.106 Although repudiated by the revolutionaries in 1911, the assembly had been moving toward a stronger legislative role in government, including the appointment of a budget committee early in 1911.107 Parliamentary politics thus both predated and powerfully shaped the 1911 Revolution.108 During the revolution provincial assembly members

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used their ofﬁcial positions and press connections to mobilize opinion and lead their provinces in breaking with the Qing.109 Parliaments may have been designed by the Qing and destined with the rise of warlordism and the party-state to be rubber stamp bodies, but that was not their actual role or immediate legacy in 1912. Senators who took up their seats in Beijing in 1912 had experienced many political highs and lows in the previous six months. On January 1, 1912, they danced in the streets of Nanjing to celebrate the election of Sun Yat-sen as provisional president and the revolution they helped bring about.110 As individuals and as a cohort the senators represented political and cultural change. A photograph taken at the end of January of the forty-three Nanjing senators shows most wearing Western-style dress, including a few frock coats, with about ten in modern military uniform.111 The senators debated and approved a new constitution through two drafts and thirty-two days of argument, accepted Sun’s resignation in favor of Yuan, weathered the attacks of infuriated suffragists, and quarreled among themselves over the location of the capital before ﬁnally decamping to Beijing.112 Throughout these several months the Senate was a lively place. Despite the fact that the Revolutionary Alliance held predominant power in the Nanjing Senate, two or three other parties emerged in opposition.113 Speeches and debate were notable for being highly emotional.114 Delegates from Fengtian and Zhili threatened to walk out at one point when they were at ﬁrst denied voting rights because their provincial governments had not yet declared independence from the Qing.115 During the debate over whether the Republic’s capital should be Beijing or Nanjing, one delegate threatened to kill himself on the ﬂoor of the Senate if the vote did not go his way.116 Discussions of other questions were civil and thoughtful, like deliberations led by Song Jiaoren and Hu Hanmin over the relative value of centralized versus decentralized governance. With his eye on gaining control of the Beijing government, Song was for a strong central state; as military governor of his home province of Guangdong, Hu wanted localities to have authority commensurate with responsibilities assumed during the revolution.117 Song declared that “the center must be strong if the nation’s strength is to be restored”; Hu, who had taken advantage of provincial autonomy to help women serve in the Guangdong assembly, countered that the center merely concentrated “the poison of dictatorship.”These were the expected growing pains, played out before an attentive public, of a government adjusting to the jarring force of open debate, voting, public disclosure, conﬂicting interests, and political division.

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As historical accounts of the period are quick to point out, China’s early parliamentary experience did not vault senators into positions of power to rival Yuan Shikai. Senators were more consumed with expressing opinions, albeit sometimes translated into resolutions and laws, than actually participating in governance. However, if the most important constructive legacy of the early Republic was a republican political culture of active citizenship, the demonstrated ability of senators to debate and declaim on a national stage was signiﬁcant. The limited role the Senate played as a ruling body was not surprising given the autocratic nature of the Qing, the disorganized condition of the new Republic, and Yuan Shikai’s dictatorial ambitions. The Senate had yet to develop a legislative process to match its formal authority and deliberative functions. The reasons for this failure were several. The collapse of the Qing and rise of Yuan’s presidency gave parliamentary forces little more than a year to make a success of the enterprise. In the meantime the Senate proved to be an unwieldy institution for its own leaders to grasp and direct. The political reporter Huang Yuanyong pointed to a basic lack of leadership in the legislature, though he admitted that key parliamentary ﬁgures like the new speaker in Beijing, Wu Jinglian, were formidable politicians.118 At times legislative proceedings seemed dilatory beyond reason. On routine questions such as when the body should adjourn for dinner, the senators preferred to rely on “a kind of collective assent” rather than permit leaders to determine the pace and structure of deliberations. While most senators did not hold to the anarchism that was popular in China at the time, they shared with anarchists a distrust of leaders and institutional authority. They favored having “careful, constitutional, and imposing discussion,” but their lack of basic knowledge of the issues and penchant for partisan and personal wrangling often produced what Huang denigrated as a “kind of pointless social gathering.”119 At times the Senate could be impressively civil. Carrie Chapman Catt’s visit to a session of the Senate in September 1912 took place on a fairly placid day with an about average sixty members in attendance. Catt’s comments revealed her habitual curiosity about the manners and mores of political Chinese and her respect for the quiet efﬁciency of the body. 7 wore European dress; 6 wore cues [sic]. The majority wore the usual silk robe, now covered with the short outer jacket for comfort. Like the Cantonese [provincial] Assembly the speakers did not recognize the chair but just talked and rivals seemed to respect each other, so all was order and peace.120

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When tensions rose the Senate as an institution barely contained members’ passions and aggression, and the rules of the body did come into play. Throughout May, the ﬁrst month the Beijing Senate was in session, ﬁerce disputes broke out over issues like accreditation of senators during which “the discussions became extremely excited and ﬁnally led to noisy scenes.”121 When Gardner Harding visited the Senate galleries in 1913—by which time relations between Yuan Shikai and the Nationalists had begun their descent toward civil war—he noted the “characteristic heedless idealism of the Southern Republicans,” the endless devotion to symbolic issues, the “abusing and insulting” greetings hurled at representatives of Yuan Shikai, and the cheering that accompanied acts of deﬁance directed toward the president.122 The assassination of Song Jiaoren and the autocratic behavior of Yuan Shikai contributed to this poisoned atmosphere. When the body was not absorbed in argument, brimming with invective, or caught in a quieter moment of civil discourse, the Senate chamber might be nearly empty. The rules of the body stipulated that threeﬁfths of senators needed to be present for a quorum.123 By the time the Senate was reinstalled in Beijing at the end of April, the total number of representatives had grown from 43 to about 120.124 This meant a quorum call for voting purposes was 72 senators. Although the total present during the daily sessions, with Sunday off, on occasion reached almost 100, the more typical attendance ﬁgure was between 60 and 80.125 Without a compelling issue on the agenda, the numbers were much lower. On one occasion in 1912 only one rank-and-ﬁle senator, a member of the Republican Party, made an appearance in addition to Speaker Wu and other leaders.126 In an emotional speech to the nearly empty chamber Wu wept bitterly at this dereliction of duty and resolved to put his own reputation at stake to persuade senators to attend future sessions. The Senate did conform to the body’s rule that “members on the Senate ﬂoor must be able to freely express their opinions.”127 As a result, within weeks the Senate in Beijing had produced a number of distinctive personalities of the type familiar to debating bodies. A press report detailing a session held on May 15 observed that Gu Zhongxiu, leader of the United Republican Party from Zhili Province, “gives speeches and arguments with perfect timing,” while fellow senator Zhang Bolie who hailed from Hubei “hews to the particular interests of Hubei people and disputes the same points over and over again, ever more ﬁercely and abstractly, until his audience grows drowsy with sleep.”128 The issues de-

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bated were quite diverse, ranging from women’s rights to the appointment of cabinet ofﬁcials but also including whether the Ministry of Education or Interior should have jurisdiction over religion, the relationship between provincial and local governments, mechanisms needed for representing pastoral and illiterate citizens in Mongolia and Xinjiang, and a dress code for citizens of the Republic.129 On the last point the Senate, many of whose members wore Western clothes, decided that requiring everyone to adopt Western dress was not yet feasible.130 In June the Senate questioned the staff size of Song Jiaoren’s Ministry of Agriculture, tried to make the government provide detailed budget information, debated the appropriate functions of the cabinet, and subjected various bills to the required multiple readings.131 The Senate grappled with the question of whether and how overseas Chinese might be represented in parliament and entertained a request from native-place societies for special seats in recognition of the fact that many Chinese lived in cities and towns far from hometown residences.132 Though not perfect or even fully functioning as a legislative organ, the Senate took its work and its formalities seriously enough to debate the issues of the day with considerable energy and scruple. It was true that a rainy day in Beijing sometimes left too few senators present to conduct business. This was understandable given the way a shower turned the capital’s unpaved streets and alleyways into mud paths. When inclement weather intervened a morning session might be postponed until the afternoon or canceled and that day’s business shifted to the next day.133 Just as leaders like Sun Yat-sen or Yuan Shikai were subject to criticism and attack, so was the Senate. A Shanghai newspaper in 1912 in an article titled “On the Private Disputes That Are Destroying the Nation,” described Senate proceedings as a meaningless exchange of petty and partisan attacks. Someone from Party A makes a speech without any real intention of explaining what the words mean. In any case, everyone from Party B opposes what has just been said, and its members all clap in approval regardless. When you do not take national politics as the foundation or treat political opinions as worthy of real discussion, you have a private dispute (sizheng), and that is it.134

The Senate not only faced the major challenge of countering the raw power and formidable guile of Yuan Shikai and minor ones like reaching a quorum on a rainy day, but also the subtle matter of persuading fellow citizens that “private disputes” involving Hubei chauvinists like Zhang Bolie or ambitious politicians like Song Jiaoren had a legitimate place in na-

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tional politics at a time when China and the public good were supposed to be served above all else. Such conﬂicts are the fuel legislatures the world over run on as they drive or lumber toward decisions. In China in 1912 a hunger for meaningful decisions was matched by a general distrust of the kind of contentious process that normally precedes a vote.

Political Parties in Motion and Collision The ﬂuid, expressive, unpredictable, and undisciplined nature of parliamentary behavior was in part a consequence of the relative weakness of political parties. Parties were coming to dominate the political landscape, and they were strong enough to lend organizational substance, for example, to pro-Yuan and anti-Yuan forces. They were less able to whip members into line when the logic of parliamentary struggle required cohesion. The modern Chinese political party that took shape in 1911 and 1912 was a profusion of political organizations, clubs, and tendencies. They had little of the coherence that began to characterize the Nationalist Party and Communist Party a decade and more later. In the early Republic politicians cheerfully deﬁed their own party leadership when it served their purposes. Parties switched support from one coalition to another. This is a common enough strategy in any parliamentary system. More surprising was the penchant of Huang Xing and many others to belong to more than one party at the same time. As far as the 1912 Senate and its successor bicameral Senate and House (Zhongyi yuan) in 1913 were concerned, the practice produced the odd but telling effect of more party members than legislators. From the nearly six hundred seats in the new House ﬁlled by the 1913 election, political parties claimed a total of seven hundred members.135 Most political parties were younger than the infant Republic. With its founding date in 1905, the seven-year-old Revolutionary Alliance/ Nationalist Party was a veteran organization by comparison. To the extent that parties looked to be simply loose collections of politicians bent on winning political advantage, they carried an aura of power for some and for others the stigma of faction.Yet under a parliamentary republic, how else could one do the kind of political arithmetic and political coordinating necessary to make China “republican” in fact as well as name? Everyone with an eye to winning ofﬁce or showing their talents seemed determined to take the plunge into party politics.136 Meanwhile, ordinary citizens were said to have nowhere to go to address their worries and concerns, except read lengthy accounts in their newspapers of the polit-

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ical stories and “dark plots” emanating from the capital. As one sign of the expectations attached to representative government, provincial newspapers like the Shengjing Times in Shenyang and the Changsha Daily closely covered goings-on in the Senate. What transpired in the Senate was taken to be national news, made both by individual personalities and by the political parties they led or belonged to. When Lu Zhengxiang arrived in Beijing in May he found “the capital was in ferment, political circles were seething, and the whole country was disturbed and agitated.”137 Lu, as he took up his position leading the Foreign Ministry, derided the ubiquity of what he dismissed as a “battalion of place-hunters.”138 This was another predictable feature of the new Republican politics: the surge of hopeful ofﬁcials toward the capital. Lu failed to see that along with the plots, the networking, and the corruption he condemned, the Republic also seethed with ideas and visions, ranging from political democracy and women’s suffrage to extending citizenship to the Inner Mongolian steppe and the Chinese diaspora, not so different in spirit from the projects he had mind for himself and the government he now helped lead and administer. By summer 1912 senators had divided into several political parties of varying degrees of coherence. With a tripling in membership of the Senate in Beijing, the Revolutionary Alliance lost its earlier numerical dominance. Press reports in April and May took note of this by counting “old senators” and “new senators” separately as they arrived in Beijing and speculating about the impending “War of the New vs. the Old.”139 Revolutionaries after half a year were now “old” by dint of their experience as legislators. Conservatives, including recycled Qing ofﬁcials, were suddenly “new.” The Revolutionary Alliance, with about forty senators, retained a formal though wavering commitment to the kind of social and economic transformations, including women’s rights, embodied in Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People.140 With the resignation of Tang Shaoyi as premier and four Revolutionary Alliance leaders as cabinet members, the revolutionaries suspended their tacit alliance with Yuan Shikai. While this reorientation did not derail Lu Zhengxiang’s nomination and approval as prime minister, party politics by its nature weakened support for Yuan’s transcendental cabinet and, by extension, new cabinet nominees. The day before the vote on Lu as premier, the Revolutionary Alliance met in Beijing at the Huguang Lodge and decided that it would no longer participate in a “mixed cabinet” composed of different parties and factions and would aim instead at a “party cabinet.”141 A second group of senators, the twenty-ﬁve-strong Uniﬁed Republi-

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can Party, was on the political fence but in the process of shifting support from Yuan Shikai to the Revolutionary Alliance as a step toward joining the Nationalist Party in August. Some observers mocked the Uniﬁed Republican Party as “the ﬁckle party” for its apparent opportunism.142 The United Republicans had been founded as a breakaway faction of the Revolutionary Alliance a few months earlier after Alliance member Jing Fanyue failed in efforts to reform the Alliance to his liking.143 A third political grouping, known simply as the Republican Party, could count on about forty votes, or about the same strength in the Senate as the Revolutionary Alliance. The Republicans backed Yuan Shikai and, in keeping with their conservative stance, derided the Revolutionary Alliance as the party of the “mob,” a reference to the Alliance’s populist tendencies. Alliance members returned the favor by calling the Republicans the “slave party,” a classic republican insult, for their close support of Yuan Shikai.144 The emerging partnership of the Revolutionary Alliance and the Uniﬁed Republican Party promised to generate a bloc of sixty-ﬁve members (to forty votes for the pro-Yuan forces) and thereby place control of parliament and veto power over cabinet appointments within reach.145 However, ﬁrst the Alliance would have to prevent its members from joining Yuan Shikai’s new Lu Zhengxiang cabinet, a task requiring more party discipline than the Alliance currently possessed. Lu Zhengxiang needed to parlay the support he had won for himself, and for impartial government, into a majority of votes for the six ministers Yuan Shikai had just selected to replace the four Revolutionary Alliance members who had quit and two others Yuan had discarded. In an intensely partisan environment, Lu promoted the message of transcendentalism. The faintly spiritual and pointedly nonpolitical connotations of the concept suited Lu’s moralizing and professional approach to affairs of this world but did not match the current political climate in Beijing. The ideal of impartiality did draw luster from the negative image of political and party intrigue and maneuvering in the capital. Impartiality, appealing as a countercurrent to ﬁerce politicking, was another dimension of the conventional Chinese notion of public (gong). If a moderate ideological agenda promised to win the Revolutionary Alliance a majority, perhaps an openly nonpolitical program could create a consensus among all parties to the beneﬁt of Yuan Shikai. In 1912 parties lacked the strength to dominate political life but were prominent enough to attract blame for conﬂict and stalemate in Beijing. Lu Zhengxiang’s proposed cabinet was billed as one that would transcend partisanship by including im-

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partial ﬁgures like Lu who would simply do what was right for the country. As one newspaper announced with an air of hope and a theatrical ﬂourish in late June, “New men ascend the great stage.”146 Despite the appealing label, and even with Lu Zhengxiang in the lead, the transcendental cabinet was transparently political to most politicians or newspaper readers and therefore a tough sell even on its own terms. The six nominees on Lu’s list, plus other holdovers from the Tang Shaoyi cabinet, amounted to yet another cabinet of mixed political allegiances. Especially galling to Revolutionary Alliance leaders was Yuan’s success in persuading two erstwhile Alliance members to join in deﬁance of the clear, albeit last-minute, directive from their party prohibiting such collaboration.147 Yuan Shikai basically controlled the makeup of the body, with ﬁve of the six handpicked by him. Only one nominee, diplomat Hu Weide for the Ministry of Communications, had been suggested by Lu. Hu Weide was a graduate of the same Shanghai language school Lu had attended and had served with Lu in the Qing embassy in St. Petersburg.148 Yuan’s willingness to include in the cabinet individuals with Revolutionary Alliance connections gave the appearance of neutrality. Since this gesture of inclusion undercut the newly stated desire of the Revolutionary Alliance to stay out of government until after the upcoming elections, Yuan’s actions infuriated many Revolutionary Alliance members, including Alliance senators.149 Yuan Shikai held the initiative in this messy political situation. He was not much of a leader in the sense of winning or eliciting “active participants” among the public for his plans or policies.150 He was, however, a master strategist adept at maneuvering forces already in motion. No party leader himself, Yuan grasped the signiﬁcance of parties as political actors and adjusted for the weight and dynamism they added to nationallevel politics. With Lu Zhengxiang’s help he repackaged the post–Tang Shaoyi cabinet as a nonpartisan initiative while encouraging partisan defections. This was a clever tactic and another example of “attacking as one lures [the enemy] in.” Those who were persuaded or distracted by the idea of a transcendental cabinet were thrown off balance, and those who saw through the rhetoric were forced to divide their anger among Yuan, Lu, and Revolutionary Alliance defectors. These political factors widened the existing, constitutionally imposed divide between president and cabinet on the one hand and members of parliament on the other. Although cabinet members could be serving members of parliament, this was not required, and the conventions and physical layout of the legislature discouraged close contact between cab-

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inet and senators. A later description of the bicameral national assembly in 1918 captures some of the resulting dysfunctional consequences. In the Senate and House of Representatives in Peking, the ministerial benches are placed on the platform on each side of the Speaker, quite apart from those of ordinary members. When speaking, a minister has to ascend the tribune, and on concluding he immediately leaves the House. There is no feeling of community between ministers and members; and there is no inducement to co-operation between the legislature and the executive parts of the Government. The one views the other with animosity and contempt; and each thinks that the other is transgressing its own power.151

As a sign of this institutional separation, Lu had not spoken to the Senate before or immediately after his nomination and election in late June. Instead of outlining his political program at that time, he waited nearly three weeks to make this, his ﬁrst parliamentary appearance.152 In the meantime he made a few pronouncements about his great area of strength, foreign policy.153 He sent a telegraphic message to provincial ofﬁcials that included conventionally deprecatory remarks and an “exhortation” to support the Republican government.154 Lu also readied an economic and ﬁnancial plan.155 By custom, he did not rise from the Senate itself or even from the ministerial benches. Instead, like Tang Shaoyi in Nanjing on April 1, he arrived from his ofﬁces, speech in hand. Unlike Tang Shaoyi, Lu Zhengxiang faced senators with whom for the most part he only had distant relations and who were largely independent of his will. This independence was a result of both the recent revolutionary experiences of many senators and Yuan’s unwillingness to share power, a political fact that encouraged deﬁance among other non-Alliance senators. If the Senate could not be a full partner in an executive-dominated government, the body could still subject one of Yuan’s representatives to intense scrutiny. Senators had added to Premier Tang Shaoyi’s political miseries by questioning his policies, patriotism, and integrity. All eyes would now be on his successor as Lu sought to turn authority in theory into fact and effect.

Lu Zhengxiang Loses a Speech By the time Lu was ready to propose the names of the six ministers on July 18, 1912, many Revolutionary Alliance senators had come to view him, and the new cabinet, as pawns of Yuan Shikai. Only the loyalist and minority Republican Party was expected to give solid backing to Lu and the new cabinet as a show of support for President Yuan and a uniﬁed

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national government. Lu seemed well positioned to exploit unease about factional threats to unity as long as he remembered that such factions did exist and that by now he could count on something less than an automatic majority. He stood a chance of persuading senators who recently had voted for him to offer their support to the new slate of ministers if they saw it as the prime minister’s cabinet of experts rather than Yuan’s collection of cronies. With politics in the capital sliding further toward partisanship and conﬂict, any such effort was likely to be an uphill battle. As events unfolded it became clear Lu Zhengxiang was not much aware he had a hill to climb. In his defense, none other than the speaker of the Senate, Wu Jinglian, misled Lu in late June by informing him that there was no opposition in the Senate to the new cabinet members or to Lu himself.156 In fact, opposition rose in intensity as Lu’s date with the Senate approached. On July 18, 1912, at 9:30 a.m. the Senate began the day’s session by debating the seemingly routine question of when a vote on the cabinet nominations should take place. Lu would have admired such early morning punctuality. Not surprisingly, supporters of Yuan Shikai wanted a quick vote right after Lu’s speech. Revolutionary Alliance members preferred a delay of at least one day to consider the qualiﬁcations of the six nominees. This would also permit them to assert the independence of the legislative body. This was a replay of the debate in Nanjing on April 1 over delays or adjournment in response to Tang Shaoyi’s list of cabinet appointees. That controversy was resolved by senators agreeing to go into closed session and then approving most of the proposed names. Now the Senate was closely divided along partisan lines. With Uniﬁed Republican Party leader Wu Jinglian in the chair as speaker, the debate became more heated as the morning wore on. Members began by calmly disagreeing over what was best for the country and ﬁnished by launching into pointed personal attacks. Ninety-ﬁve senators were present, testimony to the importance of Lu Zhengxiang’s appearance and the vote that might follow.157 This was a far better turnout than Catt witnessed two months later, a huge presence compared to the token assembly that drove Speaker Wu Jinglian to tears, and twenty to thirty more than on a typical day. The main item on the agenda was the proposal for new cabinet ministers. Wu announced to the chamber that he had called Lu on the telephone and asked him to give a speech introducing the six nominees at 11:00 a.m. The debate then began. The procedure for holding forth on this or any other issue was ﬁrst to gain recognition by the speaker and then announce to the chamber one’s

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name and seat number.158 As Catt had noticed, this rule was not always followed. Parliamentary records from 1912 denote senators by number and name, for example, “No. 52” Gu Zhongxiu. In debate senators normally referred to each other by number—“No. 52”—and less commonly by name—“Mr. Gu.” This mode of address was in line with standard parliamentary practices around the world designed to soften the personal nature of debate. At an earlier session one senator, frustrated by the challenge of ﬁtting a complete discussion into the allotted time, made an “extremely elegant” defense of the rules of order by way of urging that “if you wish to speak you ought to ﬁrst enter your number with the parliamentarian.”159 On July 18 denoting senators by number did little to suppress the parliamentary discord stirred by the points at issue. Senator Li Su opened the discussion with an appeal for a delay, couched, however, in language sympathetic to a nonpartisan approach. “Can we agree to vote tomorrow?” he asked. “These are grave matters for the country. . . . I did not come [to Beijing] to preserve political parties but to play a leading role in our nation’s crisis.”160 Senator No. 27, Zhan Yunlin, disagreed.“I think we can vote today. Why wait for tomorrow?” These mild exchanges quickly boiled over into a more a pointed rejoinder from another senator: “No. 27’s comments are completely unreasonable. We only received the President’s nominations today and so an [immediate] vote is wholly improper.” When Speaker Wu tried to guide the debate with his own interventions, a senator objected: “If the Speaker may interrupt members, why cannot members interrupt each other too?”161 Wu Jinglian, in remarks that anticipate Zhang Ji’s plaintive call for civility at the August 25 Nationalist Party convention, cautioned the members,“Every gentleman who speaks should respect parliamentary rules. Otherwise we will not be able to maintain order.” As the debate continued more and more speakers made Lu Zhengxiang’s appearance the pivot of the nomination process, either as the occasion for an immediate vote once he had introduced the nominees and explained the reasoning behind their selection or as a cause for a delay of one day until senators had time to consider nominee qualiﬁcations. Proponents of delay, like the Uniﬁed Republican Party leader Gu Zhongxiu, whose oratory had been judged “elegant” and well timed in the press, argued that not enough senators were present to justify an immediate vote. The implications of this business are very serious and so the vote should be ﬁrst published in the parliamentary agenda. Today [the proposed list] will be provisionally offered and so even an afternoon vote should not be permitted. Since there are so many members not present who therefore cannot vote, that will

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not do as reasonable. Of course members ought to attend every day. We have no reason not to come. That is up to each of us. After Premier Lu comes to explain, we can then vote tomorrow.162

With a quorum of ninety-ﬁve senators present, Gu’s claim of too few senators to hold a vote must have struck some of his colleagues as specious. With so many senators chiming in to offer their views of what was proper or improper, the rules themselves came to ﬁgure prominently in the discussion. Li Guozhen pointed out that “according to Senate Rule 32, the Senate’s parliamentary agenda is to be set with two days’ notice and an announcement to members published in the ofﬁcial gazette.”163 By this time the more basic parliamentary convention that one may not speak without recognition from the chair was being ﬂouted as “Numbers 23, 30, 119, and 45 all spoke at once.” Informal coordination of remarks based on mutual respect was no longer possible. Senator Li Shuying insisted that Liu Chengyu, “No. 45,” “has spoken more than four times and ought to be prohibited [from speaking further].” Liu replied, “I have not spoken more than four times.” (According to the record he had spoken twice, not counting his failed attempt to gain the ﬂoor against three fellow senators.) Liu then went on the offensive by claiming to be the victim of a personal attack: “One may not groundlessly slander someone. A slanderer [like Li Shuying] himself ought to be prevented from speaking!” Other senators sprang to Hubei Senator Liu Chengyu’s defense, including, of course, his fellow provincial, No. 28, Zhang Bolie.164 Senator Chen Tongxi, acknowledging that Liu was getting the better of the exchange, pushed back against the aggrieved Liu Chengyu: “How can No. 45’s evil words be permitted to wound someone like this?” By then an alert or impatient Zhang Yaozeng, a scholarly revolutionary from Yunnan, observed, “Mr. Liu has certainly spoken four times by now. It is important that parliamentary regulations be respected.”165 Wu Jinglian made a ﬁnal effort to impose order and offer a remedy from the chair by appealing to a higher, national interest. Voting on cabinet ministers is a matter of national concern, not simply the business of individuals. For this reason, we must not permit such conﬂict as this to take place. What has transpired today makes it impossible for the chair to maintain order. Premier Lu will come and introduce the qualiﬁcations of the nominees. Tomorrow we will vote. One day will not matter. Those who agree may agree. Those who disagree may disagree.166

By imposing a brief delay Wu may have revealed a partisan preference for the procedure favored by the Revolutionary Alliance, but it is also

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hard to imagine where a reasonable compromise lay between a vote held today and one tomorrow. Wu might have called for a closed session. That he did not do so probably meant that he knew there was little by way of a consensus to work with among the senators he faced. The debate shows that senators were well aware of the tensions between partisan competition and nation’s and the public’s interest in a good outcome. Less evident is conﬁdence that the public good can emerge out of partisan conﬂict as long as parliamentary decorum is respected. Bickering continued up until the time Lu Zhengxiang entered the hall. Though the Republic was young in summer 1912, the senators as a group were quite capable of using debater’s tactics (partisans wrapped in the ﬂag of national interest and nonpartisanship), legalisms (citing rules one’s colleagues are not familiar with to one’s own advantage), and personal abuse (snide remarks and charges of slander). Many in the hall had honed these skills in political meetings, provincial assemblies, and Nanjing and Beijing Senate sessions over recent months and years. Just as political activists carried on in sometimes uninhibited fashion throughout China, senators likewise felt free to improvise their own discordant notes. The Senate proved an uncertain vehicle for making policy or checking the power of the executive. The body was, however, quite capable of expressing a range of passionate views and focusing debate on matters of genuine public concern. Members knew the public eye was on them and fought for advantage on a Senate stage well lit by access to the public galleries and press reports from reporters seated there. However much consensus and unity was prized in principle, a parliamentary institution such as the Senate is designed by its rules to bring an issue to an “eitheror, yes or no” vote, and with a certain amount of rancor and polarization as natural by-products.167 There was no ﬁstﬁght. No one threw a chair or an ink pot, much less pulled a gun or plunged a dagger into a podium. The scene set for Lu Zhengxiang’s speech required no props or band music to add to the drama. The atmosphere on the Senate ﬂoor by 11:00 a.m. when Lu arrived to speak was tense if not poisoned. The appearance of nonpartisan support for Lu Zhengxiang’s efforts barely masked a deeper conﬂict between the Revolutionary Alliance and Yuan Shikai, a divide that hardened during debate over the timing of the vote. One suspects that Lu had little idea he was walking into the proverbial tiger’s lair. Given Lu Zhengxiang’s approach to public appearances of this kind, we can be conﬁdent that he had selected his wardrobe with care and prepared his words in advance. When Lu entered the Senate chambers the senators applauded and “re-

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spectfully rose” to their feet, expecting, as senators claimed later, a discussion of the “weighty affairs of the republic.”168 This was a seemingly friendlier reception than Tang Shaoyi had received on April 1 in Nanjing. Perhaps the senators stood because they were still on their toes, ready to continue the morning’s ﬁght. When Lu opened his mouth, however, he said little at ﬁrst about government policy or important political issues of the day. He did not follow the ﬁve-minute, fact-based approach pursued successfully by Tang during his cabinet presentation. Instead he launched into a discussion of contemporary manners and mores, a subject undoubtedly much on his mind in the reform of his ministry as he struggled against nepotism and lack of professionalism. In his speech Lu surprised the senators by attacking gambling and excessive banqueting, criticizing the latter as “unbearably vulgar.”169 He also compared replacing cabinet ministers with “ordering off a menu.”170 Perhaps he meant to compare the pool of Chinese political ﬁgures available for appointment to the best a ﬁne restaurant has to offer; but the senators took the witty conceit as an insult. In keeping with his well-cultivated public persona, Lu began with his signature diplomatic politesse and as if he were speaking to fellow diplomats in The Hague. Today is the ﬁrst time I have come to this august chamber and appeared before you gentlemen, and the ﬁrst time I have directly conducted business with you. I am extraordinarily happy to do so.

Then he sketched elements of his background in public service that had resulted in appointments as foreign minister and, now, prime minister. Twenty years ago I went abroad. On this occasion of my return I have met with a myriad of new impressions. During those twenty years abroad, in my heart I have always warmly thought of China. For not a single day has China been absent from my thoughts. Because the system of three years as a minister abroad and one year home had not yet been made deﬁnite at that time, it was hard to ﬁnd opportunities to return home to China. Yet every time I encountered a fellow Chinese while abroad, whether as a personal guest, a merchant, a student, or a hardworking laborer, there was not a one I did not meet cordially; because I really do like Chinese people. While in ofﬁce abroad there was no duty too menial for me to do, including helping out in the kitchen. I was even obliged to make out my own bills. Now, on this occasion of my homecoming, having only a small number of friends in China, I hope you gentlemen will treat me as I treated the countrymen I met abroad.

As a diplomat Lu had been sincerely bothered by the gulf between embassy personnel and traveling or sojourning Chinese who as common-

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ers were unwilling to “go and call on China’s envoys.” He recalled,“When I was an embassy secretary I often asked them why they were unwilling to see embassy ofﬁcers; they would reply that they did not dare see them, not dare.”171 He also expressed the hope that allowances would be made for the fact that, as a diplomat, he had spent so much time away from China. He implied that he was owed this since he had helped fellow Chinese abroad. Whether mention of his willingness to perform menial duties in the service of his country was meant to establish republican credentials, play against the more obvious fact of his impeccable tailoring and elegant grooming, or offer further evidence of his service ethos is not clear. He did go some distance beyond his president’s “Call me Mr. Yuan” gambit in expressing solidarity with his fellow citizens. The “I really do like Chinese people” comment must have struck some in his audience as condescending. By comparing his return to China and needing support to a Chinese arriving in Europe and receiving Lu’s help, he risked making his own country alien ground, an occupational hazard for a professional diplomat but one a diplomat normally tries not to draw attention to. Professing affection for his compatriots in this way suggests the cultural divide that shaped Lu’s undeniable patriotism. He had “Europeanized” himself for China (and to achieve his own and his family’s ambitions) and in the process become unlike most Chinese in personal habits and religious belief. Further complicating his effort to communicate was the manner and delivery of his spoken performance. Lu did not speak French of course, the language of his diplomatic triumphs at The Hague, but Shanghai-accented Mandarin in a quiet, measured voice that was his stock-in-trade as an ambassador but that many in the hall had trouble hearing and understanding.172 Despite a career in public life, Lu Zhengxiang did not regard himself as a trained or accomplished orator. Twenty-ﬁve years later in a conversation at the abbey of Saint André in Lophem-les-Bruges, Belgium, with his biographer, Luo Guang, Lu welcomed Luo’s news that young Chinese seminarians in Rome now spent summers practicing public speaking and essay writing in Chinese as preparation for the mission ﬁeld. Training in public speaking! When I was in Russia, Russian politics was being readied for reform and [Russia was] preparing to adopt a parliamentary system. On one occasion the Russian foreign affairs minister, in discussion, spoke to me [in public] in a very unpleasant manner. Our [Chinese] custom of discussion, our way of opening a negotiation, by contrast is to prefer mutuality on the part of both parties. I had no experience in public speaking in front of hundreds of people. I could write a report in an orderly and system-

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atic fashion. But if called before an assembly to make a report I could only hold the papers and read. If others got up and raised questions, I didn’t have the presence of mind to respond spontaneously.173

For all of Lu’s ability to negotiate diplomatic protocol and nuance, and his obvious skill writing and speaking from a prepared script, he found the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary oratory and debate intimidating and even un-Chinese. His 1939 reminiscences consciously or unconsciously echo the events of July 18, 1912, another occasion when he was “called before an assembly.” In the next section of his remarks Lu entered into territory that surprised and appalled the senators seated before him. In the past twenty years, the ﬁrst time I returned to China [1903] was only for three months and I only spent two weeks here in the capital. The second time [1908] I was in China about eleven months, but my contacts with various circles was rather limited. These same circles looked on me as a strange creature since I was not willing to consort with prostitutes or ﬂatter ofﬁcials. Nor did my relatives succeed in conducting the business they sought with me. They complained I was neither willing to take advantage of people nor willing to borrow money and, therefore, in the realm of social intercourse was extremely cold. This time too I am unwilling to consort with prostitutes, fawn over ofﬁcials, manipulate people, borrow money, or call on people to come and manage my affairs.

Lu must have thought a broadside against corruption, sexual license, hedonism, nepotism, and favoritism would advertise his qualiﬁcations as a nonpartisan,“transcendental” ofﬁcial. He certainly objected to these kinds of immoralities and abuses of power. In admittedly small ways, armed with his briefcase professionalism, he had been ﬁghting against them since he had returned to China as foreign minister. When Lu later explained his reluctant support of Yuan Shikai’s effort to make himself emperor, his criticism of Yuan was directed not at the president’s subversion of the Republic but his acting “for his personal advantage and the advantage of his eldest son and children.”174 For Lu Zhengxiang, defense of the public interest meant holding private appetites and interests at bay. In this regard Lu, though marked by a Christian sensitivity to sins of the ﬂesh, seems more Confucian than European. In his memoirs Lu made a point of recounting his own refusal to accept aristocratic titles from Yuan even as he signed off on imperial honors for other supporters of the scheme.175 For all his Westernized habits of mind and appearance, Lu’s ethical devotion was Chinese in his reliance on selﬂessness as proof of good intentions.176 Lu’s boss, Yuan Shikai, was fond of repeat-

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ing, “All for the public good and nothing for the self.” Lu Zhengxiang took this to heart. Accentuating the negative in a message to a political class widely known to indulge in such sensual recreations and privileges was a risky move. These were the kind of criticisms suffragists used to wound and alienate many in the same audience. It was true that Lu himself relied on personal connections, to the unfortunate Ambassador Xu Jingcheng early in his career and, beginning in 1908 and now more obviously, to his current master Yuan Shikai. In the manner of a conﬁdent moralist, Lu did not regard such alliances as corrupting. However, having attacked the bad behavior of family, friends, and political allies, he could hardly expect to win over enemies who differed among themselves in ideology and political afﬁliations but shared a political culture that thrived on connections and deal making. Of a piece with his moral concerns and tendency toward introspection, Lu then became even more personal in thoughts he shared with the tough-minded, fractious, and, by now, restive men before him. Late at night I think about such things. Today is actually one of the most auspicious days in my life. When I was living in foreign countries I did not think much about my date of birth because my mother died when I was rather young. This homecoming might be considered my second birth. [Of course], what I have just said is not within the realm of public affairs.

Not only had Lu Zhengxiang’s mother died when he was only six, but his father, who had advised against going abroad in diplomatic service, died in 1901 when Lu was in St. Petersburg.177 Lu asked to return home to mourn his father but received a promotion in lieu of fulﬁlling his ﬁlial obligations. His life had included considerable sacriﬁce familiar to sojourning Chinese and commensurate rewards. Within the set of personal, familial, social, and political relationships circling out from the self, Lu had redeﬁned where his loyalties lay, on more than one occasion, in favor of China and against family and friends. This was one of the subtler items on his résumé as a good ofﬁcial. His unease after coming home to a country that had changed in myriad ways and not at all in others was certainly shared by many at the time. However, the heartfelt expression of these sentiments was not appreciated by senators who had spent the morning heatedly debating each other “within the realm of public affairs.” Senator Gu Zhongxiu, who published a history of the period ﬁve years later and who was present in the hall from the beginning of the Senate debate through the end of Lu

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Zhengxiang’s speech, wrote that Lu’s speech was nothing but “menus and birthdays and all kinds of other incomprehensible stuff.”178 Ten days later Gu helped lead an effort to impeach Lu for incompetence.179 According to Senator Gu, in Prime Minister Lu’s speech there was “from beginning to end not a word about politics. The whole chamber was ﬂabbergasted.” One doubts that anyone had expected Lu to talk about his mother or to underscore the fact that late at night he imagined them whoring and otherwise amusing themselves, while Lu remained faithful to his foreign wife and quietly worked on the papers he brought home from the ofﬁce. Even as Lu spoke on July 18, the disappointment of many senators, and the freedom felt by others to no longer suppress their hostility toward Lu as the agent of Yuan Shikai, surfaced in murmurs of discontent.180 When Lu Zhengxiang saw and heard the uproar below the podium, his response was not to stare down or otherwise tame his audience as Liang Qichao or Sun Yat-sen might have done. As he himself admitted, he was not much good at unrehearsed public remarks or political theatrics. Instead, no doubt grimly grasping his prepared remarks, Lu hurried through his introduction of the six cabinet nominees, commencing with a belated, “[Now] I will speak instead of governmental affairs. Today I have come to the Senate to explain the reasons for proposing cabinet members.”181 Lu Zhengxiang then gave a brief sketch of the backgrounds of each of the six ministers proposed, just as Tang had done on April 1. In keeping with the “men of talent” theme given him by Yuan Shikai, a motif wholly consistent with his own public and private persona, Lu emphasized the foreign education, governmental experience, and technical training of the nominees.182 The ﬁnal section of Lu’s speech contained some of what senators had called for earlier in the morning. If he had given that speech rather than his sermon, he might have yet won the day. By now Lu had lost both his audience and his speech. Legislators reacted in disbelief and with “moans and groans” and “eyebrows wrinkled in consternation.”183 Some present were speechless, apparently thinking Lu was “making a big joke” or a “humorous speech.”184 Lu’s demeanor belied any such humorous intent. He might have been an affable person; but, unlike Zhang Binglin, he certainly was not a jokester. Lu Zhengxiang left the Senate hurriedly to return home.When the six nominees heard what had happened, they all wrote to Yuan Shikai and asked that their nominations be withdrawn.185 Lu continued on the job for a time, working on the vexing Mongolian issue for example.186 He asked Yuan Shikai for a ﬁve-day leave of absence, but the president refused.187

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A few days later Lu submitted the ﬁrst of what became a series of resignation letters.188 If a pointed remark by a tsarist ofﬁcial still rankled decades later, the hostile response he received from senators that morning must have been upsetting in the extreme. A month later, after the full extent of the negative reaction to his appearance became clear and the Senate’s attempt to impeach him failed, Lu Zhengxiang checked himself into a suite in the French Hospital.189 Like Tang Shaoyi, Lu had become too “ill” to continue, and, perhaps, he really did feel sick. A colleague later recalled that Lu’s health was always “extremely delicate.”190 The press reported that he was examined by French and English doctors.191 As modern institutions went, a hospital at that moment was preferable to the Senate or the Foreign Ministry. Politicians Lu faced on July 18, many of whom had earlier supported him or acquiesced in his appointment, characterized his speech-making efforts as “petty, absolutely devoid of policy, and [proving Lu] deﬁnitely inadequate to the task of serving as prime minister.”192 He failed to share any“political opinions”and instead“only spoke of contemptible things.”193 Others termed his speech “wretchedly incompetent and unbearably vulgar.”194 Given Lu’s self-image, these attacks would be especially painful. One sign of the trauma inﬂicted by the speech and its aftermath is the way Lu skips over the episode in his memoirs.195 He merely alludes to an initial “reluctance to enter into domestic politics” in 1912 and confesses that the responsibilities he took on were “sufﬁcient to absorb the energies of a stronger man than I.” Contemporary newspaper reports indicated that senators were “dissatisﬁed in the extreme.”196 Lu’s speech was widely termed “scandalous.”As a result,“public opinion underwent a huge change” in favor of “party government.”197 This shift in support of the Revolutionary Alliance position, already in motion before Lu spoke, suggests that more than a few senators may have seen a boisterously negative reaction to Lu’s remarks as an opportunity to discredit Yuan’s plans and improve their own prospects. A recent review of the events concludes that reaction to the speech was “nothing more than a pretext” for rejecting the cabinet appointees and undermining Yuan Shikai’s government.198 Press accounts reported that some senators appear to have done just that.199 However, the intensity of the debate preceding Lu’s speech, the provocative contents of the prime minister’s remarks criticizing the venal state of the Republican political elite, and the vocal nature of the response in and out of the hall suggest otherwise. Something akin to the opposite of the “thunderous applause” a winning performance typically produced for Sun Yat-sen or Shen

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Peizhen had sounded. Lu’s misstep gave his and Yuan Shikai’s opponents the opening they needed. Lu’s defenders argued that his speech was intended to satirize the “sickness” of the culture of the day and that Premier Lu had the right “medicine for saving the country.”200 His comments about the corrupting effects of personal connections were not in themselves outlandish. The banker Bian Baimei would later hold comparable sentiments about the way such ties corrupted lending practices.201 Lu’s supporters also attributed certain odd turns of phrase and examples in the speech to Lu’s years abroad serving as a diplomat and his attempt to translate foreign ideas and expressions into Chinese. Moreover, with times as dangerous as these, supporters said, Lu Zhengxiang should be given a chance to be tested against actual problems facing the ﬁnancially strapped and diplomatically insecure Chinese government. President Yuan, not much of an orator himself but someone who in the past had admired Lu’s skills in this area, grumpily opined that no speech that short could prove a person’s lack of qualiﬁcations. Reversing his camp’s earlier support for an immediate decision, Yuan appealed to the Senate to postpone the vote.202 Despite these efforts Lu’s cause was lost, and the next day the Senate, with the Revolutionary Alliance and the Uniﬁed Republican Party in the lead, rejected his six cabinet appointments by margins of two to one and, for good measure, passed a vote of no conﬁdence in Lu Zhengxiang.203 Even members of Yuan’s own Republican Party deserted the sinking political ship.204 Although Lu Zhengxiang was sidelined, the political struggle for control of the Beijing government was not over. Yuan Shikai, angry and frustrated that his cabinet had been rejected and Lu humiliated, used a mixture of appeals to the national interest, slander, rumormongering, and threats to persuade the Senate to install ﬁve of the six ministers rejected on July 18.205 For their part, Yuan’s adversaries in the Senate were also in high dudgeon. The Revolutionary Alliance was said to be “making a strong ﬁght” to take over the Senate.206 As Zhang Yufa observes, summer 1912 witnessed the high tide of parliamentary activism.207 Another, contemporary view had it that the atmosphere in the Senate was daily becoming “more horrible” and descending into “absolute chaos” as proand anti-Yuan legislators battled it out.208 In response to the senators’ spirited actions, the Presidential Ofﬁce ﬁred off an immediate rejoinder. On this occasion the cabinet ofﬁcers were proposed but simply could not be approved. Thankfully, there are many others who can do the work of a cabinet ofﬁcer. If they cannot be passed, the government will again propose. If

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those too cannot be passed, the government will again propose. It only remains to be seen if the Senate will be able to stand its ground.209

Coming from almost any politician other than Yuan, this comment might be interpreted as a show of resolve and patience rather than thinly veiled menace. The details of Yuan Shikai’s political counteroffensive suggest the homage an autocrat sometimes pays to public opinion. If meetings, circular telegrams, and testimonials were the stuff of public life, Yuan and his supporters could supply these too, albeit with a vengeance and larded with thuggish elements designed to intimidate rather than persuade opponents. Yuan Shikai invited sixty senators to the presidential mansion for a tea party.210 Although it was one of those rainy, muddy days in Beijing, in a sign of the president’s power most senators found their way to his residence.211 In his remarks to the crowd of politicians, Yuan took the high road and stressed that the political situation was urgent, the international climate was dangerous, and government ﬁnances were in an extreme state of crisis. Meanwhile, security forces allied with the president held a meeting of the Beijing Military and Police Federation at the Anqing Lodge on July 25 for senators, journalists, and sympathetic politicians and sent an open or “circular” telegram attacking the Senate for indifference to the national crisis at hand.212 Senators opposed to the cabinet nominees were “enemies of the people,” not “representatives of the people.”213 They “know there are parties but do not realize there is a nation.”214 Incendiary charges of “Destroying the Nation” were tossed back again at the Senate.215 A circular announced the “indictment” of Senators (and Speaker) Wu Jinglian and Gu Zhongxiu, and leaﬂets scattered around the city offered a 10,000 yuan award for their “heads.” A previously unknown “civic” group called the Healthy Public Ten-Man Group sent a letter to over a hundred senators advising, “If you do not sacriﬁce your party opinions, then we will use a bomb to deal with it.”216 At another meeting military and police ofﬁcials stated that unless the Senate approved a new list of cabinet ministers proposed by Yuan, the Senate would be disbanded by force. Out of sympathy for Lu or support for Yuan, some prominent public ﬁgures also weighed in. Zhang Binglin sent a telegram to Vice President Li Yuanhong asking him to urge Yuan Shikai to act without being hamstrung by the constitution. Li sent his own circular telegram to members of the Senate accusing them of allowing China to “sink into anarchy.”217

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The Senate quickly caved in to the threats. On July 26 a majority of senators reversed their earlier negative vote and approved ﬁve of the six original nominees. The evening before the vote there had been “much private discussion” among senators, and “wiser counsel” prevailed.218 Yuan had made them an offer they found difﬁcult to refuse. On the day of the vote military men with riﬂes loitered around and inside the Senate building. When asked what they were doing “a certain person” replied, “If they [the senators] don’t want a true state, then we don’t want the law.”219 This remark was reported in the press as a memorable quip. With Lu Zhengxiang’s withdrawal from ofﬁcial activity and reluctance to leave his Beijing hospital rooms, Minister of the Interior Zhao Bingjun, who had made it clear under Tang Shaoyi that he judged cabinet discussions a waste of time, became acting premier. The attempt by the United Republican Party leader Gu Zhongxiu to impeach Lu Zhengxiang for violating the “inherent rights” of senators through police and military intimidation ﬁzzled.220 Senators friendly to Yuan or Lu insisted, in a characteristic bow to the rules, that impeachment required a quorum of three quarters in the chamber.221 Given the kinds of pressures brought to bear by Yuan and his allies, it was generally agreed that “in the present circumstances the necessary quorum is unobtainable.” In a third use that summer of his “attacking as one lures [the enemy] in” strategy, Yuan Shikai simultaneously extended his invitation to Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing to visit Beijing for talks and consultations.222 After the July 26 vote journalist and aide to Sun Yat-sen, Dai Jitao, editorialized in his magazine Democracy: China today, although in name a republic with legislative organs, a cabinet and a constitution for the public instruction of the Chinese people, actually, in terms of how power and tactics are wielded and played out, [is a country where] everything is concentrated in the hands of one man: Yuan Shikai.223

Yuan Shikai’s victory was partial in that he was ultimately forced to replace Lu Zhengxiang with someone entirely lacking in moral ﬁber or political “transcendence”: Minister of Interior Zhao, a Yuan crony nicknamed “the butcher,” was later implicated in Song Jiaoren’s murder.224 Yuan retained the initiative in national politics with threats of violence that put his audience in mind of the February 29 troop riots he engineered to counter Revolutionary Alliance demands that he accept Nanjing as capital. His summary execution in Beijing in August of two Alliance military ﬁgures offered a reminder of the kind of close-in brutality he was capable of. Even in its weakened condition the Senate vigorously criti-

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cized the killings.225 Yuan also won considerable political and press support by criticizing his Senate opponents for being selﬁsh and divisive.226 Elements of the foreign press praised Yuan for the “great patience” he displayed throughout the ordeal.227 Lu Zhengxiang’s parliamentary defeat and Yuan’s successful counterattack inﬂuenced the renaming and reorganization of the Revolutionary Alliance and allied parties in August as the Nationalist Party. Opponents of Yuan clearly needed to strengthen their position in advance of new elections and future parliamentary struggles either by taking the battle for public opinion to the country or by raising new armies to match Yuan’s. Under Song Jiaoren’s leadership members of the Alliance became the Nationalists and chose the ﬁrst course. The Nationalists also coordinated a temporary rapprochement with Yuan, yielding ground before Yuan’s bluster while preparing for political struggles ahead. This effort at fence mending was led by Sun Yat-sen when he arrived in Beijing in August to preside over the refounding of his party and to press Yuan to support his railway modernization and other reconstruction projects. Yuan’s “clubs” had trumped the hand held by his parliamentary opponents. At the same time, Yuan, for the moment, was unable rescue Lu Zhengxiang from his hospital room and political limbo. After twice submitting a written resignation and twice being refused, Lu personally delivered a third at the Foreign Ministry on August 28.228 Sun Yat-sen happened to be there when Lu arrived since he was staying at the Ministry guest house.229 This was the second meeting for the men. Two days earlier Lu Zhengxiang had paid his polite respects to Sun, who had simply urged Lu to stay in ofﬁce. Lu’s wife, Berthe, had attended the Nationalist Party convention at the Huguang Lodge in order to hear Sun speak and stand in for her indisposed husband.230 This time Sun made an example of Lu Zhengxiang for the press and public. Unlike his gingerly approach to Yuan Shikai, Sun treated Lu roughly. According to an account in a Nationalist Party newspaper, Lu was forced to “listen shamefacedly” as Sun lectured him on his responsibilities. The former president bluntly told the retiring prime minister that “begging off on the pretext of illness in the face of political agitation shows a lack of consideration for the public interest and treats the Republic itself as a triﬂe.” Lu simply reiterated that he had not recovered sufﬁciently to bear the burdens of ofﬁce. Given his own record of retirements and retreats, Sun might have been more sympathetic to the beleaguered Lu. In his memoirs Lu had only praise for Sun and his “disinterestedness” or impartiality.231 This was the highest form of compliment Lu could give a political leader.

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“Time, Place, and Audience” Lu Zhengxiang’s political performance in summer 1912 has been taken as evidence of his general ineptitude in public affairs. This damning assessment contrasts with the generally positive evaluation of his Qing-era diplomatic career, as well as his subsequent, if more checkered, diplomatic service to the Republic. Li Jiannong, in his cogent and highly colored account of early republican politics, characterizes Lu Zhengxiang as “docile and sheeplike,” a “good-natured mediocrity,” and, ﬁnally, his patience apparently exhausted, “a completely useless person.”232 Gardner Harding, by contrast, found him “brilliant” and “too patriotically interested in the duties of his own crucial ofﬁce” to be drawn into partisan politics.233 The American diplomat E. T. Williams dismissed Lu as a man with “no backbone” who “needs someone to brace him.”234 An oft-cited diary of the Versailles negotiations by Woodrow Wilson’s personal interpreter alleged that Lu Zhengxiang lacked “integrity” and, ironically in light of Lu Zhengxiang’s obsessive professionalism, claimed he “was known to be open to bribes.”235 Lu’s style of life suggests that he had access to some wealth, but even in the corrosive atmosphere of the capital in July and August 1912 no one accused Lu of that particular brand of hypocrisy. Conscientious and professional in his ofﬁcial life and obtuse in domestic political matters would be a fairer description. Lu Zhengxiang’s distaste for partisan politics occasionally blinded him to its nature and dangers. A later, sympathetic observer described elements of Lu’s character and appearance that help explain his successes as a diplomat and his weaknesses in the national political arena: “An accomplished man of the world, with exquisite manners, Mr. Lu is thin, of medium height, fastidiously neat in his attire, and very distinguished; his speech is slow, his gestures graceful, and he wins people over immediately . . . [through his] great affability.”236 A recent biographer agrees that Lu’s manner was “urbane and polished” and also that he was “docile, loyal, and easy to manage” insofar as his relationship to Yuan Shikai was concerned.237 A biographer of Yuan Shikai dismisses Lu as a “so-called foreign policy celebrity.”238 A cosmopolitan manner need not exclude skill at Machiavellian intrigues. The brilliant Talleyrand was described as “nothing but so much dung in a silk stocking” in a blistering dressing-down by his employer, Napoleon, in response to the latter’s suspicions that Talleyrand was up to his old political tricks (and he was).239 Zhou Enlai, whose subservient

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relationship to Mao Zedong bears resemblance to Lu’s to Yuan Shikai, combined faultless manners with stratagems worthy of Zhuge Liang or Talleyrand and ruthless efﬁciency. Lu Zhengxiang’s “fastidious” attention to self and ofﬁce as well as his determination to Westernize Chinese diplomatic practice suffered for a lack of domestic political realism. His affability proved a poor match for the tempests brewing within and without the Chinese state. Lu offered a frank assessment of his own weaknesses in explaining what he had hoped to do and not do on his return to China. He planned, he wrote, “so far as might be possible to keep myself outside of domestic politics, leaving [to others] a task for which my long residence abroad had deprived me of all competence.”240 Tang Qunying aspired to Liu Bei’s success in attracting talent. Lu Zhengxiang, a man of recognized talent, never seems to have found a Liu Bei to succeed his ﬁrst mentor, the virtuous Xu Jingcheng. Instead he found in Yuan Shikai Liu Bei’s cunning adversary Cao Cao. For a time in spring 1912, the technical nature of Lu’s responsibilities at the Foreign Ministry and his “partyless” status protected him. This political immunity dissolved once he stepped into the political whirlpool. As for the speciﬁc disaster of July 18, Lu proved out of touch with the mood and needs of his audience. By summer 1912 China’s Senate was showing signs of the political dysfunction and liabilities adhering to a legislative body intimidated by a powerful chief executive. Yuan’s campaign of bullying exposed the institution’s weakness. Lu’s moral reservations about fellow members of the political elite made it hard for him to understand their sensitivity to challenges to their own fragile authority as professional politicians dedicated to the public good. On the occasion of Lu’s speech, legislators, whatever their political afﬁliation, expected to be taken seriously in their own house. Given what they thought was their due, they might have acknowledged Lu’s higher ground of dedicated national service. Instead they were treated to a window on their own ethical failings. Lu was eloquent when addressing the question of cultural dislocation and moral crisis in ways that gave him little purchase in the particular public debate he joined in the Senate over checks and balances and national policy. The connection between political credibility and public performance had taken a new turn. As recently as a few months before, Sun Yat-sen had not even felt it necessary to give a speech to assembled revolutionaries when accepting the provisional presidency, even though he was capable of making a great address. Instead Hu Hanmin read it for him. Joseph

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Esherick concludes that this uncharacteristic reticence on Sun’s part shows that “personal oratorical prowess was still not fully necessary for political leadership in China.”241 Much had changed in six months. On July 18, 1912, Lu Zhengxiang was not expected to demonstrate special prowess as a public speaker, even though his reputation as an effective spokesman for China in the court of world opinion preceded him. He might have been excused for giving a boring speech (the second half focusing on ministerial introductions) or, under the circumstances, a politically divisive one. He might have even said something incomprehensible and survived politically once suitable explanations were offered. But his discourse on prostitutes and banquets was both clear on one level and ﬂabbergasting on another, rather like the scene in Woody Allen’s ﬁlm Bananas when the newly installed, Castro-like revolutionary leader of a Caribbean nation announces to the assembled and mystiﬁed throngs, “From now on, we will all speak Swedish!” Lu Zhengxiang did not urge his audience to speak French, or Esperanto (as a few language reformers had recommended for the whole country),242 or become Europeans. He did imply that moral reform was necessary and that, for all his apparent humility before their “august body,” his own record of conduct offered a suitable model for how to be a good Republican civil servant. Lu took as seriously as senators took their own public dignity the connection between public life on the one hand and personal morality on the other. In his memoir he reﬂected on his Catholic faith and the humiliations that he and China had endured. I meditated on the Gospel in relation to myself and my country. In that light, I relived all the snubs that the Chinese people had received and were still receiving, whose weakness, for a century, had become the laughing stock of the world; I also relived, very calmly, the humiliations that so many foreigners— and foreigners of very questionable moral and intellectual values—had taken pleasure in inﬂicting upon me simply because I was Chinese.243

The 1912 speech, delivered at the cost of personal humiliation at the hands of his own countrymen, was directed at remedying the moral weaknesses Lu witnessed in the capital among the ofﬁcials he worked with. If moral revival, grounded in professional competence, could be effected, China, Lu believed, would be in a stronger position in a world he knew to be both exacting in matters of law and protocol and brutal in the use of power. Lu Zhengxiang’s remarks, though misplaced and inappropriate to the moment and the context, were actually relatively mild. In 1895 Kang You-

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wei had lamented that the Chinese people “are stupid and will not study.”244 A suffragist stump speech almost invariably castigated male politicians for failings like consorting with prostitutes and playing mahjongg instead of devoting themselves to the public good. Yang Changji insisted that “if the Chinese people gave up mah-jongg, China could be saved.”245 After 1918 Lu Xun had far more cutting things to say than Lu Zhengxiang ever did about corruption of person, politics, and society, and his words were taken by much of the reading public as fully justiﬁed. Sun Yat-sen could be scathing on Chinese culture and habits. He once responded to the question of why China appeared to be ungovernable with a lecture about the negative impressions Westerners had of Chinese because of the prevalence of “spitting, farting, long ﬁngernails and stained teeth.”246 Exasperated by the failures of local political initiatives in 1920, Mao Zedong declared that “Hunanese have no brains, no ideals, and no basic plan.”247 Many other writers and commentators of the day took a similar cultural or spiritual approach to confronting China’s problems and were applauded for their efforts. For his trouble in trying to reinvent the Revolutionary Alliance and serving as lightning rod for the wrath of suffragists, Song Jiaoren was mocked as “Wang Shanbao’s wife.” Feminists were dismissed as “apparitions neither Chinese nor foreign” or proponents of “anti-husbandism” for their ambition to transform gender relations. Some of the 1912 senators themselves would survive in ofﬁce long enough to be widely derided as corrupt “pigs.” Extended cultural and moral critiques of the Republic by the likes of Lu Xun lay a few years down the road, when its weaknesses had become a clearer matter of public record. Lu Zhengxiang’s July 1912 speech was ahead of its time but also deployed in the wrong venue and indifferent to the political values that guided national discourse. Knowing where you are is an essential bit of political information.248 Han Li, a pioneer advocate of public speaking as a form of political communication, stressed the vital importance of “time, place, and audience” (shi, di, ren) in devising an effective political message.249 Lu Zhengxiang misjudged all three that day. Sun Yat-sen, by contrast, was a master of the quick reconnaissance. Tang Qunying and her comrades assumed the terrain was likely to be hostile. Lu seems not to have grasped how fragile his political position was or how important it was for him to appear the disinterested expert in politics and public affairs in order to maintain the credibility of his transcendental cabinet. The senators were in the market for a report that paid them the compliment of assuming they were partners in policy mak-

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ing, at least with Premier Lu if not with President Yuan, and not for a homily on the state of the Chinese soul and their own. In Lu’s defense 1912 was a perplexing moment in Chinese history. Public life is composed of many stages and multiple audiences. The Republic Lu Zhengxiang had returned to was an especially complicated mixture of public spaces like the Senate that were clearly marked for the purpose, and just as certainly heading toward eventual irrelevance, and others, like the empty space outside Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace, as yet unmarked and yet destined to deﬁne both leaders and audiences in the years to come. Knowing where and when and how to speak out was no easy task. Perhaps Lu Zhengxiang later drew some bitter satisfaction when senators who ambushed him with their moans and groans themselves faced an even more corrosive political climate without a Benedictine monastery to shelter in. Lu Zhengxiang would not be the last ofﬁcial to enter hospital as a refuge from politics, or to be put in the hospital when verbal battles got out of hand. Joseph Levenson observed that the failure of monarchy to be successfully revived after the Qing abdication owed something to Yuan Shikai’s comic turn in 1916 as the “Grand Constitutional Achievement” Emperor, “a parody of empire” following what had become a “parody of a republic.”250 However, the Republic had not yet become a joke in summer 1912. Or rather the bitter ironies that grew up around it preserved respect for the idea of a Republic even as the new regime was savaged. The Republic’s claims to seriousness imposed a discipline on speakers and other public ﬁgures that they ignored at their peril. Fear of ridicule is a powerful theme in republican-era or, perhaps, any modern politics. When asked why he waited so long to retreat from his presidential mansion to the safety of a gunboat during General Chen Jiongming’s coup against him in Guangzhou in 1922, Sun Yat-sen claimed that “to withdraw [even] temporarily and yield to violence [would be to] face the ridicule of Chinese and foreigners.”251 Sun Yat-sen, as a public ﬁgure, was often faced with potentially embarrassing questions put to him by reporters, for example,“Did you receive a bribe of $1,000,000 dollars from Yuan Shikai [to give up presidency of the Republic]?”252 Scandal and public ridicule haunted public ﬁgures during the Republican era in part because they did at times misbehave or betray the public trust. Meanwhile, greater transparency multiplied the fronts they could be challenged on. Money politics, political intrigue, personal foibles, and brutality in pursuit of power were all fair game. A scandal sheet like “A Few Things about Mr. Sun,” commissioned by Yuan Shikai in 1913 when

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he and his erstwhile banquet companion and railway czar Sun Yat-sen had become enemies again, with a few twists of the facts turned Sun’s campaign for foreign assistance into treason, fund-raising into embezzlement, sojourner recreations into whoring, and enforced exile into cowardice.253 In addition, the kind of political success in policy terms that can blunt political slander proved elusive for most ofﬁcials and leaders, including Yuan Shikai. As a result, the gossip and innuendo that had earlier dogged the lives of emperors suspected of murdering family members, indulging in sexual excess, or having bad calligraphy expanded nearly unchecked in the Republican press to pursue and abuse public ﬁgures great and small. In this regard Lu Zhengxiang’s humiliation in summer 1912 was symptomatic rather than unique. At least he was spared the crude sexual attacks suffragists were subject to. Efforts to strip a political ﬁgure of his or her authority included mockery of motives and behavior to the point where the person became a joke: Yuan Shikai a monkey, Sun Yat-sen a blowhard, and Shen Peizhen a slut. More subtly, Lu Zhengxiang was derided in 1912 for appearing to make a joke of the Republic he served. The repetitive nature of Republican politics provided fertile ground for these kinds of japes. In 1923 the Nationalist Party paper, the Guangzhou Republican Daily News, attacked the northern warlord-politician Cao Kun for his vote-buying activities in the national parliament in Beijing. The paper abused Cao as a “second Yuan Shikai” who “rapes public opinion” and plays the “same tricks” and the “same jokes” Yuan did.254 A good joke like Yuan Shikai’s “grand constitutional achievement” found retelling as one autocratic or incompetent politician followed another. A joke may be the best example of a cultural product or form of mimetic capital that can, if it is a good one, reproduce itself almost endlessly. In the 1912 episode verbal missteps, combined with real and gathering opposition to his candidacy, did Lu Zhengxiang in politically. As a sign of his personal resilience and the fact that it was hard to know who would have the last laugh, Lu rebounded almost immediately. He left the French Hospital in early September for a “secret” meeting with Yuan Shikai.255 Lu rented a mansion in Beijing and by the end of 1912 was again Yuan’s foreign minister.256 Despite carrying out his dispiriting responsibilities during the years of Japan’s Twenty-one Demands and Yuan’s plunge into monarchism, Lu achieved a dramatic reversal of his 1912 public humiliation at Versailles in 1919. Versailles was not a diplomatic victory for China or Lu Zhengxiang. The humiliating terms of secret annexes, now made public, and trans-

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ferring Germany’s Shandong territories and privileges to Japan were ratiﬁed partly because of earlier concessions Lu had enabled or agreed to as foreign minister from 1915 to 1918. European powers and the United States ﬁnally accepted these concessions as legally if not morally binding.257 Members of the Chinese delegation at the Paris talks criticized Lu’s record of appeasing the Japanese to the point that he retreated to his villa in Switzerland pleading ill health yet again.258 Lu occasionally spoke during conference sessions, including in favor of establishing the League of Nations.259 Gu Weijun, a member of the delegation who began his diplomatic career in 1912 by working for both Lu at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Yuan Shikai, upstaged his superior by leading the charge against the initial ofﬁcial Chinese policy of signing the peace treaty.260 On May 4, as students in Beijing assembled outside Tiananmen to denounce the treaty, Lu Zhengxiang lodged a “formal protest in the name of justice” at the loss of Chinese territory to Japan.261 In the end Lu joined his delegation in not signing the onerous terms demanded by the great powers. As he later recalled, “For the ﬁrst time in my career I believed it my duty not to obey. . . . I was not willing to sign my name yet again to unjust causes, and I took it upon myself alone to refuse my signature.”262 Having been granted the indignant public he as a newly minted Qing diplomat had hoped would strengthen China’s position in the world, Lu Zhengxiang had a difﬁcult time negotiating the political turbulence that resulted. Nonetheless, Versailles offered a measure of public redemption for Lu Zhengxiang.263 That the public could forgive as well as condemn was a sign of its growing power as a political and moral force. Thousands, who had read about his expected arrival in the newspapers, greeted Lu when he arrived by boat on the Shanghai Bund on January 22, 1920.264 Despite concerns cabled to him from the Foreign Ministry in Beijing about the possibility of “disorder,” Lu for the most part was warmly greeted.265 Representatives of student groups were eager to ask his views about the Shandong question. Lu happily replied, with some exaggeration, “With regard to the Shandong question, I early on made up my mind. I refused to sign and would not directly negotiate with Japan.” He called their patriotism “heart-warming” and claimed that “even before returning home I had heard about it and I very much admire you for it.” At his diplomatic and affable best, he even asked the students, “Please be so kind as to write the Foreign Ministry to urge me on and ensure that I carry out my duties correctly. That would be wonderful!”266 He recalled the moment with great pride: “At Shanghai, as I came off the boat, and at all

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the stations at which my train stopped, [there were] great popular demonstrations, cheering him who refused to sign.”267 The importance of this popular acclaim must have been considerable for a diplomat who had long recognized the value of public support in foreign affairs but found making such a connection with ordinary citizens and their representatives elusive. He did leave out the uncomfortable fact that some parts of the crowd at Shanghai were not so welcoming. One group of about a thousand waved banners and shouted “Traitor!” when they spied the impeccably dressed and top-hatted diplomat.268 They distributed leaﬂets denouncing Lu for failing to deliver on the “hopes of citizens” that he took with him to Europe to recover Qingdao and set right other violations of Chinese sovereignty. Lu Zhengxiang’s relative isolation from political movements and ideologies, which he wore as a badge of honor in 1912, collapsed in 1919 to his great satisfaction as his conduct on the national and international stages found endorsement in welcoming crowds. He appears to have ignored critics who saw his efforts as too little and too late and focused instead on the applause and cheers following his train north to Beijing. Public performances, both winning and losing, embodied, magniﬁed, and ampliﬁed the ideas and emotions of the period. While the ideas, like nationalism, communism, anarchism, and a clutch of less prominent ideologies, are reasonably well known, the ways these beliefs came to life only fully register in the everyday routines and more spectacular and unpredictable successes and stumbles of politicians, activists, and citizens. The seemingly effortless articulation of positions and policies suggested by collected essays and speeches masks the actual grind of political gear against gear as public ﬁgures tried to move a people who variously, or alternately, embraced and resisted, praised and mocked what leaders had to say. Lu Zhengxiang achieved his apotheosis as a public ﬁgure in 1919 when, by doing the right thing at the right time for the right audience, he embodied patriotic refusal. In 1919 at Versailles he realized where he was, “what time it was,” and who he was speaking to. At that moment, as an agent of the state, he saw the world and China’s place in it like a citizen.

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Chapter 6

Sun Yat-sen’s Last Words

Whatever its ﬁnal destination in the political arena or history books, modern political oratory begins with citizens assembled before the speaker. The setting may be a face-to-face encounter in a lodge or hotel, a lecture hall built for the purpose, a town square or stadium, or a virtual substitute in which orator and audience are drawn together by an electronic thread that permits a listener to join the crowd or invites the leader in for a more intimate hearing. The vision or ambition of a leader meets or misses the hopes, thoughts, or fears of the people assembled below or beyond the podium. Modern media like radio and ﬁlm can extend the encounter between leader and citizenry to an audience of almost limitless size. Chiang Kai-shek’s radio address to millions on July 10, 1937, from the Lushan Mountains three days after the Japanese invasion, Chiang’s victory statement by radio from Chongqing on August 15, 1945, and Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949, in Beijing achieved their mass effects in an instant.1 A common language of patriotism and an audience already familiar with what they were about to hear meant that Chiang’s “thick Ningbo accent” and Mao’s Hunanese Mandarin were no real bar to communication.2 Even though “most Chinese could hardly understand” Chiang’s 1945 speech, “they knew what he was saying.”3 Most political speeches were given then, as now, in person to much smaller groups of party members, activists, contributors, journalists, and the curious. The image of the political leader in modern China begins 236

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with Kang Youwei at Songyun’an speaking to a few thousand literati and leads to a variety of set-piece scenes. These include Sun Yat-sen on a tour of the Chinese diaspora, protest leaders speaking to crowds in the 1905 anti-American boycott movement and during the railway recovery movements of the ﬁrst decade of the century, and popular movements of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. A more formal and ofﬁcial track brought political leaders, including Sun, Chiang, and Mao, to the podium to address serial party and government meetings and conventions. Often the crowd was made up of the political elite, sometimes ordinary people, and increasingly a mix of both. So powerful in China was the image of the leader speaking directly to the assembled crowd that at least one Chinese student of public speaking insisted that only a speech made while literally “facing the masses” could really be called oratory. Franklin Roosevelt’s radio “ﬁreside chats” in his view would not qualify.4 Despite the growing importance of ﬁlm and electronic media, the face-to-face encounter between leaders and the led was a hallmark of a Chinese revolution that ultimately gathered up millions of the “masses.” In such small-scale, diverse, and ﬁne-grained processes, public life ended up being segmented by locality, organizational afﬁliation, and the particular interests and perspectives of those gathered together. Unifying these small worlds of opinion and sentiment was the work of institutions such as political parties, social or political movements, national leaders, and more informal meetings of minds and emotions. In these political workshops and moments, Chinese republicanism was forged, broken, and recast.

“Talking up the Revolution” By word and deed Sun Yat-sen was that kind of political artisan and unifying leader. He was one of the most remarkable public and political ﬁgures of his era in part because he spoke to everyone and anyone, on any occasion and anywhere, and on a seemingly inexhaustible number of topics that invariably circled around to the question of China in the largest sense. He addressed groups of every provincial, occupational, and ideological character imaginable—from Guangdong sojourners and Manchu ethnic welfare organizations in Beijing to student, merchant, and civic groups in every city and town he visited. For Sun, every individual citizen or citizens’ group could serve as a synecdoche for nation and republic, just as he imagined himself standing in for his country.5 Anyone who found himself or herself sitting next to Sun Yat-sen on a train or steamer likely heard his political message. His friend Chen

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Shaobai noted, “Dr. Sun’s revolutionary ideas were very potent. When he ran into anyone, he talked that way. If the person was a businessman he would go on about the revolution just the same.”6 His capacity for “talking up the revolution” (tan geming) knew few social boundaries. As Sun later advised, “If you meet a farmer, speak to him about freeing him from his miseries. The farmer will then certainly warmly embrace what you have to say. Do the same when meeting workers, merchants, and scholars.”7 For Sun, every social circle was a part of a patchwork public, and republic, waiting to be joined together. Communists eventually fought and mobilized their way from countryside to city in their rural revolution after 1927 to bring Mao to the top of Tiananmen to give his radio speech. In his long revolutionary career, Sun began on the overseas Chinese fringe and worked in toward his country’s coast and interior. He carried out his own encirclement campaign as he talked and fought his way in from exile toward national leadership. The arc of Sun’s political life traced a homeward motion not unlike those of many of his contemporaries, including fellow sojourners and exiles Tang Qunying and Song Jiaoren, as well as Lu Zhengxiang returning from his diplomatic postings. Sun honed his skills as an orator in countless fund-raising and organizing speeches to overseas Chinese communities and exile groups. He brought this highly developed art of political communication back to China in December 1911 and, more or less, kept on talking, plotting, and organizing a republican revolution until his death in 1925. While certainly an asset, Sun’s acknowledged skill at the podium and on the stump was not always viewed by contemporaries as serving him, his party, or his country well. Some fairly saw him as more a talker than a doer and a man distracted by his own eloquence from urgent political tasks at hand. Critics complained that leaders like Sun Yat-sen talked a lot while asking for money and other forms of sacriﬁce and then did little or nothing. Early in Liu E’s 1906 novel, The Travels of Lao Can, the itinerant hero is gazing out to sea on the north coast of Shandong, an often invaded and occupied province, when he and his companions see a ship sailing by. The passengers on board this nautical allegory of an embattled China, “wet, cold, hungry, and frightened,” are being robbed and killed, not by pirates or foreign sailors, but by their own crew.8 For a moment it looks as if they will be rescued by “some other people” on board who are “making ﬁne speeches.”9 The orators persuade the other passengers to give them money to engineer a takeover of the ship. As he watches from afar, the character Lao Can is skeptical: “It seems that these people may not

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really be men of action, only making use of some modern catchwords to cheat people of their money.”10 Sure enough, having pocketed the cash, the “leaders,” in bitter parody of Sun Yat-sen and others in exile, ﬁnd themselves a safe place on the ship to wait out the carnage. Sun worked to topple the Qing from the relative safety of exile and then was late to the event itself because he was busy talking up revolution and raising money in the United States. Sun was delayed longer than Lenin later was to his revolution. The Russian arrived, with German help, at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg in plenty of time to lead the Bolshevik Revolution. Sun reached the Shanghai docks in late December 1911 when the main ﬁghting was over. Abroad, the plots and rebellions Sun had organized mainly from a distance all failed in their immediate purpose. Defeat after defeat led to dissension among the revolutionaries and criticism of Sun’s leadership. Colleagues like Huang Xing and Tang Qunying compiled far more credible records as active revolutionary ﬁghters. Huang may have had a hard time saying no to political party memberships but never to putting himself in harm’s way for the cause. In fall 1911, signaling his presence on the Wuhan ﬁeld of battle with a personal ﬂag ten feet square emblazoned with his surname, Huang, despite tactical blunders and conﬂict with other revolutionary leaders, helped hold revolutionary positions for three weeks against Qing counterattacks, long enough for revolutionaries in other parts of the country to organize their uprisings.11 Once back in China, Sun was president only brieﬂy and then embarked on his speaking campaign for railway development and reconstruction. Meanwhile, the fate of the Republic hung in the balance and power passed into the hands of Yuan Shikai. When Sun restarted his quest for national power in 1913 by military means he met, yet again, with a series of reversals and defeats. Exiled in Japan from 1913 to 1916, Sun returned once more to China and spent a year in Shanghai writing down his plans for China’s future. In 1917 he made a failed attempt to establish a rival government in Guangzhou. He returned to Shanghai for another bout of writing, followed by a second abortive attempt to establish a political and military base in Guangzhou. He was betrayed by his erstwhile follower Chen Jiongming in 1922 and forced back to Shanghai. Finally, in 1923–24, back in Guangzhou, he seemed to have put together a potent mix of ideology, organization, and military muscle. Sun then chose to spend the ﬁnal months of his life on an ill-fated journey north to talk peace with the warlords in Beijing who sat amid the ruins of Republican institutions.

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Through it all, Sun Yat-sen made speech after speech to anyone who would listen. While Sun lectured about train travel in 1912 and 1913, Yuan Shikai consolidated power. While Sun lectured throughout the 1910s on the manifold nature of “reconstruction,” political actors ranging from Song Jiaoren and Tang Qunying to Lu Zhengxiang and Mao Zedong commenced or continued their various projects of parliamentary reform, women’s emancipation, modernization of diplomacy, and youth revolution. Sun’s role in the Chinese Revolution hinged on the fact that he talked so much and so well to so many people that his words added up to a particular kind of public deed: the invention of modern Chinese political leadership as a rhetorical act and a collective exercise. His speech making was more than just talk in the sense that his purpose was to move the nation forward by seizing the imaginations of his fellow citizens. He personalized politics as he publicized his policies and distributed his own image and vision. As national leader, Sun created a public and political space others like Mao would more effectively and violently occupy. He accomplished this feat through the infectious simplicity of his own formula of self-promotion and national salvation. Anyone could aspire to be like Sun Yat-sen in the way he called the Chinese people to great things. Though it is easier to promise than to deliver, promises boldly and eloquently made are vital to political projects. In this Sun set a clear and high standard. Being like Sun Yat-sen was, in a sense, easier than being like Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Lu Zhengxiang, or, even, Yuan Shikai. You did not need a classical education, elegant manners, or well-trained regiments. You needed conﬁdence, discipline, and ambition. These were the same core values coveted by many Chinese who hoped to be good at what they did for themselves, their communities, and their country. They were prominently featured in the popular self-help, professional, and patriotic literature of the day.12 Sun made a better, more recognizable presentation of these attributes than did subtler and more profound contemporaries. Picturing Sun at the center of national life elevated one’s own struggles to that higher plane. Unlike Liang Qichao, who could be sardonically dismissive about the poor copies of his ideas surfacing everywhere in China, Sun never seems to have been much bothered by the dilution or distortion of his distinctive political brand. He had something grander, bolder, and more inclusive in mind. Sun played his mimetic and didactic role at a time when the extreme complexity of China, divided in every possible way by region, class, gender, and ideology, called for common ground and common roles that every-

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one could occupy and identify with. If Song Jiaoren built a parliamentary government he simultaneously sought to master, Sun Yat-sen did something comparable with a nascent Chinese public. Sun’s shallowness as a thinker and irrepressible optimism permitted him to cover more ground than his rivals could. His devotion to travel meant that this broad coverage was more than ﬁgurative or philosophical. The proof of this achievement can be found in part in the fact that Sun’s death, though not universally lamented, led to a wave of national mourning unrivaled until the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976.13 While other leaders may have been more complicated, more local, or more competent, Sun struck a chord nationwide with a simple tune of patriotism, sacriﬁce, and progress. Sun was late for the 1911 Revolution but on time for the construction of a national political identity and a politically engaged public.

“Sun the Cannon” Not everyone found Sun an appealing or helpful ﬁgure. His ubiquity on the stage of Chinese politics made him hard to avoid even if one wanted to. Some sensed and resented his shallowness and enthusiasm for plans with little immediate chance of success. His fondness for oratory and reputation for overly ambitious schemes contributed to his “Sun the Cannon” (Sun Dapao) nickname.14 The sobriquet had positive and negative connotations. Dapao can refer to a penchant for shooting one’s mouth off to the point of vulgarity and brutality. The Communist Party leader Wang Zhen was called “Wang the Cannon” “because every tenth sentence was profane and [Wang] with equanimity cursed everyone and his own old lady.”15 Mao thought this was an endearing and useful trait. “Wang Zhen is our bazooka. Even though it often shoots off target, it’s a lovely bazooka.”16 Mao once described himself in similar terms during his famous meeting with Richard Nixon in 1972: “I think that generally speaking, people like me sound a lot of big cannons.”17 Dapao in Sun Yat-sen’s case did not refer to foul or brutal language but to a predilection for pronouncements that resembled the “empty talk” old-fashioned school masters warned against but also to an impressive ability to “lay down heavy artillery ﬁre” (kai dapao) in his speeches and writings in a style that appealed to a nation in crisis.18 If he was often outgunned, Sun could deploy his words like weapons. “Big Cannon” was sometimes used in an insulting way by Sun enemies such as the Guangdong militarist Chen Jiongming, who in 1922 declared his intention to put an end to Sun’s national ambitions by seizing his assets and “locking

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up ‘Sun the Cannon’s’ purse.”19 Other political adversaries accused Sun of talking about revolution while others did the actual work. The People’s Society, a political party based in Hubei and the Wuhan area where many revolutionary battles took place, in 1912 condemned Sun for having preached revolution in exile while others risked life and limb ﬁghting in China and accused him of “taking the successes of others as his own.”20 Zhang Binglin in 1912 asserted that a number of other revolutionary leaders were more qualiﬁed to be president of the Republic than Sun: Huang Xing for actual achievements, Song Jiaoren for talent, and Wang Jingwei for virtue.21 In October 1912 Huang Yuanyong argued that Huang Xing and Song Jiaoren both outstripped Sun Yat-sen in ability, especially in light of Sun’s rhetorical excesses: “In the eyes of this reporter, Huang [Xing] is a man of sincerity, frankness, and earnestness. . . . Although he may not have as clear and logical a mind as [Song Jiaoren], he is different from [Sun Yat-sen], who speaks in an empty and boastful manner.”22 However, if the criteria were eloquence and a talent for image making, Sun won hands down. Sun’s boastfulness, though annoying to some, stirred hope in those eager to be convinced of China’s greatness even as he, mobile and light on his feet, avoided the kind of fatal blow someone like Yuan was capable of delivering. Hu Shi, who was as careful in his remarks as Sun was sometimes reckless in his, defended Sun’s memory in 1925 against the charge that he was a “dreamer” rather than a “realist.” Anyone without an idealistic plan cannot be a genuine realist. I therefore say that Dr. Sun was a realist precisely because he had the courage to settle on an idealistic Outline of National Construction. Most politicians simply loaf around. As soon as they hear of a ten-year or twenty-year plan, it ﬂies out of their ears. And they say, “We do not value empty talk.”23

For Hu Shi, Sun Yat-sen’s words were ambitious for China and much needed for that reason alone. Mockery of Sun as a blowhard was only possible because of the recognized power of his oratory. In her imaginative re-creation of Sun at the end of his career, the novelist Lu Ping writes, “When Sun spoke, the sound of his voice was loud and clear, his gestures forceful. He spoke with an absolute certainty that permitted no one to contradict him.”24 Putting aside the speciﬁc content of any given speech, decried in some cases as that of “a madman spouting dreams,” this image was itself compelling.25 Sun’s path to greatness included so many reversals that his political life has a picaresque quality, composed in serial installments of colorful and dramatic incidents. Cathy Davidson, in a book on the speeches and

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writings of American founders like Sun’s alter ego George Washington, argues that the “political discourse” found there “is every bit as fantastic, contradictory, and self-conﬂicted as . . . in the most rambling and ambivalent picaresque novel.”26 Sun’s life likewise had a compulsive “readability”: kidnapping, narrow escapes, personal betrayals, marriage to a beautiful young woman, and tragic death as victory seemed within reach. His life was not strictly “picaresque” in that he was not the rogue hero typical of the genre any more than he resembled the bandit protagonists of the Water Margin.27 Sun sequestered himself in hotel rooms, not mountain redoubts. Sun’s life was, however,“a novel of the road, which strings its incidents on the line of the hero’s travels.”28 In his writings and speeches Sun authored his own story, stitching together the episodes of his life by deftly turning his many defeated attempts to incite rebellion into a grand revolutionary narrative.29 Sun’s life also conformed in a morally satisfying way to Mencius’s cherished advice that “Heaven, when it is about to place a great burden on a man, always ﬁrst tests his resolution, exhausts his frame and makes him suffer starvation and hardship, frustrates his efforts so as to shake him from his mental lassitude, toughen his nature and make good his deﬁciencies.”30 Like the Republic he championed, the more Sun failed, the more he proved the virtue of his cause and calling. Lyon Sharman, a hostile and insightful critic of Sun, found his selfdramatizing strategies infuriating and trite. She also credits Sun with a preternatural talent for writing and talking himself into historical importance: “Sun Yat-sen did that presumptuous thing, so rarely done that we think of it as daring: he assumed a role in history, and he played it to the end, in spots ineffectively, even incompetently, sometimes pompously, sometimes tragically; but he played it.”31 In this regard, among twentiethcentury world leaders Sun may most resemble Charles de Gaulle, who was also convinced that his life, however frustrated and incomplete before he assumed the presidency of France, equaled his nation’s destiny. Louis Chevalier concluded that “when de Gaulle spoke of France he always seemed to be talking about himself.”32 This was Sun’s mental habit and verbal tic as well. The difference in the trajectory of their careers may lie simply in the fact that Sun Yat-sen ran out of time. De Gaulle became president of France at the age of sixty-nine. Sun died at ﬁfty-eight, too soon for one who pinned his hopes for the future, along with China’s, on a long revolution he would lead to the end. As a rhetorical leader Sun also had something like Winston Churchill’s vivid historical and political imagination. Isaiah Berlin pointed out that Churchill, prior to his ascent as wartime prime minister, kept his career

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aﬂoat with a torrent of written and spoken words. As a result Churchill also struggled to overcome charges of empty talk. Churchill was able to transcend mere garrulity, according to Berlin, because of a distinctive political language that though “denounced as so much tinsel and hollow pasteboard was in reality solid” and because of a “natural means for the expression of his heroic, highly coloured, sometimes over-simple and even naïve, but always genuine, vision of life.”33 Churchill’s rhetorical ﬂourishes, according to Berlin, were “simpler and larger than life” and “something between Victorian illustrations in a child’s book of history” and the historical pageantry depicted in Renaissance wall paintings.34 Sun’s images tended to be more modern than antique—locomotives, taxicabs, and machines of all kinds—but they ﬁt into a similar procession of simple and moving set-piece dramas evoking the rise and eventual triumph of China. In the context of early republican China, Sun had notable advantages in communicating a panoramic and compelling vision. The national mood increasingly favored a self-dramatizing approach in which the self expanded to enclose the nation as public good. Some weeks after Sun’s death, during the May Thirtieth Movement in Beijing in 1925, a man named Chen Qianfu mounted a stage outside Tiananmen surrounded by tens of thousands of fellow demonstrators and declared, “Foreigners insult us. They say we are a plate of sand. They want to massacre us. We must be avenged!” The plate of sand image was a particular favorite of Sun’s. Chen then cut his ﬁnger, wrote “Save China or Die” in blood on a white banner, and, weakened by the ordeal, was carried off by his comrades.35 Sun’s posturing and grandiloquence appealed for the same reason that the outsized gestures of protesters like Chen captured the public’s imagination. Whereas Churchill, like de Gaulle, had to wait for the right moment to ﬁnd an appreciative audience, Sun’s audience was more completely and continuously attuned to national crisis and therefore responsive to his urgent and sanguine vision. Sun helped give China a picture of an embattled but unbowed country not so different from an embattled but unbowed Sun Yat-sen.

Sun Returns Home to China When he was not in direct contact with the public, Sun Yat-sen was closeted in preparation for his next political sortie. It was in Shanghai from 1918 to 1920, between political and military forays to Guangdong, that Sun wrote the Outline of National Construction that Hu Shi found so compelling.36 Sun’s political career is a good example of a public ﬁgure

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locked in what Georg Simmel described as the alternating solipsism and engagement (“sociation”) phases of leadership.37 In prison, exile, or private life a leader may imagine or invent those he or she would lead. Once followers are engaged in more concrete terms a leader is bound by their demands and expectations. As Simmel notes, “All leaders are also led.”38 Like many “great” leaders, Sun could be self-referential in the extreme and seemingly oblivious to the facts of politics, including his often-dire circumstances. These states of self-absorption in Sun’s case were always the prelude to a period of frenetic activity. He plunged back into the world of politics in a style that was often unmediated, even reckless, when compared to the more cautious and protected circuits made by Yuan Shikai or Lu Zhengxiang. Yuan gave a tentative speech now and then. He planned an elaborate coming-out party for himself as emperor complete with tailor-made costumes and a set of imperial crockery. Lu waved happily to admiring crowds on his return from France in 1920. Sun returned to the public arena at every opportunity. In this regard Sun was not so different from a suffragist, a radical organizer of any stripe, or a campaigning politician. Sun’s leadership style mirrored and modeled the spreading popularity of political cadres around the country who likewise did not hold back when faced with the people. He not only offered a model for national leadership but also began to connect that new realm to an emerging class of local and movement leaders. Sun took himself and his message to the country convinced that he was the modern China he saw there in whole or in part. Sun’s seemingly distracted behavior in 1912—traveling the country giving speeches, accepting a nonpolitical post as railway commissioner from Yuan Shikai, and intermittently mediating between warring factions of his own party—betrayed a method. He elevated himself above the political whirlpool by articulating a vision and delivering a message to a broad if still fragmented public. This effort kept his name and image in play without entangling him in power struggles he could not at the time hope to win. He banked his vision in the public mind against the day when the balance of power would shift in his favor. He seemed to understand instinctively that a public realm existed in which these assets could be stored and developed. Whether the crowds depicted in newspaper stories, photographs, political cartoons, and unofﬁcial histories were listening, sleeping, or turning away, they did exist as politically conscious individuals and groups. Sun was not mistaken about that. In addition, a civil society was emerging suitable for distributing and showcasing images and ideas to signal political effect. Every community of

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any size now had a set of societies and organizations willing and often eager to host visiting dignitaries, a local press to report on the resulting event, and the political and civic means to react to the cargos of information and ideas delivered. C. Martin Wilbur argued that Sun’s experiences, being limited to making revolution, meant he was actually “experienced in almost nothing” and this lack of real preparation helps explain the “impracticality of his schemes.”39 However, as the Chinese Revolution lengthened beyond 1911 and absorbed the entire adult lives of many men and women, the one thing Sun could do well—be Sun Yat-sen the hybrid, polyglot, and yet fully Chinese public ﬁgure—achieved greater solidity and relevance. Being Sun Yat-sen became a full-time job. Like many modern politicians, this was Sun’s most practiced area of expertise. More speciﬁcally and in terms of technique and style, foreign exile made Sun an accomplished orator and propagandist. He found himself in cities like Tokyo, New York, and London where the presence of a modern press and the ready availability of telegraphic lines of communication from city to city and continent to continent ampliﬁed and extended the reach of his words in ways difﬁcult to duplicate as completely in China at the time. At the same time, as events in China in the 1890s had already shown, media like the telegraph and the newspaper were becoming central to public expression and political combat. Bergère observed in her biography of Sun Yat-sen that Sun had a precocious grasp of the signiﬁcance of new technologies applied to politics. These talents made him “a kind of media genius, born for jet liners, the Fax, and television, despite having had to content himself with steamers, the telegraph, and the press.”40 In this respect Sun resembled the suffragists whose outsized talent for attracting and exploiting media attention won the wary admiration of Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs. Sun’s political ambitions, media-based strategies, and incessant traveling also gave him an insatiable demand for ﬁnancial contributions. He gave lecture after lecture in overseas Chinese communities in order to raise money as he pressed his political message. The commerce of politics in coin and words came naturally to this son of commercial and coastal China.41 Sun Yat-sen’s return to China in winter 1911–12 brought a sudden end to his years in exile. In newspaper articles during the outbreak of the revolution, Sun had been referred to as “the leader of the revolution” in captions beneath his photograph and also the “Great Revolutionist” Sun Yat-sen (geming dajia).42 The Shanghai Minli bao praised his “moral purity” and decades of devotion to the revolution, inevitably describing him

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as “the Chinese George Washington.”43 The newspaper also carried a fullpage photographic display of Sun and his three children—but not his traditional-looking wife—as exemplars of the new age of Republican China. His marriage to the young and modern Song Qingling would complete this picture in an episode Lyon Sharman aptly if cruelly described as “modernization made ﬂesh.”44 Sun’s original notoriety as a rebel now became political celebrity. Despite auspicious public beginnings at the Nanjing Senate and Zhu Yuanzhang’s tomb, Sun soon found himself in a new political wilderness at home. His political connections to fellow Revolutionary Alliance leaders were tenuous, and in recent years his ties to the Alliance as an organization had atrophied. Although fast becoming the familiar face of the revolution and the Republic, Sun did not yet have national leadership in his possession. Sun responded to this latest reversal of political fortune by doing in China what he had been doing abroad. He went on a speaking tour. Instead of visiting Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe, and America, Sun toured the provinces of China in a series of trips that lasted for much of 1912. Sun disappeared from the national politics of Beijing and Shanghai for most of this period while popping up all over China, covered closely by the national and local press.45 The pattern of Sun’s career as a public ﬁgure, including various cycles of withdrawal and engagement and long journeys out into the world and through China, contributed to political innovation. Intimate connections between leaders and the led are not automatic even in political cultures with far longer traditions of representative government. In older, established democracies like Britain’s, it took a populist-leaning William Gladstone in the 1860s to pioneer the practice of being a genuine public ﬁgure available to more than a restricted electorate during political campaigns. Gladstone marked himself off from others of his political class by making the rounds of provincial cities like Manchester and giving public speeches that attracted huge crowds that included many who, until the Reform Act of 1867, did not have the right to vote. Like Sun he was “endowed with an inﬁnite capacity for making speeches.”46 In doing so, he considerably enlarged the dimensions of public life.47 Sun did much the same thing without the secure home Gladstone had in parliament and party. Considering that Song Jiaoren’s plans for building parliamentary democracy failed and led to the young politician’s murder, Sun’s refusal to pin his hopes on metropolitan institutions looks prescient, or at least prudent. He would campaign without elections and pronounce on policy

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to the nation without a seat in government. With the exception of his visit to Beijing to help refound the Revolutionary Alliance as the Nationalist Party and meet with Yuan Shikai in August and September, Sun advanced by retreating into a series of local encounters where he was greeted as the national ﬁgure the current power calculus institutionally denied him. In 1912 Sun brieﬂy visited Guangdong and his home village, Cuiheng, but he did not make hometown or native place his base. Rhetorically, all of China was Sun’s home, and he sought to prove this by visiting as much of it as he could, inscribing himself and his ideas into a circuit of towns and cities already attentive to his celebrity and newsworthiness. This other, political China, still in an agitated state following the revolution, offered him a generally enthusiastic reception. While limited in his exposure to the people by his reliance on water and rail transportation, which mainly served towns and cities, taking himself and his agenda on the road and rivers underlined Sun’s desire to anchor his quest for political centrality in places beyond Beijing and Shanghai and among some large fraction of the Four Hundred Million. Sun’s public and audiences came from sometimes wildly different backgrounds and with strikingly diverse expectations. The reaction to his initial return from abroad included a respectful welcome from fellow revolutionaries in Shanghai eager to convey Sun to Nanjing for his inauguration. The press also carried the story of a group of soldiers in the Nanjing area who shot a tiger and made a ceremonial meal of the raw meat while pledging the success of what they assumed was an impending northern expedition.48 Blood oaths and atavism competed with top hats and progressive talk for Sun’s attention. The audience that emerges from the press, memoirs, and literature of the period exuded an aura of elite sophistication, epitomized by the Western dressed, coifed, and barbered men who greeted Sun’s arrival in Nanjing and the bobbed-hair women who less decorously followed Tang Qunying into the Nanjing Senate chambers a few months later.49 There was also a more local and plebian presence represented by ritual meals of tiger meat, genocidal conﬂict, mass queuecuttings, and gentry takeovers of power in many communities. Sun’s polymorphous politicking was open to any and all who offered their support. Sun Yat-sen left Nanjing on April 3 and traveled in central and southern China throughout spring 1912 with stops that included Wuhan, Anqing, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macao, Cuiheng, and back to Shanghai. Thousands saw him off at the Nanjing train station, and many shouted statements of support that praised his willingness to step aside in favor of Yuan Shikai in order to create a better prospect for

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domestic peace.50 After his visit to Beijing in August (by way of Yantai and Tianjin) and September (with an overnight trip to Zhangjiakou) he traveled in northern China to Taiyuan, Tianjin, Baoding, Shijiazhuang, Tangshan, Kaiping (and the two nearby railway towns of Luanzhou and Yuguan), Qingdao, and Jinan, before returning to Shanghai. In October he toured the lowerYangtze River by naval vessel with stops in Jiangyin, Zhenjiang, Nanjing, Anqing, Jiujiang, Nanchang, and then back to Shanghai via Jiujiang and Wuhu. In December Sun visited Hangzhou for a Qiu Jin memorial gathering.51 Sun gave many speeches, but he also cultivated a demeanor that communicated his role and reputation as national founder and guardian of the Republic. The look was consistent in its modernity and exotic in details, like the silk hat he often wore. Later in April, during a visit to Wuhan, Sun took part in ceremonies that included a by now familiar routine of ofﬁcial welcomes, salutations, and brass band music. On at least one occasion he participated in ballroom dancing, an exercise that struck many as an “extraordinary thing” but that, of course, was the sort of recreation a man in a silk hat who had seen the world might indulge in.52 Like a politician campaigning for election, Sun often promised things to locals: an iron bridge spanning the Yangtze at Wuhan, “a great steel plant” for Taiyuan, and more railway track and trains everywhere.53 What he could actually deliver most reliably was himself. As Sun Yat-sen was passing through Jinan in late September on his way back to Shanghai, he received word that students in Qingdao wanted to invite him for a visit but that German authorities in the Treaty Port refused permission. Sun declared, “I had not originally planned to go to Qingdao. But since the German invaders do not wish it, I must go.”54 Sun went, and in speeches to the students and local residents he characteristically criticized Germans for their imperial arrogance and complimented them on their educational reforms. A few weeks later Sun visited the Yangtze River town of Anqing to lend support to local anti-opium efforts there.55 Days before his arrival, Anhui’s governor, Jiang Kuan, had supervised the destruction of a stockpile of the drug belonging to a British ﬁrm after being menaced by a British gunboat sent to investigate.56 Since the conclusion of a new treaty with the British in 1911 designed to phase out and limit the opium trade, provincial authorities and allied anti-opium reformers had become more aggressive in taking matters into their own hands. In his two-hour speech Sun condemned the British for their “unjustiﬁed intervention.”57 He credited Governor Jiang’s diplomatic prowess for a peaceful resolution to the

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confrontation. Sun also praised his audience and the Chinese people for having acquired a new sense of “national awareness” up to the task of “eradicating evils” like opium.58 At most places Sun Yat-sen received warm welcomes and extravagant praise. The imperial greeting “Ten thousand years” (wansui) was common. Sun did sometimes meet with negative reactions to his message. In Wuhan a lecture on equalization of landholdings, a particular concern of Sun’s, triggered vigorous questioning from the crowd.59 On a visit to Hanyang, one of the Wuhan tri-cities, Sun spoke to the local chamber of commerce on the need for democracy, only to be told by one chamber ofﬁcer that such notions were “premature” in China. A small group of merchants slipped out of the meeting hall in a quiet but noticeable show of disapproval.60 Sun sometimes criticized the details of his reception in the places he visited in an apparent effort to mold China into what he considered suitable, republican form. In April 1912, on his way by ship from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Sun stopped in Fuzhou, the provincial capital of Fujian. Fujian governor Sun Daoren had arranged for an impressive parade into the city led by the governor on a horse and Sun Yat-sen carried along behind him in a sedan chair. However, when Sun Daoren came out to the docks to greet Sun Yat-sen, the former president objected angrily to banners greeting him that read “Welcome President Sun” and “Long Live (wansui) President Sun.”61 Sun insisted that when a president of a republic leaves ofﬁce he then again becomes a commoner (pingmin), the same term he would use to describe himself when he arrived in Beijing in August to face the royal carriage and white horses Yuan Shikai had waiting for him. Sun declared,“How can you call [me] ‘President’? And this wansui is what ofﬁcials used to call the feudal emperor. Consider how much was sacriﬁced by our own revolutionary martyrs in order to oppose wansui? How much blood was shed? . . . I won’t get off the boat.” Sun Daoren ordered the wording changed to “Welcome Dr. Sun,” and the reception was able to proceed. Later when the procession reached a group of students, Sun got out of his sedan chair to greet them, obliging the governor to dismount from his horse. In a more conventional gesture, Sun also left samples of his calligraphy to adorn local buildings and institutions. One piece of his handiwork was later destroyed by forces loyal to Yuan Shikai during the Second Revolution in 1913–14.62 Sun also paid respects to the clan of a revolutionary martyr and gave a cash gift to the widow of another. After he departed Fuzhou, a street was renamed in his honor. Sun’s visit to Fuzhou displayed the prickly, princi-

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pled side of Sun Yat-sen when it came to ﬂags, slogans, and ritual. He had no obvious rival as arbiter of republican values, and, on occasion, he asserted that authority. He could not force Yuan Shikai to move to Nanjing, but he could memorably oblige the Fujian governor to get off his horse in full view of the public. Sun was not always consistent in such matters. He sometimes accepted “Long Live!” with good grace and even directed the salutation at Yuan Shikai during his ﬁrst banquet with Yuan during his visit to Beijing.63 Banqueting was an established feature of republican political culture at all levels and an additional underpinning of the social infrastructure that supported public life. A critic like Lu Zhengxiang might complain of such indulgences, but they were a necessary part of Sun’s social and political circuit, as they had been for literati in imperial times. On another occasion Yuan Shikai invited Sun and his entourage to his presidential headquarters for a dinner of Western-style food. After a considerable number of toasts, Yuan, by one account “half-drunk,” got up and gave an impromptu speech praising Sun, citing his years of “study” abroad and his sincerity, and blaming whatever “misunderstandings” there had been between them on “rumors.”With yet another toast to Sun, Yuan shouted, “Long live Mr. Sun!” Sun returned the favor by ﬂattering Yuan as “rich in political experience” and saluting Yuan, the Chinese Republic, and the “ﬁve nationalities” with his own wansui.64 Since there were few settled notions of proper ritual to follow, Sun and his audiences improvised their own, borrowing elements from the West or simply continuing familiar conventions of dynastic and literati good manners. Initiative by leaders in adapting convention was nothing new in Chinese history. When the Qin emperor came to worship at Mount Tai court specialists could not agree on the proper ritual. The emperor ﬁnally rejected their unwelcome advice to wrap his carriage wheels to avoid injury to the mountain. Instead he dismissed the seventy scholars in his entourage, opened a road toward the summit, erected his marker, and kept his transactions with the mountain deity to himself.65 By their nature, republican rituals now belonged to everyone, especially those involving transactions between leaders and the people as the putative source of earthly power. Sun usually arrived at a locale on the train or by boat and was met by an automobile, horse cart, carriage, or sedan chair. The modern nature of the transport he used to travel around China often contrasted with local conveyances. A sedan chair might be the best and most suitable solution to bring the great man into town even as it telegraphed the residual presence of tradition and technical backwardness. For Sun, any-

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thing in public view might be a trope and every abstract idea begged concrete explication. Sun appreciated the value of gestures large and small. The anecdotes they produced added to his legend and kept him engaged with the changing and shifting landscape of dignitaries, crowds, and audiences. During his summer 1912 visit to Beijing Sun crossed through the foreign Legation Quarter with an armed guard in violation of a ban on Chinese doing so. Because of Sun’s stature he was let off with a warning. Sun promptly incorporated the incident into his speech making and declared this was yet another reason for eventually moving the capital away from Beijing.66 Sun used such anecdotes with alacrity and skill. Like Lu Xun, Sun took what irritated or angered him, including sometimes small, everyday incidents, and made them into the stuff of allegory and rhetorical address to the nation. Ten years later, in October 1921, on a journey from Guangzhou to Guilin, Sun asked one of the sedan chair bearers how old he was. When he learned that the man was sixty he got out and walked, remarking,“In the future, when the revolution is completed, you won’t need to carry a sedan chair.”67 Such token actions became the stock-in-trade of a number of Chinese leaders of the day. The warlord Feng Yuxiang had a reputation for populism and political theater comparable to Sun’s. A Soviet ofﬁcer accompanying him on a visit to soldiers in Zhengzhou noted that General Feng traveled there by ﬁrst-class train carriage. “But at the last junction before the city, Feng took a soldier’s umbrella and a white bag with dry bread crusts—an indispensable attribute of every soldier—and moved to a freight car.” When the train arrived at the station and Feng emerged with the other soldiers, “the effect was stupendous.”68 As far as one can tell from the record, Sun rarely if ever resorted to such subterfuges. He lived, as Sharman conceded, the character he played. Sun Yat-sen attracted considerable attention as he traveled. Supplicants and devotees besieged the hotels and residences where he stayed. According to one press account, “The struggle to pay [Sun] respects was keen.”69 A reporter who sought an early morning interview with Sun during his 1912 visit to Beijing found Sun still asleep (this was the day after the exertions of the August 25 Nationalist Party convention) and already more than ten people waiting to see him, mainly Cantonese and including two Japanese reporters. Before long the small group grew to over seventy people, and the reporter left without his interview but impressed by Sun’s attractive power.70 These “ofﬁce hours,” as one press account described them, were a regular feature of Sun’s schedule and supplemented the round of meetings and banquets he participated in.71

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Certain kinds of political events are “central to the political imagination” of an age, like the entry of an emperor or his representative to a Roman city, the ceremonial and inspection tours taken by Chinese emperors, or a modern political convention.72 While mass political demonstrations and protests, especially those of a patriotic type, were central to the political culture of republican China and rightly famous, the more routine peregrinations of political ﬁgures such as Sun also quickly became a ﬁxture of public life: the welcoming ceremony at the train station or dock, the procession into the city, visits to people and sites of local importance, speeches and lectures, commemorative photographs, consultations with guests and visitors, and the departure. The idea that a ruler husbanded his power and enhanced his authority by remaining immobile and concealed behind walls had not disappeared. But mobility was now a sign of power too, as it had been for more active emperors such as Kangxi and Qianlong during the Qing. While Sun certainly hoped that his presence would have a transforming effect on the people and communities he visited, his visits also enabled more routine transactions helpful to both sides.73 By receiving visiting dignitaries, citizens and their local leaders could share in making potentially useful national and international connections. Sun expanded his network of supporters and sympathizers. Provincial China shared a common national orientation even if local issues varied. Sun responded with generalities that glittered to good effect. He promised economic development and criticized Treaty Port powers. While Sun appeared to be running away from politics, Yuan Shikai was paying his bills. Sun’s northern tour in 1912 had the air of a political campaign bankrolled by one’s opponent. He was on his campaign trail even before Song Jiaoren and his political cohorts made it to theirs in fall 1912 and winter 1912–13. Sun stayed in this public role off and on for most of the rest of his life as he grappled with the question of how to turn his celebrity into charisma, the loyalty of his supporters into an organization, and the resistance of his many adversaries into their defeat and his victory. Sun rarely led a political protest. His measured interventions in Qingdao and Anqing came close with their deﬁance of “German invaders” and British gunboat diplomacy. He did not put himself at the head of anything unruly if he could help it. He preferred an orderly public and a compliant audience. As a result, the eruption of the May Fourth student and citizen movement in 1919 made Sun’s earlier efforts seem conservative and out of touch with the times. Were not these events the deﬁning public moments

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of the Republican era? However, if we break down Republican popular movements into their component parts—making speeches, seeking broad coalitions of various circles and groups, contriving dramatic political gestures, inventing new political rituals, taking advantage of the growing mimetic power of active citizenship as political incidents fueled movements that spread from city to city, and deploying cadres with the ability to internalize a message and act in concert to deliver on it—we ﬁnd that Sun Yat-sen was expert at if not the author of each.

Sun’s Last Words Sun Yat-sen’s most famous series of speeches, and one of the most important examples of sustained oratory in China’s modern era, was offered in Guangzhou in 1924 and continued in ﬁts and starts through the last summer of his life. His lectures on the Three Principles of the People began as once-a-week speeches on January 27, 1924, on the topic “Nationalism” and continued until March 2. He then spoke on “Democracy” from March 29 to April 27 and “People’s Livelihood” from August 3 to 24.74 From his deathbed in Beijing, a little more than a year after the Guangzhou lectures commenced, Sun approved a last will and testament written for him by Wang Jingwei.75 However, in many ways the series of speeches he gave in 1924 constitute a ﬁnal summation of his thought and his instructions for the revolution he would not complete. Sun’s extended public performance in 1924 coincided with the reorganization of the Nationalist Party as a Leninist rather than a parliamentary organization. In effect, Sun Yat-sen’s last words helped talk China into the era of the party-state. The speeches and the accompanying reorganization of the Nationalist Party took place as the parliamentary Republic in Beijing was emptied by militarists of its remaining republican substance and a year before the May Thirtieth Movement galvanized public opinion against imperialist affronts to the Chinese nation with protests in more than six hundred cities and towns. In 1924 Lu Zhengxiang was serving as minister to Switzerland, a position given him at his request so that he could care for his ill wife at their home in Locarno.76 Meanwhile Tang Qunying was still active in the women’s movement in Changsha. She opened and directed a middle school for girls in the provincial capital and played a role in persuading Hunan’s provincial government to grant women equal rights, including the right to vote, under the province’s constitution.77 Sun, Tang, and Lu had each retreated from events in the capital.

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10. The Guangzhou site of Sun’s 1924 lectures. Ceceile Strand.

Sun gathered his forces in his native Guangdong for a northern expedition to reunify the country by force if necessary. Tang struggled to advance in her home province of Hunan the cause of equal rights for women that had been obstructed at the national level. Lu served out his last ofﬁcial post on foreign ground that made a better ﬁt for his cosmopolitan public and private selves than anywhere in China. Diplomatic convention at least accorded his embassy in Europe the secure sovereign legal status the Treaty Port and concession regime denied Chinese at home. Meanwhile the Chinese homeland, though fractured, invaded, and partially occupied, gave abundant signs of movement toward some kind of as yet unknown form of unity. Sun’s purpose in 1924 was to sketch out what a uniﬁed Republican China might look like on the eve of the Nationalist thrust north and to assemble the tools needed to make that picture come to life. Sun Yat-sen’s lectures were given on Sunday mornings to audiences of two thousand to three thousand people in the auditorium of the Guangdong Higher Teacher’s College (ﬁgure 10). The building, with its plaster walls and ironwork roof, still stands as a graceful example of earlytwentieth-century public architecture in a class with the Senate building in Nanjing. Built on a north-south axis, the hall pointed a speaker south in the direction of the nearby Pearl River. The room was small

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enough so that one would not have to project much to be clearly heard. A balcony provided additional seating. The interior design also resembled a higher-ceilinged, less ornate version of the Huguang Lodge in Beijing. The audience packed into the hall consisted of government and party ofﬁcials, students, and “people from all walks of life.”78 Sun’s listeners were generally attentive, though sometimes distracted by fatigue or hunger (one attendee recalled rushing to the dining hall once Sun concluded his remarks for the day). Sun spoke with the aid of an outline and relevant data but dispensed with a prepared text so that the lectures had to be transcribed.79 Sun’s lectures were the recapitulation of years of speaking and writing. He hoped what he said would have an effect beyond the immediate audience and moment. Zou Lu, a Nationalist Party ofﬁcial, was responsible for the transcription, which included many corrections and emendations made by Sun in the ﬁnal, published text.80 Sun insisted on a ﬁnal product that was clear and easily transmittable. He told Zou that despite the “profound” nature of his thought, “anyone who is literate must be able to read and understand it. Only then can it reach the masses.”81 Sun used a blackboard to make his remarks clearer and once pulled a ﬂower out of his pocket to make a point.82 He insisted that the ﬁrst edition of his lectures be published in large print so that old people with weak eyes could read them.83 In May 1924 Sun recorded a four-record set of lectures on his Principles and other, related topics.84 Reaction to Sun’s lectures was generally positive, though not universally so. At one juncture Soviet adviser Borodin sought out Sun after his “People’s Livelihood” lecture, which was critical of a number of features of Marxism, and attacked Sun’s ideas. The resulting thirty-minute debate with Borodin left Sun extremely angry, one sign of how seriously he took the enterprise and how keen he was to distinguish his ideas from Communism.85 Sun Yat-sen was by no means a settled or even always coherent political thinker. Sun’s deiﬁcation as ideological founder and framer after his death obscures the fact that he was, in the judgment of one nonpartisan biographer, “not a great thinker.”86 For someone who aspired to displace the likes of the Ming philosopher Wang Yangming and Karl Marx, Sun lacked originality and rigor.87 His writings and speeches are full of contradictions. In contrast to suffragists like Tang Qunying and Shen Peizhen, Sun ridiculed Western notions of “natural rights” as ahistorical,88 then proceeded to construct his own mythic tale of a distinctively Chinese society emerging from a state of nature. He attacked, as a democrat, the “I am the state” formula of absolutist kings while in the

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next breath inviting fellow citizens to participate in “my revolution.”89 He depicted state power as an affair of force and violence and also as the expression of a peaceful devotion to “mutual aid.” Sun insisted that Chinese under the emperors had had both too much freedom and too little.90 His love of analogy, allegory, and metaphor led him to compare government to a machine, a joint-stock company, and a family. Though his ability to see the state in mechanistic, contractual, and familial terms might suggest a richness of perspective rather than slipperiness, there is also a tendency to deal with such contradictions by conﬂating terms and acting as if real differences did not exist. He insisted that his notion of “people’s livelihood” was the same as socialism, even though he had profound differences with socialists and Communists over issues such as class conﬂict.91 He attempted to reconcile Confucianism and Communism by simply declaring the existence of afﬁnities between the two.92 The context of the speeches included Sun’s decision to embrace the necessity of a disciplined, hierarchical political party. A congress of the once-again-reorganized Nationalists had just concluded its meetings in Guangzhou. Sun admitted that words alone were insufﬁcient to the task of realizing his vision. As he said in a speech of commemoration shortly after Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924, “You, Lenin, are exceptional. You not only speak and teach; you convert your words into reality.”93 From Sun’s point of view, Lenin had solved the word and deed problem that had bedeviled Chinese republicans. Even Sun, the master of words who could evoke a beautiful future in the midst of a bleak present, felt under increasing pressure to realize his vision. Unfortunately for Sun, Lenin did not return the compliments. He had criticized Sun for being a republican in name only without the support of the people.94 The political approach Sun now endorsed included a Leninist party, a coalition with the smaller but energized Communist Party, and the creation of a trained military force. In an echo of 1912 Sun replayed Song Jiaoren’s earlier role of reorganizing and redirecting the party to absorb new coalition partners. Except that now, in 1924, the direction the party took was radical rather than conservative, and authoritarian rather than democratic. There is no evidence that Sun agonized about this departure in approach. In the past, he had headed the Revolutionary Alliance as a loose coalition of regionally based factions, given over leadership responsibilities to lesser and independent-minded ﬁgures like Song Jiaoren, insisted on personal loyalty oaths to guard against betrayal, and permitted such structures to lapse entirely while he speculated about what kind of cementing force might bind the country together.

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Only a few years earlier, in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution that ultimately made Leninism so persuasive to many Chinese, in a sign of how impressed he had been by the demonstrated power of the women’s suffrage movement and, perhaps, how desperate he was to solve his and China’s leadership challenge, Sun had taken a very different approach. In his “Preliminary Note on Democracy” he drew positive lessons from his volatile experiences with female comrades in 1912 by promoting a well-known organizer’s how-to guide from the women’s movement, The Woman’s Manual of Parliamentary Law, with Practical Illustrations Especially Adapted to Women’s Organizations, as a blueprint for mobilizing, organizing, and democratizing China.95 Sun wanted the book, written by the American suffragist Harriet Shattuck in the 1890s, translated and distributed to “clans, societies, schools, agricultural associations, unions, chambers of commerce, companies, the national assembly, provincial assemblies, county assemblies, and meetings called to discuss national affairs” in order to both stimulate and channel the energies of these bodies. Shattuck’s aim had been to prepare American women for the rigors of having to “spring full-grown into the arena of public debate.”96 Sun especially liked the way she laid out clear and binding rules for ensuring that public life would be orderly and productive, in the style of “a soldier’s manual or a chemical formula.” Sun believed he had found in Shattuck’s “parliamentarian science” (yixue) the means of pulling China together. By spreading the letter and spirit of parliamentary order, he hoped to merge the “sociability” (hequn) that once had been the province of literati with the organized “group” (tuanti) to build a society that was both civic-minded and disciplined (hequn tuanti) and therefore a match for the mobilizing powers of Western nations. The suffrage movement’s earlier formula of local events played out on a world stage, transnational synergy among international and Chinese political actors, media and propaganda campaigns, direct action, militant organizing, and a committed leadership cadre anticipated Sun’s later embrace of Leninism, Comintern advisers, militarization, and May Fourth activism. Sun’s overriding goal was a usable political order, not political pluralism, individual rights, or rule of law. His turn away from democracy in 1923 and 1924 was a major departure in method and focus but not out of character for him as a political leader. Like the ambitious entrepreneurs who appropriated Western business and advertising methods, Sun was willing to poach any formula or technique that might help him in his quest for a uniﬁed China under his leadership, including those developed by American suffragists, British colonial administrators,

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or Russian and international Communists.97 With his fascination for machines and locomotion, and the mechanistic approach to politics that issued from such enthusiasms, Sun was in the market for an instructional manual suitable for assembling a China strong enough to survive. In a world beset by crises Sun was not alone in this quest. Carrie Chapman Catt, who turned her attention to a campaign for world peace after winning the vote for women in 1920, argued in a 1938 speech, “Germany has a Nazi primer; Russia a Red primer. We should have an American primer. It must tell the story of the struggle on this continent, not for power but for liberty.”98 Sun Yat-sen’s conditional acceptance of Leninism as operational supplement to his own Three Principles primer sprang from his long-standing concern for order and discipline. The recent past, especially the 1922 revolt of Chen Jiongming in Guangdong, reinforced Sun’s desire to ﬁnd the proper mechanisms to control his own people, and fellow political elites, so that he would be able, in turn, to move and control China. This shift in method required considerable tactical ﬂexibility, a type of maneuver Sun was well versed in. He had changed course many times in the past: from reform to revolution in the 1890s, from reliance on the Revolutionary Alliance as an organization in 1905 to near-abandonment of it by 1910, from reconciliation with Yuan Shikai in 1912 to military defiance in 1913, from rebuilding a party based on personal loyalty in the 1910s to his Leninist turn in the 1920s. A recent study of leadership patterns in Chinese history praises Sun for responding well to contingencies and shifts in the trends and currents that shape a leader’s immediate environment.99 The same study, perhaps reﬂecting the market-driven concerns of the economic reform era in today’s China, as well as an intuition of the commercial basis of Sun’s thought and politics, goes so far as to compare Sun’s alliance with the Communists to the retailing genius of Macy’s department store in seeing the potential in credit purchases, credit cards, and the ten-day return policy.100 It is also true that Sun had few options left except to turn to the Soviet Union as patron and Leninism as a political technique. No other foreign power was interested in supporting him, and Sun had tried every other ideological inspiration and type of organization except anarchism or a revival of monarchy. By 1924 Sun’s prospects for centering his party and the nation on his own person and agenda had improved signiﬁcantly. Though battered by years of reversals and betrayals, Sun was still standing as a political leader. He had outlived ambitious and attractive protégés like Song Jiaoren and deadly rivals like Yuan Shikai. Living challengers like the warlords of

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China had their own credibility problems. The notion that Sun was an empty cannon, though still current, had been superseded by the yawning emptiness of the Republic itself as a viable political system, a vacuum that sharply contrasted with a citizenry and society increasingly pitched toward republican mobilization. If national Republican institutions had failed to lead China, perhaps a national Republican leader armed with a Leninist party and well-trained regiments could succeed. Sun wisely joined the chorus of critics of the Republic he had helped establish. In a January 1924 speech to Guangzhou policemen and Merchant Corps members Sun acknowledged that it was necessary to “start from scratch with a new republic” using “glorious Guangzhou” as a “good foundation.”101 In instructions in 1924 to the Whampoa Military Academy Sun declared,“The Chinese Revolution took place thirteen years ago, but the result is only a Republican reign title (nianhao), not a Republic in fact.”102 Sun’s remedy for these failures was a reorganized Nationalist Party infused with his ideas and guided by his leadership. If Sun was in agreement with many in and out of his party that the Chinese polity was in a sorry state, he also faced skepticism about the need for a paramount leader to stage a revival. In retrospect China seemed to be waiting for Sun, Chiang Kai-shek, and ﬁnally Mao Zedong to lead it. However, not everyone in the early 1920s saw leaders, or a leader like Sun, as the cure for a disorderly, weakened republic. At the time the country was still recovering from the incapacities of a child emperor, the machinations of Yuan Shikai, and the provincialism of assorted strongmen none of whom were strong enough to preserve their own power much less enhance China’s interests. One populist-minded critic was unsparing in his attack on the entire Republican generation of public ﬁgures, including Sun. The “Chinese Republic” was founded only twelve years ago and has already disgraced the Chinese people. Attempts at restoring the monarchy, civil war, an emperor called Constitutional Achievement [Yuan Shikai], betrayal of the nation by the Anfu clique [of ofﬁcials and generals], politicians creating turmoil, warlords vying for territory, mutinies, kidnappings by bandits, and members of parliament prostituting themselves. So many black deeds!103

“Who will take responsibility for resolving these crises?” he asked. Certainly not the current elite. At present no one believes the ruling class can be depended on; no one believes that bunch of warlords, politicians, and bureaucrats can do anything about it. We now seem to have shaken off our belief in hero-worship, the il-

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lusion that an idol is omnipotent. Ten years ago many people superstitiously believed that Yuan Shikai could unify China. Now there isn’t a single person who thinks Cao Kun can be a [real] president. In the past we worshiped celebrities and politicians. We didn’t realize what kind of patent medicine they were hawking by the bottle. Now we have known for some time. They are all unreliable. We cannot depend on Wu Peifu or Sun Yat-sen or any “Great Man” or “Politician,” but only ourselves.104

This was the same pseudonymous “Hua Lu” who also argued that there were “too many scripts”—federalism, centralization, communism, the Three Principles of the People, good government, or guild socialism— “and no one willing to simply get up on the stage and act.”105 In the past Sun had been derided as a glib medicine man.106 If he or someone else could offer the genuine article and really act the part of a national leader in tune with the people, might not even a cynic reconsider? Sun now downplayed the signiﬁcance of great leaders like Washington and Napoleon in favor of the notion that “the course of the nation is determined by the psychology of the multitudes.”107 Like proponents of public speaking as a new discipline or science, Sun agreed that an understanding of mass psychology was an important dimension of leadership. He also assumed that without strong leadership the masses, like a restive or resisting audience facing an ineffective speaker, would remain divided and adrift. In his 1924 lecture series Sun Yat-sen’s basic point was that under his leadership, and with the help of the Leninist party as the newest, most modern form of political organization, China was capable of pulling itself together without ceasing to be Chinese in a deep cultural sense. As signs of his grasp of what the modern world had to offer in this effort, the lectures are loaded with references to foreign ideas, events, and machines like Plato’s Republic, the American Civil War, the foreign policy of Otto von Bismarck, and textile industry innovations. As always Sun felt obliged to tutor his audience in the ways of the larger world. At the same time he went to considerable pains to overcome his image as a Westernized Chinese more in tune with foreign things and ideas than with his own country. As a “true son of the littoral,” in Paul Cohen’s phrase, much of Sun’s career had been devoted to bringing the West to China.108 As Cohen observes, the completion of Sun’s plans for unifying China required “indigenous validation.”109 Tang Qunying had looked both to the mother of Mencius and Rousseau, Lu Zhengxiang to Confucianism and Catholicism, and Zhang Binglin to social Darwinism and Han dynasty social etiquette (the latter in a riff about how the dofﬁng of hats originated in

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ancient China).110 As he turned his focus to the problem of a new social and political order, Sun also, in a maneuver Frantz Fanon later described as common for intellectuals in colonized circumstances, sought “secure anchorage” in tradition.111 Sun worried out loud as always about China remaining divided “as a sheet of sand” and too weak to resist imperialism and solve its many internal problems. He argued that this divisiveness resulted from too much devotion to family and clan interests. Foreign observers say that the Chinese are a sheet of sand. Why might this be? The reason is that the people only have family-ism and clan-ism. They have no nationalism. The rallying power of the Chinese toward family and clan is extremely strong. . . . Because this kind of doctrine is so deeply rooted in the psyche, sacriﬁce for the clan [for example] is ever possible. In contrast, as regards one’s country, there is nothing comparable in the form of a spirit of real sacriﬁce. And so, the rallying power of the Chinese can extend only to the clan and no further. It has not yet reached the nation.112

In identifying family and lineage sentiments as rivals of nationalism, Sun might have been laying the groundwork for an attack on the traditional family system. Such views were commonplace in the early Republic and the May Fourth era, as exempliﬁed by many of Lu Xun’s stories and by Tang Qunying’s diatribe against the poisonous effects of Zeng Guofan’s clan rules. The premise of republican politics, expressed through suffrage alliances and political parties, was that the citizen as part of an organized body of citizens would replace the family as the central metaphor of politics. Sun has also sometimes been associated with such criticisms of traditional culture.113 Instead, in 1924 Sun accepted the permanence of family and clan and, in one of the strangest and most arresting moments in the lectures, imagined a modern China organized on the basis of lineage. This rhetorical turn clearly owes something to Zhang Binglin and the “national essence” school that contrived to discover in select Western ideas ancient Chinese values worth preserving.114 Like Zhang, Sun sought to explain how China could become politically modern by drawing on inner cultural reserves. A master of allying present and future to spur the revolution on, Sun now sought a grand alliance of past, present, and future to match and anchor the complete unity he envisioned for the Chinese people. In his ﬁfth lecture on the principle of nationalism, given in February 1924, Sun imagined how a “national body” (minzu tuanti) might be formed from family and clan units. The style is very much a piece with

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Sun’s typically discursive, almost conversational style of address combining the abstract and the personal. This was how he held an audience, and how he hoped to take hold of China. I noted earlier that China had very solid family and clan groupings. . . . For example, when Chinese meet on the road and engage in conversation they will ask each other’s family name. If, as a result, they discover they are from the same lineage, they become extremely affectionate and, sharing the same name, regard each other as close relations. Building on this worthy sentiment, we could extend clan-ism to nationalism. If the nationalism we have lost is to be restored, we must be uniﬁed, uniﬁed on a larger scale. If we are to form a great body, we must ﬁrst have small foundations. Only from such a foundation can uniting together meet with ready success. The foundation we in China have for this purpose is the lineage group. In addition, we have the hometown (jiaxiang) foundation. The native-place outlook of the Chinese is also very deep. Persons from the same province, county, or village ﬁnd it particularly easy to join together. As I see it, if we take these two worthy perspectives as the foundation, we can certainly bring everyone in the country together.115

Sun encountered such family or ﬁctive family ties on an everyday basis: in the personal and provincial connections that undergirded his revolutionary efforts and at venues such as the Huguang Lodge. Sun believed that China’s national identity had been alive and well in ancient times but then lost through imperial, especially Manchu, and literati malfeasance. Sun early on had justiﬁed his alliances with secret societies by arguing that their understanding of the national interest was superior to the scholar-ofﬁcial class because these “good fellows” were more in tune with what it meant to be Chinese. Recovering this national feeling required digging deep into Chinese culture and remolding what one found there. The trick was to turn the sand of familism and clanism into solid “rock.” If we pick up a handful of sand—regardless of how much—each grain shakes around a lot, unrestrained. This is what a sheet of sand is. If we add cement to the sand, it forms a rock, a solid body. Once transformed into a rock, this body is quite solid and the sand has no freedom. So it is readily apparent that if one compares sand and rock, rock is basically something formed from sand. But once inside the solid body of rock, sand cannot move. It has lost its freedom. One way of thinking about freedom, simply put, is that freedom is the ability to move around within a [larger] body.116

It is not always clear whether Sun intended to smuggle authoritarian ideas like these into his thought or whether, lacking the brilliance of someone like Liang Qichao, his love of metaphor as a rhetorical device led his

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thinking in unintended directions. One can hear the public speaker in the written passage and be reasonably conﬁdent that Sun wanted to transform his immediate audience and then the entire nation into a hardened body that would not run through the ﬁngers of a leader like grains of sand. The Chinese people are a tactile and potentially volatile presence in Sun’s mind and in the hall where he spoke. Sun noted that there were as many as four hundred common surnames in China, and if each of these was made the basis of the kind of organizing he had in mind, “we could, in the name of the clan, rally people at the village and county level ﬁrst and then expand to the provincial and national levels. Each family name would then become a great body.” Once aware of the “threat of extinction we face, they would all unite into one great Chinese Republican national body.”117 Sun counted on fear on the part of lineages at the prospect of the family line dying out being translated into a direct identiﬁcation with the racial threat he saw to China. Gunboat diplomacy on theYangtze River, military threats along China’s borders, and warlord depredations everywhere would enable Chinese to make this association. Sun was seeking more than a turning of lineage-based solidarity outward to the political community. He wanted these feelings organized within the matrix of China’s administrative hierarchy. Unlike groups or “circles” (jie) of farmers, merchants, workers, and women, these clan orders would have no obvious interests to articulate or press aside from their own and the nation’s survival. The result would be a kind of leader’s utopia grounded in a mobilized and compliant population. Sun was edging closer than he might have imagined to his old rival Yuan Shikai’s vision of the nation as an efﬁcient workspace for the workaholic leader, and for some of the same reasons. Sun’s position in South China in 1924, gathering strength to project his power nationwide, was now close to Yuan’s in Beijing and North China in 1912. Since Sun Yat-sen never attempted to create such a family- and clanbased polity, his intent in the speech seems more rhetorical than prescriptive. Analogous to John Locke’s ﬁctive state of nature from which Locke derived real-world individual rights and obligations, Sun put forward a kind of timeless “state of culture” to remind Chinese of the dangers of self-interest and disunity. Imagine a China in which each citizen treated the state as his or her family and then use that standard of loyalty to test any partial interest or claim. Sun was well aware there would be objections to such a standard and, as he always did in lectures, provided concrete illustrations of the dangers he had in mind.

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In foreign countries, the individual is the unit, and the law regarding the individual rights of parent and child, elder and younger brother, elder and younger sister, and husband and wife is such that each is accorded his or her own protection. In the case of a lawsuit, you would not consider the family’s situation but only that of the individual. And so the state is an enlargement of the individual. Between the individual and the state, there is no solid and common intermediary social ground (zhongjian shehui). So that we can say that in the case of the structural relationship between the citizen and the state, foreign countries differ from China. Because in China, in addition to the individual, we attach such importance to the family, if there is some issue of consequence, we naturally ask the head of the household. Some say this arrangement is good. Some say it is bad. From my standpoint, the structural relationship between Chinese citizens and the state begins with the family, extends to the clan, and only afterward the nation. This kind of organized, step-by-step [in the sense of ascending stairs] enlargement, in perfect order, would be, in the structural relations between large and small, very solid and concrete.118

One can easily imagine Zhang Binglin and other conservatives agreeing with Sun that the persistence of patriarchy would be good for the country and militant suffragists vehemently disagreeing along with many others whose rights and interests depended on freedom from family control. In addition, as Fei Xiaotong pointed out, the actual practice of ﬁguring out where one’s loyalties lay in a given circumstance was far more ﬂexible in Chinese political culture than Sun implies. Some of the grains of sand Sun and other uniﬁers ﬁxed their eyes on, like suffragists, were convinced that their personal freedom of movement was essential to the public good, a mobility and independence Sun epitomized in his own life and career. In his discussion of individual, family, “intermediary social ground,” and the state or nation, Sun ventured into the realm where theories of “civil society” apply. Sun needed trains and boats to get around China, but without native-place associations, chambers of commerce, professional bodies of all kinds, newspapers, and student groups he would have had no place to come to rest, speak, and politick. After considering this intermediate, social infrastructure, Sun professed to ﬁnd little of interest save affronts to the Chinese way of doing things. Imagine a child hiring a lawyer and suing her parent! Or, one might add, imagine judging Sun a bigamist on account of his marrying Song Qingling without legally divorcing Lu Muzhen. The space, morally and organizationally, between the individual and the state, described by writers as diverse as Hegel, Tocqueville, and Liang Qichao as containing complex strata of associations,

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contractual relationships, or civic-minded sociability, is for Sun empty or weak. In China Sun claimed to see only the smooth incorporation of the individual and family into the state and nation. In one of the supple, not to say slippery, maneuvers he was well known for, Sun blinked away the complex, modernizing, and group-based social and political world he had operated in all his political life. This was the political world he had invoked in his 1917 brief for a republican and democratic order with the help of the writings of Harriet Shattuck and the example of Tang Qunying and Song Jiaoren. Sun’s political thought moved in two directions at once: toward the West as a store of useful invention and toward a cultural understanding of China as distinct from the rest of the world. For Sun, a republic as an imported political invention is ﬁnally more Chinese than some refurbished or reinvented monarchy, because under a republic the Chinese community is better served and protected. Equality in Sun’s Republic meant a common identity as a people, shared sacriﬁce, and equitable distribution of the good things a modern China would bring, not power sharing. Sun did not foreclose the possibility of genuinely democratic institutions. He planned for their eventual appearance once the people were ready. Democracy was an exhibit in Sun’s museum of the future, along with women’s suffrage and other claims and demands inconvenient to the pursuit of power in present-day China. While it is tempting to see Sun’s warnings about individualism as an expression of an old man’s impatience with new and renewed challenges from rebellious youths, rights-conscious women, class-conscious workers, and antitax merchants, Sun’s concerns go deeper. Partha Chatterjee, in a critique of the application of theories of civil society to countries like India and China, argues that even in Hegel, an author of the concept, there is a profound ambivalence concerning what is missing from the world of lawyers, interest groups, and public opinion.119 When Hegel seeks to preserve a place for the family as a “natural or immediate phase” of ethical life against the supremacy of the state and the suprafamilial realm of the marketplace and social organization, Chatterjee sees this as a “suppressed narrative of community.”“Hegel’s arguments on the family,” he says, “remind us of the irreducible immediacy in which human beings are born in society: not as pure unattached individuals free to choose their social afﬁliations . . . but as already ascribed members of society.” 120 Mohandas Gandhi’s vision of India as a republic of villages and Sun Yat-sen’s of China as a confederation of clans both offer an al-

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ternative narrative of community to nations and societies busy arming themselves with the machinery of modern politics and economics.

Growing Old and Appealing to the Young With his new political base, party, and army in the south, Sun moved to what would be his last living moment on the political stage. He had something substantial to offer now by way of an insurgent regime buttressed by interlocking party, government, and military institutions. The continued expansion of print media, the entrenched habits of public protests, and the enhanced propaganda capacity of the new party-state also brightened and ampliﬁed Sun’s role as leader and political prophet. Sun faced an old crowd of disillusioned republicans and a more youthful and emancipated audience of May Fourth–era idealists. In a long revolution managing, and accepting, generational change among leaders and followers is vital. Sun was especially conscious of the challenge represented by young people who had joined the Nationalist Party as individuals or as part of the Nationalist–Communist alliance, or “united front.” During the May Fourth Movement Sun had sent messages of support to Peking University students and “urged Shanghai students to follow their lead.”121 One of the strengths of the reorganized Nationalist Party was the inﬂux of this new blood.122 Younger people also carried the antiauthoritarian impulse of the May Fourth Movement and could be expected to be skeptical of the founder of a republic many of them had come to revile. Hu Shi registered this pressure and danger when he referred to the mobilized young as a “mob of children who naturally act without anyone leading them.”123 Lu Zhengxiang’s criticism of politicians as too fond of visiting courtesans had been replaced by the more corrosive charge that members of the political class were themselves prostitutes. Sun as salesman for a revolution that had made many deals and compromises faced a young generation bent on uncompromising struggle. How Sun reacted to this new constituency and how the young reacted to Sun can be glimpsed in a revealing encounter Sun had with three Tsinghua University students in January 1924, shortly before he began his lecture series.124 Sun’s talent for provoking and persuading is on display in what amounts to an unusually complete record of both the content and the style of Sun’s rhetoric and also the mixed reaction of an engaged and questioning audience. If the Chinese population, especially the educated young, were not as inert and easily manipulated as Sun had assumed be-

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fore the May Fourth Movement, how could they be won over by a national leader demanding sacriﬁce and compliance? The students, led by Xu Yongying and bound for study in the United States, discussed a wide range of issues with Sun, including the Nationalist Party’s alliance with the Soviet Union and prospects for success in the planned Northern Expedition to unify China by military force. The scene was reminiscent, though in a more private venue, of Lu Zhengxiang’s interview with the crowd of students on the Shanghai Bund in 1920. However, Sun’s encounter with Tsinghua students in 1924 was very different in tone: part appeal, part lecture, and part interrogation. Sun began the interview by explaining why the reorganization of the Nationalist Party along Leninist lines was necessary. He stressed the importance of “discipline” (jilu) and criticized party members who “would not accept restrictions imposed by the party because they considered restrictive orders destructive to their freedom.”125 As he would soon detail in his lectures, Sun insisted that the idea of individual freedom was an obstacle to social and political mobilization. The goal of the revolution was freedom for the people, not for the individual. He had harsh words for the political tendencies of students in comments that sound at ﬁrst as misconceived as Lu Zhengxiang’s failed attempt to win over his audience of senators by attacking their lack of virtue. Past revolutionary parties were mostly made up of students. Because the thinking of students is of the new sort, they are able to understand the meaning of revolution. It is easy for them to gather together on that basis. But they cannot really grasp the part [about discipline]. They think the goal of revolution is to seek equality and freedom. They themselves want freedom. They don’t follow party orders and don’t accept limits set by the party.126

This lack of discipline resulted, according to Sun, in a Chinese revolution dependent on a single leader. The presence of discipline in Lenin’s party would permit the Soviet party and state to survive Lenin’s death. With its new reorganization, the Nationalist Party would be similarly protected from the consequences of a lost leader or a fractious membership. This was a clever response on Sun’s part to complaints about hero worship and an eerie anticipation of his own demise the following year. Accept party discipline (and obedience to Sun as party leader), and be done with slavish dependence on great men (like Sun). Sun then suddenly seemed to reverse course by asking the students, “Why do Westerners struggle for freedom and the Chinese do not? Chinese not only do not struggle for freedom, but even the word (ziyou) ac-

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quired its current meaning only in the last ten or twenty years.” Like many such concepts, “freedom” was a loanword from Japan and a new addition to China’s political vocabulary. Xu and his classmates fumbled for an answer because, as Xu later reported, they “did not understand what he was getting at.” This was an odd question to members of a generation initiated to politics under the 1919 banner “Democracy and Science.” Sun launched into a lecture on the nature of freedom and its dangers that rehearsed what he would have to say about the topic in his second lecture on democracy two months later. He declared that “Chinese have too much freedom and therefore do not even know they have it.” He sought to prove his point—how Chinese could have something they did not even have an agreed-on word for—by comparing freedom to the air one breathes while oblivious to what would happen if one’s air supply were cut off. People think more about eating as a necessity, even though “we can stop eating for one, two, or three days without endangering our lives. But try to stop breathing for one, two, or three minutes. You probably would not be able to do it. Doesn’t this prove that breathing is more important than eating? When we ordinarily think about life, we are only aware of food, not air. That is because there is so much air. We can use it as we please.” Sun suddenly interrupted his remarks to leave the room and conduct some other business. As he left, “at a goose-step pace,” he called to the students to wait for him to return. The remarks are typical of Sun Yat-sen’s conversational style. They never fail on reading to make me a bit dizzy. One can imagine the impact of a live performance. When they were alone for a moment, one of Xu’s companions, He Yongji, reacting to what he had just heard and to the way Sun had exited the room, exclaimed, “He really is too much!” Aside from Borodin’s semiprivate attack on Sun for his treatment of Marxism in his “Principle of People’s Livelihood” lectures in August, we have little indication of dissent on the part of Sun’s audiences at the 1924 lectures. As he usually did when he lectured, Sun maintained control to the point that dozing off by a few individuals seated before him were the only recorded acts of resistance to Sun’s river of words. In comparison, the Tsinghua students form a kind of focus group, free in Xu’s telling to vent their real feelings. Sun could be direct and to the point. He also loved to muse about the nature of things in a style that bordered on the pompous and professorial. Self-dramatization of a kind that could either inspire or annoy was second nature to him. Xu disagreed with his friend’s negative judgment and defended Sun, arguing that Sun probably”goose-stepped” as a matter of habit and not just to impress his audience. Besides, “Chinese

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who have this kind of vigor (jingshen) are too few and far between. When we see an old guy of sixty act like that, why make a fuss?” Was Sun acting according to some trite script or some more authentic personal impulse? Xu was inclined to give Sun the beneﬁt of the doubt. Despite Sun’s distance from the student movement on matters of politics and philosophy, he was an old guy who could act young, and with “vigor” or “spirit.”“Vigor” was a keyword and much sought after quality for students of public speaking and activists in general. It remained so forty-two years later when Mao Zedong took his famous swim in the Yangtze at the onset of the militant phase of the Cultural Revolution and “gave a triumphant demonstration of his continuing vigor.”127 Xu was not bowled over by a charismatic Sun but instead persuaded by his energy and commitment. Was Sun an old fool or a vigorous statesman? At this moment, in front of his small audience, Sun could be seen teetering on the edge between an inspiring presence and a comic turn not unlike the one Yuan Shikai had succumbed to when he decided to try to act like an emperor. Perhaps Sun’s show of vitality was less an old man’s vanity and more a recognition of the evident power of a newly awakened generation any leader would have to meet partway if not match. As Simmel argued, to be effective, leaders must also be led. Later, in his article about their visit with the great man, Xu Yongying admitted that certain aspects of Sun’s manner were unusual. When Mr. Sun spoke to us, he generally smiled and was unusually affable. Then, suddenly, his smile would disappear, his mouth would shut, and he would have this serious look you didn’t dare cross. When he directed this expression toward us, we deﬁnitely could not speak freely. This is the face he used towards those subordinate to him. With these two faces he could make you feel on intimate terms with him or in awe of him. This [ability to be twofaced] is clearly in tune with the times insofar as what it takes to be a leader. One kind of person can smile and grin. Another kind is severe-looking. To have only one [of these] would be to be partial and incomplete.128

The different reactions of Xu and He to Sun’s alternately warm and cold, intimate and aloof manner suggest mercurial elements of Sun’s personality. In his successive encounters with Lu Zhengxiang in Beijing in late August 1912, Sun had given the beleaguered prime minister ﬁrst his smiling and then his severe and scolding demeanor. Sun lacked Huang Xing’s transparent sincerity and Song Jiaoren’s clarity of thought. He was no strongman like Yuan Shikai. Capable of charm, he possessed some of Lu Zhengxiang’s diplomatic skills. Twelve years earlier, while making the rounds during his 1912 visit to Beijing, Sun had been criticized for be-

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ing too affable and diplomatic when he should have been tougher and willing to use “words that hurt but also help in healing the nation’s serious maladies.”129 In other meetings with May Fourth–era students Sun had accented his warmer side. In 1920 when Sun met with Zhang Guotao and three other student radicals the young people pressed Sun hard on a range of issues. At times Sun became “agitated” or “showed disapproval.” But he listened patiently, and Zhang recalled that Sun’s “graciousness entirely transformed the atmosphere which . . . had been charged with antagonism [so that] everyone . . . wore a smile.”130 With Xu Yongying and his friends Sun Yat-sen turned on the charm. He also pressed hard to override what he saw as resistance by the younger generation to his ideas and plans. In his multiple guises he came closest to Tang Qunying who also could be rigid or ﬂexible, empathetic or furious, and analytical or impulsive as the occasion warranted. The criticism Sun offered of student politics and the May Fourth Movement would inﬂuence fellow party members in their growing belief that such spontaneous outbursts required disciplined leadership.131 What is more remarkable is the willingness of members of the new revolutionary generation to submit to such discipline in order to be “good” Nationalists, or Communists. Sometime after meeting with the students, Sun conﬁded to Zou Lu that independent-minded young people who viewed love, marriage, and family as matters of personal choice and freedom were imperiling the Chinese race with their selﬁshness. The educated classes did not seem to understand that China was threatened with underpopulation and the consequent extinction of the “yellow races” by the growing power and numbers of whites. Look at today’s educated youth. The men are afraid of the ﬁnancial burdens of raising children. Women fear the pain of childbirth and, as a result, blindly advocate remaining single and practicing birth control. . . . The educated do not give a thought to propagating. The result can only be a weak and diminished race (minzu). . . . We must advocate ﬁlial piety because if there is ﬁlial piety, everyone will see there are advantages in having sons and daughters.132

Considering the heartfelt nature of these sentiments, signs perhaps of Sun’s frustration with young people, including feminists, who regarded him as an “old guy,” and, even, a ﬂare-up of lingering hostility to the literati types who had bedeviled his early political life, Sun’s challenge to the Tsinghua students was measured and calculated to ﬁnd common ground on the relatively safe and familiar terrain of patriotism.

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When Sun returned to the room, he calmly resumed his discourse on freedom with one of his signature comparisons of China and the West. A person with air to breathe is not even aware there is such a thing as air. It is like a ﬁsh in the water not being aware of water. But take a ﬁsh out of water and put it on land. After half a minute, that ﬁsh will know what water is. If you shut a person inside a room and draw the air out with a pump, that person will know what air is. China does not know to demand freedom any more than the ordinary person does not think of demanding air. Westerners know the importance of freedom and struggle for it. This is because since the Middle Ages people’s freedom has undergone severe repression, as if they had the air sucked from them. They became like ﬁsh on dry land. Chinese have actually had excessive freedom. What they need is discipline, not freedom.133

Six months earlier Lu Xun had published in a Beijing newspaper literary supplement his short essay containing the “iron room” metaphor of a China asleep and suffocating.134 The dilemma Lu Xun posed was whether the sleepers should be awakened or left to die quietly without pain and fear. Lu Xun chose to rouse them through his writing in the hope that Chinese would ﬁnd a way to break out of their prison. The metaphor implied that Chinese would need to be vocal to accomplish this feat. They would need to wake each other and devise a plan for their common liberation. Sun shared Lu Xun’s goal of awakening China without being wedded to a student demonstration model of what political speech would entail. Perhaps inﬂuenced by the procrustean promise of Leninism, he chose to do so by building his own iron room designed to inﬂict the pain of discipline. What better metaphor for Leninism? That discipline would help keep a lid on his fractious compatriots. Implied is the need to pump air out, presumably with the aid of the regimented party he was constructing in Guangzhou. That some of those affected might end up gasping like a ﬁsh without water or a person without air did not seem to trouble him. Certainly he had witnessed with a mixture of sympathy and detachment that kind of torment among suffragists in 1912. For women like Tang Qunying and Shen Peizhen, the Nationalist Party convention in the Huguang Lodge was a constricting experience that no amount of heckling, speech making, and weeping seemed to pry open. Their male comrades refused to wake up. The room where they met with Sun after their August 25 debacle “shook” with their weeping. Sun was “moved” but unshaken in his resolve to stay his course of expediency. In October 1924 Sun would inﬂict pain and suffering on the same Guangzhou merchants he had appealed to for support in January by suppressing a gen-

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eral strike and meeting armed resistance with a brutal counterattack of his own against the city’s merchant quarter.135 For Sun, pain was necessary in order to achieve the common end of nation building. Consciousness of freedom produced as a by-product of regimentation would bear democratic fruit in the future. In this, Sun was not far wrong. When the Tsinghua students who met with Sun in January 1924 later discussed the meeting among themselves, He Yongji criticized Sun on this point as well, labeling the water and air business a “false analogy.” He Yongji had a point. Most of us take breathing for granted, but anyone with a modern education thinks of “air” as a concept from time to time, or as something even more material when one is running a race or choking on exhaust or factory fumes. A ﬁsh out of water does not “know what water is” in any meaningful sense. Sun’s vivid metaphor is also nearly the same as that of the pioneering sociologist Pitrim Sorokin who used it a few years later to illustrate his belief—not so different from the point Sun was trying to make—that we often ignore basic features of the reality we are a part of.136 Sun’s rhetorical technique is similar to what Kenneth Burke describes as the use of “perspective by incongruity” to achieve a “comic corrective” to unexamined assumptions.137 Sun is arguing that Chinese will never understand what freedom is unless they are subjected to real discipline in their lives. Students who have recently experienced what they think is liberation are asked to see rebellion against parents, teachers, and political authorities as an exercise in anarchy and selﬁshness. Although Sun Yat-sen now and then made a joke, he was no more a comic than Lu Zhengxiang or Tang Qunying. What all three shared was a distinctly nonironic approach to politics suitable for cutting through social ironies and mockery that sometimes disabled more thoughtful and sensitive political actors. After all, Tang’s riposte to an editorial mocking her as a not-so-chaste widow was to wreck the newspaper ofﬁce, not offer mockery in return, even though her literary and debating skills fully equipped her to do so. Sun asked big and important questions about the nature of Chinese culture, politics, and society and answered them with colorful and provocative talk. This bold approach held his listeners’ attention, even though at times what he said seemed to defy logic. Even Xu was inclined to agree with his friend He’s criticisms of Sun on the question of freedom. Xu thought Sun had overdone it in exerting himself so. It was a rather outsized address for such a small audience—“a lengthy speech that came in a tireless torrent [of words].” However, Xu also concluded that

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Sun’s emphasis on discipline was “naturally quite correct.” Logical or rhetorical missteps should not be held against him. Sun Yat-sen’s republican discourse worked or misﬁred on more than one level. This was fortunate since his efforts to achieve ideological coherence and to appeal to common interest sometimes failed or fell short. As Bruce Lincoln points out: Discourse is not only an instrument of persuasion, operating along rational (or pseudo-rational) and moral (or pseudo-moral) lines, but it is also an instrument of sentiment evocation. Moreover, it is through these paired instrumentalities—ideological persuasion and sentiment evocation—that discourse holds the capacity to shape and reshape society.138

Contemporary Chinese understood the power of these “paired instrumentalities.” Yu Nanqiu, a student of public speaking, noting that giving speeches before a “sea of people” had become by the 1920s “a kind of universal thing,” wrote that even “in the law courts lawyers stand up and use words of emotion and reason in their ﬂuent and endless arguments.”139 By appealing to emotion and sentiment, Sun overcame the weaknesses of his arguments and the confusion that sometimes resulted from his torrent of written and spoken words. To many, Sun had the right “look” (zirong) and emotional message to be convincing. The danger that a compelling emotional appeal might mask faulty thinking and wrongheaded policies was evident from the beginning to at least some observers. That Xu Yongying also saw the danger and was willing to listen and follow Sun is also signiﬁcant. Xu ended up joining the Communist Party after his return to China and was killed by Nationalists in 1931. Reading Sun’s speeches for content alone misses a critical element of his appeal. As one judicious summing-up of Sun Yat-sen’s strengths and weaknesses as a rhetorician explained,“Lacking intellectual maturity and inner coherence, his writings [and, one might add, speeches] appear as conglomerations of unrelated facts and absurd inaccuracies, fuzzy reasoning and blatant distortion, interspersed however, with emotional eloquence, high idealism, and ﬂashes of genuine inspiration.”140 Supporters like Xu Yongying responded to the eloquence and idealism and forgave the inconsistencies.

Nose to Nose with the People Sun navigated through the wreckage of other politicians’ careers with a public presence that deﬁed ridicule, irony, and more objective measures

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11. Sun Yat-sen speaking in Guilin in 1921. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–96941.

of political and military power. In January 1924, as Sun commenced his lecture series in Guangzhou, a newspaper editorialist singled out Sun for praise in an article the title of which—“Sun Yat-sen Is Certainly No Thug”—illustrated the uphill struggle faced by leaders during the era.141 Sun, the writer said, was someone who “told the truth, was straightforward, and acted with complete composure” in the face of crisis. Sun was not immune to the barbs launched at his rivals. However, his willingness to go to the people was irrepressible and often persuasive. He demonstrated that a leader’s public performance could galvanize an audience and exploit the same celebrity that also encouraged people to poke fun at public ﬁgures. A photograph shows Sun giving a speech in Guilin in December 1921 shortly after his arrival in the southwestern city as he attempted to rally support for a military campaign against northern warlords (ﬁgure 11). This effort would fail in the face of an armed rebellion by his erstwhile supporter, Chen Jiongming, the following summer. The event depicted included representatives of seventy-six Guilin “military, political, and student” groups. Sun’s message focused not on military matters but on his vision for China. He warned, “If the people do not un-

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derstand the Three Principles of the People, there is no hope at all for the future of the Republic.”142 Sun’s gift for rhetorical and visionary leadership is celebrated in Ye Shengtao’s 1927 short story, “Barefeet.”143 In the story, set in 1924, Sun appears before a vast outdoor crowd of Guangdong farmers who have streamed in to attend the ﬁrst meeting of the Provincial Peasants’ Congress. Since the First Guangdong Peasant Congress did not actually meet until May 1925, a month and a half after Sun’s death, Ye Shengtao appears to have based his imaginative re-creation of events on Song Qingling’s account of Sun’s address to a “get-together” of peasants from Guangzhou municipality in late July 1924.144 Participants in that less formal assembly, called to order by the pioneer peasant organizer Peng Pai, were drawn from among rural Nationalist Party members and numbered over a thousand. They met in a campus auditorium, likely the same venue where Sun was giving his Three Principles of the People lectures.145 Sun’s actual speech noted the slow pace of progress in implementing the three principles of Nationalism, Democracy, and People’s Livelihood, with Nationalism only “half completed,” Democracy “defeated,” and People’s Livelihood not even tried.146 He issued a call to arms in which he urged the crowd to raise a militia: “Once you have riﬂes, and train your own peasant militia, you will be masters of China of the ﬁrst rank and will speak in a powerful voice.”147 One could hear the rising cadences of Peng Pai’s, and later Mao’s, rural revolution in Sun’s call for a mobilized, regimented people. Sun supported organization of peasant associations in summer 1924, though by August he was expressing concern about the radical direction they had taken.148 In his ﬁctional version of the event, Ye Shengtao presents Sun in glowing terms, as a kind of god or timeless hero: “Dr. Sun stepped out onto the stage, eyes shining as he stared boldly ahead and into the distance. Although his sixtieth year was fast approaching Dr. Sun stood straight as a stone pillar.”149 Sun shared his political divinity with a timeless, immortal nation rather than with heaven or nature under the older mandate. With the elegant Song Qingling at his side, Sun gazed on the crowd “as if facing something sacred.” Ye Shengtao sensed a religious-like fervor in the new mass politics. The epiphany, real and imagined, effaced the cultural gap between Sun the globetrotting salesman for revolution and the barefooted village existence he abandoned as a boy. Sun had not only “indigenized” his thought but also himself in the eyes of his followers.

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The electricity of the ﬁctionalized encounter is real enough. Sun did stand ramrod straight when he gave speeches, and he was almost always able to move a crowd through well-chosen words and stories and his ﬂair for political theater. In Ye’s story those assembled are a force of nature, a crowd of “human heads wriggling below like bees swarming from a hive.” Peasants had “hurried in from counties all over Guangdong, along many, many roads, carrying in their hands baskets and earthen jugs” to hold food and drink for the trip.150 The eyes of the crowd “look expectantly to Dr. Sun on the platform, toward his broad forehead, his thick eyebrows, and his graying mustache. At the same time they felt as if Dr. Sun was drawing closer to them, almost nose to nose.”A hatless Sun Yatsen looks back at the crowd of peasants and sees their bare feet squirming in the mud “like earthworms,” standing as if their muddy feet were “pasted to the surface of the earth.”151 Following closely Song’s account of the 1924 encounter she and her husband had with village activists, Ye describes Sun as deeply moved by the sight of his barefooted audience. He thinks about his own rural roots and the need for the revolution to address the needs of China’s peasant majority so that “China’s children might have shoes to wear and rice to eat.”152 This was why he had “for thirty or forty years been unable to stop writing, lecturing, seeking out [knowledge in] books, and calling on people.” Ceaseless efforts at public exposure had given Sun and his image the same broad currency the face of his dead rival Yuan Shikai had on silver coins, amounting in Sun’s case to an unspent political treasure. Ye Shengtao’s vignette of Sun Yat-sen’s encounter with peasant China accords with Sun’s self-image as a rock-solid pivot around which Chinese political life turned. The scene hints at the rural future of the Chinese Revolution, a political and military front Sun himself had barely opened but that was implied in his expansive rhetorical appeal to the people. Ye’s description of Sun as an authentic popular leader is the antithesis of Hu Shi’s attack on Yuan Shikai as a political charlatan. That the former could become the latter, as happened in the long career of Mao Zedong, probably had not occurred to either Ye or Hu at the time. Much depended on context and audience. Sun worked hard at winning popular approval. By most accounts he was successful in doing so. Because of Sun’s celebrity status, he did not need to struggle like some of his contemporary fellow leaders to make an impression. General Feng Yuxiang took a less subtle approach to the same problem of gaining popular recognition.

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Feng climbed up on a table and cried out: “Who has not seen me yet?” He removed his hat: “Now take a look at Feng!” Then he explained how he took care of the troops.153

And yet, on another day, and from a different angle, portraits of Sun Yatsen as leader and Yuan Shikai as impostor could easily be reversed, with Sun playing the comic blowhard and Yuan the indispensable strongman. The construction of political authority in the expanse of revolutionary China came down to achieving a sustained and repeatable effect among diverse constituencies and in rapidly changing circumstances. On that ground Sun proved against odds that he had staying power. Sun gave the public and his party a torrent of words even as he struggled to acquire the weapons and the organizational capacity to act on them. He may have praised Guangzhou as a revolutionary starting point or birthplace, but as the compliment indicated, and the brutality he showed toward the rebellious merchants of the city in fall 1924 proved, his goal was a journey north and ﬁnal uniﬁcation of China by military or diplomatic means. A photograph taken in August 1924 in Guangzhou shows a bareheaded Sun at a lecture site, framed by giant blue sky and white sun ﬂags and ﬂanked by Chiang Kai-shek in military uniform a step ahead on the platform and his wife, Song Qingling, a step behind.154 The image of this threesome—an old man and his beautiful young wife, the senior statesman and his ambitious military protégé—suggests both the nature of Sun’s achievement and the fragility of his position as he faced the challenge of a youth revolution, a continuing militarization of politics, and his own mortality. In her historical novel of Sun’s last years with Song, Lu Ping highlights Sun’s anxiety about losing his elevated position as a national leader and sinking back into the provincial pack of warlords and regional politicians.155 By fall 1924 some newspapers referred to him as “Guangdong Sun” (Yue Sun) as if he were in the same league as the northeastern warlord, “Fengtian Zhang” (Zuolin).156 Few politicians had a stronger sense of place than Sun. Every locality was a stop on a real or imagined rail line running through his real and imagined China, a grain of sand to be pressed into a single national body. Consigning Sun to a region was a form of internal exile he resisted to the end and with all the vigor at his disposal. It was no accident that he died in Beijing rather than in his home province. Making Sun out to be merely Cantonese was a bit like gossiping about an impending marriage for Tang Qunying or calling Lu Zhengxiang a traitor. For Sun, his home village or even Guangzhou was

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no Locarno-like refuge or Xinqiao or Changsha-like retreat. Sun was more than happy to campaign in the provinces as long as the path led to the capital and national power. Perhaps he sensed by 1924 that time was running out for him to make his move. Through his own considerable efforts Sun Yat-sen became the face and voice of the revolution and the Republic. He embraced public notoriety to a degree other ﬁgures of the day such as Liang Qichao found difﬁcult to bear.157 Sun became a national ﬁgure by taking advantage of national and international media but also by attending to the local bases of who he was and what he wanted. Although Sun had a strong sense of China as an abstraction, he realized that in order for an “imagined community” to be a shared feature of political life the nation needed to be made as local as possible even as local people saw their horizons expand. Wherever he went, Sun embellished his stump speech on the Three Principles and the need to build a new China with facts and details about the place he was visiting. Sun read audiences and local circumstances as he declaimed his thoughts and policies. Sun’s willingness to extemporize with the help of local particulars injected an air of unpredictability into his political performances. Song Qingling recalled, “It all depended on the political situation and the audience, I would be as nervous as a cat, sitting next to him on the platform and wondering what was coming next.”158 Sun Yat-sen left a complex set of legacies. As “Cannon” Sun his gift for rhetoric was both recognized and mocked. Sun used words as a substitute for the cash and soldiers he often lacked. He also spoke in public in an effort to transform defeats into rhetorical victories. Garry Wills, in his study of the Gettysburg Address, demonstrates how Lincoln “transformed the ugly reality [of a battle costly to both sides] into something rich and strange.”159 Ugly realities of betrayal, bloody defeat, and humiliation faced Sun nearly every moment of his political career. Even his triumphs were invariably bracketed by defeats he had just survived and would soon face at the next turn in his and his party’s long political road. Sun Yat-sen never gave the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. Kang Youwei may have done that in his 1895 speech in Beijing on the occasion of China’s humiliation in the ﬁrst Sino-Japanese War. For his part Sun never stopped talking, and this torrent of words on multiple stages at home and abroad became a persuasive version of the core narrative of the Chinese Revolution. Sun had an intuitive grasp of the “imaginative possibilities of the situation” that ﬁnally eclipsed Yuan Shikai’s more practical understanding of the mechanics of power and the delusional imperial vision Yuan backed into.160 Sun seemed to grasp that there was more to be gained in a large,

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even imperial gesture, like honoring the founder of the Ming dynasty, than in Yuan’s literal-minded pursuit of imperial authority.161 Yuan Shikai, the consummate governor-general, lacked the “political imagination” to be a national leader.162 It is hard to conceive of Sun being effective at any level other than national leader since he did not have the patience to wrestle with administrative details. The details he did encounter, from a postage stamp studied in Hawaii as a youth to a taxi ride in Shanghai, triggered rhetorical ﬂights rather than concrete policies. Even Sun’s railway administrator stint for Yuan Shikai was more rhetorical than real in any nuts-and-bolts administrative sense. In Isaiah Berlin’s famous analogy of the hedgehog who knows one great thing and the fox who knows many things, Sun was a leader and thinker who knew the essential identity of himself and his country and saw evidence of this one fact in everything he read and experienced. Perhaps making China’s brilliant future vivid enough to seem real was Sun’s greatest talent. Before the 1911 Revolution Sun, more than many of his revolutionary colleagues, “could imagine himself in a Chinese republic.”163 Sun used this technique in response to feminists like Tang Qunying when they pressed the case for equal rights. He could imagine women as equals and conveyed the sentiment to suffragists in ways that lessened their anger at being denied. Sometimes the strategy made Sun appear weak and ineffectual. In a September 1912 meeting with Yuan Shikai, Yuan, citing numerous obstacles, turned down Sun’s request that the capital be moved from Beijing to Nanjing. Sun then lamely declared he would be content if the move could be made sometime “in the future.”164 Yuan gave Sun little reason to be optimistic: “I am a Henan man. I really would not be willing to do that. In fact, I’ll never do it.” Rather than be put off by Yuan’s intransigence, Sun simply imagined his own career and China’s future a step ahead of Yuan’s. Sun at times came perilously close to Lu Xun’s hapless Ah Q character who also “thought so well of himself” and treated every humiliating defeat as a victory.165 Sun’s futurist orientation was one reason he was regarded by some as a purveyor of empty talk. He talked about things that did not exist. But since other politicians, in the words of one writer,“have no long range plans for the people or even themselves . . . [and] only wish to plunder the people today,” Sun’s ﬂights of fancy were attractive by comparison.166 Despite the uncertainties and risks of public speaking as an element of leadership, Sun’s contemporaries and immediate successors could hardly go back to the simple issuing of edicts. Nor was private persuasion a solution to every political problem. Partly because of Sun’s efforts,

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visionary rhetoric was ﬁrmly installed in politics and the public stage a permanent part of the political process. Mao Zedong, for one, absorbed elements of Sun’s commitment to oratory and a well-crafted public persona in creating his own sense of what a leader looked and sounded like. Mao met Sun in Guangzhou in winter 1923–24 and heard Sun’s address to the Nationalist Party congress on January 30.167 Mao recalled of Sun, “I heard him speak many times and felt he had a kind of grand, bold vision.”168 Jonathan Spence recently suggested that Mao’s own impact as a leader was due to “his rhetoric and his inﬂexible will.”169 Mao’s command of classical Chinese and the essay style gave his ideological pronouncements a solid textual basis. He also gave many speeches, from a funeral oration for his mother to his famous denunciation of the Hunan warlord Zhang Jingyao delivered in 1920 in Beijing’s Hunan guildhall to countless other speeches and reports.170 Mao’s style was quite different from Sun’s. Especially early in his career as a political activist, he favored “terse interventions” rather than lengthy orations.171 Mao evinced a certain concision and brutality of delivery that evokes Liu Bang pissing in the hats of Confucian scholars. Mao also could be as verbose as Sun Yat-sen. As Spence observes, “One thing that power brought to Mao in Yan’an was the liberty to lecture others at will, as often or as long as he liked.”172 Like Sun, Mao could hold an audience. More than Sun, Mao knew what to do with the people once he had them. Sun in death continued to lend his authority to political projects, including the careers of his successors Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. His face was everywhere, from money and cigarette packs to classrooms and public buildings.173 Striking workers sometimes carried Sun’s portrait as a shield to ward off police attacks.174 Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists used the political ritual of Monday morning readings of Sun’s last will and testament and bowing to Sun’s portrait to consolidate their authority.175 Sun’s portrait hung in private homes, especially in southern China, a custom probably inﬂuenced by the American practice of displaying presidential portraits and “Lenin corners” in the Soviet Union.176 Men wore the “Sun Yat-sen suit,” a style of dress Sun developed for himself from English hunting clothes and Japanese school uniforms, including turn-down collar, Chinese-style jacket with buttons down the front, and left and right stitched pockets.177 Despite the hope that all Chinese men would wear the suit as a sign of citizenship and commitment to Sun’s ideals, the jacket mainly served for ofﬁcials on formal occasions, another example of the difﬁculty of ensuring that the common people would be treated as citizens rather than as individuals lacking ofﬁcial status.

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Sun’s political afterlife included mythic retellings of his story small and large. In the 1950s, People’s Daily published an account of Sun’s antiopium speech at Anqing in 1912 provided by Liu Tianqiu, a revolutionary veteran by then in his nineties. In this version the burning of the opium, the arrival of the British gunboat, and Sun’s oration on the evils of the drug took place on the same day. At noon it was announced that the governor of Anhui would accompany Sun Yat-sen to speak at a hastily constructed site outside the South Gate where the opium, placed in a pit piled high with kerosene-soaked brush, was ready to be burned. As soon as the masses heard the news nearly ten thousand people—men and women, young and old—assembled on both banks of the river. At 1:00 p.m. Jiang Kuan arrived and escorted Sun to the stage as a band played and the crowd cheered. In a resonant voice Sun vehemently and indignantly told the story of the Opium War. . . . During the lecture, the British gunboat began to make steam and the crowd took this to mean that it was about to open ﬁre. But then they [the crowd and, presumably, the British] saw that Dr. Sun [remained] composed, his spirit even ﬁrmer. His voice grew ever louder. His words, deeply felt, ﬂowed in an uninterrupted torrent like a river to the sea. There was no one who was not moved.178

With Sun’s speech concluded, the opium was burned and the gunboat turned about and sailed away (or “ﬂed” as the account had it). However, contemporary sources indicate that Sun was not there that day. He was late for the Anqing crisis as he had been for the 1911 Revolution.179 In the creative hands of a writer like Ye Shengtao or through a trick of Liu Tianqiu’s memory, Sun deﬁed not only his adversaries but also, on occasion, the constraints of time and space. Shamanistic invulnerability rituals of the Boxers had failed to repel the foreign threat. Might not republican rituals of patriotic deﬁance sanctioned and presided over by a national leader succeed by giving inspirational ﬁction the weight of fact? As a leader, Sun fell short of charisma. He was more entertaining than magical, more earnest than irresistible. He did, however, help prepare the way for Chiang Kai-shek as a spectacular failure as a national ﬁgure and Mao as a genuinely charismatic leader by creating a place at the center of Chinese political life for the leader as an active, highly visual presence. The deﬂation of the Republic’s political capacity by the 1920s seemed to call forth such inﬂated and explosive personalities. Although there was no manual to explain how to play this role, except, perhaps, the story of Sun Yat-sen’s life, it was, emphatically, a speaking part.

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When word of Sun Yat-sen’s death in Beijing on March 12, 1925, reached her in Hunan, a grief-stricken Tang Qunying wrote a poem titled “I Weep for President Dr. Sun Yat-sen.” She likened the nation’s sorrow to a miasma spreading out from the capital with the news of his passing. Tang recalled her own experiences with Sun and the medal he had awarded her, honors that now left her “conscience-stricken.”1 Later that month the girls’ school Tang founded in her home county held a memorial service. She supplied two commemorative scrolls titled “Lamentation for President Dr. Sun Yat-sen.”The sentiments preﬁgured the disillusionment she would voice in the 1930s. “The great powers have not been overthrown; the warlords have not been rooted out,” she wrote. Tang did credit Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist Party for having“alone destroyed”China’s ancient monarchy and insisted that Sun, having traveled “the length and breadth” of China “for 80,000 miles,” could only be compared as a leader and national hero to George Washington.2 Tang was a tireless traveler too; but few politicians could match Sun Yat-sen’s tracks across China and the world. In April Tang sailed downriver to Changsha to join teachers’ contingents in a memorial gathering for Sun that drew 160,000 people and the participation of 240 civic organizations.3 The crowd amounted to a third or more of the city’s population.4 Memorial services for Sun Yat-sen took place all over China in the weeks following his death. The gatherings, rallies, and parades, large and small, featured both old and new styles of public mourning, including 283

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tables laden with incense and ritual offerings of food, as well as ﬂower arrangements and a performance by a girls’ choir.5 Funeral scrolls often made the by now familiar George Washington comparison. Sun was portrayed as a national hero exactly as he had represented himself. Popular acclaim in death was all the more remarkable since segments of the political elite and the press retained doubts about Sun’s contributions to China and the revolution. On the one hand, many editorialists had nothing but praise for Sun, comparing him not only to Washington but also to Confucius, Jesus, and, more obscurely, Dr. Stockmann, the upright ﬁctional scourge of the complacent in Henrik Ibsen’s play, “Enemy of the People.”6 On the other hand, an editorialist at a Shanghai newspaper tied to Liang Qichao depicted Sun not as a martyr but as someone who had long outlived his value as a political ﬁgure: “Therefore, when I consider Sun’s death today, I cannot help thinking it came too late.”7 Sun was also criticized for a “blind reliance on military force,”“agitating among young people,” allying with the Soviet Union, and an erratic personality.8 Anger still lingered in some quarters about Sun’s military suppression of Guangzhou merchants the previous fall.9 While the Nationalist Party played a role in orchestrating memorial services, crowds in Beijing and elsewhere were too spontaneously emotional to be the product of top-down mobilization.10 Leninism as an organizing principle was in its early stages of development in 1925. Tang Qunying for one no longer played an active part in the Nationalist Party machinery. As her poem of lamentation suggested, her feelings about Sun were deeply personal and woven into her own life story, from her political awakening in Hunan and Japan to her struggles during the revolution and the founding of the Republic in 1911–12 and afterward. For others who did not know him intimately as friend or foe, Sun Yat-sen was the face of the revolution and the Republic. He had no rival in that regard. Sun dead had far more appeal than sitting head of the Beijing government and warlord politician Duan Qirui alive. This was testimony to Sun’s achievement of inserting himself into the public’s consciousness and a sign of the institutional disarray and legitimacy crises still besetting the Republic and anyone who claimed a national leadership role. Mourning for Sun in spring 1925 stood in sharp contrast to public reaction to the funeral in 1916 of Yuan Shikai, Sun’s only serious rival as a national leader in the 1910s. U.S. ambassador to China and political scientist Paul Reinsch described the scene in the capital as Yuan’s casket was carried to the train station to begin its journey south to his estate in Henan.

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The vast throngs that lined the route behind lines of troops looked on in respectful silence. There was no sign of grief, rather mute indifference. Yuan had not won the heart of the people, who regarded him as a masterful individual dwelling in remote seclusion whose contact with them came through taxes and executions.11

This kind of reticence, no doubt encouraged by the presence of the troops who survived their master, contrasted sharply with the crowds in Beijing in 1925 whose emotionalism and frantic shouting of slogans like “Down with Imperialism” and “Long Live Sun Zhongshan’s Thought” shocked even Sun’s most devoted disciples.12 In 1916 Reinsch had concluded that “a Chinese crowd is incapable of the enthusiastic hero-worship which great leaders in the Occident receive. The people have not yet come to look upon such men as their leaders.” Crowds had responded emotionally in the past to upright ofﬁcials and courageous advocates. Subjects had reportedly wept in ritually appropriate fashion at the news of the death of an emperor.13 However, the direct and volatile response of people to the passing of Sun Yat-sen constituted a breakthrough in the connection between leader and the led. The emotionalism that had become so much a part of political life on the streets, in the press, and in schools, clubs, lodges, and teahouses was now available as a component of national leadership. Without Sun’s engaging approach to leadership, this transference would not have been possible. Students of modern leadership, from Leo Tolstoy on Napoleon to Georg Simmel, James M. Burns, and Garry Wills on twentieth-century world leaders, agree that the explanation for why an ordinary person would die for, vote for, or even show up in a crowd to welcome or mourn a leader is to be found, in Tolstoy’s words, “in the relation to the people of the man who wields the power.”14 Leadership is a personal and relational matter of deals and bargains on one level, with the potential to be elevated to another, more “transformative” plane.15 The times favored an emotional pitch and transformative message keyed to ﬁnding the proper place for individual, community, and nation in a modern world. This rhetorical tendency was satirized by Lin Yutang as the use of imperialist outrages to sell silk stockings and embraced by countless others who wrote or spoke their personal or group struggles into a national narrative of progress and resistance just as Sun did. Sun Yat-sen and other leaders imagined themselves ﬁghting for China, but so did nurses, accountants, students, farmers, and rickshaw men. Making these separate battles a common struggle required the kind of dynamic leadership that Sun Yat-sen offered.

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Yuan Shikai at his peak had more raw power than Sun in the sense of bending people to his will. Yuan also better ﬁt the model of the traditional Chinese ruler who husbands rather than liberally spends power and who practices careful economies of force while keeping up a patter of political moralizing through ritual performance and edicts. Sun’s investment in a more active and communicative relationship with China’s citizenry had begun to pay off. Unfortunately for him, ﬁnal conﬁrmation of his achievement as a political leader, and a subtle proof of the existence in cities, towns, and even many rural areas across the country of a Chinese public able to respond to his leadership, arrived with his death, the public display of anguish at his passing, and the nationwide eruption of the May Thirtieth Movement less than two months later. Unlucky in dying before his political ambitions could be realized, Sun’s passing was perfectly timed to catch and raise the next wave of nationalist feeling, which in turn put both the Nationalist and Communist Parties in position to expand their memberships and inﬂuence.16 Less than two weeks after its massive Sun Yat-sen memorial assembly in April, Changsha joined six hundred other cities and towns in equally large demonstrations against the killings on May 30 of Chinese workers in Shanghai by foreign-controlled police. As Harrison points out, these nationalistic demonstrations, conducted in the style of the May Fourth and earlier movements but on a vastly larger scale, included many of the same people and organizations and many of the same rituals of patriotic feeling that had been part of the mourning for Sun.17 In a political culture where duplicating political performances was essential to achieving a nationwide effect, any political event might be dress rehearsal for the next. Lamentations for Sun in March prepared the way for patriotic grief and anger in May and June. In early June in Changsha, a few days after the violence in Shanghai and on the eve of planned citywide demonstrations, Hunan Governor Zhao Hengti, caught in treacherous warlord, Nationalist, and local political currents, approached Elder Sister Tang Qunying on behalf of a panicky provincial assembly for help quieting expected student unrest. As one might expect, Tang rejected her younger friend’s entreaty out of hand with the rebuff, “Before you were a patriot. Now you are more in love with official titles.”18 Tang, at the age of ﬁfty-four, then followed her hard words to Governor Zhao with more local activism as May Thirtieth protests continued. By the middle of June Tang had returned to Hengshan to help organize demonstrations there, including propaganda campaigns against Japan and Britain and evening lantern parades and rallies.

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In their approaches to politics Sun Yat-sen and Tang Qunying were much alike. Both were drawn to the political stage conﬁdent that they could persuade even hostile or indifferent audiences to follow them. Their outspokenness, often spectacular in effect, was little different in form and spirit from that of several generations of politicians and activists from the 1890s on who faced colleagues and constituents on a regular basis in a chamber of senators, a lodge hall of fellow provincials, a teahouse crammed with workers or voters, or a street full of students. Hunan native and Communist Xiang Jingyu, age thirty in 1925, admitted that though once “too timid to dare speak out,” the example set by women like Tang Qunying and Zhang Hanying had persuaded her that as women they should “in all kinds of gatherings express [their] own opinions.”19 Exemplary leadership inspired younger, more local and less famous individuals to follow suit. Waves or fevers of mimetic activity on many political, social, economic, and cultural fronts led to deeper commitments on the part of activists. When republican institutions faltered and mass movements subsided these commitments remained to support a new culture of politics favoring an upright posture, vocal message, and public presence shared by leaders and followers. This Chinese republican way of politics was visible in Tang Qunying’s scolding of male senators, Lu Zhengxiang’s quiet resistance to blustering foreign diplomats, and Sun Yat-sen’s endless speech making to his fellow citizens. Tang’s failure to win national suffrage for women in 1912, Lu’s record of political stumbles and secret appeasement, and Sun’s difﬁculty grasping ﬁrmly what he so publicly reached for underline the gap that persisted between style and substance and gesture and institutional capacity. While this gap measures the weaknesses of the Republic, the sparks of emotion and argument that ﬂashed across it drew on energy supplied by a broad acceptance of modern citizenship. Lu Zhengxiang experienced his “leader as the led” epiphany at Versailles in 1919 and in Shanghai in 1920. The most capable leaders made an effort to see the world at least occasionally as citizens. Engaged citizens in turn acquired a political consciousness that relied in part on their ability to see like a modern Chinese state would. The former optic enabled a novel degree of political intimacy—even “nose-to-nose” at times—with those who otherwise lived radically separate lives. The latter offered government a powerful reservoir of popular support for policies that privileged unity of purpose and a common, public interest. This support held as long leaders foreswore the corrupting effects of private and particular interests. Grave threats to modern autocratic regimes in-

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cluded not only republican revivals but also twentieth-century avatars of Mencius ﬁnding a target in a modern-day King Xuan of Qi. It was no accident that the twin concerns of Beijing demonstrators in 1989 were democracy and corruption, issues understood in terms of both new and old standards of political virtue. Sun did not invent modern political oratory in China. He rode a tide of public speaking by literati giants like Kang Youwei, local merchantgentry reformers, and student activists to eventually outperform his generation in commanding an audience. On his journey of “80,000 miles,” Sun theorized and carried out a politics in motion freed from any ﬁxed geographic or ideological position. He made his recognized faults—a lack of a classical education, the taint of commerce adhering to his family’s overseas business ventures, no experience in government, and an obsessive concern with how he looked and how his movement was perceived— into assets and virtues: an openness to global culture as a source of materials mined to forge a new politics, a spirit of political entrepreneurship in selling reform and revolution, the ability to substitute vision and political prophecy for shortfalls in political performance, and the insight that, short of the kind of total control Yuan Shikai and other strongmen aspired to, political inﬂuence might be extended through image making by his own hand and with the collaborative efforts of countless others eager to join in the construction of a new China that included them. Sun Yat-sen cannot be credited with strengthening the institutions of the Republic, except insofar as he fortiﬁed the Nationalist and Communist Parties by his endorsement of Leninism, a move with decidedly ambiguous results for republican principles.20 Lu Zhengxiang and Tang Qunying may well have done more by way of achieving concrete institutional change within the narrower precincts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing and female education in Hunan. A leader like Sun or Mao might boldly envision a modern China; without professional diplomats, educators, and other specialists, progress toward that end was bound to be elusive and incomplete. Sun did strengthen the political culture of republicanism by providing a model of leadership that depended in fundamental ways on popular support and a politics usable by anyone with the will to speak out. There may be no single key to unlock an enigma like Sun Yat-sen, Tang Qunying, or Lu Zhengxiang, much less Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong, or a puzzle like the Chinese public’s loyalty to an at times seemingly hopeless republican political project. Assuming a general craving for emperorlike or strongman leadership that makes republicanism a mere facade

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cannot explain the rejection of one-man rule by democrats, federalists, anarchists, feminists, and former Qing ofﬁcials. A supposed Chinese predisposition for collectivism cited to account for the conversion of the Chinese Republic into the People’s Republic ﬂies in the face of Sun Yat-sen’s ﬁrm belief, shared by many other political pioneers, that China was actually threatened by sandlike disunity of both groups and individuals. A resulting near-consensus on the need for a countervailing national unity did persist, even as the same principle ran into stubborn resistance rooted in localism and the independent-mindedness of individuals wary of uniformity. If China was not one thing but many, the toughest problem faced by political actors who led and followed was not discovering or distilling a national essence—though the sale of such political patent medicines like the Three Principles or Maoism has been robust at times—but rather joining many elements or parts into something workable. This was an organizational problem to be sure but also one in which registering and then harmonizing the multiple perspectives of urban and rural, rich and poor, male and female and ethnically diverse Chinese were critical. Nationalism provided the fundamental tone of these harmonics, but the case still had to be made on particular emotional and interest-based grounds in direct, memorable, and reproducible encounters with the people. Nationalism encouraged unity. Under certain conditions the many circles of identity and obligation identiﬁed by Fei Xiaotong could become a single, all-encompassing Chinese nationalism. At the same time, insisting that defense of the nation was the obligation of each citizen encouraged public criticism of the state when it fell short of expectations. The incompleteness and tentativeness of the Republic in rural and more remote parts of China was also a recurrent feature of political life at the center, despite the greater sophistication and clearer republican sentiments of urban citizens. The Huguang Lodge meeting on August 25, 1912, with Sun Yat-sen and Tang Qunying at the podium, Madame Lu Zhengxiang in the audience, and Prime Minister Lu several kilometers away in the French Hospital, prepared the new Nationalist Party for China-wide elections that did take place, though without the participation of women and without men lacking the requisite ﬁnancial means or education. The elections sent representatives to a national parliament that collapsed within a year. A record like this seems to share the condition and fate of other false starts, dead ends, and losers in modern Chinese history. Paradoxically, because the Republic began to fail almost immediately, an acute consciousness of political failure among republican activists sustained the expectation that success must follow in due course. In this regard, Sun

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Yat-sen, with the famous ups and downs of his career, was, yet again, the model. What failed at one moment in one place must succeed elsewhere. What went missing could return in a provincial assembly, a village school, a reorganized or renamed political party, a student demonstration, a guerrilla base, or a new or revitalized leader. Like Sun, Tang Qunying and Lu Zhengxiang had their moments of fatigue and disillusionment; but they also carried on. Tang built her school for girls in the countryside and a bridge—her father had also ﬁxed a bridge in need of repair—to make it easier for children to reach it.21 After leaving China and abandoning his diplomatic career to become a monk in Belgium, and mailing to Pope Pius XI a case ﬁlled with his collection of Qing and Republican decorations, medals, and citations, Lu continued to work in Europe on behalf of his country as an informal diplomat.22 His last words at the end of a life of great complexity and many failures to match many successes were “All for China!” By “getting up and giving a speech” in twentieth-century China, win or lose, one entered ancient and modern traditions that were supple and self-critical and that continue to be productive of both authority and dissent. Creating regimented publics from a controlled press and ofﬁcial boilerplate can be self-defeating because the same cue meant to elicit compliance can, under the right circumstances, provoke opposition. Since these critical and corrosive functions have been embedded in Chinese political culture for a century or more and involve a reasoned and impassioned response to leaders who “speak to the people” and appeal to public opinion, no matter how cynically intended that speech and appeal may be, the periodic reappearance of an independent-minded, aroused public should not be marveled at. These recurrences and recoveries draw on an enduring faith in political virtue as a performative act and the republican rerouting of authority from ruler to the people. From this point of view, the 1911 Revolution, with its toppling of the monarchy and legacy of a vocal, upright, and watchful public, remains, not a failure, but rather unﬁnished.

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Introduction 1. Chen Xiqi, ed., Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian (A comprehensive chronological biography of Sun Yat-sen) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), vol. 1, 642. 2. Li Chien-nung [Li Jiannong], The Political History of China, 1840–1928 (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), 279; Li Jiannong [Li Chien-nung], Zhongguo jin bainian zhengzhi shi (A political history of China’s last century) (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1974), 371. 3. Mu Jinyuan,“Miuxu” (A poor preface), in Richard D. T. Hollister, Yanshuo xue (The science of public speaking), ed. Liu Qi (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1930), 6. 4. Bernard Silberman, Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the U.S., and Great Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 5. In Philip Petit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20. 6. I am grateful to Qin Shao for pointing out the signiﬁcance of “Emperorism.” 7. Joan Judge, “Public Opinion and the New Politics of Contestation in the Late Qing, 1904–1911,” Modern China 20:1 (January 1994): 86. 8. William C. Kirby, “The Internationalization of China: Foreign Relations at Home and Abroad in the Republican Era,” China Quarterly 150 (June 1997): 449. 9. Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 23–24. 10. Edwards, “Women’s Suffrage in China: Challenging Scholarly Conventions,” Paciﬁc Historical Review 69:4 (November 2000): 632; Xiang Jingyu, Xiang Jingyu wenji (Collected works), ed. Xu Rihui (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1980), 130, 206.

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11. Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 18–19, 25–26. 12. Howard L. Boorman, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), vol. 1, 320. 13. Ibid. 14. Li Zhao, Kaihui mang (Busy going to meetings) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1955). 15. Shen Tong, Almost a Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1990). 16. Ibid., 126. 17. For “social technology,” see Eva Federe Kitty, “A Feminist Public Ethic of Care Meets the New Communitarian Family Policy,” Ethics 111:3 (April 2001): 542. 18. Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), chap. 1. 19. Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Jan Vladislav, ed., Vaclav Havel or Living in Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 46. 20. Ibid. 21. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): xiv. 22. Ruth Hayhoe, “Political Texts in Chinese Universities before and after Tiananmen,” Paciﬁc Affairs 66:1 (Spring 1993): 34–35, 43; Orville Schell, Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 116. 23. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 25, 31, 37; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 24. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 25. Charles Tilly criticizes the hydraulic approach in “Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 390–91. 26. Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words, 16–17. 27. For “transformational” leadership, see James M. Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 28. Petit, Republicanism, 32. 29. Peter Zarrow, “Historical Trauma: Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China,” History and Memory 16:2 (2004). 30. Sun Zhongshan [Sun Wen], Zongli quanji (Complete works of the Zongli), ed. Hu Hanmin (Shanghai: Minzhi shuju, 1930), vol. 1, 116. 31. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 58. 32. Norman Smith, “Disrupting Narratives: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Cultural Agenda in Manchuria, 1936–1945,” Modern China 30:3 (July 2004): 301. 33. Petit, Republicanism, vii. 34. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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35. Silberman, Cages of Reason, 49. For the 1912–13 elections, see John H. Fincher, Chinese Democracy: The Self-Government Movement in Local, Provincial and National Politics, 1905–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), 8. 36. Bryna Goodman, “Democratic Calisthenics: The Culture of Urban Associations in the New Republic,” in Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 90–94. 37. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), chap. 5. 38. Marianne Bastid-Bruguière, “Sun Yat-sen’s Republican Idea in 1911,” in Etoˉ Shinkichi and Harold Z. Schiffrin, eds., The 1911 Revolution in China : Interpretive Essays (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984), 214. 39. Ibid., 210. 40. Li Fan, Sun Zhongshan quanzhuan (A comprehensive biography of Sun Yat-sen) (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1991), 1. 41. Chen Peiwei and Hu Qufei, eds., Zongli yijiao suoyin (Index to the late President’s teachings) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 76–79, 145, 252–53. 42. Gao Ru (pseud.), “Sun Zhongshan daodi cha qiangren yi” (Sun Yat-sen is certainly no thug), Huabei xinbao (Tianjin), January 20, 1924. 43. “Inside property” is used by Robert Coles in his book The Political Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 63. 44. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 78–81; and John R. Hall, “Cultural History,” in Peter N. Stearns, ed. Encyclopedia of Social History (New York: Garland Press, 1994), 185. 45. Gardner L. Harding, cited in Hu Shi [Suh Hu], “Manufacturing the Will of the People: A Documentary History of the Recent Monarchical Movement in China,” Journal of Race Development 7.3 (January 1917): 327. 46. Ibid. 47. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing.

Chapter 1. Slapping Song Jiaoren 1. Hu Jing, “Huiyi xianren Tang Qunying” (Remembering my ancestor Tang Qunying), in Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, eds., Tang Qunying nianpu (A chronological biography of Tang Qunying) (Hong Kong: Xianggang tianma tushu yuxian gongsi, 2002), 135. 2. Edwards, “Women’s Suffrage in China,” 626. 3. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 127. 4. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6. 5. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 49. 6. Daniel R. Headrick and Pascal Griset, “Submarine Telegraph Cables: Business and Politics, 1838–1939,” Business History Review 75:3 (Autumn 2001): 561, 563, 567.

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7. James Harrison Wilson, “China and Its Progress,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 20 (1888): 404. 8. Yang Huaizhong [Changji], “Yu gailiang shehui zhi yijian” (My opinions on reforming society), Gong yan (Public Word) 1:2 (1914); Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 4, 1–3; Liu Liyan, “The Man Who Molded Mao: Yang Changji and the First Generation of Chinese Communists,” Modern China 32:4 (2006): 497. 9. Liu Liyan, “The Man Who Molded Mao,” 504–5. 10. Ibid., 508–9. 11. Yang Changji, “Yu gailiang shehui zhi yijian,” 1. 12. Liu Liyan, “The Man Who Molded Mao,” 499. 13. Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clark, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Communism, 1921–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 1, 494. 14. Ibid., vol. 1, 496. 15. Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 146. 16. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 4–5. 17. Frank Dikötter, The Age of Openness (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). 18. Kirby, “Internationalization of China,” 433. 19. Hanchao Lu, Street Crier: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 2005), 19. 20. Ibid.; Hill Gates, China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 63. 21. G. William Skinner,“Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China,” pts. 1–3, Journal of Asian Studies 24:1 (November 1964), 24:2 (February 1965), 24:3 (May 1965). 22. Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 23. Ibid., 4. 24. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 18–19. 25. P’eng P’ai, Seeds of Peasant Revolution: Report on the Haifeng Peasant Movement, trans. Donald Holoch (Ithaca: Cornell University China-Japan Program, 1973), 20. 26. Sherman Cochran and David Strand,“Cities in Motion: An Introduction,” in Sherman Cochran, David Strand, and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast, and Diaspora in Transnational China (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2007). 27. Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), 265–66. 28. I am grateful to Roderick MacFarquhar for pointing out the signiﬁcance of Sun as a political “good father.” 29. On the double dating system that accompanied the 1911 Revolution, see Henrietta Harrison, “Spreading the Revolution beyond Politics: Queue Cutting, Calendar Reform and the Revolution of 1911,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC, 1995.

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30. In his diary Lu Xun always mentioned Sundays in that fashion. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (Complete works) (Shanghai: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), vol. 14, “Riji” (Diary). 31. The most detailed single account of the day’s events has Shen Peizhen striking ﬁrst (Zhongguo ribao, August 26, 1912, 3). Other versions give Tang Qunying credit or blame for the blow. See Shibao, August 29, 1912, 4; and Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan (A critical biography of Tang Qunying) (Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1995), 109. Tang later apologized to Song Jiaoren for hitting him that day (Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 133). In an earlier account of this incident I suggested that Shen Peizhen alone struck the blow. Though contemporary accounts are contradictory and the scene was confused, Tang Qunying struck Song at some point in the fracas (David Strand, “Citizens in the Audience and at the Podium,” in Goldman and Perry, Changing Meanings of Citizenship, 60). 32. Madeleine Yue Dong, “Unofﬁcial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian,” in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 2005), 170; Paul Bailey, “ ‘Women Behaving Badly’: Crime, Transgressive Behavior and Gender in Early Twentieth Century China,” Nan Nü 8:1 (2006): 157–58. 33. Shibao, September 1, 1912, 3–4. 34. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu” (A general account of the early Republican women’s movement), Minguo qunqiu (Annals of the Republic) 3 (1995): 6. 35. Edwards, “Women’s Suffrage in China”; and Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 230. 36. Luke S. K. Kwong,“The Rise of the Linear Perspective in History and Time in Late Qing China c. 1860–1911,” Past and Present 173 (November 2001): 173. 37. Ibid. 38. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 43. 39. Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avantgarde from Rimbaud through Post-Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 91. 40. Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q,” in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 156. 41. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1935), 351. 42. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 387. 43. Yu Yingshih, “The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century,” in Tu Wei-ming, ed., China in Transformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 131–32. 44. Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 189. 45. Ibid., 161. 46. Ibid., 189.

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Notes to Pages 23–26

47. Gardner L. Harding, Present-Day China: A Narrative of a Nation’s Advance (New York: Century Company, 1916), 24. 48. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xv. 49. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, 1922–1939: The Prophet of Truth (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1977), 499–500. 50. Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity, 216. 51. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan (A biography of Lu Zhengxiang) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1999), 98. 52. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 51–54. 53. Ibid. 54. Mary B. Rankin,“State and Society in Early Republican Politics, 1912–18,” China Quarterly 150 (1997): 261. 55. Bastid-Bruguière, “Sun Yat-sen’s Republican Idea,” 211. 56. Guo Tingyi, Jindai Zhongguo shigang (An outline history of modern China) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980), vol. 1, 418; Xu Mao, Zhonghua minguo zhengzhi zhidu shi (A history of the Chinese Republican political system) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1992), 31. 57. Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895–1980 (New York: Viking, 1981), 248. 58. Harrison, “Spreading the Revolution.” 59. Lee, Shanghai Modern, 5. 60. Zhou Hong and Shu Hanguo, eds., Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo (A record of events during China’s twentieth century) (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 2000), vol. 1, 9. 61. Kwong, “Rise of the Linear Perspective,” 188. 62. North China Herald, January 6, 1912, 29. 63. Poon Shuk Wah,“Refashioning Festivals in Republican Guangzhou,” Modern China 30:2 (April 2004): 202. 64. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 67. 65. North China Herald, January 13, 1912, 105. On the colors of the ﬂag, see Xin Ping, Hu Zhenghao, and Li Xuechang, eds., Minguo shehui daguan (An omnibus of Republican society) (Fuzhou: Fujian chubanshe, 1981), 33. 66. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, vol. 14, 22, 24, 39, 42–44, 46–47. 67. The phrase “two kinds of time” was used by the journalist Graham Peck to suggest the Chinese tendency to think of the past as “before you, below you, where you can examine it” and the Western habit of turning one’s back to the past and facing to the future. Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time: Life in Provincial China during the Crucial Years 1940–41 (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1967). 68. Wah, “Refashioning Festivals,” 203. 69. Chang Kuo-t’ao, The Rise of the Communist Party, 1921–1927 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1971): 171. 70. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 67. 71. Zheng Derong and Wang Weili, eds., Zhongguo geming jishi (A chronicle of the Chinese revolution) (Jilin: Dongbei shifan daxue chubanshe, 1990), 196, 193–200 passim. 72. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political

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Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 253. 73. North China Herald, February 24, 1912, 500–501. 74. Ibid., 503–4. 75. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 41–42; North China Herald, February 24, 1912, 500–504. 76. Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Signiﬁcance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981): 4. 77. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 41. 78. Zhou Hong and Shu Hanguo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 295–96. 79. Bastid-Bruguière,“Sun Yat-sen’s Republican Idea,” 215; Pan Wei-tung, The Chinese Constitution: A Study of Forty Years of Constitution-Making in China (Washington, DC: Institute of Chinese Culture, 1945), 15. 80. William L. Tung, The Political Institutions of Modern China (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 23; Xu Mao, Zhonghua minguo zhengzhi zhidu shi, 28; Pan Wei-tung, The Chinese Constitution, 23–24. 81. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 220. 82. North China Herald, March 16, 1912, 706; Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 17–20; and W. W. Yen, East-West Kaleidoscope, 1877–1944: An Autobiography (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1974), 58. 83. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 18. 84. Ibid., 19. 85. Rhoads, Manchus and Han, 253. 86. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe (1912: First try at a republic) (Shanghai: Shanghai shiji chuban jituan, 2004), 115; Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 1911–1913 (A detailed chronology of Sun Yat-sen, 1911–1913) (Tianjin: Tianjin chubanshe, 1986), 258. 87. Bastid-Bruguière, “Sun Yat-sen’s Republican Idea,” 211. 88. Huang Zonghan and Wang Canchi, Sun Zhongshan yu Beijing (Sun Yatsen and Beijing) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1996), 5. 89. Benjamin I. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 90. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 16–17; Jonathan Fenby, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (London: Free Press, 2005). 91. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 147. 92. Ibid., 150–51. 93. C. Martin Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen, Frustrated Patriot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 75. 94. Sun Zhongshan [Yat-sen], The International Development of China (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1929 [orig. pub. 1922]). 95. Mary B. Rankin,“Nationalistic Contestation and Movement Politics: Railway-Rights Recovery at the End of the Qing,” Modern China 28:3 (July 2002). 96. Richard Cleary, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Romance of the Master Builder,” in Richard Cleary, Neil Levine, Mina Marefat, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Joseph M. Siry, and Margo Stipe, Frank Lloyd Wright: From within Outward (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 50.

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97. Garry Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 154. 98. Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 227. 99. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 390. 100. Ibid., 258–59. 101. Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-Creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 127. 102. Lu Xun, “On Photography,” in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 201. 103. Louis Wirth,“Preface,” in Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace: 1936), xxv. 104. Aiguo bao, August 25, 1912, 3; North China Herald, August 31, 1912, 606. 105. Mentioned in Lu Xun’s diary, Lu Xun quanji, vol. 14, 22, 24; New York Times, August 26, 1912, 5. 106. Aiguo bao, August 30, 1912, 1–2. 107. North China Herald, August 31, 1912, 606. 108. Zhongguo ribao, August 25, 1912, 2; Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 347. 109. Aiguo bao, August 24, 1912, 3. 110. L. C. Arlington and William Lewisohn, In Search of Old Peking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9. 111. Li Fan, Sun Zhongshan quanzhuan, 211. 112. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 149. 113. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 55. 114. Chen Jiang, “Xiyang yinyue de chuanru (The transmission of Western music), in Xin Ping, Hu Zhenghao, and Li Xuechang, Minguo shehui daguan, 770. John K. Fairbank, Katherine F. Bruner, and Elizabeth M. Matheson, eds., The I. G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868– 1907 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), vol. 2, 1276, 1294. 115. Tsai-Ping Liang, Chinese Music (Taibei: Chinese Classical Music Association, 1964), 25–35. 116. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 148–49. 117. Erik Baark, Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China’s Technological Modernization, 1860–1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 177. 118. Wan Renyuan, ed.,Yuan Shikai yu Beiyang junfa (Yuan Shikai and the Beiyang warlords) (Hong Kong: Shangwu yishuguan, 1994), photo no. 65. 119. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 7. 120. North China Herald, August 31, 1912, 606. 121. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 358–59. 122. Ibid., 347–48; North China Herald, August 31, 1912, 606. 123. Hanchao Lu,“Out of the Ordinary: Implications of Material Culture and Daily Life in China,” in Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein, eds., Everyday Modernity in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 23. 124. Ibid.

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125. Hu Qufei, ed., Zongli shilue (A biographical sketch of the president) (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1971). 126. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 150. 127. Feng Gengguang,“Sun Zhongshan he Yuan Shikai de diyici huijian” (The ﬁrst meeting between Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai), in Shang Mingxuan, Wang Xueqing, and Chen Song, eds., Sun Zhongshan shengping shiye zhuiyilu (Recollections of Sun Yat-sen’s life work) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1986), 238. 128. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 351. 129. Belsky, Localities at the Center, 5–6, 232. 130. Ibid., 265. 131. Ibid., 265–66; Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), 204. 132. Belsky, Localities at the Center, 66–7, 187, 234. 133. Xu Mao, Zhonghua minguo zhengzhi zhidu shi, 52. 134. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 107. 135. Ibid., 107–8. 136. Elizabeth Kaske,“Mandarin, Vernacular and National Language: China’s Emerging Concept of a National Language in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China (Boston: Brill, 2004), 283. 137. “Guangxu ershiba nian Sichuan Zongli Cen Chunxuan ‘Quanjie chanzu gaoshi’” (Sichuan Governor Cen Chunxuan’s 1903 “Statement on Footbinding”), Lishi dang’an (Historical Archives) 91:3 (2003): 69–70. 138. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 107–8. 139. Edward Friedman, Backward toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 15; Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang (Political parties during the early Republic) (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2004), 56. 140. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 108. 141. Aiguo bao, August 13, 1912, 3. 142. K. C. Liew, Struggle for Democracy: Sung Chiao-jen and the 1911 Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 174–76. 143. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 108. 144. Liew, Struggle for Democracy, 98. 145. Li Chien-nung, Political History of China, 278; Friedman, Backward toward Revolution, 15. 146. Jiang Renlan, “Shuo nüzi canzheng zhi liyou” (On the reasons for women’s suffrage), Funü shibao (Women’s Times), September 1912, 1. 147. Zhongguo ribao, August 26, 1912, 2; Da ziyou bao, August 26, 1912, 6. 148. Zou Lu, Zhongguo Guomindang shigao (A draft history of the Nationalist Party) (Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1965), 132–35. 149. Zhongguo ribao, August 26, 1912, 2; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 26–27; and Yaxiya ribao, August 27, 1912, 6. 150. Hu Jing, in Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 132–33. 151. Minguo yiwen (Anecdotes of the Republic) 3 (n.p.: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 206.

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152. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 130. 153. Shengjing shibao, August 30, 1912, 23. 154. Zhongguo ribao, August 26, 1912, 3. 155. Ibid., 2. 156. Wang Canzhi,“Sun Zhongshan yu Beijing Huguang huiguan” (Sun Yatsen and Beijing’s Huguang Lodge), in Beijing Huguang huiguan zhigao (Draft annals of the Beijing Huguang Lodge) (Beijing: Beijing yanshan chubanshe, 1994), 23. 157. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950, ed. Joshua A. Fogel, trans. Kathryn Bernhardt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 87. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid. 160. Guo Tingyi, Jindai Zhongguo shigang, vol. 2, 427. 161. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 351. 162. Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29:4 (October 2003). 163. Patricia Ebrey, “The Chinese Family and the Spread of Confucian Values,” in Gilbert Rozman, ed., The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 49. 164. Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalism and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106:2 (June 2001). 165. Wang Canzhi, “Sun Zhongshan yu Beijing Huguang huiguan,” 33. 166. Bailey, “ ‘Women Behaving Badly,’ ” 183 n. 95. 167. Wang Canzhi, “Sun Zhongshan yu Beijing Huguang huiguan,” 33–34. 168. Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 195, 198–99; Wang Di, Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 180–81. 169. Da ziyou bao, September 3, 1912, 7. 170. Harding, Present-Day China, 63. 171. Xiong Yuezhi,“The Theory and Practice of Women’s Rights in Late-Qing Shanghai, 1843–1911,” in Kai-Wing Chow, Tze-Ki Hon, Hung-Yok Ip, and Don C. Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity (New York: Lexington Books, 2008), 73. 172. Ibid., 74. 173. Bailey, “ ‘Women Behaving Badly,’ ” 194. 174. Zhongguo ribao, November 9, 1912, 7. 175. Peter G. Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 191. 176. Yang Jialuo, ed., Liang Rengong nianpu changpian (A comprehensive chronological biography of Liang Qichao) (Taibei: Shijie shuju, 1972), 250. 177. Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, 56. 178. Liew, Struggle for Democracy, 86. 179. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1, 16.

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180. Zhengzong aiguo bao, August 27, 1912, 4. 181. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 362–63. 182. Beijing xinbao, August 26, 1912, 3. 183. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 351. 184. Ibid., 387–88. 185. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 110; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 133. 186. Liew, Struggle for Democracy, 150. 187. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong” (The women’s suffrage movement in the early Republic), Minchu shengzhi (Politics of the early Republic), pt. 1, in Zhongguo jindai xiandai shi lunji (Collected commentaries on modern and contemporary Chinese history) (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1986), vol. 19, 695. 188. Ibid. 189. Ibid.; Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 108.

Chapter 2. Speaking Parts in Chinese History 1. Luke S. K. Kwong, “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reﬂections on the Hundred Days Reform of 1898,” Modern Asian Studies 34:3 (July 2000): 688–89. 2. Ibid., 690. 3. Zhu Jianhua and Song Chun, Zhongguo jin xiandai zhengdang shi (A history of modern and contemporary political parties in China) (Heilongjiang: Heilongjiang chubanshe, 1984), 15–16. 4. Goldstein, Drama Kings, 216. 5. William C. Wooldridge Jr., “Transformations of Ritual and State in Nineteenth-Century Nanjing,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2007, 104. 6. Zhang Jianyuan, “Dengtai yanshuo buyi” (Getting up and giving a speech isn’t easy), Beijing xinbao, September 11, 1912, 1, 3; Min Jie, Jindai Zhongguo shehui wenhua bianqian lu (Records of social and cultural change in modern China), ed. Liu Zhiqin (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1998); Mary B. Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong (Lower-class enlightenment in the late Qing period) (Nangang: Institute of Modern History, 1992); Wang Di, Street Culture in Chengdu; Strand, Rickshaw Beijing. 7. Feng Ziyou, Geming yishi (Historical reminiscences of the revolution) (Chongqing: n.p., 1943), vol. 1, 57. 8. Min Jie, Jindai Zhongguo shehui wenhua bianqian lu, 258. 9. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, chap. 5; Yu Heping, Shanghui yu Zhongguo zaoqi xiandaihua (Chambers of commerce and China’s early modernization) (Shanghai: Shanghai remin chubanshe, 1993). 10. Wang Di, The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 228–29. 11. Da ziyou bao, August 25, 1912, 7.

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12. Goldstein, Drama Kings, 11–12. See also Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 98–99. 13. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, chap. 7. 14. Weston, The Power of Position, 160; Yeh, Provincial Passages, 188. 15. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 125; Minli bao, July 20, 1912. 16. West China Missionary News 23:12 (December 1921): 24. 17. Hanchao Lu, “Out of the Ordinary,” 39–41. 18. Changsha ribao, January 18, 1913, 10. 19. Guo Tingyi, Jindai Zhongguo shigang, vol. 2, 433. 20. Ibid. 21. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 287. 22. Fenby, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost, 36. 23. Deng Weizhi, Jindai Zhongguo jiating de biange (The transformation of the modern Chinese family) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1994), 70. 24. Bailey, “ ‘Women Behaving Badly,’ ” 183. 25. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen. 26. Sun, Zongli quanji, vol. 1, 731. 27. F. G. Bailey, The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason and Reality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 7. 28. Yang Changji, “Yu gailiang shehui zhi yijian,” 2. 29. Jensen Chung,“Ineffability and Violence in Taiwan’s Congress,” in Randy Kluver and John H. Powers, eds., Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 77; Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural Identity and the Politics of Recognition in Contemporary Taiwan,” China Quarterly 148 (December 1996): 1130. 30. Aihwa Ong, “Clash of Civilizations or Asian Liberalism? An Anthropology of the State and Citizenship,” in Henrietta L. Moore, ed., Anthropological Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 31. Beijing shi (A history of Beijing) (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1985), 372. 32. Eva Shan Chou, “Literary Evidence of Continuities from Zhou Shuren to Lu Xun,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 59:2 (2005): 51. 33. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (2005), vol. 4, 11–15; Lu Xun, Silent China: Selected Writings of Lu Xun, ed. and trans. Gladys Yang (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 34. Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman,” in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, 36. 35. Liang Qichao used the expression in a 1901 essay. Michael Tsin, “Imagining ‘Society’ in Early Twentieth-Century China,” in Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow., eds., Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 215. 36. Lu Xun, Silent China, 164. 37. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 97–102. 38. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (2005), vol. 14, 48, 51. 39. Ibid., vol. 4, 15; Lu Xun, Silent China, 167. 40. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, vol. 4, 22, 24, October 9, 1912. 41. Ibid., 22, 24, October 10, 1912.

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42. William A. Lyell Jr., Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 124. 43. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (2005), vol. 14, 32–33, December 26, 1912 (presented to Yuan Shikai); 17, September 6, 1912 (speech by Minister Fan); 45, 47, February 15, 1913 (skips ofﬁcial tea party); 183, October 28, 1915 (lecture on traditional values). 44. Ibid., 75, September 28, 1913. 45. Ibid., 103, 107, March 2, 1914. 46. Lyell, Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality, 125. 47. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (2005), vol. 14, 11, July 30, 1912. 48. Ibid., 8, July 7, 1912. 49. Ibid., 6, June 26, 1912. 50. Ibid., 333–34, November 26, 1918. 51. Elizabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895– 1919 (Boston: Brill, 2008), 407–16. 52. Ibid., 412. 53. Ibid., 385. 54. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1, 418. 55. Gang Yue, The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 79. 56. Lyell, Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality, 164; Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (2005), vol. 14, 43, February 8, 1913. 57. Lung-Kee Sun, “To Be or Not to Be ‘Eaten’: Lu Xun’s Dilemma of Political Engagement,” Modern China 12:4 (October 1986): 463. 58. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman, 67–69. 59. Ibid., 27. 60. See Fitzgerald, Awakening China. 61. Hu Hanmin, “Lubang de qunzhong xinli” (Le Bon’s mass psychology), Jianshe 1:1 (August 1919): 1. 62. Fincher, Chinese Democracy, 8. 63. Ibid. 64. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 107. 65. Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, “The Beginnings of Mass Culture: Journalism and Fiction in the Late Ch’ing and Beyond,” in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 372. 66. Ibid., 374, 376. 67. Snow, Red Star over China, 150. 68. Lee and Nathan, “Beginnings of Mass Culture,” 371–72; Henrietta Harrison, “Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China, 1890–1929,” Past and Present 166 (February 2000): 195. 69. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 85; Harrison, “Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China,” 195–96. 70. Chang Peng-yüan, “Political Participation and Political Elites in Early Republican China: The Parliament of 1913–1914,” Journal of Asian Studies 37:2 (February 1978): 302.

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71. Wang, Street Culture in Chengdu, 239. 72. Sun Qimeng, Yanjiang chubu (Public speaking preliminaries) (Shanghai: Shenghuo shudian, 1946), 1. 73. Ibid., 3. 74. Mu Jinyuan, “Miuxu,” 1. 75. Lawrence A. Schneider, A Madman of Ch’u: The Chinese Myth of Loyalty and Dissent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 38; Derk Bodde, “Types of Chinese Categorical Thinking,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 59:2 (June 1939): 209. 76. R. Kent Guy, Four Treasures: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch’ienlung Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 206. 77. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 10. 78. Sun Qimeng, Yanjiang chubu, 4. 79. J. I. Crump, Intrigues: Studies of the Chan-kuo Ts’e (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 36. 80. Ibid., 6. 81. Pan Ku, Courtier and Commoner in Ancient China: Selections from the History of the Former Han by Pan Ku, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 116–17. 82. Ibid., 114. 83. F. W. Mote,“The Transformation of Nanking, 1350–1400,” in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977). 84. Burton Watson, introduction to Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih-chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien, ed. and trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 4. 85. Ibid. 86. Crump, Intrigues, 100. 87. The Four Books, trans. and ed. James Legge (New York: Paragon, 1966), 490. 88. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xv–xviii. 89. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Historian, 202. 90. Benjamin A. Ellman, “The Formation of the ‘Dao Learning’ as Imperial Ideology during the Early Ming Dynasty,” in Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 58. 91. Guy S. Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shuming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 1. 92. Shao Shouyi, ed., Yanjiang quanshu (Complete book of public speaking) (Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 1991), 653. 93. Ebrey, “The Chinese Family,” 75–76. 94. Victor H. Mair, “Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict,” in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski, Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, 335. 95. Ibid., 340.

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96. James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 193. 97. Ibid., 64. 98. Li Boyuan, Wenming xiaoshi (A history of modern times) (Hong Kong: Jindai tushu gongsi, 1958 [orig. pub. 1906]). 99. Ibid., 12. 100. Ibid., 14. 101. Ibid., 15. 102. Ibid., 122. 103. Ibid.,125. 104. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 105. James Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 64. 106. Li Boyuan, Wenming xiaoshi, 127. 107. Tang Changye, Guofu geming xuanchuan zhilue (A sketch of the Founding Father’s revolutionary propaganda) (Taibei: Zhongyang sanmin zhuyi yanjiuyuan, 1985), 99. 108. Ibid., 100. 109. Polachek, The Inner Opium War, 21. 110. John K. Fairbank, “Introduction: The Old Order,” in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, pt. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 12. 111. Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China, 5. 112. Ibid., 129. 113. Yang Jialuo, Liang Rengong nianpu changpian, 15–16. 114. Beijing shi, 292–94. 115. Liang Qichao, Kang Nanhai xiansheng zhuan (A biography of Mr. Kang Youwei), introd. Dai-Ming Lee (San Francisco: Chinese World, 1953), 15. 116. Yang Jialuo, Liang Rengong nianpu changpian, 17. 117. Liang Qichao [Ch’-ch’ao], Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period, trans. and introd. Immanuel C. Y. Hsü (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 101. 118. David Strand, “Changing Dimensions of Social and Public Life in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Cities,” in Léon Vandermeersch, ed., La société civile face à l’État dans les traditions chinoise, japonaise, coréenne et vietnamienne (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1994). 119. Sun, Zongli quanji, vol. 1, 66. 120. Mao Zedong, “Minzhong de dalianhe” (Grand Alliance of the Masses), in Takeuchi Minoru, ed., Mao Zedong ji (Collected writings of Mao Zedong), vol. 1. 121. Ibid., 60. 122. Peter G. Zarrow, “Liang Qichao and the Notion of Civil Society in Republican China,” in Fogel and Zarrow, Imagining the People, 239. 123. Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), chap. 5.

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124. Liang Qichao, Kang Nanhai xiansheng zhuan, 10. 125. Liang Qichao, “Hunan shiwu xuetang xueyue shizhang” (Ten rules of the compact of the Hunan Contemporary Affairs Academy), in Liang, Liang Qichao wenxuan (Selected works of Liang Qichao), vol. 2. (Beijing: Zhongguo bodianshi chushe, 1992): 380. 126. Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6. 127. Shao Shouyi, Yanjiang quanshu,572. 128. Beijing shi, 295. 129. Polachek, The Inner Opium War, 32. 130. Beijing shi, 295. 131. Belsky, Localities at the Center, 221. 132. Beijing shi, 296. 133. Tong Qiang, Kang Youwei (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 1998), 132; Belsky, Localities at the Center, 219–20. 134. L. Carrington Goodrich, ed., Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), vol. 2, 1504. 135. Belsky, Localities at the Center, 224. 136. Wu Jidang and Liu Su, “Huiguan jianzhu zhi shu gailun” (An introduction to the art of huiguan architecture), in Zhongguo jianzhu yishu quanji (The complete art of Chinese architecture) (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 2003), vol. 11, 5. 137. Tong Qiang, Kang Youwei, 133. 138. Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 40–55. 139. Shao Shouyi, Yanjiang quanshu, 590. 140. Min Jie, Jindai Zhongguo shehui wenhua bianqian lu, 256. 141. Ibid., 255. 142. Rhoads, Manchus and Han, 52. 143. Chang Lau-Chi, “The Reform Movement in the Province of Chili in China, 1900–1910,” M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1910, 27. 144. Rhoads, Manchus and Han, 180. 145. Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China; Rankin,“Nationalistic Contestation and Movement Politics”; Mary B. Rankin, “The Origins of a Chinese Public Sphere: Local Elites and Community Affairs in the Late Imperial Period,” Études chinoises 9:2 (automne 1990); Min Jie, Jindai Zhongguo shehui wenhua bianqian lu; Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong. 146. Liu Zehua and Liu Jianqing, “Civic Associations, Political Parties, and the Cultivation of Citizen Consciousness in Modern China,” in Fogel and Zarrow, Imagining the People, 43. 147. Min Jie, Jindai Zhongguo shehui wenhua bianqian lu, 255. 148. Li Xin, Zhonghua minguo shi (A history of the Chinese Republic), 1:1, Zhonghua minguo de zhuangli (The founding of the Chinese republic), vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 10. 149. Hanyu da cidian (Comprehensive Chinese dictionary) (Wuhan: Hubei cishu chubanshe, 1986–90), vol. 6, 107. 150. Robert Ruhlmann, “Traditional Heroes in Chinese Popular Fiction,” in Wright, Confucianism and Chinese Civilization, 124–25.

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151. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 85. 152. Qingmo Beijingzhi ziliao (Late Qing gazetteer materials), trans. [from Japanese] Zhang Zongping and Lu Yongping [1907] (Beijing: Beijing yanshan chubanshe, 1994), 543; Shao Shouyi, Yanjiang quanshu, 574. 153. Wang, Street Culture in Chengdu, 209. 154. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 95. 155. Massimiliano Tomasi, “Oratory in Meiji and Taisho Japan: Public Speaking and the Formation of a New Written Language,” Monumenta Nipponica 57:1 (Spring 2002): 43. 156. Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China, 234. 157. Ibid., 5. 158. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 93. 159. Shao Shouyi, Yanjiang quanshu, 592. 160. E E Sheng, “Yanshuo wei zuiyao zhi xuewen” (Lecturing is a most important kind of study), Aiguo bao, August 8 and 11, 1912. 161. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 79. 162. Ibid., 81–82. 163. Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China,” Journal of Asian Studies 49:4 (November 1990): 843. 164. Zhongguo jianzhu yishu quanji (The complete art of Chinese architecture) (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 2003), vol. 11, 23. 165. Beijing mingsheng guji cidian (Dictionary of places of historic interest and scenic beauty in Beijing) (Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 1992), 228. 166. Lin Yutang, My People and My Country, 71–72. 167. Jonathan Culler, “Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative,” Poetics Today 21:3 (Fall 2000): 510. Emphasis in original. 168. Wilmer A. Linkugel, “Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919), a Case Study in Rhetorical Enactment,” in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ed., Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 411. 169. Gang Yue, The Mouth That Begs, 79. 170. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 17. Emphasis in original. 171. Hua Lu, “Minzhong yundong de fangshi ji yaosu” (Patterns and key elements in mass movements), Dongfang zazhi 20:13 (July 10, 1923): 23–31. 172. Long Dajun, “Ping ‘minzhi’ yu ‘ducai’ de lunzhan” (On the debate over “democracy” and “dictatorship”), Zhonghua yuebao 3:3 (March 1, 1935): A16. 173. Nie Qijie, Dafen zhuyi (Excrementalism) (n.p.: Gengxin zhai, June 5, 1925), 1. 174. Ibid. 175. He Xiangning, “Dui Zhongshan xiansheng de pianduan huiyi” (A fragmentary memoir of Dr. Sun), in Shang Mingxuan, Wang Xueqing, and Chen Song, eds., Sun Zhongshan shengping shiye zhuiyilu (Recollections of Sun Yat-sen’s life work) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1986), 32. 176. Glen Peterson, The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 8. Peterson cites Evelyn Rawski’s and Bernard Luk’s research on literacy rates.

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177. Wusi shiqi de shetuan (Social organizations of the May Fourth era) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1979), vol. 2, 158. 178. Shao Shouyi, Yanjiang quanshu, 596. 179. Wusi shiqi de shetuan, vol. 2, 168. 180. Deng Yingchao, “The Spirit of the May Fourth Movement,” in Patricia Ebrey, ed., Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook (New York: Free Press, 1993), 361. 181. Yu Nanqiu, Yanshuoxue ABC (The ABCs of the science of public speaking) (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1928), 8; Yu Nanqiu, Yanshuoxue gaiyao (Outline of the science of public speaking) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1934), 11. 182. Yu Nanqiu, Yanshuoxue ABC, 27. 183. Ren Biming, Yanjiang, xiongbian, tanhua shu (The art of lecture, debate, and conversation) (Hong Kong: Shixue shuju, 1966 [orig. pub. Guilin, 1941]), 1. 184. Ibid., 13. 185. Xiangdao zhoubao 166 (August 6, 1926):1669. 186. Zhang Jianyuan, “Dengtai yanshuo buyi,” 1, 3. 187. E E Sheng, “Yanshuo wei zuiyao zhi xuewen.” 188. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 128. 189. Han Li, Yanjiang shu, 11. 190. Yu Nanqiu, Yanshuoxue gaiyao, 84 ff. 191. Zhang Jianyuan, “Dengtai yanshuo buyi,” 1. 192. Guy S. Alitto,“Rural Elites in Transition: China’s Cultural Crisis and the Problem of Legitimacy,” Select Papers from the Center for Far Eastern Studies 3 (1978–79). 193. Bruce Lincoln on how public events can permit either a win or a loss. See his Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 194. Mu Jinyuan, “Miuxu,” 4. 195. Ren Biming, Yanjiang, xiongbian, tanhua shu, 12. 196. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 25–26. 197. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 92. 198. Changsha ribao, October 14, 1912, 10. 199. E E Sheng, “Yanshuo wei zuiyao zhi xuewen.” 200. Mu Jinyuan, “Miuxu,” 6. 201. R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 68–69. 202. Weston, The Power of Position, 177. 203. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 63, 83. 204. Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 165. 205. Deng Yingchao, “The Spirit of the May Fourth Movement,” 361. 206. Hong-Yok Ip, “Politics and Individuality in Communist Revolutionary Culture,” Modern China 23:1 (January 1997): 34–35. 207. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 300.

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208. Liang Shiqiu, “Cong ting Liang Qichao yanjiang tandao mingren yanjiang” (Comments on hearing Liang Qichao’s lectures and famous speeches), Zhuanji wenxue (Biographical Literature) 72:6 (1998): 27. 209. Liang Qichao, Liang Qichao shiwen xuan (Selected poems and essays of Liang Qichao) (Guangzhou: Guangzhou renmin chubanshe, 1983), 190. 210. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), 118. 211. Quoted in Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam (New York: Penguin, 2002), 263. 212. Ren Biming, Yanjiang, xiongbian, tanhua shu, 42. 213. Yu Nanqiu, Yanshuoxue gaiyao, 15. 214. Roland Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals and Teachers,” in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 380. 215. Sun Zhongshan yishi ji (Collected anecdotes of Sun Yat-sen) (Shanghai: Sanmin gongsi, 1926), 167. 216. Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen, 204. 217. In Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity, 161. 218. Chang Hao, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis, 121. 219. Chen Jianhua, “Geming” de xiandaixing: Zhongguo geming huayu kaolun (The modernity of “Revolution”: A study of Chinese revolutionary discourse) (Shanghai: Shanghai ji chubanshe, 2000), 14. 220. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 137. 221. Yu Jiaju, Lingxiu xue (The art of leadership) (Shanghai: Shanghai Dalu shuju, 1932), 40. 222. Ibid., 41. 223. Ibid., 14. 224. Pa Chin, Family (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 61. 225. Wang Yuzhang, “Zhongguo funü yundong zai wusi yundongzhong zoushangle ziji jiefang de daolu” (Chinese women ascend the path toward their own liberation in the May Fourth Movement), in Luo Qiong, ed., Funü yundong wenxian (Documents of the women’s movement) (Harbin: Dongbei shudian, 1948), 101. 226. Huang, 1587, 135. 227. North China Herald, May 4, 1912, 304–5. 228. Ibid. 229. Shengjing ribao, May 3, 1912, 4. 230. Aiguo bao, May 1, 1912, 2. 231. Gu Zhongxiu, Zhonghua minguo kaiguoshi (A history of the founding of the Republic) ( n.p.: Wenhai chubanshe, 1971 [orig. pub. 1917]), photos following p. 96. 232. North China Herald, May 4, 1912, 304–5. 233. Geng Yi, “Zai zhuisui Zhongshan xiansheng de niandaili” (In the generation that followed Dr. Sun), in Shang Mingxuan, Wang Xueqing, and Chen Song, Sun Zhongshan shengping shiye zhuiyilu, 56. 234. Lucian Pye, “An Introductory Proﬁle: Deng Xiaoping and China’s Political Culture,” in David Shambaugh, ed., Deng Xiaoping: Portrait of a Chinese Statesman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 8; François Jullien, The Propensity

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of Things: Toward a History of Efﬁcacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 49. 235. Bao Jialin, “Xinhai geming shiqi de funü sichao” (Popular thought among women in the period of the 1911 Revolution), Jindai sichao (Modern thought), pt. 2, in Zhongguo jindai xiandai shi lunji (Collected commentaries on modern and contemporary Chinese history) (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1986), vol. 18, 948; He Liping, Minguo qianqi de nüquan yundong (19 shijimo zhi 20 shiji nianchu) (The women’s rights movement in the early days of the Republic [end of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century]) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan yanjiu shengyuan jindai lishixi, 1996), 12. 236. Jiang Renlan, “Shuo nüzi canzheng zhi liyou,” 1–2. 237. Qiu Jin, Qiu Jin ji (A Qiu Jin anthology) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1991), 3. 238. Ibid. 239. Ibid., 4. 240. Shao Shouyi, Yanjiang quanshu, 588. 241. Song Jiaoren, Wo zhi lishi (My story), ed. Wu Xiangxiang (Taibei: Zhongguo xiandai shiliao pushu, 1962), 17, 41, 76. 242. Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society, ed. and introd. Joseph R. Gusﬁeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 15. 243. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 61. 244. Hu Ying, “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life: Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning,” Late Imperial China 25:2 (2004): 132–33. 245. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, 94. 246. Hu Ying, “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life.”

Chapter 3. A Woman’s Republic 1. Li Xisuo and Xu Ning, “Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi” (A critical analysis of the “political participation craze” around the time of the early Republic), Tianjin shehui kexue (Tianjin Social Science) 2 (1992). 2. Joan Judge, Precious Raft of History: The Past, The West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8. 3. Li Xisuo and Xu Ning,“Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi,” 52. 4. Ibid. 5. Zhongguo funü mingren cidian (A dictionary of famous Chinese women), ed. Yuan Shaoying and Yang Guizhen (Changchun: Beifang funü ertong chubanshe, 1989), 498; Sheng Shusen, Tan Changchun, and Tao Zhi, “Zhongguo nüquan yundong de xianqu Tang Qunying” (Tang Qunying, forerunner of Chinese feminism) Renwu (People) 2:72 (1992): 82; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 5. 6. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu. Tang Cunzheng’s father was Tang Suijiu, Tang Qunying’s nephew and son of her younger brother Qianyi. Childless

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after the death of her young daughter, Qunying became Suijiu’s foster mother and he her heir (Li Tianhua and Tang Chunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 303). 7. Sheng Shusen, Tan Changchun, and Tao Zhi, “Zhongguo nüquan yundong de xianqu Tang Qunying,” 82. 8. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 2–3. 9. Ibid., 2. 10. Ibid., 4. 11. Ibid. 12. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 91. 13. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 14. Guo Ping provided help with translation of this verse. 14. Ibid., 14–16. 15. Ibid., 16. 16. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 22. 17. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 5. 18. Ibid., 8. 19. Ibid., 10. 20. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 21. 21. Mann, Precious Records, 100–101. 22. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 6. 23. Interview with Tang Cunzheng, June 5, 2005, Xinqiao village, Hunan. Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1944), 203–4. 24. Don C. Price, “Escape from Disillusionment: Personality and Value Change in the Case of Sung Chiao-jen,” in Richard J. Smith and D. W. Y. Kwok, eds., Cosmology, Ontology, and Human Efﬁcacy: Essays in Chinese Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 221. 25. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 10. 26. Ibid., 16–17. 27. Zhao Shirong, Nüjie zhi xiang: Heye jishi (Village of heroines: An account of Heye) (Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 2005), 113. 28. Ibid. 29. Zhongguo funü mingren cidian, 545–46. 30. Zhao Shirong, Nüjie zhi xiang, 114–15. 31. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 20–21; Arthur W. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1943), 169; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 10. 32. Zhao Shirong, Nüjie zhi xiang, 114. 33. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 21. 34. Wusi shiqi funü wenti wenxuan (Selections from women’s issues during the May Fourth period) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1981), 167–68; Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 20. 35. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 27.

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36. Ibid., 32; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 10. 37. He Yikun and Li Jinxi, Zeng Guofan pingzhuan (Zeng Guofan: A critical biography) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 1999), 906. 38. Bao Jialin, “Xinhai geming shiqi de funü sichao,” 950. 39. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 303. See note 6. 40. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 33. 41. Ibid., 32. 42. Sheng Shusen, Tan Changchun, and Tao Zhi, “Zhongguo nüquan yundong de xianqu Tang Qunying” ; Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 82. 43. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 38–39. 44. Ibid., 39. 45. Kang Youwei, Kang Youwei zhenglun ji (Collected political writings of Kang Youwei) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 149. 46. Rong Tiesheng, “The Women’s Movement in China before and after the 1911 Revolution,” in Chün-tu Hsüeh, ed., The Chinese Revolution of 1911: New Perspectives (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Company, 1986), 143. 47. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 39. 48. Ibid., 47; Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 129. 49. Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” 772. 50. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 47. 51. Louise Edwards, “Tang Qunying,” in Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: the Twentieth Century 1912–2000, ed. Lily Lee (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). 52. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 695; Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 53; Jiang Weitang and Liu Ningyuan, eds., Beijing funü baokan kao, 1905–1949 (A study of women’s periodicals in Beijing) (Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe, 1990), 99. 53. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 137. 54. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 57; Edwards, “Tang Qunying.” 55. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 46. 56. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 59; Edwards, “Tang Qunying”; Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 78. 57. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 678. 58. Bao Jialin, “Xinhai geming shiqi de funü sichao,” 936. 59. Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” 795. 60. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 66. 61. Ibid., 69. 62. Ibid., 70–74; Edwards, “Tang Qunying.” 63. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 18. 64. Gujin zhongwai nümingren cidian (A dictionary of famous ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign women) (Baoding: Zhongguo guangbodian chubanshe, 1989): 554; Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 70. 65. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 70. 66. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 698. 67. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 18–19.

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68. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 188. 69. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, 77. 70. “The Biographies of the Assassin-Retainers,” in Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Historian, 45–67; Hu Ying, “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life.” 71. Weijing Lu, “Beyond the Paradigm: Tea-Picking Women in Imperial China,” Journal of Women’s History 15:4 (Winter 2004). 72. Zhang Ji, “Zhongguo geming yu funü” (The Chinese revolution and women), in Zhang Puquan xiansheng quanji (The complete works of Mr. Zhang Ji) (Taibei: Zhongyang wenwu gongying she, 1951). 73. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 19. 74. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 75. 75. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 19. 76. Tan Sheying, Zhongguo funü yundong tongshi (A general history of the Chinese women’s movement) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 13. 77. He Liping, Minguo qianqi de nüquan yundong, 12. 78. Ibid., 18. 79. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 150. 80. Tan Sheying, Zhongguo funü yundong tongshi 18. 81. Ibid., 21. 82. Liang, Liang Qichao wenxuan, 108. 83. Fincher, Chinese Democracy, 16. 84. Hunan difang zizhi baihua bao (Hunan Local Self-Government Vernacular Post) 6 (1910), 16:3. 85. Louise Edwards, “Narratives of Race and Nation in China: Women’s Suffrage in the Early Twentieth Century,” Women’s Studies International Forum 25:6 (November–December 2002); Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 22–23. 86. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1952), 7. 87. Ibid. 88. Tan Sheying, Zhongguo funü yundong tongshi, 4; Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi (A history of the lives of Chinese women) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1928), 352. 89. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 76. 90. New York Times, June 13, 1910. 91. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 79–80. 92. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 12, 38–39. 93. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 77. 94. Belsky, Localizing at the Center, 161. 95. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 84; Bao Jialin, “Xinhai geming shiqi de funü sichao,” 935; Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi, 356; Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 48. 96. Zhongguo funü mingren cidian, 499; Huang Meizhen and Hao Shengchao, eds., Zhonghua minguoshi shijian renwu lu (A record of events and personalities in the history of the Chinese Republic) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1987), 50; Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 86;

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Young-tsu Wong, “Popular Unrest and the 1911 Revolution in Jiangsu,” Modern China 3:3 (July 1977): 326–27. 97. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 86. 98. Carrie Chapman Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” in Catt Papers, Library of Congress, XII, 41; New York Times, November 12, 1912, 18. 99. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 87. 100. Ibid., 88–89. 101. Renè Grousset, The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 71. 102. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 22. 103. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 89. 104. Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi, 357. 105. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 90. 106. Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi, 357; Huang Meizhen and Hao Shengchao, Zhonghua minguoshi shijian renwu lu, 50. 107. Li Xisuo and Xu Ning, “Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi,” 52. 108. Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi, 359. 109. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 20; Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 21; Zhongguo funü mingren cidian, 499. 110. Harding, Present-Day China, opposite p. 42. 111. Liew, Struggle for Democracy, 156. 112. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 250. 113. Sun Wen xiaoshi (A few things about Mr. Sun), 6-page handwritten copy (n.a., n.p., 1913?), 7; Hu Qufei, Zongli shilue, 52. 114. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 249–54. 115. Xu Mao, Zhonghua minguo zhengzhi zhidu shi, 38. 116. Zhang Qicheng and Guo Zhikun, Sun Zhongshan shehuike sixiang yanjiu (A study of the social scientiﬁc thought of Sun Yat-sen) (Hefei: Anhui renmin chubanshe, 1985): 57. 117. Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters, 234 n. 3. 118. Xu Youchun, ed. Minguo renwu da cidian (A comprehensive dictionary of Republican personages) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1991), 916; Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 3; Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 683. 119. Zhou Hong, and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 285; Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1, 94. 120. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 4. 121. The Four Books, 1:14, 144. 122. Tsou Jung, The Revolutionary Army: A Chinese Nationalist Tract of 1903, introd. and trans. John Lust (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 52. 123. Qin Shao, Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 124. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 4. 125. Ibid. 126. Edwards, Politics, Gender, and Democracy, 71. 127. Christine A. Lunardini and Thomas A. Knock, “Woodrow Wilson and

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Woman Suffrage: A New Look,” Political Science Quarterly 45:4 (Winter 1980): 655. 128. Ibid., 659. 129. Ibid., 670. 130. Ibid., 656. 131. Edwards, “Narratives of Race and Nation in China.” 132. Hu Ying, “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life,” 131. 133. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 81–82. 134. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 97; Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 130; Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 75. 135. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 97. 136. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu” 4. 137. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 102. 138. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 696. 139. Ibid. 140. Harding, Present-Day China, 49–50. 141. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 50. 142. Harding, Present-Day China, 50. 143. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 200. 144. Harding, Present-Day China, 49, 53; Secretary’s Third Report, Harvard College Class of 1910 (Cambridge, MA: Crimson Printing Company, 1917), 145. 145. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 682–85. 146. Joan Judge, “Citizens or Mothers of Citizens? Gender and the Meaning of Modern Chinese Citizenship,” in Goldman and Perry, Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China. 147. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 77. 148. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu” 4. 149. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 685. 150. Edith F. Hurwitz,“Carrie C. Catt’s ‘Suffrage Militancy,’ ” Signs 3:3 (Spring 1978): 740. 151. Hurwitz, “Carrie C. Catt’s ‘Suffrage Militancy,’ ”; Lunardini and Knock, “Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage.” 152. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 159–60. 153. Cheng Sih-Gung, Modern China: A Political Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919), 316. 154. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 687. 155. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 99. 156. North China Herald, March 2, 1912, 567. 157. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 21. 158. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 4. 159. North China Herald, April 6, 1912, 21. 160. Charles D. Musgrove,“Building a Dream: Constructing a National Capital in Nanjing, 1927–1937,” in Joseph W. Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 152. 161. North China Herald, March 30, 1912, 847.

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162. Ibid., April 6, 1912, 21. 163. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 82–84. 164. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu” 4. 165. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 83. 166. North China Herald, March 30, 1912, 847. 167. Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. 168. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 22. 169. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 4. 170. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, say March 21. 171. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 83. 172. North China Herald, March 30, 1912, 847. 173. New York Times, November 17, 1912, 18. 174. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 21. 175. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 5. 176. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 100. 177. Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi. 178. Cong Xiaoping, Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), chap. 4. 179. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 85. 180. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 71. 181. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 681. 182. North China Herald, March 9, 1912, 606–7. 183. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 23. 184. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 85. 185. New York Times, November 12, 1909. 186. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 109. 187. Dong, “Unofﬁcial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Republic,” 171–72; Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 93–99. 188. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 691. 189. Ibid., 692. 190. Ibid., 693. 191. Tan Sheying, Zhongguo funü yundong tongshi, 57. 192. Li Xisuo and Xu Ning, “Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi,” 52. 193. Hans J. Van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3, 100. 194. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 5. 195. He Liping, Minguo qianqi de nüquan yundong, 83–84; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 25. 196. He Liping, Minguo qianqi de nüquan yundong, 84. 197. Aiguo bao, August 8, 1912, 5. 198. Da ziyou bao, July 16, 1912, 6. 199. Dong, “Unofﬁcial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Republic,” 173.

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200. Ibid., 174–75. 201. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 97–98. 202. Bailey, “ ‘Women Behaving Badly,’ ” 179. 203. Jiang Renlan, “Shuo nüzi canzheng zhi liyou,” 1. 204. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 696. 205. Shibao, August 29, 1912, 4. 206. Cao Xueqin, Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes (New York: Penguin, 1973–86), vol. 1, 150. 207. Price, “Escape from Disillusionment,” 218; Cao Xueqin, Story of the Stone, vol. 3, 466, 472. 208. Zhongguo ribao, May 22, 1912, 2. 209. Cao Xueqin, Story of the Stone, vol. 3, 466, 472. 210. Louise Edwards, “Women in Honglou meng: Prescriptions of Purity in the Femininity of Qing Dynasty China,” Modern China 16:4 (October 1990): 416. 211. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Human Rights and the Lessons of History,” Current History (September 2001): 268; Schell, Mandate of Heaven, 48. 212. Michael Yang, “Naming in Hongloumeng,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 18 (December 1996): 82. 213. Cao Xueqin, Story of the Stone, vol. 1, 89. 214. Ibid., vol. 3, 472–73. 215. Ibid. 216. Maria Magro,“Spiritual Autobiography and Radical Sectarian Women’s Discourse: Anna Trapnel and the Bad Girls of the English Revolution,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34:2 (Spring 2004). 217. Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, 133. 218. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 77–78. 219. Edwards, “Women in Honglou meng,” 416. 220. Ibid., 415. 221. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 222. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 223. Raphals, Sharing the Light, 46, 58–59. 224. Judge, The Precious Raft of History, 83. 225. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 258; Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 84–88. 226. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 85. 227. Jiang Weitang and Liu Ningyuan, Beijing funü baokan kao, 1905–1949, 99; Harding, Present-Day China, 58. 228. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 6. 229. David S. Birdsell, “Carrie Lane Chapman Catt (1859–1947), Leadership for Woman Suffrage and Peace,” in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ed. Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 323–24. 230. Ibid., 322. 231. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII, 29. 232. Yau Tsit Law, “Canton Women in Business and the Professions,” News Bulletin (Institute of Paciﬁc Relations) (December 1926): 12.

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233. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, 87–88. 234. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 197–98, 139. 235. Ibid., 198. 236. Ibid., 198–99. 237. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII, 29. 238. China Press, September 3, 1912, in Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII. 239. New York Times, November 5, 1912, 12. 240. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 200. 241. Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 97. 242. China Press, September 3, 1912, in Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII. 243. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 201. 244. China Press, September 5, 1912, in Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII. 245. Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 99. 246. Shibao, September 5, 1912, 5. 247. Harding, Present-Day China, 50. 248. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 698. 249. Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 15. 250. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII, 32. 251. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 697. 252. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII, 37. 253. Mineke Bosch,“Colonial Dimensions of Dutch Women’s Suffrage: Aletta Jacobs’s Travel Letters from Africa and Asia, 1911–1912,” Journal of Women’s History 2:2 (Summer 1999): 19–20. 254. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 177. 255. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 203. 256. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII, 62. 257. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 698. 258. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 7. 259. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 203–4. 260. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII, 63. 261. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 204. 262. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 159. 263. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 4, 89. 264. Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 103. 265. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 202; Bailey, 183. 266. Charlotte Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911–1950,” Feminist Studies 27:1 (Spring 2001). 267. Ibid., 132. 268. Birdsell, “Carrie Lane Chapman Catt,” 325. 269. In Leila J. Rupp and Venta Taylor, “Forging Feminist Identity in an International Movement: A Collective Identity Approach to Twentieth-Century Feminism,” Signs 24:2 (1999): 379.

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Notes to Pages 134–141

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270. Hurwitz, “Carrie C. Catt’s ‘Suffrage Militancy.’ ” 271. Jacobs, Memories, 161. 272. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 160. 273. Tianmin bao, February 19, 1913, 3; Edward S. Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1998), 102; Changsha ribao, March 9, 1913, 7; New York Times, February 21, 1913. 274. Harding, Present-Day China, 56. 275. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 699. 276. Ibid. 277. New York Times, September 20, 1912, 11; February 18, 1913, 5. 278. Ibid., September 24, 1909, 10. 279. The Tso Chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989): 11; James Legge, ed. and trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, The Ch’un Ts’ew with the Tso Chuen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1970), 92–93. I have altered Legge’s translation to make it more idiomatic. 280. New York Times, March 22, 1912, 4. 281. North China Herald, March 23, 1912, 768. 282. New York Times, March 22, 1912, 3; November 12, 1912, 18; Linkugel, “Anna Howard Shaw.” 283. Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 37. 284. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Virago Press, 1978), 382. 285. New York Times, March 23, 1912, 13. 286. Ibid., May 5, 1912, 1–2. 287. Ibid.; and May 2, 1912, 11. 288. Ibid., November 12, 1912, 18. 289. Ibid., December 15, 1912, C4. 290. Bosch, “Colonial Dimensions of Dutch Women’s Suffrage,” 19. 291. Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, 28–29. 292. Xu Mao, Zhonghua minguo zhengzhi zhidu shi, 54–58. 293. Wang Jiajian, “Minchu de nüzi canzheng yundong,” 700. 294. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 88–89. 295. He Liping, Minguo qianqi de nüquan yundong, 84. 296. Shibao, December 11, 1912, 2. 297. Ibid., September 15, 1912, 3; Aiguo bao, September 10, 1912; Yaxiya ribao, September 9, 1912, 3. 298. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 115–16. 299. Jing Shenghong, “Minchu nüquan yundong gaishu,” 5. 300. Sherman Cochran, personal communication. 301. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 91. 302. He Liping, Minguo qianqi de nüquan yundong, 84. 303. Shibao, September 27, 1912. 304. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 146. 305. Ibid., 146. 306. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 141–148

307. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 48. 308. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 147. 309. Ibid. 310. Che Jixin, Minguo yishi (Anecdotes of the Republic) (Jinan: Taishan chubanshe, 2004): 1442–46. 311. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 22. 312. Ibid., vol. 1, 143. 313. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 151. 314. Changsha Daily, March 9, 1913; March 19, 1913, 7. 315. Cheng Weikun, “The Challenge of the Actresses: Female Performers and Cultural Alternatives in Early Twentieth Century Beijing and Tianjin,” Modern China 22:2 (April 1996): 226. 316. Dong, “Unofﬁcial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Republic,” 176–77. 317. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 133. 318. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 153. 319. Ibid., 122. 320. Ibid., 153. 321. Ibid., 151. 322. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 49–50. 323. Harding, Present-Day China, 59. 324. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 133–34. 325. Peter R. Moody Jr., “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Popular Chinese Political Thought,” Review of Politics 37:2 (April 1975): 185. 326. Hao Chang, “Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Intellectual Changes in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Asian Studies 29:1 (November 1969). 327. Charlotte L. Beahan, “In the Public Eye: Women in Early TwentiethCentury China,” in Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen, eds., Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1981), 237. 328. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 25, 31; Scott, Weapons of the Weak. 329. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, ﬁg. 7. 330. Mann, Precious Records, 89. 331. Ibid., 91. 332. Ibid. 333. Edwards, “Narratives of Race and Nation in China.” 334. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” XII, 63.

Chapter 4. Seeing Like a Citizen 1. Harding, Present-Day China. 2. Ibid., 104–6. 3. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, chaps. 2, 3. 4. Intercollegiate Debates on the Income Tax: Harvard vs. Yale at Woolsey Hall, New Haven, Harvard vs. Princeton at Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, March 22, 1910 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Debating Society, 1910). 5. Harding, Present-Day China, 107.

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6. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 33, 40. 7. Harding, Present-Day China, 109. 8. Ibid., 110. 9. Chang Peng-yüan, “Political Participation and Political Elites,” 302. 10. Changsha ribao, March 9, 1913, 2. 11. Ibid., April 24, 1912, 2. 12. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 47. 13. Ibid., 49–50. 14. Li Xisuo and Xu Ning, “Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi,” 53. 15. Kojima Yoshio, “Reformist Parties in the Early Years of the Republic,” in Etoˉ and Schiffrin, China’s Republican Revolution, 91. 16. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (2005), vol. 14, 6; Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 276. While resident in the Shaoxing Lodge in Beijing in summer 1912, Lu Xun received a letter and a membership card in the mail from Yuan Shikai’s Republican Party. He did not respond. 17. Ding Shifeng, in Li Xisuo and Xu Ning, “Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi,” 51. 18. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 31. 19. Li Xisuo and Xu Ning, “Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi,” 51–52. 20. Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 269. 21. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 34–35. 22. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 279. 23. Li Xisuo and Xu Ning, “Minyuan qianhou (1911–1913) Minguo ‘Canzheng re’ pingxi,” 51–52. 24. Kojima, “Reformist Parties in the Early Years of the Republic,” 90. 25. Qian Nanxiu,“Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition,” 400. 26. Kojima Yoshio, “The Chinese National Association and the 1911 Revolution,”in Etoˉ and Schiffrin, The 1911 Revolution in China: Interpretive Essays, 178. 27. Chang Peng-yüan, “Political Participation and Political Elites,” 301. 28. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 286; Wang Yexing, “Lun Minguo chunian yiyuan zhengzhi shibai de yuanyin” (On the reasons for the defeat of parliamentary politics in the early Republic), Lishi dang’an (Historical Archives) 64:4 (1996): 111. 29. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 35. 30. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 455; Wang Yexing, “Lun Minguo chunian yiyuan zhengzhi shibai de yuanyin” 111. 31. Wang Yexing, “Lun Minguo chunian yiyuan zhengzhi shibai de yuanyin” 111. 32. Martin Bernal, “The Tzu-yu tang and Tai Chi t’ao, 1912–1913,” Modern Asian Studies 1:2 (1967): 135. 33. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 279; Li Jiannong, Zhongguo jin bainian zhengzhi shi, 371. 34. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 278. 35. Bernal, “The Tzu-yu tang and Tai Chi t’ao, 1912–1913,” 133.

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36. Ibid., 139. 37. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 132. 38. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 140. Emphasis in original. 39. Harding, Present-Day China, 122–23. 40. Peitit, Republicanism, 140. 41. Harding, Present-Day China, 127. 42. Ibid., 130, 133. 43. Ernest P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). 44. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonge, 160. 45. Ibid., 157. 46. Weston, The Power of Position, 160. 47. Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48 (April 1983). 48. Alexandra Kalev, Erin Kelly, and Frank Dobbin, “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efﬁcacy of Corporate Afﬁrmative Action and Diversity Policies,” American Sociological Review 71:4 (August 2006): 590. 49. DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” 151. 50. Liang, Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period, 114. 51. DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” 151. 52. Ibid., 152. 53. Yu Heping, Shanghui yu Zhongguo zaoqi xiandaihua. 54. Yi Guan, “Quanguo shanghui zhi xiankuang yu jianglai zhi xiwang” (The conditions and future prospects of chambers of commerce throughout our country), Dongfang zazhi 16:3 (March 1919): 219; Yu Heping, Shanghui yu Zhongguo zaoqi xiandaihua, 75–76. 55. Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 31. 56. David Strang and Sarah A. Soule, “Diffusion in Organizations and Social Movements: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 273. 57. Mayfair Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 307–8. 58. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 3. 59. Ibid., 35. 60. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 285. 61. Friedman, Back toward Revolution, 23. 62. Klein and Clark, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Communism, vol. 1, 620. 63. Liu Shaoqi, Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984), vol. 1, 122–23.

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64. Ibid., 138. 65. Ibid.; Lawrence R. Sullivan, “The Role of the Control Organs in the Chinese Communist Party, 1977–83,” Asian Survey 24:6 (June 1984): 598. 66. Craig R. Littler, “Understanding Taylorism,” British Journal of Sociology 29:2 (June 1978): 188. 67. The Four Books, I.3, 384. 68. A. I. Cherepanov, As Military Adviser in China (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), 187. 69. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1, 94–95. 70. DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” 152. 71. Harding, Present-Day China, 56. 72. E-tu Zen Sun,“Wu Ch’i-chün: Proﬁle of a Chinese Scholar-Technologist,” Technology and Culture 6:3 (Summer 1965): 405; Huang Liu-hung, A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence: A Manual for Local Magistrates in Seventeenth-Century China, trans. and ed. Djang Chu (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). 73. Sun, “Wu Ch’i-chün.” 74. Brett Sheehan, Trust in Troubles Times: Money, Banks, and State-Society Relations in Republican Tianjin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 107. 75. Ibid., 124. 76. Ibid., 124–25. 77. Liu Shaoqi, Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, 138; Sheehan, Trust in Troubles Times, 24–26, 125. 78. Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organizations 46:1 (Winter 1992): 2. 79. Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 31. 80. Ibid., 34. 81. Ibid., 32–33. 82. Evelyn Lin, “Nursing in China,” American Journal of Nursing 38:1 (January 1938): 8. 83. Zhang Xiaobo,“Merchant Political Activism in Early 20th Century China: The Tianjin Chamber of Commerce, 1904–1925,” Chinese Historian 8 (1995): 49, 51. 84. Goodman, “Democratic Calisthenics.” 85. Yu Heping, Shanghui yu Zhongguo zaoqi xiandaihua, 98. 86. Snow, Red Star over China, chap. 2, 147. 87. Ibid., 148–49. 88. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1, 202. 89. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6. 90. Min Jie, Jindai Zhongguo shehui wenhua bianqian lu, 258. 91. Yang Jialuo, Liang Rengong nianpu changpian, 216. 92. Sherman Cochran, “Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China, 1900–1950,” in Yeh, Becoming Chinese, 70–73. 93. Snow, Red Star over China, 143. 94. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, 236.

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95. Cochran,“Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China,” 76, 91. 96. Zou Lu, Huigu lu (Reminiscences) (Nanjing: Duli chubanshe, 1947), vol. 1, 175. 97. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 6. 98. Ibid. 99. Qingmo Beijingzhi ziliao, 471. 100. Liew, Struggle for Democracy, 26. 101. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 6. 102. Lu Danlin, Shizheng quanshu (Complete book of municipal government) (Shanghai: Daolu yuekanshe, 1931), 16. 103. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 104. Ibid., chap. 1. 105. Li Hsiao-t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, 125. 106. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 272. 107. Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praeger, 1963): 70. 108. Wusi shiqi de shetuan, vol. 2, 182. 109. Richard Evans, Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China (New York: Penguin, 1997), 18–19. 110. Benjamin A. Ellman and Alexander Woodside, Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 12. 111. Chang Kuo-t’ao, The Rise of the Communist Party, 22. 112. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 140–41. 113. Allison Rottmann, “To the Countryside: Communist Recruitment in Wartime Shanghai,” in Cochran, Strand, and Yeh, Cities in Motion. 114. Wong, “Popular Unrest and the 1911 Revolution in Jiangsu,” passim; Jonathan Spence estimates two million dead in the ﬁrst years of the Republic. Spence, Gate of Heavenly Peace, 105. 115. Changsha ribao, March 9, 1913, 2. 116. Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China, 301. 117. Judge, “Public Opinion and the New Politics of Contestation in the Late Qing,” 86. 118. Huang Xuchu, Zhongguo jianshe yu Guangxi jianshe (The reconstruction of China and the reconstruction of Guangxi) (Guilin: Reconstruction Book Company, 1939), 8; David Strand, “Calling the Chinese People to Order: Sun Yat-sen’s Rhetoric of Development,” in Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and David Strand, eds., Reconstructing Twentieth Century China: State Control, Civil Society, and National Identity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 56. 119. Harald Bøckman, “China Deconstructs? The Future of the Chinese Empire-State in a Historical Perspective,” in Brødsgaard and Strand, Reconstructing Twentieth-Century China. 120. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai, 78. 121. Da ziyou bao, August 25, 1912, 7. 122. Shengjing ribao, May 2, 1912, 1.

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123. Donald J. Munro, Images of Nature: A Sung Portrait (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 212–13. 124. Xu Mao, Zhonghua minguo zhengzhi zhidu shi, 63. 125. Hu Shi [Suh Hu], “Manufacturing the Will of the People,” 319–28. 126. Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen, 188. 127. “Lun Zhongguo zhengzhishang zhi weiji” (On the Chinese political crisis), Da ziyou bao, June 16, 1912, 1. 128. Judge, “Public Opinion and the New Politics of Contestation in the Late Qing,” 78. 129. Stephen Owen, “Salvaging Poetry: The ‘Poetic’ in the Qing,” in Huters, Wong, and Yu, Culture and State in Chinese History, 109–10. 130. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, 69; James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History 1912–1949 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 218–19. 131. Long Dajun, “Ping ‘minzhi’ yu ‘ducai’ de lunzhan,” A16–17. 132. Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: Foundations of Chinese Society, introd. and epilogue Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 60; in Chinese: Fei Xiaotong, Xiangtu Zhongguo (From the soil) (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1995), 25. 133. Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil, 65. 134. Munro, Images of Nature, 223. 135. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 30–40. 136. Da ziyou bao, August 23, 1912, 10. 137. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 32. 138. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai, 78. 139. Da ziyou bao, August 8, 1912, 5. 140. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman, 72. 141. Shuntian shibao, September 21, 1928, 7. 142. Munro, Images of Nature, 212–13. 143. Burke, On Symbols and Society, 104. Emphasis in original. 144. Zhongguo ribao, December 8, 1912, 1. 145. E. T. Williams, “The Relations between China, Russia and Mongolia,” American Journal of International Law 10:4 (October 1916): 802–7; Guo Tingyi, Jindai Zhongguo shigang, 440; Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 26. 146. Zhongguo ribao, October 23, 1912, 7. 147. Ibid., December 8, 1912, 1. 148. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 127. 149. Culp, Articulating Citizenship, chap. 2. 150. Ni Danzhuan, Zhonghua minguo guotu yanshuo (Lectures on the national territory of the Chinese Republic) (Shanghai: Guomin jaioyu shijinhui, 1913). 151. He Luzhi, Guojia zhuyi gailun (On nationalism) (Shanghai: Zhongguo ren wen yanjiuso, 1948; orig. pub. 1929), 12; Brian E. McKnight, “Sung Justice: Death by Slicing,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93:3 (July–September 1979): 59–60. 152. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.

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153. Weston, The Power of Position, 217. 154. Fei Xiaotong, Xiangtu Zhongguo, 32. 155. Paul S. Reinsch, An American Diplomat in China (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1922), 373. 156. Lincoln, Authority, 116. 157. See Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 158. Lincoln, Authority, 116. 159. Ibid., 78. 160. Yun Daiying, “Minzhi yundong” (Democratic Movements), Dongfang zazhi 19:18 (September 25, 1922), 7; Minguo renwu da cidian (Comprehensive biographical dictionary of the Republic) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1991), 1169. 161. Noel Pugach, “Embarrassed Monarchist: Frank J. Goodnow and Constitutional Development in China, 1913–1915,” Paciﬁc Historical Review 42:4 (November 1973): 512. 162. The joke about Yuan “resembling a monkey” is found in Feng Gengguang, “Sun Zongshan he Yuan Shikai de diyici huijian,” 238; the pun, Sun Zhongshan yishi ji, 183–84. 163. Minguo ribao, February 8,1916. The figure says, “I’m taking it!” 164. See Scott A. Boorman, The Protracted Game: A Wei-Qi Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 165. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 166. Ibid., 339–40. 167. Ibid., 32.

Chapter 5. Losing a Speech 1. Cheng, Modern China, 32. 2. Li Shoukong, Minchu zhi guohui (National assemblies in the early Republic) (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1964), 38. 3. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 441. 4. Knight Biggerstaff, The Earliest Modern Government Schools in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), 150, 195. 5. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 441. 6. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 77. 7. Vladimir D. Pastuhov, A Guide to the Practice of International Conferences (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 1945): 122; Ernest Swatow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice (New York: Longmans, Green, 1932), 28–29. 8. Pastuhov, A Guide to the Practice of International Conferences, 79–80; Swatow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 290. 9. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 78. 10. Zhang Maopeng, “Lu Zhengxiang,” in Yang Daxin, ed., Beiyang zhengfu

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zongtong yu zongli (Presidents and premiers of the Beiyang government) (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 1991), 225. 11. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 441. 12. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 312. 13. Lu Zhengxiang [Lou Tseng-Tsiang/Dom Pierre-Célestin], Ways of Confucius and of Christ, trans. Michael Derrick (London: Burns Oates, 1948), 8. 14. The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences: The Conference of 1899 [1 vol.] and The Conference of 1907 [3 vols.], ed. James Brown Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920 [1899]), 213. 15. Proceedings [1907], vol. 2, 84. 16. Ibid., 115. 17. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 24. 18. Times of London, June 17, 1907. 19. John W. Foster, Diplomatic Moments (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1909), vol. 2, 240–41. 20. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 77. 21. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 442. 22. Ibid. 23. Minguo renwu da cidian, 993; Lu Zhengxiang,Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 29–30. 24. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 38. 25. Ibid., 37. 26. Madeleine Chi, China Diplomacy, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1970), 41–43. 27. Lu Zhengxiang,Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 36. 28. Ibid., 42; Stephen G. Craft, V. K. Wellington Koo and the Emergence of Modern China (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2004); Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, 165. 29. Craft, V. K. Wellington Koo and the Emergence of Modern China, chap. 2. 30. Ibid., 51–52; Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 40. 31. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 43. 32. Weston, The Power of Position, 38. 33. Nicholas M. Keegan, “From Chancery to Cloister: The Chinese Diplomat Who Became a Benedictine Monk,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 10:1 (March 1999): 174; Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 101. 34. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 20. 35. Ibid., 9. 36. Bastid,“Ofﬁcial Conceptions of Imperial Authority at the End of the Qing Dynasty.” 37. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, vol. 1, 313. 38. Alphonse Monestier, “The Monk Lu Cheng-Hsiang: An Ex-Prime Minister of China Enters the Benedictine Order,” Bulletin of the Catholic University of Peking 7 (December 1930): 16. 39. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, vol. 1, 313; Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 23. 40. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 101. 41. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 441–42;

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Luo Guang, “Fangwen Lu Zhengxiang shenfu riji” (Diary of a visit with Father Lu Zhengxiang), Zhuanji wenxue (Biographical Literature) 19:2 (August 1971): 51. 42. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 442. 43. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 70. 44. Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 13. 45. Rhoads, Manchus and Han, 209. 46. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 75. 47. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 22. 48. Rhoads, Manchus and Han, 163. 49. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 73. 50. Ibid., 74. 51. E-Tu Zen Sun,“The Chinese Constitutional Missions of 1905–1906,” Journal of Modern History 24:3 (September 1952): 252. 52. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 75. 53. Monestier, “The Monk Lu Cheng-Hsiang,” 15. 54. Ibid. 55. Keegan, “From Chancery to Cloister,” 175. 56. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai, 72. 57. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 9. 58. Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (New York: Penguin, 1986), 347. 59. Richard Madsen,“Hierarchical Modernization: Tianjin’s Gong Shang College as a Model for Catholic Community in North China,” in Yeh, Becoming Chinese, 163–64, 184–87. 60. Quoted in Keegan, “From Chancery to Cloister,” 181. 61. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 30. 62. Luo Guang, “Fangwen Lu Zhengxiang shenfu riji,” 50; Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 442. 63. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai, 71. 64. Luo Guang, “Fangwen Lu Zhengxiang shenfu riji,” 50. 65. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 157. 66. Luo Guang, “Fangwen Lu Zhengxiang shenfu riji,” 51. 67. Monestier, “The Monk Lu Cheng-Hsiang,” 16. 68. Yen, East-West Kaleidoscope, 76–77. 69. Luo Guang, “Fangwen Lu Zhengxiang shenfu riji,” 50; Zhang Maopeng, “Lu Zhengxiang,” 226. 70. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 442. 71. Kenneth E. Folsom, Friends, Guests, and Colleagues: The Mu-fu System in the Late Ch’ing Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 194. 72. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 12. 73. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 33. 74. Mishima Yukio, Runaway Horses (New York: Knopf, 1973), 4. 75. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 101–2. 76. Ibid., 103. 77. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai, 55.

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78. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 14. 79. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 280. 80. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 98. 81. North China Herald, April 6, 1912, 21–22. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., April 27, 1912, 242. 84. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 281. 85. Liew, Struggle for Democracy, 164; Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 297. 86. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 281. 87. Zhang Maopeng, “Lu Zhengxiang,” 227. 88. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 102. 89. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 281–82. 90. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 116. 91. Ibid., 119; O. Edmund Clubb, Twentieth-Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 46. 92. North China Herald, May 18, 1912, 468. Sun denied the report. Ibid., June 29, 1912, 912. 93. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 127. 94. North China Herald, June 29, 1913, 912; Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 964–65. 95. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 104; North China Herald, July 6, 1912, 30. 96. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 121; North China Herald, July 6, 1912, 30. 97. New York Times, June 10, 1912, 4; James L. McClain, A Modern History of Japan (New York: Norton, 2002), 324–25. 98. Carlton H. Hayes and Edward M. Sait, “Record of Political Events,” Political Science Quarterly 27:4 (December 1912): 773. 99. Ibid.; Paul S. Reinsch, “Diplomatic Affairs and International Law, 1912,” American Political Science Review 7:1 (February 1913): 78. 100. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 283. 101. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 121. 102. Meribeth E. Cameron, “American Recognition Policy toward the Republic of China, 1912–1913,” Paciﬁc Historical Review 2:2 (June 1933): 220. 103. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 4, 86. 104. Clubb, Twentieth-Century China, 49–50. 105. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 169. 106. Fincher, Chinese Democracy, 16; Clubb, Twentieth-Century China, 37. 107. North China Herald, January 6, 1912, 12. 108. Fincher, Chinese Democracy, 16. 109. Ibid., 19. 110. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 14–15. 111. Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, front photograph section. 112. Ibid., vol. 1, 294. 113. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 27.

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114. Li Shoukong, Minchu zhi guohui, 19. 115. Ibid., 20. 116. Ibid., 25. 117. Ibid., 31. Hu Hanmin’s ancestral home was Jiangxi. His paternal grandfather started a new home in Guangdong, where Hu was born. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 159. 118. Huang Yuanyong, Yuansheng yizhu (Writings of the late Huang Yuanyong), ed. Wu Xiangxiang (Taibei: Zhongguo xiandai shiliao, 1962), vol. 1, 149. 119. Ibid. 120. Catt, “Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt,” xii, 79. 121. North China Herald, June 1, 1912, 609. 122. Harding, Present-Day China, 33. 123. Zhonghua minguo Canyiyuan fa (Procedures of the Senate of the Chinese Republic) (n.d. [1912?]), 2. 124. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 101. 125. Li Shoukong, Minchu zhi guohui, 46. 126. Ibid. 127. Zhonghua minguo Canyiyuan fa, 5. 128. Zhongguo ribao, May 16, 1912, 3. 129. Ibid., August 13, 1912, 9–10; August 3, 1912, 9; Aiguo bao, July 21, 1912, 2–3. 130. Zhongguo ribao, August 1, 1912, 9. 131. North China Herald, June 15, 1912, 763; June 22, 1912, 847. 132. Ibid., June 1, 1912, 609. 133. Aiguo bao, July 7, 1912, 3. 134. Li Shoukong, Minchu zhi guohui, 44. 135. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 285; Xu Mao, Zhonghua minguo zhengzhi zhidu shi, 60. 136. Li Shoukong, Minchu zhi guohui, 38. 137. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 30. 138. Ibid., 31. 139. Aiguo bao, April 28,1912, 3; Shengjing shibao, May 7, 1912, 4. 140. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 277. 141. Zhonggo ershi shiji, 305; North China Herald, July 20, 1912, 185. 142. Zhonggo ershi shiji, 299, 300. 143. Ibid., 299. 144. Ibid., 277. 145. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 101. 146. Da ziyou bao, June 28, 1912, 6. 147. Zhonggo ershi shiji, 305. 148. Minguo shi da cidian (A comprehensive dictionary of Republican history) (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo shidian chubanshe, 1991), 944. 149. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 106. 150. Harding, Present-Day China, 149–50. 151. Cheng, Modern China, 72. 152. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 106. 153. Da ziyou bao, July 4, 1912, 6.

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154. North China Herald, July 6, 1912, 34. 155. Ibid., July 20, 1912, 181. 156. Da ziyou bao, June 29, 1912, 6. 157. Zhonghua minguo shishi luyao (chugao) ([Draft] record of historical events of the Chinese Republic, July–December 1912) (Taibei: Zhonghua minguo shiliao yanjiu zhongxin, 1971), 50–54. 158. Chih-Fang Wu, Chinese Government and Politics (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1934), 186. 159. Shengjing shibao, May 10, 1912, 4. 160. Zhonghua minguo shishi luyao, 50. 161. Ibid., 51. 162. Zhonghua minguo shishi luyao, 52. 163. Ibid. 164. Minguo shi da cidian, 768. Liu Chengyu was a native of Guangdong but grew up and went to school in Wuchang, Hubei. 165. Ibid., 885. 166. Zhonghua minguo shishi luyao, 52. 167. Alexander Moore, “From Council to Legislature: Democracy, Parliamentarism, and the San Blas Cuna,” American Anthropologist 86:1 (March 1984): 29–30. 168. Gu Zhongxiu, Zhonghua minguo kaiguo shi, 104–5; Shengjing shibao, July 23, 1912, 4. 169. Li Jiannong, Zhongguo jin bainian zhengzhi shi, 377. 170. Zhang Maopeng,“Lu Zhengxiang,” 227; Hou Yijie, Yuan Shikai yisheng (A life of Yuan Shikai) (Xinxiang: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1982), 208. 171. Luo Guang,“Fangwen Lu Zhengxiang shenfu riji,”46. Emphasis in original. 172. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 107. 173. Luo Guang, “Fangwen Lu Zhengxiang shenfu riji,” 47. 174. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 37. 175. Ibid., 38. 176. Munro, Images of Nature, 212–13. 177. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 9; Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 441–42. 178. Gu Zhongxiu, Zhonghua minguo kaiguoshi, 105. 179. Guo Jianlin, ed., Beiyang zhengfu jianshi (A brief history of the Beiyang government) (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 2000), 134. 180. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 107. 181. Ibid.; Zhonghua minguo shishi luyao, 52–53. 182. Zhonghua minguo shishi luyao, 54. 183. Li Jiannong, Zhongguo jin bainian zhengzhi shi, 377. 184. Shengjing shibao, July, 23, 1912, 4. 185. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 108. 186. Aiguo bao, July 20, 1912, 6. 187. Shibao, July 20, 1912, 2. 188. Aiguo bao, July 24, 1912, 6. 189. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 107; Aiguo bao, August 19, 1912, 3; Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 134.

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190. Yen, East-West Kaleidoscope, 78. 191. Aiguo bao, August 19, 1912, 3. 192. Huang Yuanyong, Yuansheng yizhu, vol. 1, 188. 193. Zhonggo ribao, July 19, 1912, 2. 194. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 108. 195. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 34. 196. Shengjing shibao, July 23, 1912, 4. 197. Ibid., July 23, 1912, 4. 198. Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 129. 199. Shibao, July 20, 1912, 2; North China Herald, July 27, 1912, 252. 200. Huang Yuanyong, Yuansheng yizhu, vol. 1, 189. 201. Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times. 202. Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 305. 203. Hou Yisheng, 208; Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 108; Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo,, vol. 1, 305; Shengjing shibao, July 23, 1912, 4; North China Herald, July 27, 1912, 252. 204. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 128. 205. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 283. 206. North China Herald, July 27, 1912, 253. 207. Zhang Yufa, Minguo chunian de zhengdang, 282. 208. Shibao, July 20, 1912, 2. 209. Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 130–31. 210. Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 305. 211. Aiguo bao, July 23, 1912, 3. 212. Hou Yijie, Yuan Shikai yisheng, 208; Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 305. 213. Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 131. 214. Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 305. 215. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 129. 216. Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 131. 217. Hou Yijie, Yuan Shikai yisheng, 208. 218. North China Herald, August 3, 1912, 314. 219. Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 133. 220. Zhou Hong and Shu Han’guo, Zhongguo ershi shiji jishi benmo, vol. 1, 306. 221. North China Herald, August 3, 1912, 316, 319. 222. Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 146. 223. In Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 134. 224. Minguo shi da cidian, 938. 225. North China Herald, August 24, 1912, 532. 226. Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi, 132. 227. North China Herald, August 3, 1912, 314. 228. Minli bao, September 4, 1912, in Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 366.

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229. Feng Gengguang,“Sun Zhongshan he Yuan Shikai de diyici huijian,” 238. 230. Shengjing shibao, August 30, 1912, 23. 231. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 31. 232. Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 282; Li Jiannong, Zhongguo jin bainian zhengzhi shi, 376. 233. Harding, Present-Day China, 184. 234. In Russell H. Fiﬁeld, Woodrow Wilson and the Far East: The Diplomacy of the Shandong Question (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965), 183. 235. Stephen Bonsal, Suitors and Suppliants: The Little Nations at Versailles (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), 237. 236. Monestier, “The Monk Lu Cheng-Hsiang,” 19. 237. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 102, 106. 238. Hou Yijie, Yuan Shikai yisheng, 282. 239. Duff Cooper, Talleyrand (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 187. 240. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 32. 241. Joseph W. Esherick, “Founding a Republic, Electing a President: How Sun Yat-sen Became Guofu,” in Etoˉ and Schiffrin, China’s Republican Revolution, 147–48. 242. Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 380–85. 243. Keegan, “From Chancery to Cloister,” 183. 244. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 58. 245. Yang Huaizhong, “Yu gailiang shehui zhi yijian,” 5. 246. Sun Zhongshan, Zongli quanji, vol. 1, 77. 247. Van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade, 25. 248. John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 249. Han Li, Yanjiang shu, 17, 110. 250. Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), vol. 2, 4. 251. Sun Zhongshan yishi ji, 75. 252. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 326. 253. Sun Wen xiaoshi. 254. Guangzhou minguo ribao, November 6, 1923. 255. Aiguo bao, September 3, 1912, 3. 256. Ibid., September 17, 1912, 4. 257. Craft, V. K. Wellington Koo and the Emergence of Modern China, 50, 55–56; Fiﬁeld, Woodrow Wilson and the Far East, 140, 144–45. 258. Fiﬁeld, Woodrow Wilson and the Far East, 187. 259. New York Times, January 27, 1919. 260. Craft, V. K. Wellington Koo and the Emergence of Modern China, 50–59; Pao-chin Chu, V. K. Wellington Koo: A Case Study of China’s Diplomat and the Diplomacy of Nationalism, 1912–1966 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1981), 31. 261. Roy Watson Curry, Woodrow Wilson and the Far Eastern Policy, 1913– 1921 (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 281. 262. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 42; Chu, V. K. Wellington Koo, 31.

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263. Keegan, “From Chancery to Cloister,” 178. 264. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 242; Shibao, January 23, 1920, 5. 265. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 242–43. 266. Ibid., 243. 267. Lu Zhengxiang, Ways of Confucius and of Christ, 43. 268. Shi Jianguo, Lu Zhengxiang zhuan, 243.

Chapter 6. Sun Yat-sen’s Last Words 1. Michael A. Krysco, “Forbidden Frequencies: Sino-American Relations and Chinese Broadcasting during the Interwar Era,” Technology and Culture 45:4 (2004): 727–28. See also Dorothy Borg, “War Speeds up Expansion of Telecommunications in China,” Far Eastern Survey 9:9 (April 1940): 105–6. 2. Taylor, The Generalissimo, 8. 3. Ibid. 4. Yin Dehua, Yanjiangshu lihua (A guide to public speaking techniques) (Shanghai: Wenhua gongying she, 1948), 3. 5. Jan Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, “American Synecdoche: Thomas Jefferson as Image, Icon, Character, and Self,” American Historical Review 103:1 (February 1998). 6. Li Fan, Sun Zhongshan quanzhuan, 37. 7. Zhang Qicheng and Guo Zhikun, Sun Zhongshan shehuike sixiang yanjiu, 342. 8. Liu E, The Travels of Lao Can, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Panda Books, 1983). In his preface Yang Xianyi identiﬁes the allegory (p. 8). 9. Ibid., 16–17, 20. 10. Ibid., 20–21. 11. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 196; Liao Dawei, 1912: chushi gonghe, 10; Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China, 226–27. 12. See Susan L. Glosser on New Culture radicals inﬂuenced by the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Smiles. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 37. 13. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, chap. 6. 14. Tang Chengye, Guofu geming xuanchuan zhilue, 23. 15. Zhong Yumin, “Wang Zhen liqi faji mishi” (The secret history of Wang Zhen’s bizarre rise to power), Zheng Ming (April 1993): 53. 16. Mao in Ming Ruan, Deng Xiaoping: Chronicle of an Empire (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 27. 17. Mao, quoted in Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, an Investigative History (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), 133. 18. Lyon Sharman, Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Meaning, a Critical Biography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 271; Li Fan, Sun Zhongshan quanzhuan, 5. 19. He Xiangning, “Dui Zhongshan xiansheng de pianduan huiyi,” 41. 20. Zhongguo ershi shiji, 287. 21. Li Shoukong, Minchu zhi guohui, 34.

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22. Hsüeh Chun-tu, Huang Hsing and the Chinese Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 215–16. 23. Sun Zhongshan pinglun ji (Commentaries on Sun Zhongshan) (Shanghai: Sanmin chubanshe, 1925), 83. 24. Lu Ping, Xingdao tianya (Journey to a Faraway Place) (Taibei: Lianhe chuban, 1995), 51. 25. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 16–17. 26. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 158. 27. Geremie Barmé, “Wang Shuo and Liumang (‘Hooligan’) Culture,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 28 (July 1992): 51. 28. Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 146. 29. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 43. 30. Hanchao Lu, Street Criers, 62. 31. Sharman, Sun Yat-sen, 326. 32. Louis Chevalier, The Assassination of Paris, trans. David P. Jordan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 94. 33. Isaiah Berlin, “Winston Churchill in 1940,” in Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (New York: Viking, 1980), 2–3. 34. Ibid., 4–5. 35. Yang Yicun, “Beijing renmin aiguo fandi de yizi zhuangju wusan yundong Tiananmen dahui (A glorious Beijing people’s patriotic anti-imperialist May Thirtieth Movement Tiananmen rally), Wenshi ziliao xuanbian (A compendium of historical materials) 31 (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1986): 106–9. 36. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 180. 37. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans and ed. Kurt H. Wolf (Glencoe: Free Press, 1950), 181–89. 38. Ibid., 185; David Strand, “Social History and Power Politics: Agency, Interaction, and Leadership,” Wilder House Working Papers 12 (Spring 1995): 14–15. 39. Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen, 75. 40. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 5. 41. Marie-Claire Bergère,“The ‘Other China’: Shanghai from 1919 to 1949,” in Christopher Howe, ed., Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 42. Shishi xinbao, October 1, 1911; Shibao, December 27, 1911. 43. Minli bao, December 30, 1911. 44. Sharman, Sun Yat-sen, 183 ff. 45. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 222; Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu. 46. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York: Modern Library, 1918), 7. 47. Jenkins, Gladstone, 237. 48. Shibao, December 26, 1911: 3. Tiger skins were available for sale in markets of the day, though the rare “tiger” reported shot may have been the more common leopard. Malcolm P. Anderson, “Notes on the Mammals of Economic Value in China,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 39, China: Social and Economic Conditions (January 1912): 174.

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49. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 14. 50. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 258. 51. Chen Xiqi, ed., Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian (A comprehensive chronological biography of Sun Yat-sen) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), vol. 1, 686–705, 733–54. 52. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 224. 53. Ibid., 267, 425–26. 54. Ibid., 435–36. 55. Chen Xiqi, Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian, vol. 1, 741–42. 56. R. K. Newman, “India and the Anglo-Chinese Opium Agreement, 1907– 1914,” Modern Asian Studies 23:3 (1989): 552–53. The gunboat was instructed to investigate the incident rather than use force (p. 556). 57. Chen Xiqi, Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian 741–42. 58. A later account by a Revolutionary Alliance member, Li Tianqiu, ﬁrst published in People’s Daily in the 1950s (October 28, 1955), depicts Sun’s speech as taking place in the face of the British gunboat anchored offshore (Liu Tianqiu, “Zhongzhan xiansheng zai Anqing shao yapian de gushi” [The story of how Dr. Sun destroyed opium in Anqing], in Shang Mingxuan, Wang Xuiqing, and Chen Song, Sun Zhongshan shengping shiye zhuiyilu, 231–32). Contemporary sources, including the Minli bao article cited in Chen Xiqi, have Sun in his speech on October 23 noting that the gunboat incident had taken place days before his arrival. The British cruiser had been “ordered to Anking on October 14, 1912” (Hayes and Sait, 733) 59. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 224. 60. Ibid., 225–26. 61. Qian Luzhou,“Ji Sun Zhongshan xiansheng lai Fuzhou de jianwen” (What I saw and heard when Dr. Sun Yat-sen came to Fuzhou), in Shang Mingxuan, Wang Xuiqing, and Chen Song, Sun Zhongshan shengping shiye zhuiyilu, 235–36. 62. Zheng Zhenwen, “Sun Zhongshan xiansheng lai min” (Dr. Sun Yat-sen came to Fujian), in Shang Mingxuan, Wang Xuiqing, and Chen Song, Sun Zhongshan shengping shiye zhuiyilu, 233. 63. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tan Qunying pingzhuan, 112. 64. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 366–67. 65. Aihe Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142. 66. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 377. 67. Zhang Meng,“Sun Zhongshan Xiansheng zai Guangxi shi de yiduan huyi” (A recollection of Dr. Sun Yat-sen when he was in Guangxi), in Shang Mingxuan, Wang Xuiqing, and Chen Song, Sun Zhongshan shengping shiye zhuiyilu, 334. 68. Cherepanov, As Military Adviser in China, 188. 69. Wang Canzhi, “Sun Zhongshan yu Beijing Huguang huiguan” (Sun Yatsen and Beijing’s Huguang Hostel), in Beijing Huguang huiguan zhigao (Draft annals of the Beijing Huguang Hostel) (Beijing: Beijing yanshan chubanshe, 1994). 70. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 371. 71. China Republican, September 3, 1912, in Catt, XII. 72. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, 13.

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73. Burns, Leadership. 74. Zhongshan nianpu (A chronological biography of Sun Yat-sen) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 33. 75. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 185. 76. Ibid., vol. 2, 444. 77. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 55. 78. Cheng Yin-Fun, “On Hearing Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Lectures on the San Min Chu I,” China Forum 5:1 (January 1978): 226. 79. Ibid. 80. Zou Lu, Huigu lu, vol. 1, 166–70. 81. Ibid., 172. 82. Sun Zhongshan, Zongli quanji, vol. 1, 117–18. 83. Ibid., 177. 84. Luo Jialun, ed., Guofu nianpu chugao (Draft chronological biography of the Father of the Republic) (Taibei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1959), 667. 85. Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen, 243. 86. Harold Schiffrin, Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 2. 87. Ibid., 365. 88. Sun Zhongshan, Zongli quanji, vol. 1, 94. 89. Ibid., 90–91. 90. Ibid., vol. 1, 106, 714. 91. Young-tsu Wong, review of Sidney H. Chang and Leonard H. D. Gordon, All under Heaven, Journal of Asian Studies 51:1 (February 1992): 142–43. 92. Wolfgang Bauer, China and the Search for Happiness (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 347. 93. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 9. 94. Hou Wulai, Sun Zhongshan dao Mao Zedong (From Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong) (n.p., 1949), 8. 95. Sun Zhongshan, “Minquan chubu zixu” (A preliminary note on democracy), in Sun, Zongli quanji, vol. 1; Harriet Shattuck, The Woman’s Manual of Parliamentary Law, with Practical Illustrations Especially Adapted to Women’s Organizations (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1891); Tricia A. Lootens,“Publishing and Reading ‘Our EBB’: Editorial Pedagogy, Contemporary Culture, and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,’ ” Victorian Poetry 44:4 (Winter 2006): 492, 503. Shattuck is described as a “pioneer in the ﬁght for women’s suffrage” in her obituary notice, New York Times, March 23, 1937. 96. Shattuck, The Woman’s Manual of Parliamentary Law, iv. 97. Studies of Chinese business practice by Cochran, “Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China.” 98. Birdsell, “Carrie Lane Chapman Catt,” 335. 99. Tang Shouzhen and Wang Qihou, eds., Lingdao shili chengbai bijiao (A comparison of historical examples of the success or failure of leaders) ( Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1989), 51. 100. Ibid., 53. 101. Guangzhou minguo ribao, January 28, 1924. 102. Luo Jialun, Guofu nianpu chugao, 669.

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103. Hua Lu, “Minzhong yundong de fangshi ji yaosu” (Patterns and key elements in mass movements), Dongfang zazhi 20:13 (10 July 1923): 23. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Chang, The Rise of the Communist Party, 22. 107. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 63. 108. Paul Cohen, Between Modernity and Tradition: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 260. 109. Ibid., 242–43. 110. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 55. 111. Charles Peterson, “Returning to the African Core: Cabral and the Erasure of the Colonial Past,” West Africa Review 2:2 (2001). 112. Sun Zhongshan, Zongli quanji, vol. 1, 2. 113. Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 141. 114. Yu, “The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century,” 30. 115. Sun Zhongshan, Zongli quanji, vol. 1, 164. 116. Ibid., vol. 1, 103. 117. Ibid., vol. 1, 65–66. 118. Ibid., vol. 1, 64–65. 119. Partha Chatterjee, “A Response to Taylor’s ‘Modes of Civil Society,’ ” Public Culture 3:1 (Fall 1990). 120. Ibid., 124. 121. Weston, The Power of Position, 179. 122. Lu Fangshang, Geming zhi zaiqi: Zhongguo guomindang gaizu qian dui xin sichao de huiying (Rekindle the revolution: the Nationalist’s response to the New Thought Movement prior to reorganization) (Taibei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1989). 123. Ibid., 24. 124. Xu Yongying, “Jian Sun Zhongshan xiansheng ji” (An account of meeting Mr. Sun Yat-sen), Jindai shi ziliao (Modern Historical Materials) 68 (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1988), originally published in Qinghua zhoukan (Tsinghua Weekly) 308 (April 4, 1924); Strand, “Calling the Chinese People to Order,” 50–53. 125. Xu Yongying, “Jian Sun Zhongshan xiansheng ji,” 183. 126. Ibid. 127. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 128. Ibid., 184. 129. Yang Manqing, “Sun Zhongshan,” Beijing xinbao, September 2, 1912. 130. Chang, The Rise of the Communist Party, 78, 80. 131. Lu Fangshang, Geming zhi zaiqi, 32 n. 37. 132. Zou Lu, Huigu lu, vol. 1, 171. 133. Xu Yongying, “Jian Sun Zhongshan xiansheng ji,” 185. 134. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman, 27. The essay, the preface to a collection of short stories that came out simultaneously, was published in Beijing on August 21, 1923 (Lyell, in Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman, 21).

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135. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 346–49. 136. Joseph R. Gusﬁeld, Contested and Uncontested Meanings: The Construction of Alcohol Problems (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 34. 137. Gusﬁeld, introduction to Burke, On Symbols and Society, 8. 138. Lincoln, Authority, 8–9. 139. Yu Nanqiu, Yanshuoxue gaiyao, 2. 140. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 189. 141. Gao Ru, “Sun Zhongshan daodi cha qiangren yi.” 142. Chen Xiqi, Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian vol. 1, 1403–4. 143. Ye Shaojun [Shengtao], Ye Zhishan (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1982), 205–6. 144. Roy Hofheinz Jr., Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement, 1922–1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 325 fn. 14; Chen Xiqi, Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian, 1956–57; Soong Ching Ling, “Statement Issued in Protest against the Violation of Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Principles and Policies; Hankow, July 14, 1927,” in Soong Ching Ling, The Struggle for New China (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1953), 5. 145. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3, 317. 146. Chen Xiqi, Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian, 1957. 147. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 339. 148. Ibid. 149. Ye Shaojun, Ye Zhishan, 205. 150. This line closely follows Song Qingling’s recollection (Soong,“Statement Issued in Protest,” 5). 151. Ye Shaojun, Ye Zhishan, 205. 152. Soong, “Statement Issued in Protest,” 5. 153. Cherepanov, As Military Adviser in China, 188. 154. Wang Zonghua, Zhongguo da geming shi (A history of the great Chinese Revolution) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1990). 155. Lu Ping, Xingdao tianya. 156. Ibid., 40. 157. Liang, in Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity, 161. 158. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 277. 159. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 20. 160. Harding, Present-Day China, 27. 161. Ibid. 162. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai, 243. 163. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 169. 164. Wang Gengxiong, Sun Zhongshan shishi xianglu, 390. 165. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman, 108. 166. Xie Mingxiao, “Sichuan minzuxing de ruodian” (The weaknesses of the Sichuanese), Guowen zhoubao 2:39 (October 1925): 13. 167. Mao Zedong, “Zai jinian Sun Zhongshan shishi shisan zhounian ji zhuidao kangdi chenwang jiangshi dahuishang yanshuoci” (Speech at a Memorial on the Thirteenth Anniversary of the Death of Sun Yat-sen and to Com-

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memorate Ofﬁcers and Men Who Died in Battle Resisting the Enemy), in Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong ji, vol. 5, 329; Luo Jialun, Guofu nianpu chugao, 656. 168. Zhang Qicheng and Guo Zhikun, Sun Zhongshan shehuike sixiang yanjiu, 343. 169. Jonathan D. Spence, Mao Zedong (New York: Penguin, 2000), xi. 170. Ibid., 4; Belsky, Localities at the Center, 233–34. 171. Stuart R. Schram, “Party Leader or True Ruler? Foundations and Signiﬁcance of Mao Zedong’s Personal Power,” in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Foundations and Limits of State Power in China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1987), 208 n. 11. 172. Spence, Mao Zedong, 98. 173. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 27. 174. China Weekly Review, March 24, 1934, 147. 175. Xin Ping, Hu Zhenghao, and Li Xuechang, Minguo shehui daguan, 21–22. 176. Sharman, Sun Yat-sen, 315. 177. Xin Ping, Hu Zhenghao and Li Xuechang, Minguo shehui daguan, 586; Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 23–25. 178. Liu Tianqiu, “Zhongzhan xiansheng zai Anqing shao yapian de gushi,” 231–32. 179. Standard chronologies and Sun Yat-sen’s own reported words place him at Anqing after the opium and gunboat crisis by a week or several days (Chen Xiqi, Sun Zhongshan nianpu changpian, vol. 1, 741–42). Liu Tianqiu’s account offers no date for the event except sometime after Sun returned from Beijing to Shanghai in 1912 and offers an itinerary before the visit to Anqing (Hankow and Wuhu) instead of the more likely Jiangyin, Zhenjiang, and Nanjing route. See also note 58, above.

Conclusion 1. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 56. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Alfred C. Reed, “Changsha and Yale-in-China,” American Journal of Nursing 16:6 (March 1916): 517. 5. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, chap. 4, 144 ff. 6. Sun Zhongshan pinglun ji; Strand, “Calling the Chinese People to Order,” 34–35. 7. Shishi xinbao, in Sun Zhongshan pinglun ji, 40. 8. Ibid., 21. 9. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 348–49. 10. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 140–44. 11. Reinsch, An American Diplomat in China, 196–97. 12. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 141. 13. Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (New York: Penguin, 2000), 76. 14. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Norton, 1966), 1323; Burns, Lead-

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ership, 19–20; Garry Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 15. Burns, Leadership, 19–20. 16. Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen, 161–162. 17. Ibid. 18. Li Tianhua and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying nianpu, 57. 19. Xiang Jingyu, Xiang Jingyu wenji, 206. 20. Bastid-Bruguière, “Sun Yat-sen’s Republican Idea in 1911,” 216. 21. Jiang Xue and Tang Cunzheng, Tang Qunying pingzhuan, 168–69. 22. New York Times, March 16, 1927, 43; Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 444.

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Glossary

baogao 报告 bitan 笔谈 cainü 才女 Canyi yuan 参议院 changyan 唱言 chaoran zhuyi 超然主义 chufengtou 出风头 dadan de shuohua 大胆的说话 dafen zhuyi 大粪主义 dagong wuwo 大公无我 da huoju 大活剧 daqun 大群 Datong shu 大同书 da yitong 大一统 dengtai yanshuo 登台演说 dengtai yanshuo buyi 登台演说不易 di 帝 dizhi ziwei 帝制自为 Duchayuan 都察院 duihua 对话 E E Sheng 谔谔声 facai 发财 falüxue 法律学 fatuan 法团 fuqiang 富强 Funü jianfa hui 妇女剪发会 Fu Wenyu 傅文鬱

gaotan geming 高谈革命 Ge Jianhao 葛健豪 geming 革命 geming dajia 革命大家 Gengshen 庚申 Gengzi 庚子 Gonghe dang 共和党 gonghe guo 共和国 Gonghe shijin hui 共和实进会 gong 公 gongjia 公家 gongkai de shuo 公开的说 gonglun 公论 gongzheng wusi 公正无私 Gu Zhongxiu 谷钟秀 guanhua 官话 guohui baoli 国会暴力 guojia 国家 guomin 国民 Guomin gongdang 国民公党 Guomin gongjin hui 国民共进会 Guomindang 国民党 He Xiangning 何香凝 hequn 合群 hequn tuanti 合群团体 Heye 荷叶 Hongxian 洪宪 343

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Glossary

houtai 后台 huanggua jiao 黄瓜脚 huangquan zhuyi 皇权主义 Huaxing hui 华醒会 Huguang huiguan 湖广会馆 huoqi 活棋 jianfa 剪发 jiangxue 讲学 jianshe 建设 Jiashen 甲申 Jiawu 甲午 jiaxiang 家乡 jie 界 jilü 纪律 jingshen 精神 jin’guo yingxiong 巾帼英雄 Junsheng zazhi 军声杂志 junzi 君子 kai dapao 开大炮 kaihui 开会 Kaihui mang 开会忙 Kong Hai 空海 kongtan jia 空谈家 Leng Yan 冷眼 Li Fuchun 李富春 Lin Sen 林森 Lin Zongsu 林宗素 LiuRi nü xuesheng hui 留日女学会 liuxu 柳絮 Lu Zhengxiang 陆征祥 luan 乱 min 民 minben 民本 mindang 民党 minguo 民国 minguo yuan 民国元 minquan 民权 minsheng 民生 minyi 民意 Minzhu dang 民主党 minzu 民族 minzu tuanti 民族团体 motan guoshi 莫谈国事 nanfang guanhua 南方官话 nannü 男女 nannü pingdeng 男女平等 nianhao 年号

nü guomin 女国民 nü xiake 女侠客 pingmin 平民 Qianmen 前门 qiaoyan 巧言 qiaopi fenzi 俏皮分子 qipao 旗袍 quanli 权利 qun 群 re 热 renao 热闹 renlun 人伦 renmin 人民 Renzi 壬子 Sanji tang 三吉堂 Sanmin zhuyi 三民主义 shangxue 商学 Shen Peizhen 沈佩贞 shen yu yan 慎于言 Shenzhou nujie gonghe xieji she 神州女界共和协济社

shi, di, ren 时, 地, 人 shuchang 书场 shuishang wugende fuping 水上无根的浮萍

shuo 说 shuxiang 书香 si 私 siren quanli sixiang 私人权利思想 siyan 私言 sizheng 私争 Sun Dapao 孙大炮 tan geming 谈革命 Tang Qunying 唐群英 Tang Xingzhao 唐星照 tanhua jiguan 谈话机关 ti 体 tian xi bing 天洗兵 Tongmenghui 同盟会 Tongyi gonghe dang 统一共和党 tuanti 团体 Wang Changguo 王昌国 wangguo 亡国 wansui 万岁 weiqi 围棋 wen 文 wenming 文明

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wu 武 Wu Jinglian 吴景濂 wusheng de Zhongguo 无声的中国 wuxing quanli 无形权力 xiangyue 乡约 xiaopi fenzi 小批分子 xiaoren 小人 xiatai 下台 xin 心 Xing 邢 xing 刑 Xinqiao 新桥 xiaoqun 小群 xiaoren 小人 xiatai 下台 Xinhai geming 辛亥革命 Xinzheng 新政 xiyi 西医 xue 学 xuehui 学会 xueshu 血书 yanjiang 演讲 yanlu 言路 yanshuo 演说 yanshuo jia 演说家 yanshuo xue 演说学 yanshuo yuan 演说员 yiwu 义务 yixue 医学 yixue 议学 youda youla 有打有拉

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youshengde Zhongguo 有声的中国

youtiao 油条 youxing 有形 youshui 游说 yuan 猿 yuebao chu 阅报处 yulun 舆论 Zhang Hanying 张汉英 Zhang Ji 张继 Zhang (Sophia) Zhaohan 张昭汉, also known as Zhang Mojun 张默君

zhengdang 政党 zhengzhi re 政治热 zhi 制 Zhongguo 中国 Zhongguo diyi weiren 中国第一伟人 Zhonghua geming dang 中华革命党 Zhonghua minguo nüzi canzheng tongmenghui 中华民国女子参政同盟会

zhongjian shehui 中间社会 Zhongshan zhuang 中山装 zhongyi 中医 Zhongyi yuan 众议院 zhuyi 主义 zirong 姿容 ziyou 自由 Ziyou dang 自由党 Zizheng yuan 资政院

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Aberdeen, 15 Abolitionists, 127 Advertising, 166, 167 Allen, Woody: Bananas, 230 Alsace-Lorraine, 194 American Civil War, 261 Amsterdam, 134 Anarchism, 17, 46, 104, 135, 259; Society to Advance Morality, 46 Anderson, Benedict, 181 Anhui, 249, 282 Anqing, 248, 249, 253, 282 Anqing Lodge, 225 Arendt, Hannah, 87 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 121 Athenian agora, 65 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, 98 Australia, 49 Ba Jin: Family, 91 Bailey, F.G., 55 Ban Chao, 110 Ban Zhao, 110 Baoding, 249 Barthes, Roland, 90 Beggars: as political activists, 53–54 Beijing, 16, 17, 26, 56, 60, 75, 98, 129, 148, 155, 167, 168, 176, 181, 198, 208, 239, 247, 248, 249, 279; Altar of Agriculture, 25; as capital, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30; Beijing Higher Normal College, 89; Chong-

wen Gate, 147; Court of Censors, 73– 74; Forbidden and Imperial Cities, 28, 30, 36, 57; French Hospital, 37, 223, 233, 289; Front Gate, 36, 38; funeral of Sun Yat-sen, 284–85; funeral of Yuan Shikai, 284–85; Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen), 232, 234, 238, 244; Imperial University, 192; Inner and Outer Cities, 35, 36, 38; Legation Quarter, 27, 35, 182, 252; literati quarter, 38, 57– 58, 74; Liulichang, 58; Senate, 92–93; Songyun’an, 74, 237; Soviet Mission, 159; Temple of Confucius and Hall of Classics, 58; Temples of Heaven and Agriculture, 36, 184; train station, 36; Xuanwu Gate, 38, 57, 74, 92 Belgium, 190, 191, 197, 219 Belsky, Richard, 74 Bergère, Marie-Claire, 14, 171, 246 Berlin, 15 Berlin, Isaiah, 243, 280 Bi Gan, 64 Bian Baimei, 161–62 Bismarck, Otto von, 261 Bolshevik Revolution, 258 Boppe, Auguste, 182 Borodin, Mikhail, 256, 269 Bovy, Berthe, 190, 192, 193, 227, 289 Boxer Uprising, 21, 35, 192, 282 Brown, John, 134 Brussels, 197

373

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Budapest, 131, 141 Buddhism, 162 Burke, Edmund, 64 Burke, Kenneth, 96, 178, 273 Burma, 130 Burns, James M., 285 Butler, Judith, 80 Cabinet: parliament and, 212–13; “party,” 210; politics, 199–204; “transcendental,” 202, 210, 212, 220 Cai Yuanpei, 58, 77–78, 200, 201 Calendar, Chinese: attempts to abolish lunar New Year, 24–26, 27, 167;Gengshen year (1860–61), 21, 25; Gengzi year (1900–01), 21, 25; Jiashen year (1884– 85), 21, 25; Jiawu year (1894–95), 21, 25; New Year couplets, 80–81; Renzi year (1912–13), 19, 21, 25; sixty-year cycle, 19; Xinhai year (1911–1912), 25 Calendar, Western: New Year celebrations, 24, 25; Sundays, 19; Yellow Emperor and, 24; Zhang Binglin opposes, 24–25 Cao Cao, 229 Cao Kun, 233, 261 Cao Rulin, 157 Cao Xueqin, 124, 125 Castro, Fidel, 230 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 246, 259; advocacy of “health reform dress,” 138–39; compared to Tang Qunying and Shen Peizhen, 139; criticism and praise for suffragettes, 116, 131,133–34; inﬂuence on Chinese women, 131, 135–36, 140; internationalism, 129, 131–32, 134; nationalism, 134, 182; Orientalism, 129; photograph, 138; political moderate, 116–7; praise for political women in China, 129, 131, 133–34, 139, 145; public speaker, 129, 132; racism, 134; Senate visit, 206; speeches, 130–33; visit to China, 129–39; world tour, 129 Cen Chunxuan, 40, 42 Certeau, Michel de: everyday arts of resistance, 6; “poaching,” 167–68, 258 Ceusescu, Nicolae, 6 Chambers of commerce, 9, 76, 153, 156–57, 163, 259, 266; Beijing, 28, 53 Hanyang, 250 Changsha, 25, 135, 198, 279; Changsha Daily, 88; civic groups, 54, 155; First Normal College, 16, political activism, 149, 150, 283, 286; women’s movement, 141–42, 254

Chatterjee, Partha, 266 Chen Dian, 105, 110, 115 Chen Dongyuan, 120 Chen Duxiu, 8 Chen Guofu, 165 Chen Huanxing, 122 Chen Jiongming, 90, 232, 241, 259, 275 Chen Qianfu, 244 Chen Shaobai, 237–38 Chen Tongxi, 216 Chen Xiying, 33 Chengdu, 53, 63, 150 Chevalier, Louis, 243 Chiang Ching-kuo, 7 Chiang Kai-shek, 3, 6, 7, 10, 13, 236, 237; and Army Voice Magazine, 4; political failure, 31, 282; political leadership, 153, 260, 281; Sun Yat-sen and, 278 China Nursing Society, 163 China Popular Education Society, 59 Chinese Accounting Society, 162 Chinese language: accent and dialect, 39, 57, 59, 82, 83, 101, 219, 236; “brush conversations,” 81–82; classical, 57, 66, 76, 77, 78, 108, 171, 189, 281; fosters unity and division, 81–84, 171; literacy rates, 82; Mandarin and “Southern” Mandarin, 74–75, 82; reform efforts, 59, 91, 230; vernacular, 40, 76 Chinese Revolutionary Party, 38 Chongqing, 236 Christianity, 187, 230; Catholic CounterReformation, 195; Confucianism and, 195, 220; dissent and, 195; missionary training, 219; Sun Yat-sen compared to Jesus, 285 Churchill, Winston, 23, 243–44; views on women’s suffrage, 121 Cicero, 65 Cigarettes, 121, 140–41, 167, 182 Citizen and citizenship, 3–6, 8–9, 11, 20, 22–23, 30, 37, 38, 60, 83, 88, 174, 177; dress code, 208, 281; education for, 169, 179–80; emotion integral to, 68, 88, 287; equality, 36; erect posture, 1– 2, 79, 287; “female citizens,” 18, 35, 45, 47, 90, 93, 97, 103, 107, 111, 116, 117, 121, 127, 128, 135, 144, 145, 147; “Four Hundred Million” in number, 40, 57, 82, 248; growing power of, 254, 288; leader as, 38, 168, 206, 235, 287; Liang Qichao on, 30–31,107; nation and, 29, 113, 262, 265; perspective offered by, 146, 178–85, 235, 287; public speaking

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Index and, 87–88; repertoire of, 2, 53, 59, 62–63, 94, 164; self-actualized, 62, 75, 147, 156; soldier and, 110; spectator role, 79, 80, 236; status of overseas, sojourning and pastoral populations, 208; student role model, 57, 63; vocal, 64, 163–64; workers and, 26 Citizens Party, 40 Citizens Progress Society, 40 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 125, 193 Cochran, Sherman, 167 Cohen, Paul, 261 Comintern, 14, 138, 258 Commercial Press, 169 Communism and Marxism, 17, 235, 256, 257, 262, 269 Communist Party, 10, 11, 171, 209, 238, 241, 257, 267, 271, 286 Confucianism, 17, 161, 175, 176, 195, 220, 257, 284; Admonitions for Women, 101; Analects, 63, 113, 197; Confucianism Society, 58; Confucius’s birthday celebration, 58; enduring inﬂuence, 173, 261; The Four Books, 159; target and weapon, 91,100, 109; women and, 44–45,102, 109, 114, 144 Crump, J.I., 65 Cuiheng, 248 Cultural Revolution, 270 Czechoslovakia, 5 Dai Jitao, 4, 226 Darwinism, Social 162 Davidson, Cathy, 242 Debating, 6, 148; republics as “debatebased,” 153, 182, 205, 207 De Gaulle, Charles, 243–44 Deleuze, Gilles, 157 Democracy Movement (1989), 5, 6, 125, 288 Democratic Party, 149 Demosthenes, 64 Deng Xiaoping, 31; “Doctor of Mimeography,” 171; mocked, 125 Deng Yingchao, 88 Diaspora, Chinese, 15, 166, 190, 208, 210, 237, 246 DiMaggio, Paul, 160 Disguises, 17, 105, 124, 149, 174 Dong, Madeleine Yue, 123 The Dream of the Red Chamber, 124–29 Du Fu, 109 Duan Qirui, 284 Dulles, John Foster, 189–90

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Eastern Europe, 5 Edwards, Louise, 108, 125, 127 E E Sheng, 78, 84, 85, 87, 88 Elections and assemblies: 1912–1913, 9, 54, 55, 62, 289; “Department of Electioneering,” 40; Leninism and, 5; Qing era, 107; rules, 139, 141; Taiwan, 20; undemocratic, 9; women and, 20, 107– 8, 289 Emotion, 85, 88; among politicians, 205– 7; anger, 42, 44, 48, 118–9, 126–7, 145; appearance of insanity, 87–88,132; as political tactic, 50, 55–56, 66, 71, 89– 90; fear, 93; grief, 143, 283–85; love and affection, 90; reason and, 56, 89, 274, 287; weeping, 49, 66, 75; 88–89, 91, 92, 272 Esherick, Joseph, 79, 229–30 Esperanto, 230 Examinations, imperial, 39, 73–75; “eightlegged” essay, 99; women and, 99 Fang Wei, 35 Fanon, Frantz, 262 Fascism, 175 Fei Xiaotong, 175–76, 178, 179, 181, 182, 265, 289 Feng Yuxiang, 252, 277–78 Fengtian, 205 Finland, 49 Foot binding, 15, 18, 132; disabling effects, 100, 133; “natural” feet and, 124; resistance to, 40, 53, 70, 71, 100, 108, 176; Sun Yat-sen and,113 Foreigners and foreign inﬂuence, 14–17, 19, 49, 155; Belgium, 197; Britain, 41, 108; Chinese inﬂuence on foreigners, 134, 136–9, 163; France, 197; Great Powers, 27–28, 35; Japan, 41, 190; limits of, 116; missionaries, 83, 112, 163, 182; political parties, 52; revolutionaries, 104, 105; Russia and Soviet Union, 41, 105, 159; suffragists and suffragettes, 108,120–1,128,135, 140, 160 Foster, John W., 189 France, 73, 189, 197, 204, 243, 245 Fu Wenyu, 45, 134 Fujian, 250 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 77 Fuzhou, 150, 248, 250–51 Gandhi, Mohandas, 266 Ge Jianhao, 101–2 George, Henry, 167

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Germany, 15, 202, 234, 259 Gladstone, William, 247 Goodman, Bryna, 72, 163 Goodnow, Frank, 183 Great Britain, 15, 77, 160, 179, 189, 203, 247 Greenblatt, Stephen, 166, 168 Gu Weijun, 191, 234 Gu Zhongxiu, 207, 215–16, 221–22, 225, 226 Guan Yu, 144 Guangdong, 17, 73, 129, 139, 205, 244, 248, 255, 259, 276 Guangxu emperor, 76 Guangzhou, 71, 129, 150, 174, 232, 239, 248, 252, 254, 260, 272, First Guangdong Peasant Congress, 276; Guangdong Higher Teacher’s College, 255–56, 276; Merchant Corps uprising, 260, 273, 278, 284 Guangzhou uprising, 183 Guattari, Felix, 157 Guilin, 252, 275 Habermas, Jürgen, 151 Hague, The, 2, 189, 190, 191, 193, 218 Hai Rui, 92 Hair: short on women, 20, 144, 93, 156; political symbolism, 29; Women’s Haircutting Societies, 20. See also queues and queue-cutting Han (dynasty), 65, 67, 261–62 Han Chinese, 25, 179 Han Li, 86, 87, 231 Hand luggage, East Asian: briefcase, 196, 198; furoshiki, 198; suitcase, 91 Hangzhou, 17, 249 Hankou, 28, 29, 168 Hanoi, 143 Harding, Gardner, 11, 45, 147–49, 152– 53, 154, 167, 228; Senate visit, 207; suffragists and, 116, 135, 160 Harrison, Henrietta, 26, 28, 176, 286 Hart, Robert, 36 Havel, Vaclav, 5, 6 Hawaii, 24, 46, 280 He Luzhi, 70, 180–81 He Xiangning, 82, 104 He Yongji, 269–70, 273 Hegel, G.W.F., 62, 265, 266 Henan, 36, 132, 280, 284 Hengshan, 98, 142, 143, 286 Heye, 101–2 Hitler, Adolf, 175

Hong Kong, 7, 30, 56, 129, 248 Hong Shuju, 54 Honolulu, 30 Hu Hanmin, 61–62, 229; supports provincial rights, 205; supports women’s suffrage, 129 Hu Shi, 12, 22, 169, 174, 267, 277; praises Sun Yat-sen, 242, 244 Hu Weide, 212 Hua Lu, 80, 260–61 Huang, Ray, 27 Huang Xing, 106, 115, 127, 200, 203, 226, 242, 270; attitudes toward women, 104; Awaken China Society, 104, battleﬁeld leader, 109, 239; compared to ﬁctional Lady Xing, 125; multiple party memberships, 150–51, 158, 159–60, 165, 209 Huang Yuanyong, 206, 242 Hubei, 38, 59, 207, 208, 216, 242 Huguang Lodge, 18, 19, 36, 38–39, 41–42, 46, 48, 50, 53, 58, 79, 82, 109, 124–25, 173, 210, 227, 256, 262, 289 Hunan, 18, 20, 38, 39, 54, 69, 71, 73, 75, 127, 139, 160, 283; constitutional reform, 107; native-place ties, 104; ponds, lakes and rivers, 102, 105, 158; revolution in, 105–6; women’s movement, 141–42, 254, 255, 284, 287 Hunan Lodge, 123 Hundred Days of Reform (1898), 75, 76 Hunt, Lynn, 128 Ibsen, Henrik, 169, “Enemy of the People,” 284 Imperialism, 29, 69, 180–81, 252, 264; as worms, 179; British, 249, 282; German, 191, 249; Japanese, 190; in the name of democracy, 204; racism, 197 India, 266 Internationale, 148 Jacobins, 39, 152 Jacobs, Aletta, 129, 134–35, 136, 139, 246 Japan, 15, 156, 167, 180, 198, 203, 234, 239, 284 Jiang Kanghu, 158 Jiang Kuan, 249, 282 Jiang Menglian, 90 Jiang Renlan, 94 Jiangnan Arsenal, 187 Jiangsu, 59 Jiangxi, 59, 105 Jiangyin, 249 Jin Tianhe, 94

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Index Jinan, 249 Jiujiang, 249 Judge, Joan, 173, 174 Kaiping, 249 Kang Youwei, 8, 30, 33, 59, 75, 166, 193, 194, 231, 240; academy founded by, 71, 75; Book of the Great Unity, 102–3; May 1, 1895 speech, 73–75, 237, 279; physical appearance, 74; speaking style, 71, 288; women and, 102 Kangxi emperor, 252; “Sacred Edict,” 68, 76 Katsura Taro, 203 Knight-errant tradition, 99, 110 Kowtow, 9, 23, 68 Kulun, 179 Kunming, 143 Kwong, Luke, 21 League of Nations, 234 Lee, Haiyan, 88 Lee Teng-hui, 20 Lei Feng, 164 Leng Yan, 34 Lenin, Vladimir, 159, 247, 268; “Lenin corners,” 281, Leninism, 4, 6, 11, 159, 163, 258, 259, 260, 261, 268, 272 Levenson, Joseph, 232 Li Boyuan: A History of Modern Times, 69–70, 75 Li Dazhao, 56 Li Fuchun: Changsha museum about, 16, 198 Li Guozhen, 216 Li Hongzhang, 197 Li Hsiao-t’i, 76, 77, 85 Li Jiannong, 151, 158, 228 Li Shuying, 216 Li Su, 215 Li Xikui, 142 Li Yuanhong, 225 Li Zhao: Busy Going to Meetings, 5 Lian Zining, 67 Liang Qichao, 22, 23, 24, 33, 48, 50, 52, 57, 59, 70, 74, 75, 102, 149,155, 156, 158, 165, 166, 195, 240, 262, 265, 279, 284; academy founded by, 71–72; on citizenship, 30–31,107, 180; popularity as lecturer, 73; public persona, 46, 86, 222; on society, 176; speeches, 46, 89; on tolerance, 72 Liang Shiyi, 37 Liang Shuming, 67 Liao Dawei, 154, 203

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Liberalism, 17 Liberal Party, 150, 151 Liberal Party (British), 39 Lin, Evelyn, 163 Lin Sen, 42, 92–93, 139, 142; speaker of the Senate, 117–18, 120, 136, 200 Lin Yutang, 22, 79, 166, 169, 175, 285 Lin Zongsu, 104, 115, 124; pioneer journalist, 113–14 Lincoln, Abraham, Gettysburg Address, 279 Lincoln, Bruce, 182–83, 274 Literati, 57, 72, 73; emotional and cerebral appeals, 68, 90; genteel carousing, 198; local gentry, 68, 98; reformers and revolutionaries, 39, 53, 69, 71, 73–78, 169, 170, 237; reluctance to incite the masses, 75; rowdy behavior, 51, “scholar-commoners,” 71, 78; scholarofﬁcials, 53, 92, 161, 192 Liu Bang, 67, 281 Liu Bei, 144, 229 Liu Chengyu, 216 Liu E, Travels of Lao Can, 238–39 Liu Renxi, 20 Liu Shaoqi, 160; “How to be a Good Communist,” 158–59, 161–62, 165, 197 Li Tianqiu, 282 Locarno, 254, 279 Locke, John, 264 London, 18, 20, 246 Long March, 13 Lu Muzhen, 112, 265 Lu Ping, 242, 278 Lu Xun, 79, 103, 169, 191, 231, 252, 262; “An Unimportant Affair,” 61; criticism of mass politics, 60–61, 79, 80, 96; criticism of Republican institutions, 58– 60; “Diary of a Madman,” 56–57, 78; dislike of crowds, 58; engaged citizen, 60; heroic young people, 57, 92; iron house metaphor, 61, 272; language reformer, 59, 78; Ministry of Education employee, 26, 179; photography, 33; political activities, 25–26, 56; retreat from public life, 60; “Silent China,” 56; speeches, 56–57, 59; “The Story of Hair,” 177; “The True Story of Ah Q,” 22, 56, 280; “Vocal China,” 57, 87 Lu Yaozhen, 53 Lu Zhengxiang, 2, 11, 18, 238, 240, 240, 245; advocate of foreign ideas, 193– 94, 195, 196–97, 197–98, 234; animus toward politics, 191–92, 199, 210; attacks extraterritoriality, 189; attempt

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Lu Zhengxiang (continued) to impeach, 222, 226; becomes Benedictine monk, 191, 193, 199, 219, 290; Catholicism, 18, 189, 194, 220, 230; childhood and education, 187–88, 189, 221; compared to Tang Shaoyi, 213; Confucian inﬂuences, 195, 220, 261; criticizes Republican politics, 218, 220, 223–24, 251, 267; cuts his queue, 193; death of parents, 221; Europeanized identity, 189; foreign minister, 190, 195, 196, 210, 212, 220, 233; Hague Peace Conferences, 2, 189, 191; home visits to China, 193, 220; ill-health, 223, 234; in seclusion at the French Hospital, 37, 152, 223, 226, 233, 289; Kang Youwei and, 193, 194; linguist, 188, 189; marriage, 189, 190, 192, 222, 254; meets with student activists, 234–35, 268; memoir, 190, 220, 223; moralist, 196, 197, 210, 221, 230; negotiating style, 190, 191, 270, 287; orator, 189, 219– 20, 222; patriotism, 197, 218, 219, 278, 290; personality, 192–93, 222, 228–29, 234, 273; photograph, 188; physical appearance, 187–88, 189, 217, 228; political redemption, 233–35, 287; posting at Berne, 254; posting at The Hague, 190, 193; postings in St. Petersburg, 189, 190, 195, 221; praised and blamed, 228, 234– 35, 287; prime minister, 187, 202–204, 210–27; professionalism, 192, 196–99; Qing diplomat, 187, 188–90, 192–93, 204, 218–19, 234; reformer, 193–94, 196– 97, 288; republican, 190, 192, 194, 195; resentment at China’s humiliations, 189, 194–95, 230; resignation from ofﬁce, 223, 227; secret treaties with Japan, 61, 190; self-image, 194, 195, 196, 198, 218, 223, 229, 230, 255; speech to Senate, 2, 186– 87, 213–33, 198, 268; Sun Yat-sen and, 19, 227, 270; Versailles Peace Conference, 191, 199, 233–35; villa in Locarno, 254; Xu Jingcheng and, 189, 192, 194, 199, 221; Yuan Shikai and, 190, 195, 196, 220–21, 224, 228–29, 233 Luanzhou, 249 Luo Guang, 219 Lushan, 236 Lyon, 14 Macao, 248 Machiavelli, 32 Macy’s, 259

Mahjong, 119, 231 Manchester, 121, 155, 247 Manchus, 25, 27, 28, 128; active in Republican politics, 35, 97; citizens of China, 179; reviled by republicans, 8, 28, 114, 148, 169, 176, 262 Mao Zedong, 3, 7, 10, 13, 23, 170, 231; “Big Cannon,” 241; funeral, 241; “Grand Alliance of the Masses,” 72; Maoism, 289; “Mao’s China,” 31; newspaper reader, 62; Nixon visit, 132; political coming-of-age, 165–66; political leadership, 154, 240, 260, 270, 276, 277, 281, 282; speeches, 67, 236, 237, 238, 281; student days, 16; Sun Yat-sen and, 281 Marlborough, Duke of, 23 Marx, Karl, 151, 153, 167, 256; Marxism, 158 May Fourth Movement, 56, 61, 82, 83, 154, 170–71, 182, 234, 253, 258, 262, 268, 271; idealism, 267, 269 May Thirtieth Movement, 81, 83, 123, 244, 254, 286; death of Sun Yat-sen and, 241, 286 Meetings, 3; bell-ringing, 47, 83, 119; demands for orderly conduct, 55; language reform conference, 59; satires of, 5; ubiquitous, 3, 9, 22, 54, 60, 76, 154; volatility of, 44, 47, 48, 131 Mei Lanfang, 33, 53 Mencius, 18, 66, 100, 150, 170, 243, 287; mother of, 18, 107, 145, 161, 261 Mimesis, social and cultural, 70, 75, 86, 92, 155–58, 169, 170; “best practices,” 155; in commerce, 167; “fevers,” fashions, manias and crazes, 155–56, 165, 166, 168, 287; leadership and, 167, 170, 240–41; Liang Qichao on, 155, 156, 158; “mimetic capital,” 166, 168, 169, 245; political jokes as example, 233; “rhizomatic” pattern, 157; weak/strong forces, 157, 185 Min Jie, 76 Ming (dynasty), 24, 27, 74, 92, 247, 280 Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, 124, 125, 200, 208 Ministry of Communications, 212 Ministry of Education, 26, 36, 57, 179, 208 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 28, 31, 36, 48, 196–97, 210, 227, 234, 288 Ministry of Interior, 208 Mishima, Yukio: Runaway Horses, 198

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Index Mongols and Mongolia, 25, 28, 41, 74, 179, 180, 203, 208, 210, 222 Mt. Tai, 251 Moscow, 16, 17 Mu Jinyuan, 3, 63–64, 87, 88 Mulan, 18, 99–100, 107, 110, 132, 145 Music, 25, 55, 68; brass bands, 36, 37, 42, 92 Muslims, 25, 179 Najita, Tetsuo, 171 Nanhai Lodge, 74 Nanjing, 33, 176, 248, 249; abandoned as capital, 29; capital, 24, 27, 28, 50, 149; hosts suffragists, 115; Senate building, 117 Napoleon, 23, 116, 228, 261, 285 Nation: bodily imagery, 70, 88–89, 180–81, 278; social basis of, 73 National Assembly (Qing), 204 Nationalism, 169, 289; “imagined community,” 70, 181, 250, 279; public interest and, 181; women and, 108, 114 Nationalist Party, 10, 11, 31, 126, 147, 167, 171, 201, 209, 233, 286; agents and cadre, 149, 271, 276, 284; history, 38, 187; party meetings, 140, 152–53; reforms (1912), 39–41, 42–43; reorganization (1924), 6, 11, 254, 256, 267, 268, 272 Nationalist Party Political Convention (August 25, 1912): 4, 18, 19–20, 21, 38–51, 52, 80, 82, 94,155, 173, 186, 215, 227, 252, 272, 289 national politics: legacy of the 1911 Revolution, 111; national leadership, 10, 54; new arena, 32, 163; retreat from, 254– 55; Sun Yat-sen and, 241, 245, 253–54, 264, 278–79 native-place: consciousness, 104, 207, 208, 216, 262, 280; lodges and associations, 3, 35, 38–39, 57, 74, 79, 154, 208 Nazis, 259 Netherlands, 190 New Fourth Army, 171 New Life Movement, 175 New Policies, 31, 76, 93, 153, 156 New York, 14, 20, 246; Cooper Union, 136; pro-suffrage march, 137 New Youth, 15 New Zealand, 49 Newspapers and magazines, 44, 95; 37, 52, 120, 128–9, 152–53, 154, 165, 167, 171, 245, 246; circulation, 62; criticism of,

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44, 84, 95, 124; newspaper reading rooms, 168, 169; reading audience, 62, 176, 210; “unofﬁcial histories,” 123–24 Ni Danzhuan, 180 Nie Qijie, 81 1911 Revolution, 63, 239; as Xinhai Revolution, 25; battle for Nanjing, 109; commemorations, 25, 58; failures and successes, 1,10, 12, 21, 22, 24, 29–30, 32–33, 50–51, 290; Hu Shi on, 22; Liang Qichao on, 22; Lin Yutang on, 22; Lu Xun on, 22; paradoxical nature, 22; popular conceptions, 23; role of assemblies, 204–5; role of diplomats, 190; Tang Qunying on, 13–14, 22; victims, 177; violence, 172, 248; Wuchang Uprising, 4, 24, 25, 109–10; women and, 20, 105–6, 107, 109, 115–16 Nixon, Richard, 132, 241 Northeast China, 166, 180 Northern Expedition, 268 Ono Kazuko, 120 Opera, Beijing, 33, 39, 53, 79; performers as political activists, 53 Opium suppression, 1, 53, 249, 282; Opium Abstaining Societies, 62 Opium War, 69, 71 Orwell, George, 108 Paine, Tom, 89 Pan Xulun, 162, 164 Pankhurst, Emmeline, Sylvia and Christabel, 116, 121, 134; inﬂuence of China on Sylvia, 137 Paris, 14, 16, 153, 156, 193, 197 Park Chung-hee, 153 Parliaments and parliamentary order, 152; disorder, 42, 44, 52–53; “legislative violence,” 56; “parliamentary science,” 162, 258; procedures, rules and customs, 43–44, 52, 59, 80, 92–93, 200, 205, 207, 215; Qing-era, 52, 62, 66, 204–205; Robert’s Rules of Order, 18, 130; voting, 47–48. See also Harriet Shattuck People’s Society, 242 Patent medicine, 167, 171 Paul, Alice, 116–17, 121 Peking University, 5, 53, 154, 267 Peng Pai, 17, 276 Pericles, 65 Perovskaya, Soﬁa, 106 Photography, 33; group photographs, 33, 54, 93, 131

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Pius XI, 290 Plato, Republic, 261 Polachek, James, 68, 71 police, 35, 36, 45, 61, 154, 166, 177, 200, 225, 260; repressive role, 60, 106, 148, 174, 176, 226–27, 281, 286 political authority: as effect, 70, 182; corrosion of, 183, 232; imperial, 65–66, 74; persuasion and, 66; “popular feeling,” 204; rerouting of, 68, 290 political communication: diffusion of ideas, 75, 77, 165, 169; diplomatic languages, 188; “formalized” nature, 5; hybrid constructions, 148, 250; inﬂuence of classical rhetoric, 67; insulting nature, 140; jargon, 83, 84; “Liang Qichaostyle,” 155; mass line, 170; movies, 168; “pathway for words,” 71, 73; petitioning, 74,111, 117, 120, 139; postcards, 169; propaganda, 64, 71, 74, 166, 172; resistance to and through, 6, 74; slogans, 151, 156; theatrical bases of, 79; wordof-mouth, 72 Political culture: awakening the people, 61, 83, 95, 272; “civilized/modern”values, 69,121, 123; Confucian values, 15, 61, 88, 175, 220; criticism of Chinese culture, 231; egalitarianism, 1–2, 8–9, 44,121; “discipline,” 268; family-style, 43, 91, 127–8, 262–63; ﬂuid nature, 98, 153, 160; “freedom,” 268–69, 272– 73; “Great Systemic Unity,” 173; late imperial, 172; monarchism, 3, 8, 30; political irony, 175, 232, 273; self and society, 176; self-dramatizing tendency, 244, 269; “sociability” as medium, 72– 74, 101, 102, 165, 258; “structures of feeling,” 88; “symbolic uncertainty,” 155, 164; transparency, 62,117; “vigor,” 85, 270; virtue, 63, 126–27, 128, 288, 290; youth and old age, 89, 91–92, 126–28, 152, 267–74, 278. See also mimesis Political dissent: ancient, 64, 65, 66; imperial, 67, 92, 178; republican, 67–68, 93; post-1949, 5–8 Political leadership: behind-the-scenes, 2, 55, 61, 91, 94, 125, 135, 253; charismatic, 154, 165, 270, 276, 282; cranes and chickens, 154, 175; demagoguery, 90–91, 152; emotional content, 91, 274, 284–85; heroes and heroines, 88, 96, 111, 162–64, 276; mobile vs. ﬁxed position, 170, 171, 253, 288; model

supplied by Sun Yat-sen, 288; at odds with patriarchy, 43; political entrepreneurs, 167, 170–71; populism, 287; relational nature, 11, 92, 285; republican, 2, 68, 277; solipsism, 174, 235, 245; Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai compared, 30, 34, 37, 277, 279–80, 286; twentieth century Chinese leaders compared, 10, 31, 33; vocal nature, 2, 230, 282. See also Lu Zhengxiang, Sun Yatsen, Tang Qunying and Yuan Shikai. Political parties, 39–41, 52, 201, 209–13; branches, 149; criticized, 128, 215, 225; gateway to politics, 165; geographic distribution, 150; history, 52; Liang Qichao on, 52; mail solicitations, 59; memberships, 149, 150, 158; mania for, 149–50; Nationalists and Communists form “united front,” 267; parliamentary vs. conspiratorial, 39–41; as political metaphor, 43; propaganda and publicity, 150; stigma of faction, 209; weakness and strength, 149–51, 158, 209, 211, 268. See also individual parties by name Powell, Walter, 160 Professionals and professionalism, 158– 64, 288; accountants, 162; bankers, 161–62; cadres and politicians, 159– 60, 168; commercial and other forms of “learning,” 156, 157, 162, 171; Confucian inﬂuence, 161; controversy and contention, 163, 198; deﬁned, 156–58, 160; epistemic communities, 162, 198; ethical content, 160; hybrid nature, 161; legal status, 153; nurses, 163; revolutionaries, 161; suffragists, 159, 160. See also chambers of commerce and Lu Zhengxiang Prostitutes, 45, 46, 220, 231; as citizens, 113; as metaphor, 267 Protect the Emperor Society, 166 Public life, 89; architecture, 117–18, 255– 56; assemblies, crowds and protests, 35–37, 42, 45, 56, 123, 141, 237; banqueting, 48, 69, 75, 198, 250; burdens of, 22; charitable campaigns, 59; electronic media, 152, 236, 246; expansive, 23, 66, 72; Gate of Heavenly Peace, 232; gendered nature, 35, 45–46, 93, 131, 132–33, 145; hygiene, 15; integral to politics, 94; letters, 49; manifestos, 128, 131, 139; markets and marketing, 53, 60, 77, 83; medals, 111, 192, 283, 290;

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Index mockery, satire, ridicule and insults, 40, 48, 59, 71, 81, 89, 95, 119, 122, 123– 29, 140, 184, 202, 207, 212, 216–17, 222–24, 231, 232, 233, 242; outspokenness as value, 57, 151, 152, 163, 183; performative elements, 63, 78–81, 82, 86, 194–95; poetry clubs, 69; private and public interests, 48, 174, 178, 208– 9, 220–21; “public,” 174, 175–76, 182, 211; public scrutiny, 55, 61–62; repression of, 148, 168; stridency and pandemonium, 53, 55, 56, 201; study societies, 76, 165; teahouses, 45, 50, 53, 64; theatrical nature, 53, 96, 174, 250, 252; universities, 86, 91–92, 154; See also newspapers and magazines and meetings Public opinion: criticized as dangerous, 124; invoked as authority, 113–14; “manufactured,” 174, 183; role in foreign relations, 194, 234–35; synonymous with unity, 171, 182 Public speaking: abuse of, 90–91, 208, 238; academic subject, 77, 261; art or science, 78, 84, 86, 87, 89–90; audience reactions and participation, 45, 48, 54, 56, 67, 69, 79, 83–86, 88, 93, 140, 153, 175, 189, 207, 222–23, 231, 235, 236, 237, 250, 256; comparisons to Beijing opera, 79; Confucius and, 63; electronic media, 236; emotional content, 85, 88, 90; by generals, 64, 65, 69; gestures and props, 82, 83, 96, 183, 217; governmentsponsored, 76; heckling and other verbal interventions, 6, 44, 47, 48, 50, 56, 58, 67, 86, 89, 90, 131, 183; individual speeches and lectures, 27, 28, 42, 43, 44, 46–47, 54, 58, 59, 65, 67–8, 73–74, 84–85, 89, 92–93, 109, 118–119, 131– 33, 137, 148–49, 153, 162, 175, 189, 200, 213–33, 225, 236, 254–67; Japanese inﬂuences on, 77, 78; language barriers, 81–84, 236; lecture campaigns, 71, 77, 82–83, 91–92, 170; by literati, 68, 69, 75; literacy and, 69, 78, 83, 95; losing a speech, 70, 87, 186; missionary inﬂuence on, 83; novelty, 64; patriotic value, 76; political leadership and, 94, 230, 236; political mobilization and, 63, 88, 95; prejudice against, 63–64, 65; propaganda use, 83; recordings, 256; religious preaching, 64; “reporting,” 5; republican logic, 47; “revolutionary harangues,” 70; rewards of, 64; roots in Chinese history and culture, 64–68;

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ruler as audience, 65–67, 92; by scholarofﬁcials, 64, 65; speaker’s demeanor, 46, 84, 87, 148, 152–53; speaker as “policeman,” 90, 92; societies dedicated to, 70, 95; Soviet inﬂuence, 159; speeches published in newspapers, 70; stage fright, 70, 86; story-telling and, 76–77, 83; suppression of, 64, 75–76; symbol, 63, 76; terms in Chinese for, 5, 76–77; test of authority, 183, 229, 236; textbooks on, 63, 78; ubiquity, 2, 3, 52, 53, 63, 84, 93–94, 156, 165, 281, 288; use of imagery in, 67, 70; venues, 53, 69, 71, 74, 79, 117, 169, 170, 255–56, 276, 278; village covenant, 68, women and, 94–96. See also Lu Zhengxiang and Sun Yat-sen Public sphere, 151–51 Public Word, 15 Puyi, 1, 23, 30, 202 Puyuan, 77 Qianlong Emperor, 253 Qin Emperor, 251 Qing, Prince, 202 Qing (dynasty) 24, 26, 30, 31, 39, 42, 47, 62, 68, 76, 98, 105, 122, 192, 239; constitutional reform, 76, 107–8, 118, 166; legacy of civic and political activism, 70, 168; political rituals, 53. See also New Policies Qingdao, 202, 235, 249, 253 Qiu Jin, 95–96, 97, 101–02, 108; “Advantages of Public Speaking,” 95, criticism of, 96, 114–15; death of, 104; dressed as a man, 144; husband and, 101; knight-errant tradition, 96; memorial, 249; study and life in Japan, 102, 104 Queues and queue-cutting, 15, 23, 47, 55, 76, 93, 176–77, 193; Sun Yat-sen and, 29; Yuan Shikai and, 26 Railways, 17, 31–32, 35, 36–37, 41, 44, 227, 233, 239, 245, 280 Railway Protection Movement, 53, 233; Sun Yat-sen travels by, 33, 249 Rankin, Mary, 24, 71, 76, 172 Reform Act of 1867, 247 Reinsch, Paul, 284–85 Ren Biming, 83, 89 Reorganization Loan, 202 Republic, Chinese, 32, 164; “aborescent” vs. “rhizomatic,” 157; as comedy, 169, 175, 232, 273, 278; commemorations, 25;

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Republic, Chinese (continued) constitution, 117, 186; corruption, 127, 187, 197, 218; democratic potential, 164–65, 204, 226; dating system, 24, 26, 29, 260; diplomatic recognition, 29, 203–4; double nature, 26, 146, 177–78, 278; “duckweed,” 3, 151, 158, 163, 185; expectations for, 29, 63, 180; failures and successes, 11, 239, 260, 289–90; ﬁve-color ﬂag, 25, 26, 84, 179–80; founding of, 21, 24; gendered nature of, 136; invoked as political value, 42, 43, 66, 84, 147–49; Leninism, and, 4, 5; locomotive as symbol, 29, 32–33, 36; Lu Xun on, 58–59; misread as democratic, 87; multilevel, 153; “people’s state,” 29; political dysfunctions, 201, 284; politically permissive, 66; “political whirlpool,” 187, 229; postage stamps, 173 postimperial state, 153; “signboard,” 1, 31, 183; “talkative” regime, 87 republicanism, 288; anti-monarchism, 8; clothing, 93, 208, 281; cultural logic, 52, 54; emotionalism, 88, 159, 205– 6, 287; everyday meanings, 29; experimental nature of, 47; hats, 9, 33, 35, 48, 76, 156, 261–62; hybrid composition, 28, 248; ideal nature of, 10; lantern parades, 55; “layered” nature, 26; leadership and, 7; memory of, 7; opposition to, 3; the “people,” 173, 184–85, 204; “people as foundation,” 86–87, 173; performative nature, 147–49, 164; as political theater, 79, 252–52; race and racism, 8, 28; revival of, 8, 288, 290; rights, 175–76, 178, 179; rituals, 37, 55, 81, 250, 251, 253, 281, 284; slavery and, 8, 28, 106, 143, 211; terms of address, 37; unity of government and people in, 4, 32, 43, 48, 50, 172–78; visualized through maps, 179–80. See also citizen and citizenship Republican Party, 40, 159, 202, 211 Republican Progress Society, 40 Revolutionary Alliance, 19, 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 50, 149, 158, 166, 201, 216, 247, 257, 259; compared to ﬁctional Grand View Garden, 125–9; founding, 104; parliamentary challenge to Yuan Shikai, 211–12, 214–17, 223, 224–25; Senate strength, 210–12; women and, 104, 111, 115, 123 Revolution: American, 13, 115; French, 13, 115, 128, 157

Revolution, Chinese: complexity, 26; core narrative, 279; “family romance” of, 127–28; geographical expanse, 14, 16, 17; long, 13, 19, 49, 177, 267; mobility, 34; politicizes personal relationships, 125 Rickshaw pullers, 12, 60–61, 83, 148–49, 167 Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 77 Rome, 219 Roosevelt, Franklin: ﬁreside chats, 237 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18 Russia, 179, 203, 259 Russo-Japanese War, 203 St. Petersburg, 14, 189, 192, 194, 203, 212, 221, 239 San Francisco 14 Scott, James: Seeing Like a State, 185; “weapons of the weak,” 6 Scramble for Concessions, 189 Sears, Roebuck and Co., 32 Second Opium War, 21 Second Revolution, 84, 149, 153, 250 Senate, 2, 20, 36, 39, 123, 204–209; access to public galleries, 116, 119–20, 136, 140–1, 200; attacked by suffragists, 117– 121, 142; criticized, 128–29, 206; decorum and rules, 200, 206, 214–15; debate, 205, 207; debates cabinet nominees, 200, 214–17; debates women’s suffrage, 139–40; decline, 10, 232, 254; divided by party, 210–13; expressive and emotional nature, 205–6, 213, 216–17, 224; inaugural session in Beijing, 92–93; intimidated by Yuan Shikai, 226; issues before, 205, 208; itinerant, 28, 34, 122; legitimacy, 204; peak performance of, 9, 224; photograph, 119; physical settings and appearance, 117–18, 206, 213; president and, 213; public interest in, 205, 210, 217; quorum, 207; resident in Nanjing, 117, 200; senators as political class, 152, 205, 210; turbulent nature, 50, 93, 205; votes Yuan Shikai provisional president, 27; youth of members, 118 Senate (Rome), 65 Senate (United States), 55 Shandong, 62, 181, 182, 191, 234, 238 Shanghai, 17, 18, 22, 28, 70, 75, 82, 129, 155, 143, 187, 195, 198, 212, 239, 247, 248, 248, 249; Bund, 234, 268; human capital, 171; Palace Hotel, 130; political activism, 26, 150; Zhang Garden, 131 Shaoxing, 56

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Index Shaoxing Lodge, 58 Sharman, Lyon, 243, 247 Shattuck, Harriet: The Woman’s Manual of Parliamentary Law, 258, 266 Shaw, Anna Howard, 114, 136–37, 138 Sheehan, Brett, 161 Shen Peizhen, 94, 134, 139, 256; at Nationalist Convention, 19–20, 42, 48, 272; political radical, 135–6, 181–82; satirized, 123–24; speaking style and speeches by, 118–19, 133, 140, 145, 153, 223; Sun Yat-sen and, 49, 66; victim of scandal, 142, 233 Shen Tong, 5 Shengyang, 210 Shiji, 65 Shijiazhuang, 249 Shimoda Utako, 103 Sichuan, 40 Sima Qian, 67 Simmel, Georg, 245, 270, 285 Sino-French War, 21, 71 Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), 21, 194, 279; Treaty of Shimonoseki, 73 Snow, Edgar, 62 Socialist Party, 41, 149, 158, 167 Society: as “sheet of sand,” 57, 244, 262, 289; civil, 71, 151, 245, 265–67; group basis of, 72, 258, 262–67; picturing, 33; rhetorical, 78; social “circles,” 264 Socratic Method, 170 Song Jiaoren, 10, 19, 31, 58, 95, 123, 143, 178, 200, 208, 238, 240, 242, 259, 270; assassination of, 10, 54, 68; compared to ﬁctional Wang Shanbao’s wife, 124– 26, 231; democrat, 39, 201, 203, 247, 266; disrupts political meeting, 46; drafter of provisional constitution, 117; exile in Japan, 104; ﬂair for controversy, 50, 55, 100, 125; party-leader role, 38, 39–41, 42, 45, 54, 62, 80, 159–60, 167, 227, 257; sacriﬁces women’s rights plank, 40, 123, 133; satirized, 123–29; slapped by suffragists, 20, 42, 50, 82, 97, 126; speeches, 46, 54; supports strong state, 205 Song Qingling, 112, 265, 276–77, 278, 279 Sorokin, Pitrim, 273 Soviet Union, 5, 259, 268, 284 Spencer, Herbert, 162 State, the: alienation of reformers from, 75; constitutional reform, 76; disciplinary technologies, 6; perspective of, 185; rhetorical, 78, 185

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Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 99 Students, 5, 7, 16, 17, 39, 71–72, 73, 107, 193; as activists, 53, 56, 82–83, 88, 92, 115, 168, 169, 170, 181, 234, 267; as athletes, 89; in political meetings, 46, 53, 85, 95, 96, 174, 249, 250; meet with Sun Yat-sen, 267–274; returned from abroad, 77. See also May Fourth Movement Suffragists and feminists, 42, 162, 164, 199; British, 108, 115, 118, 119–20, 135; Chinese Republican Women’s Cooperative Society, 116, 130; compared to Communists, 122–23, 137–38, 258–59; controversy over constitutional rights, 117–121; elite background, 115; expanding membership, 122–23; “female assassination squads,” 45, 54, 134; female legislators in Guangdong, 129–30, 139, 141, 205; image of, 144; international suffragists, 14, 139; International Woman Suffrage Association, 116, 129, 130, 134, 137, 141; Lady Gui and, 136; long struggle for, 13, 49; Lysistrata and, 135–36; mistaken belief abroad that Chinese women received vote, 136–7; National American Woman Suffrage Association, 114, 129, 136; nationalism and, 107–8, 129, 131,134, 146; opposition to, 46, 54, 113–14, 118; political ideas and agenda, 106, 108, 122–23; proposed boycott of marriage and men, 135–36; protests by, 42, 93, 117–21; radicals and moderates, 45, 114–117, 120, 122–3, 129–30, 135–6; Republic of China Women’s Suffrage Alliance, 115, 122–23, 150; republicanism of, 8, 111, 115, 140, 144; suffragists and suffragettes, 80, 134–35; theatrical productions by, 115–16, 142; Women’s Political Union (U.S.), 136; Women’s Revolutionary Alliance, 128; Women’s Social and Political Union (Britain), 121, 135; use and threat of violence by, 42, 50, 117,119–20. See also Carrie Chapman Catt, Shen Peizhen, Tang Qunying, and women’s rights Sun Daoren, 250 Sun Qimeng, 63 Sun Yat-sen, 1, 10, 11, 18, 19, 22, 24, 41, 54, 57, 66, 123, 151, 200; advocates foreign ideas, 195, 258–59, 261, 266; anti-Manchuism, 8; anecdotal basis of political rhetoric, 252, 280; atavism and

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Sun Yat-sen (continued) traditionalism, 29, 114, 247, 248, 261, 262–4, 266, 276; attempted comebacks, 239, 290; authoritarian tendencies, 258, 262–64, 268–69, 271–73; “Big Cannon,” 42, 48, 49, 94, 238–39, 241–44; calligraphy, 250; campaigning locally, 170, 249, 250–53, 275, 279; commemorates Ming founding, 27; compared to ﬁctional Lady Xing, 125–26; compared to world leaders, 114, 239, 243–44, 257; compared to George Washington, 31, 247, 283–84; compared to Yuan Shikai, 30–34; concern for order and unity, 55, 60, 72, 172, 173, 180, 253, 255, 257, 258, 262–66, 273; “construction,” 23, 240; conversations, 238, 267–74; criticism of, 31, 202, 208, 232–33, 246, 257, 261, 269–71, 284; criticizes Chinese culture, 197, 231; criticizes the Republic, 260; emancipator, 113; death and funeral, 241, 283–86; “Democracy” (Principle), 30, 254, 276; ﬂexibility and opportunism, 48, 158, 259; exiled, 14, 239; future-orientation, 32, 49, 242, 246, 252, 266, 280; historical consciousness, 32, 243, 262; idealism, 49; identiﬁcation with China, 243, 244, 280, 284; “International Development of China,” 31; land tax, 170, 250; late to the Revolution, 239, 241; legacies, 281– 82; Leninism and, 254; love of crowds and visitors, 38, 252; machine-age thinking, 32, 257, 259; marriages and family, 247, 265; “media genius,” 246, 249, 279; Mencius and, 243; “mid-life demon,” 112, 128; “Nationalism” (Principle), 30, 254, 262–65, 276; nation as race, 264, 271; Outline of National Construction, 242, 244; orator, 71, 86, 186, 222, 223, 231, 237, 240, 242, 243, 244, 256, 264, 267, 269, 273, 275, 276–79, 280–81, 287, 288; patchwork public, 238, 248; “People’s Livelihood” (Principle), 30, 39–40, 111, 167, 254, 256, 257, 269, 276; picaresque life, 242–43; personality, 90, 237, 257, 269, 270–71, 284; physical appearance, 33, 35, 249, 269, 276–77; political “good father,” 18, 43, 104–5, 128; political salesman, 171, 191, 261, 276; political leadership, 30–38, 48–49, 80, 167, 191– 92, 199, 240–41, 245, 247, 253–54, 259, 261, 264, 267–68, 276–79, 282,

285, 286, 287; political thought, 256– 57, 268–69, 274; praise and inﬂuence, 26, 30–31, 33, 86, 165, 168, 242, 246, 248, 252, 269–70, 275, 283–85; presidency, 25, 26, 29, 205; presides over Senate, 118; railways, 31, 44, 191, 233, 239, 240; republicanism, 10, 37–38, 114, 250, 280; self-image, 174, 256; Senate and, 2; Song Qingling and, 90; speaking tour(1912), 33, 247– 54; speeches, 27, 42, 48, 94, 254–67, 275–76, 276–77; Three Gorges Dam, 31; “Three Principles of the People,” 30, 39, 197, 210, 259, 261, 276, 289; travel and mobility, 14, 243, 248, 253, 283; turbulent career, 187; visits to Beijing, 30 (1884), 30–51, 58, 226, 289 (1912), 239 (1925); visualizing, 33, 240, 276– 77; women’s rights and, 20, 44, 48–50, 111–12, 113–14, 116–17, 120, 258, 271; Yuan Shikai and, 37–38, 48, 227, 232, 239, 248, 251, 253 Suzhou, 166, 175, 182 Switzerland, 189, 234, 254 Taiping Rebellion, 98 Taiwan, 180, 194; democracy, 7, 20, 56 Taiyuan, 249 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 228 Tan Yankai, 142 Tang Cuzheng, 98 Tang Daiyu, 149 Tang Qianyi, 103 Tang Qunying, 11, 13, 22, 67, 82, 94, 97, 191, 238, 240; attacks ofﬁces of Changsha Daily, 141, 273; bomb-making, 104; childhood, 98–100; compared to fictional Tanchun, 124–29; compared to Liu Bei, 144, 229; compared to Lu Xun; death, 14; criticism of exile politics, 106– 7; criticism of male politicians, 128, 131, 139; criticism of Yuan Shikai, 140; criticism of Zeng Guofan, 109, 262; death of daughter, 102; disillusionment, 14, 290; educator, 160, 254, 288, 290; father and, 98–99, 122, 290; feet bound and unwrapped, 100, 111; foster motherhood, 102; friendship with Song Jiaoren, 104, 127, 142–43; “Hero of Womankind,” 111; Hunan identity and ties, 103–4, 105, 140; inﬂuence of classical ideas on, 107, 161; 42–51; Kang Youwei’s inﬂuence, 102–3; leadership of the suffrage movement, 2, 18, 111, 115, 122–

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Index 23, 130–1, 139–40, 150, 159, 162, 168, 254–55; marriage, 101–2; mother and, 99, 105; museum dedicated to, 101; national ﬁgure, 143–44; at the Nationalist Convention, 19–20, 42–51, 80, 289; patriotism, 14,107–8, 286; personality, 55, 139, 142, 271, 273, 286; photograph of, 111–12; poetry, 99, 103; political ideas, 102, 111, 115, 256, 266; Qiu Jin and, 101, 104; Sun Yat-sen and, 18, 49, 66, 104–5, 111–12, 117, 120, 126–7, 142–43, 272, 280, 283–84; radicalism, 45, 115, 120, 164; republicanism, 146, 178, 287; in retirement, 13; revolutionary activities, 105; Revolutionary Alliance and, 104; role as sister, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 126, 127, 286; satirized, 123–4; soldier, 109–10, 111, 239; speeches, 45, 109, 231; storms the Senate in Nanjing, 2, 118–120, 143; study and life in Japan, 103–7; status as widow, 101–2, 127, 129, 141, 278; tabloid journalism and, 95, 141; tea picker disguise, 17, 105, 124; Zhang Hanying and, 105 Tang Shaoyi, 92, 93, 123, 125, 196; prime minister, 199–202, 210, 212, 231, 218, 223 Tang Xingzhao, 98–100, 102; gentry activities, 98, 290 Tangshan, 249 Telegraph, 36–37, 246 Thoreau, Henry David, 89 Tianjin, 161, 249 Tibetans and Tibet, 25, 28, 41, 179, 180, 203 Time, linear, 21; coalitions of past, present and future, 21, 23, 32 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 265 Tolstoy, Leo, 285 Tongzhou, 33–34, 58 Tokyo, 15, 18, 20, 47, 75, 98, 155, 246; Chinese exile and student community, 46, 48, 53, 84, 95, 103–4, 150 Treaty Ports, 69, 202, 249, 255 Tsinghua University, 86, 267, 268, 271, 273 Twenty-one Demands, 190, 233 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 118, 127 Uniﬁcation Party, 161 Uniﬁed Republican Party, 39, 207, 210–11, 214, 215, 224, 226 United States: China policy, 189, 204 Utah, 129

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Vernacular Post, 95 Versailles Peace Conference, 57, 61, 88, 182, 191, 199, 228, 233–34, 287 Violence: armed conﬂict, 96; assassinations, 10, 38, 45, 54, 68; assaults and ﬁstﬁghts, 20, 42, 50, 80; executions, 35, 64, 67, 74;fear of, 35; popular potential for, 60–61, 91; troop riots, 28, 33–34 Wang Changguo, 94, 123, 124, 140; at Nationalist Convention, 19–20, 42, 44, 48, 50; Revolutionary Alliance and, 104, 123 Wang, Di, 63 Wang Jingwei, 242, 254 Wang Yangming, 256 Wang Zhen, 241 Wang Zheng, 100 Wang Zhixiang, 202 Warlords, 38, 239, 259, 278 Warring States period, 64 Washington, George, 32, 115, 243, 247, 261, 283–84 Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, 79 Water Margin, 77, 243 Weber, Max, 154 weiqi, 184–85 Wen Yiduo, 67–68 Whampoa Military Academy, 260 Wilbur, C. Martin, 246 Williams, Rose, 145 Williams, E. T., 145, 228 Willis’s Rooms, 39 willow catkin role, 98–100, 105, 124, 191 Wills, Garry, 279, 285 Wilson, Woodrow, 59, 204; attitudes toward women, 114; support for women’s suffrage, 117 Wirth, Louis, 33 Women: arranged marriage and concubinage, 15, 101, 106, 133; “bad girls,” 127; “book fragrant” family backgrounds, 102; breaking of taboos, 45– 46, 121, 127; Chinese Female Students in Japan Society,” 106; disguises and, 105–6; elite, 45–46, 101–2; friendship, 101–2; “good wives and wise mothers,” 103; journalists, 104, 107, 116, 128, 142, 143; late imperial culture and, 44–45; law schools, 116; modern fashion, 132, 18–39; object of reform movements, 40; orators, 94–96; public presence, 20, 45–46, 109, 116, 145; republicans, 8, 97, 101, 104, 106, 146;

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Women (continued) schools for girls, 77, 92, 160, 254; Shenzhou Girls Academy, 122; soldiers, 109–11, 115, 120, 132, 133, 137, 139; vulnerable to tabloid attacks, 95, 124, 141; “worthy ladies” and “women of talent,” 44 women’s rights, 41, 129, 146, 210; constitutional basis, 117; cultural support for, 44–45, 127; “goodwives and wise mothers” alternative, 45; in relation to men’s, 44; “male-female equality,” 47, 106; opposition to, 44–49,107–8; war and violence and, 108, 119–20, 133–34, 135, 137; Western origins of, 44, 115, 122, 256 Women’s Times, 94 Workers: as political activists, 26, 53 World War Two, 38 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 31 Wyoming, 129 Wu Jinglian, 39, 40; speaker of Senate, 207, 214, 215, 216, 225 Wu, King, 67 Wu Mulan, 132, 134, 138 Wu Qijun, 161 Wu Tingfang, 150 Wu Zhihui, 59 Wuchang, 168, 169 Wuer Kaixi, 6 Wuhan, 239, 250 Wuhu, 249 Vietnam, 104 Xiang Jingyu, 287 Xiang Army, 98, 122 Xiang River, 102; revolution and, 105 Xiangxiang, 105, 115 Xiong Xiling, 201 Xinjiang, 179, 180, 208 Xinqiao, 98, 102, 279 Xu Jingcheng, 189, 192, 194, 195, 221 Xu Shichang, 202 Xu Yonggyin, 268–74 Xuan of Qi, King, 66, 288 Yan Fu, 30, 102 Yan’an, 158, 281 Yang Changji, 15, 17, 21, 22, 49, 60, 77 Yang Jisheng, 74 Yang Kaihui, 15 Yang Liwei, 122 Yantai, 249 Yao Wenfu, 47

Yao Ying, 69 Ye Shengtao, 79: “Barefeet,” 276–77, 282 Yeh, Wen-hsin, 17 Yan Huiqing, 197 Young Men’s Christian Association, 53, 56 Yu Jiaju, 90 Yu Nanqiu, 83, 90, 274 Yuan Shikai, 31, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 48, 50, 57, 87, 143, 147, 152, 158, 190, 194, 198, 208, 239, 240, 248, 250, 251, 259; attitudes toward women, 133; compared to ﬁctional Jia She, 126; death and funeral, 284–85; estate in Henan, 36; “Grand Constitutional Achievement” emperor, 1, 10, 30, 174, 178, 183–85, 190, 203, 232, 233; murder of Song Jiaoren, 10, 54, 207; orator, 93; political leadership, 30, 34, 153–54, 195, 220, 240, 245, 260, 270, 278, 280, 286; praised by foreign press, 227; presidency, 26, 28, 187, 199–204, 217, 221, 232, 248; republican, 26, 80, 173, 178, 191, 219; reformer, 31, 194, 197; repressive policies, 151, 153–54, 159, 173, 225–26; reviled by republicans, 35, 148, 174, 184, 233, 261, 277; speeches, 28, 92–93; statist views, 28–29; strategies and tactics, 35, 94, 198–99, 200, 203, 210–12, 214, 224–27, 232, 264; suffragists and, 54, 93–94,123, 134, 140, 199; violence as method of communication, 28, 34, 93, 225, 226; workaholic, 196; “Yuan’s Group,” 196 Yuguan, 249 Yun Daiying, 183 Yunnan, 161, 180 Yunnan University, 67 Zeng Guofan, 98; attitudes toward women, 102, 109, 262; Heye as ancestral home, 101 Zeng Zhuangang, 101 Zhan Yulin, 215 Zhang Binglin, 150; criticizes Sun Yat-sen, 242; cultural conservatism, 24–25, 261– 62, 265; jokester, 125, 222; language reformer, 59; on women, 113–14; serial political enthusiasms, 159; supports Yuan Shikai, 225 Zhang Bolie, 207, 208, 216 Zhang Guotao, 26, 271 Zhang Hanying, 104; friendship with Tang Qunying, 105–6, 141–42; military role, 109; as political radical, 122

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Index Zhang Ji, 153; chairs Nationalist Party Convention, 20, 42–48, 60, 66, 83–4, 173, 215; disrupts political meeting, 46; home invasion, 47; orator, 84; views on female revolutionaries, 106, 109–10 Zhang Jian, 163; on women, 113–14 Zhang Jianyuan, 84–88 Zhang Renlan, 122 Zhang Yaozeng, 216 Zhang Yufa, 150, 224 Zhang Zhaohan (Sophia, Zhang Mojun): leader of moderate feminists, 115–16, 118, 130, 131, 135, 181 Zhang Zhenwu, 35 Zhang Zuolin, 278 Zhangjiakou, 249

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Zhao Bingjun, 201; murder of Song Jiaoren, 54; prime minister, 226 Zhao Hengti, 103, 142, 286 Zhejiang, 77, 133; All-Zhejiang Society, 59 Zheng Shidao, 141 Zhenjiang, 249 Zhili, 202, 205, 207 Zhou (dynasty), 67 Zhou Enlai, 228–29; funeral, 241 Zhu Di, 67 Zhu Yuanzhang, 27, 247 Zhu Yun, 65, 67 Zhuge Liang, 144, 229 Zongli Yamen, 187 Zou Lu, 256, 270 Zou Rong, 47, Revolutionary Army, 169 Zuozhuan, 136

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