This Week in China's History: The Qing Abdication

February 12, 1912

“We, the Emperor, hand over the sovereignty to the people,” declared Puyi, the 11th and last emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty. “We now retire to a peaceful life and will enjoy the respectful treatment of the nation.” 

There was no last, grand imperial audience, no pomp or circumstance intended to awe subjects and impress rivals. The edict announcing the end of the Qing dynasty was anticlimax: submitted by court officials, endorsed by the Empress Dowager, acting as regent, and then published in the Peking Gazette, where the denizens of the capital could read that their world had been turned upside down.

The phrasing evokes a world-weary monarch turning the reins of power over to his subjects, but bear in mind that this emperor was just six years old. He had come to the throne as a toddler, but the dynasty he headed had lasted nearly three centuries. And the imperial system —though never as continuous or as uniform as the old “5000 Years of History” saw would have you think — had been around for millennia. There had been gaps, and schisms, and splits, some of them lasting for centuries, but for most of the 2000 years preceding February 12, 1912, there had been someone to point out as “emperor of China” — or at least a claimant to that title. After that date, aside from a handful of trivia answers, there were none.

Rulers giving up their power 

The U.S. Supreme Court is embroiled in debate over Donald Trump’s actions as he tried to prevent power from passing to his elected successor. In Senegal, the president was more successful — for the moment at least — in forestalling his constitutionally mandated exit from the presidential palace. Xi Jinping successfully removed term limits from his job description as head of China’s Communist Party. But of course, none of these cases is unique. People in power generally prefer to stay there.

Why, then, did Puyi surrender the throne? 

The Qing had risen in the mountains of Manchuria to become the world’s largest land empire, encompassing most of East Asia including, of course, China, which was conquered starting in 1644. Its founder, Nurhaci, organized the dynasty in 1616, at the same time he coined the term “Manchu” — after the Bodhisattva Manjushri — for his confederation of Jurchen tribes (Nurhaci named his dynasty the Later Jin 后金, after the 11th-century empire of his forebears; it adopted the name Qing in 1626).

For two centuries, the Qing story was one of expansion and conquest. The early emperors went to war with Zunghars, and with the Russians as they spread across Northeast and Central Asia. The Manchu conquest of China was bloody and slow, but eventually brought Qing rule to every corner of the realm. The Qing were not only established as a Chinese dynasty (albeit one with non-Chinese rulers) but one of the largest, encompassing nearly 6 million square miles at its height, in 1790.

But from that height, a fall.

Traditional Chinese historiography might point to the dynastic cycle: after the stability and glory of the Great Reigns in the 17th and 18th centuries (Kangxi and Qianlong chief among them) followed less capable monarchs like Xianfeng and his successors, who were so weak that the Dowager Empress Cixi led a coup in a surprisingly successful effort to save the dynasty.

Likewise, the rising tide of imperialism drowned the dynasty slowly, as the European powers and Japan (but not Italy!) took pieces of the dynasty’s territory, sovereignty, and dignity.

Internal rebellions rocked the dynasty; tens of millions died across the empire.

As the 19th century ended, three crises in rapid succession seemed to doom the Qing: a disastrous war with Japan upended the geopolitical environment of East Asia; sweeping reforms followed by a brutal coup in 1898 retrenched conservative forces at court; and then in 1900, the Boxer Uprising killed thousands and ended with foreign troops occupying parts of Beijing — the Eight-Nation Alliance so infamous in China’s Century of Humiliation narrative. As the foreign forces advanced, the Qing government fled, returning only after agreeing to pay an enormous indemnity and punish egregiously anti-foreign officials. Just four years later, the empire endured the humiliation of seeing Japan and Russia fight for primacy in Northeast Asia, on Qing soil.

Yet, somehow, the dynasty survived. It enacted a new constitution — its first — with reforms to the empire’s economy, military, and political system. But the constitutional monarchy only went so far: the new constitution boldly declared “The Great Qing Emperor rules the Great Qing Empire, for ten thousand generations, and must be revered for all eternity.”

It was a bold bit of hyperbole that flew in the face of signs all around. An aging regent clung to power — a state of affairs that only worsened when Cixi died in 1908 and three-year-old Puyi “ascended” the throne. Uprisings were constant, even though none had yet succeeded.

After years of planning and plotting, it was ultimately an accident that put the wheels in motion that would culminate in the Qing abdication. A bomb went off prematurely in the Russian concession in Wuchang, now part of Wuhan, and the Double-10 Uprising that followed gathered momentum quickly. 

Desperate, the monarchy turned to its former top general, Yuan Shikai. Yuan had gone into retirement following the death of the Empress Dowager Cixi in 1908, but he retained influence over the dynasty’s most powerful army, the Beiyang Army. The dynasty pleaded with Yuan to resume his former post and command his army against the rebels, while at the same time, the rebels negotiated for Yuan to join the Republic.   

It may have been too late to save the dynasty, but relying on Yuan Shikai as their champion surely doomed them. In the grand tradition of Wu Sangui the Ming general who let the Manchus enter China in 1644, Yuan double-crossed both sides. He accepted the role of premier for the Qing, working with the court to manage a transition to constitutional democracy (with himself as the key policy maker), but also maneuvered to secure an offer to become president of a post-Qing republic. Using his military connections, Yuan kept himself indispensable to both sides.

As winter deepened, China remained in turmoil. Sun Yat-sen had the ideological claim to the revolution and was the self-declared president of the new Republic of China, having been sworn in on January 2, 1912. The Qing dynasty, tottering, remained ensconced in the Forbidden City, still claiming the imperial mantle. 

In January, the Provisional Government of the Republic and the Qing dynasty began talks to ensure the safety of the royal family in exchange for formally relinquishing power. That agreement wouldn’t be formally signed for another two years, but the initial pledges that would allow for Puyi to retain his title, his residence, and a stipend — along with the reality that their circumstances were likely only to worsen over time — satisfied the Manchus enough to agree to the abdication.

Plans were put in motion to draft a statement. Son of Heaven or not, six-year-old Puyi’s skillset did not include decrees that would put an end to China’s imperial order.  A small committee of Qing officials drafted the edict. Entrepreneur Zhāng Jiǎn 张謇 is usually credited with the framework, but deputy education minister Zhāng Yuánqí 张元奇 and cabinet minister Xú Shìchāng 徐世昌 also played roles. The draft edict was endorsed and then signed by Empress Dowager Lóngyù 隆裕太后, who was acting as regent (and would herself only outlive the dynasty by two years).

The edict itself is, appropriate to the moment, a blend of old and new, written in classical Chinese. Couched in the language of Confucian ideology, Puyi’s ghostwriters lament the disorder into which the empire has fallen. The text never refers to “China” or the Qing empire, using instead a classical abbreviation 九夏 jiǔxià — literally “nine Chinas” — that is shorthand for jiǔzhōu huáxià. The “nine provinces” refers back to the pre-Qin era of Xia and Shang, while huaxia is a classical name for China. So, the edict is explicitly tying the dynasty to the ancient past, legitimating itself even as it declares its end. The Mandate of Heaven is passing, visible in “the universal desire of the heart of the people” for Republicanism.

At the same time that it invokes antiquity, the edict sets forth the foundations for “a great Republic of China” comprising five races — Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Hui (Muslim) — and maintaining the territorial integrity of the Qing great state. It was this last that may have laid the groundwork for many of China’s struggles today as it tries to manage the territorial and ethnic scope of an empire with the ideology of a nation-state. 

Puyi remained in the Forbidden City for a dozen years after giving up the throne, and he would get another turn as emperor, this time in the Japanese-led puppet state of Manchukuo, before being arrested by the Soviets and later tried by Chinese communists. He lived his last years tending his garden, dying at age 61 of cancer during the Cultural Revolution. His was a remarkable life, one that was just beginning when he ended China’s imperial history.