The Cambridge Illustrated History of China

The half century from 1900 to 1949 was a period of intense effort on the part of an increasingly diverse elite to refashion China into a powerful, modern state. Centre stage was taken by energetic men and women who felt compelled to act: to promote new ideas, start new enterprises, build new institutions, organize the oppressed, fight corruption, and defeat aggressors. Patriots wanted to reconstitute China as a nation of the Chinese people and make it strong enough to stand up to foreign threats. Intellectuals and artists wanted to create a new culture that would be both Chinese and modern.

Revolutionaries succeeded in toppling the Qing dynasty in 1911, but their initial efforts to replace it with a republican government foundered, with the revolutionary Sun Yatsen losing out to the general Yuan Shikai. From 1916 to 1927, China was politically fragmented as local warlords competed for supremacy and imperialist powers extended their domination. At the same time, young people got caught up in new cultural and political ideas.

With the help of the Communist International (Comintern), a fledging Communist Party was formed and for a few years was allied with the Nationalists to reunite the country. The Northern Expedition succeeded in eliminating warlords or reducing their power, but when it reached Shanghai, the Nationalists turned on the Communists, who were driven underground and outside the major cities.

In these circumstances Mao Zedong emerged as the leader of the Communist Party, which had to retreat to the Yan’an region where it strengthened party discipline and gained experience in mobilizing peasants. War with Japan frustrated the efforts of the Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek to modernize and forced the government to retreat far inland. After the war with Japan, civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists ended with the victory of the Communist Party.

Undermining the Qing dynasty

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Qing dynasty was undermined on nearly every front. Its moral authority had been weakened by the defeat by Japan in 1895, the Empress Dowager's coup against the emperor in 1898, and the imperialists’ intervention into the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.