Republic of China

The Republic of China was born of the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命), named after the year 1911 in the traditional Chinese calendar. On 10 October 1911, after a plot was uncovered in Hankou, troops mutinied in Wuchang, and city after city then declared against the Qing dynasty. The date is remembered as "Double Ten". On 1 January 1912 Sun Yat-sen (孙中山), who since 1905 had led a revolutionary coalition, the United League (Tongmenghui), became provisional president of the Republic in Nanjing.

Military power, however, lay with Yuan Shikai (袁世凯), whose Beiyang Army was then the only major modern army in the country. On 12 February 1912 the boy emperor Puyi abdicated, ending the Qing dynasty; on 15 February the National Council elected Yuan provisional president, with Sun's support. Yuan ruled through the army rather than parliament, even though the Nationalist Party, whose campaign Song Jiaoren organised, won the 1912–13 elections. In December 1915 he proclaimed himself emperor; Cai E rose in revolt in Yunnan, and province after province turned against him. In March 1916 Yuan restored the Republic after 83 days on the throne; he died on 6 June.

His death opened the warlord era (军阀). Britannica calls Yuan the "father of the warlords": at least ten of the major warlords of the 1920s had been officers in his army. In July 1917 a brief restoration of Puyi was put down by Duan Qirui. Throughout the 1920s the military cliques fought one another for territory and for posts in the government in Beijing, known as the Beiyang government (北洋政府): the Anhui clique of Duan Qirui, the Zhili clique of Cao Kun and Wu Peifu, and the Japanese-backed Fengtian clique of Zhang Zuolin in Manchuria.

While the generals fought over the country, a new generation of intellectuals set out to rethink Chinese culture itself. In 1915, in Shanghai, Chen Duxiu (陈独秀) founded the magazine that became New Youth (新青年), published until 1926, to spread new ideas, above all the Western ideals of democracy and science. Its writers launched the New Culture Movement (c. 1915–1922), which argued for a society of free individuals rather than the traditional Confucian order.

In 1919 the movement turned political. At the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War, Germany's former concessions in Shandong province were awarded to Japan instead of being returned to China. On 4 May 1919 more than 3,000 students from 13 Beijing colleges demonstrated against the decision. Enraged by the government's acquiescence, they burned the house of the minister of communications and assaulted China's minister to Japan, both pro-Japanese officials.

Over the following weeks demonstrations spread across the country: several students were killed or wounded and more than 1,000 were arrested. In the big cities, strikes and boycotts of Japanese goods lasted more than two months. In the end the Chinese government refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The May Fourth Movement (五四运动) takes its name from these protests.

The New Culture reformers wanted Chinese to be written in baihua (白话文), the vernacular close to speech, instead of classical Chinese (文言文), a style Britannica describes as elegant but, to the average Chinese, incomprehensible.

The opening shot came from Hu Shi (胡适), then a graduate student at Columbia University. On 1 January 1917 New Youth (vol. 2, no. 5) published his essay "Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature" (文学改良刍议). It set out eight principles, among them: have something to say, do not imitate the ancients, drop forced parallelism, and do not shun colloquial words. Literary historians generally see it as the curtain-raiser of the new literature.

On 15 May 1918 the same magazine (vol. 4, no. 5) published Lu Xun's (鲁迅) "Diary of a Madman" (狂人日记), modelled on a story by Gogol. It is often called the first modern Chinese short story written in the vernacular. Through the self-told story of a "madman" who feels persecuted, Lu Xun attacks the old Confucian ritual code (礼教) as something that "eats people" (吃人).

The reform soon reached the classroom. In January 1920 the Ministry of Education ruled that, from that autumn, the first two years of primary school would switch from classical to vernacular Chinese, and the school subject "国文" (national literature) became "国语" (national language).

The Republic also wanted a national language (国语, guoyu) that everyone would pronounce the same way. In 1913 the Ministry of Education convened the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (读音统一会) in Beijing, from 15 February, to fix the standard reading of each character and to adopt phonetic letters. Its choice, the zhuyin zimu (注音字母, "sound-annotating letters"), drew on symbols proposed by Zhang Taiyan (章太炎): each letter is an ancient character with only a few strokes, and each syllable is spelled in three parts (initial, medial, final), with the tone marked separately.

The Beijing government then put off promulgating it for several years. Only on 23 November 1918, as the literary revolution gathered pace, did the Ministry of Education officially promulgate it.

Settling the pronunciation itself took longer. A Dictionary of National Pronunciation published in 1919 defined a hybrid pronunciation that matched no one's actual speech. During the 1920s the choice shifted to the pronunciation of Beijing, and in 1932 a Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use normalised every character to it, laying the foundation of the standard pronunciation of modern Chinese.

In 1930 the letters took their present name, zhuyin fuhao (注音符号, "phonetic symbols"). On the mainland Hanyu Pinyin replaced them from 1958, but Taiwan still uses its 37 letters, also known as "bopomofo" (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ).

Two parties dominated what followed. The Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (国民党) grew out of the United League and took that name in 1912. The Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党), co-founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, came out of the May Fourth generation: its First Congress opened in Shanghai in July 1921, with Mao Zedong (毛泽东) among the delegates. In 1923 Sun Yat-sen and the Soviet envoy Adolf Joffe agreed on Soviet aid to the Nationalists, and Communists joined the party as individuals: the First United Front. In 1924 Sun set up the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou, headed by Chiang Kai-shek (蒋介石).

Sun died on 12 March 1925. In July 1926 Chiang's army set out from Guangzhou on the Northern Expedition (北伐) against the warlords. In Shanghai on 12–13 April 1927, gangsters and troops crushed the guards of the General Labour Union; many Communists were arrested and executed, and by the end of the year the CCP had lost most of its members. The Nationalists set up their government in Nanjing, took Beijing in 1928 and, when Zhang Xueliang declared allegiance on 29 December 1928, formally reunified the country under one-party rule.

Chiang then pressed his campaigns against the Communists' Jiangxi Soviet. After their defeat in the fifth encirclement campaign, some 86,000 Red Army troops broke out in October 1934: the start of the Long March (长征). At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935 Mao joined the Politburo Standing Committee, and the party turned towards him. According to Britannica the column covered some 10,000 km (the distance is disputed) and reached Shaanxi in October 1935 with about 8,000 survivors. In December 1936 two of Chiang's generals, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, who wanted to fight Japan rather than the Communists, arrested him in Xi'an; he was freed on 25 December after talks in which Zhou Enlai represented the Communists. The Xi'an Incident led to a second United Front against Japan.

Japan had been encroaching on China since 1931. On the night of 18 September 1931 its army used an explosion on the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway, which most observers believe it had staged itself, as a pretext to invade Manchuria, where it set up the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932.

Open war began on 7 July 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (卢沟桥事变), a clash near Beijing that escalated into a full-scale invasion. Beijing and Tianjin fell within weeks, Shanghai in November after three months of fighting. On 13 December 1937 Japanese troops entered the capital, Nanjing, and carried out the Nanjing Massacre (南京大屠杀): over some six weeks they killed civilians and prisoners of war, raped women (about 20,000 by the most common estimate, up to 80,000 by others) and burned a third of the city. The death toll is disputed. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, in Tokyo, estimated more than 200,000 dead; the Nanjing tribunal of 1947 gave the figure of 300,000 that the Chinese government uses; historians' estimates range from about 40,000 to over 300,000, depending on the area counted.

The government retreated inland. After Wuhan fell in 1938 it settled in Chongqing (重庆), a wartime capital bombed again and again. Japan ran the occupied east through collaborationist governments, from 1940 one led by Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. Nationalists and Communists, allies in theory, mostly fought their own separate wars, the Communists favouring guerrilla warfare. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, China joined the Allies and American aid grew.

Japan announced its surrender on 15 August 1945 and signed it on 2 September; in China its forces formally surrendered in Nanjing on 9 September. Taiwan, a Japanese colony since 1895, was placed under the control of the Republic of China. Estimates of Chinese deaths, military and civilian, range from about 10 to 20 million; the official figure of the People's Republic is over 20 million.

The war left the Nationalist government weakened and the economy ruined, while the Communists now controlled large rural areas. From 28 August to 10 October 1945 Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong negotiated in Chongqing, and the American general George Marshall then tried to broker a unified government. But clashes never stopped, and full-scale civil war broke out in June 1946. The Communists call it the "War of Liberation" (解放战争).

The Nationalists at first held the cities and even took Yan'an, the Communist capital, in March 1947. But land reform won the Communists the support of vast numbers of peasants, while hyperinflation, corruption and desertion ate away at Chiang's armies. Between September 1948 and January 1949 three great campaigns, Liaoshen in the northeast, Huaihai in the east and Pingjin around Beijing and Tianjin, destroyed the bulk of his forces; Beijing surrendered without a fight in January 1949. On 21 April the People's Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze, and on the 23rd it took Nanjing.

On 1 October 1949, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国). The Nationalist government fell back to Guangzhou, then to Chongqing and Chengdu; on 7 December 1949 it announced its move to Taipei. About two million people, soldiers, officials and civilians, went to Taiwan. The state's gold reserves were moved there too. Thousands of crates of treasures from the Palace Museum, shipped between December 1948 and February 1949, now form the core of the National Palace Museum's collection in Taipei. Since then the Republic of China has governed Taiwan and the People's Republic mainland China; no armistice or peace treaty has ever been signed between the two sides.