Holding the torch of the Xinhai Revolution, 95 years later
Ninety-five years ago to this day events in the Yangtze River valley transpired into one of the greatest watersheds in the history of the Chinese civilization. On October 10, 1911, the New Army soldiers stationed in Wuchang launched an uprising that irreversibly set of the cascade of events ending nearly two millennia of imperial rule in China. The young men who launched the 1911 Revolution surely had lofty goals in mind—they had secretly gathered in the months before thinking of ways to make China strong and the Chinese people confident. To them, the best way to reinvigorate the Chinese nation was to do something dramatic, to throw off the imperial yoke and establish a liberal system of government that had thus far succeeded so well in the West.
The National Father Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who took on a pivotal role in the early Republic as its first provisional president and later as a devoted opponent of warlordism, summarized his vision of China under the Three Principles of the People. He dreamed of a China free from foreign domination, governed under a liberal constitutional democracy, and harmonized with a vital industrial economy and equitable land holdings.
Looking back, can we confidently say that the 1911 Revolution was a success? Does the China that exists today represent the legacy of the republican revolutionaries? Or must we mark 1911 as a year of failure, having been effectively quashed by the tumult of the 20th Century?
The hopes of Sun Yat-sen and the New Army mutineers lie today not in the Chinese heartland, but with the 23 million people of Taiwan. Only in Taiwan have we seen Chinese democracy in action, as it thrives under a free society governed by Dr. Sun’s Five-Power Constitution. The Taiwan of the past 20 years is clear demonstration of democracy’s potency and its ability to succeed in Chinese society. But the 1911 Revolution is not complete—now, greater than ever, it is under siege. The existence of the Republic of China—the very legacy of the revolutionaries—is now under threat.
The People’s Republic of China has strived to stamp the Republic of China out of existence to legitimize a civil war victory that brought about decades human disasters through miscalculated policies. The Taiwan independence forces have been determined to forge a separate Taiwanese state to replace the Republic of China, of what little is left of it, to cement their dream of separate nationhood. Those of us wishing to complete the 1911 Revolution and reunify China under the Three Principles of the People find ourselves increasingly marginalized by a bipolar battle between the Communist Party and Taiwan independence. We find our purpose being ridiculed and our beliefs being ignored. They tell us the Kuomintang is weak, the Communist Party is powerful, and give us two impalatable and extreme options: to embrace a single China ruled by Leninist authoritarianism or to resist communism by forcing a permanent separation of our nation. We accept neither!
Our purpose here is carry on with the 1911 Revolution—to promote the peaceful reunification of China under a constitutional liberal democracy. The ideals of 1911 must not be forgotten. China’s rise back to its great place in the world cannot be complete if it is not democratic, as democracy is an inevitable end in the advancement of progressive nation-states. It is democracy that will ensure the mechanisms of legitimizing the state, harmonizing the society, and regulating the government. Democracy is the ideal that will link the peoples of both side of the Taiwan Strait, separate so long by mutual animosity, into unifying to build a strong, accordant, and prosperous China.
Today is the anniversary of not only the birth of a new order, but the birth of a new ideal. Today, we inaugurate the newest front of a century-old democratic revolution.
