Recovering lost histories : ethnoracial violence in China's 1911 revolution

Abstract

This dissertation refutes the widely accepted narrative of the 1911 Revolution as a peaceful process of regime change. Subsequent Chinese governments have discouraged awareness of the anti-Manchu sentiments that prevailed before the revolution, the massacres that took place during it, and the widespread and persistent discrimination against Manchus after it. These mythologized interpretations of the revolution and their impact on Manchus preclude a comprehensive understanding of the role of race and ethnicity as crucial motivating factors in the revolution. Using official records, revolutionary propaganda, the memoirs of both revolutionaries and missionaries and writings by Manchus, I reveal the ethnoracial violence of the 1911 Revolution and its subsequent impact on the lives of Manchus. I show how the revolutionaries, from the beginning, interpreted the revolution as a revolt against Manchus as a people, not only as a government, and aimed at their expulsion/extinction. Through an examination of revolutionary propaganda, I examine its similarities with propaganda on modern-day mass murders and its correlational relationship with subsequent massacres of Manchus. The identification of Manchus during the killings elucidates how Manchus qua banner people remained, at the end of the Qing regime, a distinct social group that was perceptibly different. These enduring differences continued to separate Manchus from Han civilians after the end of the revolution. The study of anti-Manchu sentiments and violence also illuminates how the Chinese government reinterpreted the revolution as anti-imperial (anti-foreign powers) rather than anti-Manchu for the purposes of Chinese nation-state building. It also calls attention to the understudied anti-Manchu sentiments before the 1911 Revolution, the atrocities during it, and the prevalent discrimination against Manchus in the succeeding decades and reveals how the ethnoracial nature of the revolution remains a critical component of its legacy and continues to influence ethnoracial thought in China today.