New bottles of old wine - commemorating the 110th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution

On October 10, 1911, the Wuchang Uprising broke out, opening the prelude to the Xinhai Revolution. In hindsight, the storm caused by the Xinhai Revolution in old China can be described as far-reaching, but the revolutionary martyrs at the center of the event and all social strata at that time did not realize how this thunderclap would bring about changes to the dark land of China.

Time back to 1909, the British army invaded Tibet, the Tibetan forces due to the British invasion of violent turmoil, in order to quell the unrest in Tibet, the Qing court sent troops into Tibet. Chen Quzhen was a management camp that entered Tibet with the army, mingled with Tibetans in Tibet, and became close to a Tibetan woman named Xiyuan. In 1911, due to the rebellion of the Sichuan Brotherhood of Elders, Chen Quzhen decided to return to Hunan by Rao Dao Qinghai, and experienced hardships on the way back to his hometown, and his wife Xiyuan also died of illness in Shaanxi due to water and soil disobedience.

The reason for the Brotherhood rebellion was that the Qing court wanted to take back the ownership of the railway, and the red-top merchant Sheng Xuanhuai was tough, which intensified the contradiction between the Qing government and the national bourgeoisie and broke out the road protection movement. The Baolu Movement was vigorously carried out in sichuan, Hunan and Hubei provinces, and the Qing government created many bloody conflicts in the process of suppression, provoking popular uprisings, and the rebel army besieged Chengdu, with more than 200,000 responders, and the Qing court had to mobilize many armies such as the Hubei New Army to suppress the bullets. Zhao Erfeng, the governor of Sichuan who led the Qing army into Tibet to resist aggression, was also dismissed from his post in the process.

After the new army was transferred, the Qing government's ruling power in the Hanyang area of Wuchang, Hubei Province, was weak, and an armed vacuum appeared, which provided mature external soil for the outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising. However, the main leaders of the revolutionary party, Huang Xing, Song Jiaoren, and others, were not in Wuchang at this time, and the rebel army desperately needed a person with enough prestige to lead them to complete this feat, so Li Yuanhong, an official of the Qing court army, was embraced as the governor of the Hubei military government. From here, we can also find that although the Xinhai Revolution is different from the previous peasant uprisings in history, the revolution led by the bourgeoisie still has a strong feudal color, and this uprising is still a repetition of the countless times in the past when the wall changed the banner of the great king:

A thousand years ago, Guo Wei was forced to rebel by Liu Chengyou, the Emperor of the Later Han Dynasty, and led an army into Tokyo to overthrow the Emperor Yin. In Liaozhou, he was supported by the generals, and the yellow robe was added to the body, and the Later Zhou was established; a few decades later, Zhao Kuangyin launched a mutiny at Chen Qiaoyi, which was also supported by soldiers, and the yellow robe was added to the body to establish the Song Dynasty.

Li Yuanhong's ascension to the throne is no different from the rise to power of the feudal era in the past few thousand years, and the limitations of the bourgeoisie itself require that they must unite a part of the old bureaucracy and use the prestige of the old bureaucracy to stabilize the situation, but such a revolution with incompleteness and compromise is doomed to fail to bring old China out of the quagmire of poverty and weakness.

By describing the Xinhai Revolution, the author is not blindly denying it, but we should see the progressive significance of the Xinhai Revolution: it has brought a liberating effect to the Chinese people politically and ideologically that cannot be underestimated. The Xinhai Revolution created a modern national democratic revolution in the full sense of the word, overthrew the absolute monarchy that had ruled China for thousands of years, established a republican form of government, and ended the absolute monarchy. It has spread the concept of democracy and republicanism, greatly promoted the ideological emancipation of the Chinese nation, and promoted China's social change with great shock and influence. However, it cannot be fully affirmed, and the Xinhai Revolution has certain limitations, which are determined by the limitations of its leading class.

Only by truly and thoroughly seeing the good and bad of this revolution can we see what the proletarian revolution should carry forward and what it should abandon, and can we make decisions at the new historical intersection that are more in line with the needs of our country's development. This is also the most important enlightenment brought to us by the Xinhai Revolution, and even the entire bourgeois revolutionary process. With this article, I would like to commemorate the 110th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution!