Sun Yat Sen and the Awakening of China (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m THE RISE OF A GREAT TYRANNY TO understand aright the Chinese Revolution?the most remarkable event surely of our time?we must realize the nature of the forces opposing Sun Yat Sen and his supporters. We must find out, in fact, upon what the Manchus based their apparently impregnable despotism. The story is a fascinating one?almost as fascinating as it is sinister. In nothing is it more remarkable than this: that while the Manchus, once upon the Chinese throne, professed to be opposed inexorably to change, and determined to preserve intact and at all costs the institutions of the country, and while to all appearance they succeeded in doing so, yet in actual fact they contrived, all unsuspected, to transmute the whole character of China's government and civilization. In this single fact we have the key to a dominion as mysterious as it was powerful ?the dominion of a barbaric Tartar clan over an ancient empire. That their Manchurulers were foreigners was always keenly felt by the Chinese. Most wisely, therefore, did the Manchus show all the deference proper in foreigners to Chinese forms of government, but none the less did they change the spirit of that government as completely as if they had thrown everything into the melting-pot. It is no exaggeration to say that the Empire Sun Yat Sen has overthrown was more alien to that of his forefathers than the Republic he has established, and the great achievement of the Revolution has been to restore China to her true, her normal self. It is easy to explain this paradox. Consider for a moment the working of the normal Chinese autocracy in the pre-Manchu days. It was absolutely different to all the despotisms of the East. Such a thing, for instance, as the sudden elevation by the Emperor of grooms and barbers to high official pos...