New World or Dangerous Terrain? Computational Methods in the Historical Social Science of China

Siying Fu, University of Wisconsin-Madison

test: Revolutions rarely happen without any prior indication. Widely studied predecessors to a full-fledged revolution include social movements, local rebellions, and failed reforms (Skocpol 1979; Goldstone 2001). The last predecessor is the main focus of this paper. I argue that the interaction between reformists and revolutionaries remain understudied and undertheorized in the existing literature on revolution. With the case of the Chinese Xinhai Revolution of 1911, I show that such interaction significantly influence the possibility and pattern of the revolutionary dynamic by 1) driving both reformists and revolutionaries to take increasingly clear and extreme positions in opposition to each other, 2) forcing the educated public - a social group that initially either weakly supported the reform or remained neutral to take a strong stance between reform and revolution, and 3) exposing fetal vulnerabilities of the ruling Qing monarchy to a point that the public started losing confidence in the reform without definitive evidence of its failure. As a result, when revolutionaries started rebel in Wuchang on October 10, 1911, the rest of the country quickly followed suit despite still uncertain support to a revolution in the larger society at that point. The Xinhai Revolution was laden with contingency, from its unplanned start, to the surprising momentum afterwards, to its surprising success. I show that in order to understand how all these accidents coincide to make a tremendous revolution, we must start with the interaction between reformists and revolutionaries years prior.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 113. Commemorating Xiaohong Xu: Comparative Historical Methodology and China Studies