China: Military Dictatorship

The military dictatorship of Yuan Shikai 1913-1916. Was the first stage in the reign of the Boyan militarist clique in China. Relying on the strength of the old Asian despotism - bureaucracy, shenshi, landlords, and mainly the army, Yuan Shikai attempted to restore the monarchical order. In 1915 he organized a monarchical movement and in December became an emperor. In response to this, in Central and Southern China in 1916, anti-Yuan Shikai movement began - an uprising that led to the fall of the imperial regime and the death of Yuan Shikai. After this the Bayan clique broke up into two parts. The northern and central provinces shared the Zhili and Anhui general cliques. In Manchuria, the Featian clique consolidated, and in the southern provinces - "independent" generals. Changed the Yuan in Beijing, the head of the Anhui clique, Duan Qizhui, was a pro-Japanese politician. There was a sharp weakening of the central government, a period of militaristic internecine wars began, that is, wars between cliques, a period of independence of militaristic estates, fragmentation and further weakening of China in the face of imperialist dictatorship. In the context of the ongoing struggle between the old and the new in 1917, the last and also unsuccessful attempt was made to restore the monarchy. China: Military Dictatorship ...

The starting point of the national liberation movement in China of modern times was the May 4 movement of 1919. The outer cause for this movement was the decisions of the peace conference opened in Paris on January 18, 1919. The imperialist powers refused to consider the demands of China (an ally in the World War from August 1917) to transfer to him all the rights and privileges previously obtained by Germany in the province of Shandong, to liquidate all the rights and privileges of the imperialist powers in China. On April 30, the Powers adopted articles 156-158 of the Treaty of Versailles, according to which all the rights and privileges previously received by Germany in agreement with China were wholly transferred to Japan.

Unjust and humiliating for China, the articles of the Treaty of Versailles caused an outburst of outrage among various sections of Chinese society. The demonstration and rally, organized on the initiative of the Beijing students on May 4 under the slogans of non-recognition of the Treaty of Versailles, marked the beginning of the mass anti-imperialist, anti-Japanese patriotic movement of the Chinese intelligentsia, the urban small and medium commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, artisans and workers in the major cities of China, which lasted until June 1919. The ideological and political force of the movement was guided by a democratically and radically inclined petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and students. The Chinese proletariat was still a "class in itself," and "went" to the general democratic and anti-imperialist slogans of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. But the participation of about 100,000 workers in anti-Japanese strikes, demonstrations and boycott in May-June 1919 indicated the first attempts of the Chinese working class to enter the arena of political struggle as an independent revolutionary force. The "May 4" movement contributed to the gradual growth of the political activity of the Chinese working class.

China: Military Dictatorship