Summary: Double Ten (October 10) is the national day of the Republic of China in Taiwan Province. It represents a commemoration of the Xinhai/Hsin-hai Revolution which overthrew the decadent and corrupt Qing/Ch’ing Dynasty during the winter of 1911/1912.
In the 108 years since the Xinhai/Hsin-hai revolution began, the history of East Asia has been, in many ways, a gory, clawing horror, full of just about every sin and wickedness of which human beings are capable. Yet, as we stumble our way into the third decade of the 21st century, we must acknowledge that, as between the two countries calling themselves China, there is more of a moral case to be made for the Republic of China in Taiwan Province then there is for the communist regime in Beijing. 2500 years ago, Confucius declared “the Zhou is resplendent in culture, having before the examples of two previous dynasties. I am for the Zhou.” Master Kong forthrightly proclaimed his preference. I do the same.
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Today, if you happen to be in the Western Pacific, and tomorrow, if you happen to be on our side of the International Date Line, is Double Ten, the 108th anniversary of the Wuchang Rising that sparked off the Xinhai/Hsin-hai Revolution that ultimately overthrew China’s decadent and corrupt Qing/Ch’ing Dynasty.
The Wuchang Uprising itself had a kind of Keystone Kops, slapstick aspect to it. During the evening of October 9, 1911, a Chinese revolutionary activist almost blew himself up by tinkering with a bomb he was trying to build. He was taken to hospital; the authorities got wind of what was going on; and to avoid a crackdown, the revolutionaries in Wuchang started an uprising against the local Ch’ing/Qing Huguang Viceroy. The Viceroy was overthrown, the three Wuhan cities of Hankou, Hanyang, and Wuchang were seized by revolutionary forces, and the Xinhai/Hsin-hai Revolution was well and truly underway. Within a matter of weeks, eighteen broad provinces of South China had thrown off the Qing/Ch’ing yoke. The Republic of China was proclaimed on January 1, 1912, and by February 12, 1912, the last Qing emperor had abdicated.
Unfortunately, the overthrow of the Qing had left China without a stable central government whose writ could run everywhere within the national boundaries. Tibet and Outer Mongolia soon declared de facto independence. Mongolia remains independent to this day, while Tibet enjoyed her de facto independence from 1912 until 1951, when the People’s Liberation Army marched in and restored the traditional dependence of Lhasa upon Beijing. Moreover, East Turkestan, known to the Chinese as Xinjiang/Sinkiang, lost in central Asia between the Russian Empire and China proper, found itself in a kind of curious geopolitical limbo, somewhere between de facto independence and adherence to the Nationalist government in East China.
In fine, the period between 1912 and 1949 represented what the novelist Robert S. Elegant described in his novel Dynasty as a time of “gory, clawing horror.” The Republic, proclaimed on January 1, 1912 amid such extravagant hopes of a better future, soon found itself assailed and belabored on all sides: by the Japanese, by provincial warlords known as Dūjūn, by the Russians/Soviets in Xinjiang and in Manchuria, and above all, by the Chinese Communist Party under Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Mao Zedong. Under such conditions, the Republic, not surprisingly, soon gave itself over to Chiang Kai-shek, a military strongman who believed, rather like Donald Trump believes, that “only he could save China.”
Now, in Chinese political philosophy and traditional Chinese thinking, the legitimacy of any government depends upon its possession of what is known as the “Mandate of Heaven,” a neat philosophical device by which the pragmatic sanction of events might be given a cloak of respectability. In the traditional calculus of Chinese political thinking, dynasties at their beginning were held to possess the Mandate of Heaven, but as they declined, the Mandate of Heaven was held to have slipped away from the Dynasty in question. And as dynasties entered their and stages, a godsend or a catastrophe could very well trigger the ultimate collapse.
For the Republic, hard-pressed at every turn, possession of the Mandate of Heaven could never be assumed. Tragically, the Republic of China resembled nothing so much as as an imperial Dynasty in its terminal stages, fighting for its life against enemies both foreign and domestic. Born in civil strife, the Republic never knew a moment’s peace. The Civil War the began with the overthrow of the Qing was the backdrop against which the life of the Republic played itself out on mainland China. By 1949, the Communists had been victorious; the Republic had fled to the island of Taiwan, anchored like a great, unsinkable ark, a hundred miles off the coast of Fujian province.
And there the Republic has remained safely ensconced to this very day. In pragmatic, historic terms, the Mandate of Heaven on the mainland has clearly passed to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, in a Confucian sense, and indeed, even in a Western moral sense, the case for the Republic of China, ensconced as it is in Taiwan province, remains strong, even unanswerable.
Now we must acknowledge that the history of the Republic, both on the mainland and on Taiwan has not been without some significant blots upon its escutcheon. In particular, the treatment of local Taiwanese by agents of the ruling Kuomintang in the years following the Japanese retrocession of Taiwan (which had been under Japanese occupation since the Sino Japanese War of 1894-1895), and the authoritarian rule by the Kuomintang up until martial law was lifted in 1987, must stand as two of those significant blots on the escutcheon of both the Republic and the Kuomintang.
Nonetheless, the Republic has had significant success in democratization and political reform. Moreover, its record is largely innocent of the kinds of horrors of which the PRC has been guilty during the 70 years of its rule on the mainland. The CCP can justifiably be taxed with the extermination of much of China’s middle-class following 1949, with the horrors of the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, which led to the famine related deaths of millions of Chinese farmers, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and such lesser enormities as the harvesting of organs of convicted criminals. Finally, we knew, after the events of Tiananmen in June, 1989, that the PRC, by appealing to mere naked force, had abandoned any claim to legitimacy or benevolence. The People’s Liberation Army, which the government of the PRC had insisted existed to protect the “workers and peasants” of China had been revealed to be nothing more than a muscular instrument of state terror.
And that’s only what happened within China Proper. In the “hinterlands,” in Xinjiang and Tibet in particular, the horrors have continued. In Tibet, particularly after the flight of the 14th Dalai Lama in 1959, the Beijing authorities essentially declared open season on the Tibetan people and upon their ancient, nonviolent, Buddhist culture. In Xinjiang, where the Uighur people of East Turkestan, who have lived there since the dawn of recorded history, have been persecuted for their Islamic faith, and herded into what can only be described as concentration camps, while Han Chinese apparatchiks occupy the cities and run the infrastructure. It is not unreasonable to believe, in fact, that something approaching a genocide of the Uighur people may be underway in East Turkestan.
Of course, the PRC, as an acknowledged great power, can get away with such gory, clawing horrors. It can also get away with such Orwellian institutions as “social credit” system of mass reputational surveillance of individuals. The Republic, on the other hand, has always been more transparent and more subject to worldwide scrutiny. And as such, the Republic has had to behave more responsibly, and more in line with what Confucius the great Sage, himself might have called Benevolence and Propriety.
More than 2500 years ago, Confucius said “the Zhou is resplendent in culture, having before at the examples of two previous dynasties. I am for the Zhou.” Confucius, Analects, 3:14. The Republic of China is resplendent in culture and superior in Benevolence and Propriety. I am for the Republic.
On this Double Ten, I take the liberty of extending my best wishes to the people of the Republic of China in Taiwan and Fujian provinces.
Chung Hua Wan Sui. 10,000 years the Republic of China.
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Paul S. Marchand (whose Chinese business name is Ma Yuan) is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He has traveled in the People’s Republic of China. Whatever may have been the benefit of the doubt to which the PRC might have been entitled in the 1980s vanished with the massacre of Tiananmen Square. Thus, Mr. Marchand’s sympathies are entirely with the Republic of China in its fortress of propriety on the island of Taiwan.
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