Abstract
The seeds of conflict, or even of a revolution, in a society can germinate from policies of a nation-state that are designed to strengthen its power of governance. This paper explores how such seemingly contradictory phenomena emerged within the Qing government and led to the Repiblican Revolution of 1911. The ideas included here have been borrowed from Theda Skocpol, a historical sociologist, who has made a major contribution to research on the revolution. Emphasizing that a state autonomously functions as a governing body, she focuses on the process of how old regimes in the past, pressured by military competition with foreign powers, provoked conflicts within and among different groups of people or along the lines of class while campaigning for the modernization of national institutions. This paper shares her view but differs in that it terms a government's attempt to strengthen its functions as "naturalization," instead of "centralization," in order to more clearly outline how state policies and society influence each other, thereby laying the seeds for a possible revolution.
In this context, the Republican Revolution best demonstrates how a revolution can result from policies intended to strengthen the government's functions. The Qing government initiated "naturalization" through the devolution of its power to provincial assemblies in the 1900s. On being granted a certain degree of autonomy by such a policy, political actors in several provinces utilized the assemblies as a channel to directly make claims to the central government. In fact, the assemblies served a wider function : Local intellectuals, who identified themselves as "Han," made them a base from which to resist the dominance of the Qing government, i. e., the dynasty of the "alien" Manchu. This paper brings to light how such "naturalization" through devolution, which was accelerated by the military organization during this period, induced local revolutionary elements and resulted in the collapse of the dynasty.
