For many nineteenth-century Chinese, only the Han ethnicity could be viewed as legitimate Chinese rulers. Like the Mongol Khans of the Yuan dynasty, the Manchu of the Qing dynasty were widely viewed as foreign invaders. While, in the early days of the regime, the Qing were able to forge alliance with influential Han administrators, and contrived to position themselves as the heir to the Ming dynasty, putting down the peasant rebellion that had caused the collapse of the previous regime in 1644, the notion that they were foreign masters never left the majority Han population. Manchu officials dominated at court, were present at all levels of government, and Manchu soldiers were garrisoned in all the important urban centres to assure the stability of the regime. Imperial regulations favouring the Manchu were a tolerable irritant to the subjects of the empire during the prosperous Kang-Qian period, but became an intolerable invasion of sovereignty when fortunes turned bad in the nineteenth century. Significantly, the demonstration of weakness evident in the loss of the Opium War (1839–42) to Britain instigated a series of open rebellions and secessionist movements in the West and South, dividing the attention of the Court for the last half of the century.

While rebellion raged, other agitators sought reform to re-establish the authority of the dynasty through the will of the people. The One Hundred Days Reform (1898) of the Guangxu Emperor, with the advice of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, is one example of a non-revolutionary reform movement in the late Qing period. However, the abject failure of the movement and the harsh reaction of the conservative forces in the government only further convinced revolutionaries that the removal of the Qing was the only hope for China.

Sun Yat-sen believed the best remedy was to transit into a republic. He began actively looking to reverse the Qing regime in the 1890s. By 1894 he had established the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society) to work toward this goal.