The 37 years from 1912 to 1949 are known as the period of the Chinese Republic. This chapter discusses one of the major historical issues, events and Chinese achievements in these various realms. Some of the seemingly 'foreign influences' on the Republican Revolution have coincided with or grown from older Chinese trends that shared certain traits with the foreigners. The chapter indicates the dimensions of this historical problem. It also tries to establish the identity and trace the growth of Maritime China, a peripheral region along the south-east coast. The growth of treaty-port trade in China brought with it the new technology of transport and industry, a new knowledge of foreign nations, and so a growth of nationalism. The rebel tradition, secret and fanatical, had been too often in the negative guise of Boxerism, profoundly anti-intellectual and likely to degenerate into local feuding.

The years immediately following the Revolution of 1911, when Yuan Shih-k'ai was president of the first Chinese republic emphasizes the beginnings of warlordism. It also stresses the continuities with the pre-revolutionary years and sees the Revolution of 1911 as an early climax in a nationalist movement to invigorate politics and society. The ambiguity of the revolutionary aftermath began with the negotiated settlement of the revolution itself. The social conservatism of the 1911 Revolution and the scope given to gentry power in the new order make understandable such politics among those most oppressed. It was apparently believed, at least by Yuan Shih-k'ai, that the switch to a monarchy would keep the Japanese, with their own monarchical proclivities, at bay until the war ended. It appears that the two failed political experiments of the early republic liberal government and dictatorship contributed to each other's destruction. Yuan's dictatorship collapsed with themonarchy.