The Xinhai Revolution and the Fall of the Qing Dynasty

Modern Chinese nationalism grew rapidly among the thousands of Chinese students who studied in Japan after 1895, where Sun Yat-sen, who had founded the Revive China Society in 1894, merged several revolutionary organizations in Tokyo in 1905 into the Chinese United League (Tongmenghui), built around his "Three Principles of the People": nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood. Numerous armed uprisings organized by the Tongmenghui between 1906 and 1911 failed militarily, including the "Yellow Flower Hill Uprising" of April 1911 in Canton, but kept the revolutionary cause alive. The same period saw China's own Manchurian homeland turned into a battleground for Russo-Japanese rivalry, culminating in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, fought largely on Chinese soil without Chinese participation — a humiliation that reinforced nationalist arguments that only fundamental change could restore Chinese sovereignty, and one the Qing court answered only belatedly by converting Manchuria into ordinary provinces in 1907.