| Imperialist aggression had intensified during the late Qing and the Qing government, increasingly corrupt, was weak and helpless. Chinese democratic thinking gradually developed in the country, and Chinese revolutionaries headed by Sun Yat-sen appeared. The founding of the Chinese Revolutionary League in 1905 market the beginning of a bourgeois revolutionary party in China. The revolutionaries carried out a series of bitter and heroic armed struggles against the Qing government. On October10, 1911, an uprising in Wuchang, Hubei Province, succeeded and the next day a military government was established in the province. Other provinces in the south quickly followed suit, and declaring their independence from the Qing. On January 1, 1912, the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was founded with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president on February 12, 1912, and the last Qing emperor Puyi announced his abdication. It was ending the feudal monarchic system that had ruled China for more than two thousand years. |
