On The Nationality And Locality Of The Historical Narration About The Revolution Of1911in The Initial Period Of The Republic Of China

In the initial period of the Republic of China, the Revolution of1911was an important subject for historical Narration. There were many works covered this subject, some narrated the revolution of a province or a county, some narrated the revolution of the whole country. Many works about local revolution were written by those who experienced and drove the revolution, some of them were revolutionist, they did have identity of the nationality of the revolution, but their narration manifested that their revolutionary activities were localized. What’s more, there were serious geographical barriers between them. For the constitutionalists, this revolution was a great opportunity for them, they wanted to hold the reins of local government, what they narrated was mostly focused on local place, but the upper gentry also had desire to participate in national politics, so their works referred to something about the national revolution and regional cooperation. Local Chronicles had a great deal of description about local revolution. Some emphasized the fact that the local revolution was started by the local force, some considered the revolution was nothing more than social upheaval, and thanks to the local gentry, they protected the stability of social order. As regards the nationality of the revolution, these works didn’t give much attention on it.Due to a wider geographical spread, the works on the national revolution paid more attention on the nationality of the revolution. For instance, they had to analyze the cause of the revolution in terms of the overall situation and they need to relate how these provincial military governments got a new coalition government. Nevertheless, when referred to the concrete process of local revolution, these works also reflected the locality of the revolution. On the contrary, textbooks had no enough space to describe local revolution, so, in these works, the nationality was more marked.The narrative mode created by Sun Yat-sen had the most notable nationality. Sun took himself as the absolute national leader of the revolution, in his works, it was him and the China Alliance Committee that decided the trend of the revolution and the China Alliance Committee was united, which had no regional barriers. At that period, Sun Yat-sen’s narrative mode was applied to some related works written by Kuomintang, but they were far from perfect. The real typical work which made use of this mode perfectly was born in the Nanjing National Government Period.