There
is a little over a century, China was ending four centuries of empire, from the
Xia Dynasty to the last, the Qing Manchu and on 1 January 1912, Sun Yat-sen
became the first President of the Republic of China. But a century later, when
the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) convened on November 8 will confirm the arrival of a new
management team, the struggle for power does not seem as likely to have changed
...
The
fall of the empire marked, in fact, nearly two centuries of decline since
the peak had represented the reign of Emperor Qianlong in the eighteenth century,
when China weighed alone, nearly a third of the the global economy. Indeed, the
republic did not last long. Four months later, Sun Yat-sen gave way to the real
strongman of this transition period, Yuan Shikai, a general whose career began
in the Empress Cixi.
The new
regime found the imperial empty crates and had to negotiate an
international loan of 10 million pounds sterling in particular humiliating
terms: Europeans took control of the administration of the tax on salt and
installed a control office expenses which all departments were asked to submit
their accounts.
China
began to quickly descend into chaos, the central government does not control a
dozen provinces. On 23 December 1915, however, Yuan proclaimed himself emperor,
taking the name of reign as Hong Xian (the "Constitutional Abundance"
...). The new
empire lasted only three months and death carried the dream of Yuan Shikai.
