Yuan Shikai Abdicates: China's Empire Ends

Yuan Shikai's 83-day empire ended not with a revolution but with humiliation. The former military strongman who had maneuvered his way to the presidency of the Republic of China declared himself Emperor on January 1, 1916, restoring the monarchy he had helped abolish just four years earlier. By March 22, he was forced to abdicate, abandoned by his own generals and provincial governors who refused to recognize his throne. Yuan had been the most powerful figure in Chinese politics since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary leader, had ceded the presidency to Yuan because only Yuan commanded the loyalty of the Beiyang Army, the strongest military force in China. Yuan promptly dissolved parliament, outlawed the Kuomintang party, and revised the constitution to make himself president for life. The imperial restoration was Yuan's fatal miscalculation. He announced the Empire of China with himself as the Hongxian Emperor, expecting support from provincial leaders who had backed his authoritarian rule. Instead, Yunnan province declared independence within weeks, and a National Protection War erupted as military governors turned against him one after another. Japan, which had imposed the humiliating Twenty-One Demands on Yuan's government, publicly opposed the monarchy. Even his own Beiyang subordinates wavered. Yuan cancelled the monarchy on March 22, 1916, and died three months later, reportedly of kidney failure exacerbated by the stress of his political collapse. His death fractured China into the warlord era, a decade of competing military fiefdoms that left the country divided until the Kuomintang's Northern Expedition partially reunified it in 1928.