They overestimated the ability of Guangxu to override the authority of Cixi while underestimating the opposition of the die-hard conservatives. In the final analysis the idealistic reformers had no political experience or support from the real power holders in the government. The 103 days of euphoric reforms came to an end.
Six reform leaders were executed while Kang, Liang, and a number of others escaped and went into exile. On September 21 Cixi and her supporters mounted a successful coup d’état that stripped Guangxu of all his powers and put him under arrest. Between June 11 and September 16, 1898, over 40 reform decrees were issued by the emperor that encompassed such areas as education, government administration, military reorganization, economic development, and the budget.Īlthough there had not been time to implement most of the reforms, they nevertheless alarmed the Confucian conservatives and officials loyal to the ostensibly retired but still powerful dowager empress Cixi (Tz’u-hsi). He was particularly impressed by Kang’s accounts of reforms under Peter the Great of Russia and in Meiji Japan.Īs a result, he appointed him and his supporters to important government positions. Meanwhile, the young emperor Guangxu (Kuanghsu), who had nominally assumed the reins of government, began to show sympathy for the new reform ideas and read many of Kang’s memorials and other works. By 1898 their study societies had galvanized a sizable number of reform-minded intellectuals into a political force. One of the candidates, named Kang Youwei (K’ang Yu-wei), penned a long memorial to the throne protesting against the treaty and urging immediate reforms it was cosigned by 603 of the candidates and gained widespread attention.Įliciting no response, Kang and his student Liang Qichao (Liang Ch’i-ch’iao) began to organize study societies in Beijing and other major cities, sponsoring lectures and founding newspapers and magazines with the goal of promoting modernization and political change. In 1895 defeat by Japan and the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki provided the catalyst that stirred into action a group of candidates who had gathered in the capital, Beijing, for the triennial metropolitan examinations. The inadequacies of the Self-Strengthening Movement adopted by the Qing (Ch’ing) government of China convinced many educated Chinese that only thorough institutional reforms could save the nation from the expansionist ambitions of the Western powers and Japan. Guangxu Emperor receives a foreign envoy before the Hundred Days' Reform
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