Table of Contents for Transpacific Reform and Revolution
Introduction
The "Introduction" briefly examines Chinese migration from Guangdong Province, Qing China, to North America from the late 1840s to the 1880s, the dominance of Cantonese migrants from this province in American and Canadian Chinatowns, and their native-place connections with the leading political reformers, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, as well as the chief revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen. It also provides background on Kang and Sun, their early political activities, and the causes of their respective turn to political reform and anti-Qing revolution. Based on a survey of early transpacific Chinese diasporic networks, network analysis is stressed as the major approach for the study of the origins, interrelationships, and influences of the transpacific reform and revolution, especially their associations, among the predominantly Cantonese migrants on the West Coast of Canada and the United States from 1898 to 1918.
1.Kang Youwei and the Rise of Overseas Chinese Political Reforms from North America
Chapter 1 starts with Kang Youwei's involvement in the short-lived political reform of the Qing government in 1898, his futile search for foreign support on his first global trip, and his subsequent initiation of a radical reform for both China and Chinatowns through his personal interactions with Western political systems and overseas Chinese migrants in Canada. It stresses his collaboration with merchant leaders of Canadian Chinatowns to launch political reform and a reformist organization, the Chinese Empire Reform Association, with its patriotic, progressive, and antiracism platform. Kang used his Guangdong provincial fellows in Canada, the United States, and Australia, as well as his former students and second daughter, Kang Tongbi, to expand this reformist association and its movement, including its women's branches and feminist activities, to Canadian and American Chinatowns and to Chinese communities across the Pacific Rim.
2.The Crest and Ebb of Chinese Reform Politics from North America to the Pacific Rim
Chapter 2 follows Kang Youwei's consecutive trips from Canada to the United States and Mexico between 1904 and 19076 and the simultaneous expansion of the Chinese Empire Reform Association through transpacific mobilization against American racism, promotion of constitutional reform in China, and development of a transnational business empire. While this reformist association rapidly expanded through interpersonal and institutional relationships, a few Canadian and American leaders of the organization, especially those from Vancouver, brought their personal, familial, and even factional interests into its organizational activities and thus limited its institutional ability to check their cliquish power. Their personal and factional clashes with Kang's group culminated in mutual striving for the control of Zhenhua Company and contributed to the transpacific decline of the Chinese Empire Reform Association by 1909.
3.Transpacific Interactions between Chinese Reformers and Revolutionaries
Chapter 3 focuses on the transpacific mobility of Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionary fellows like Feng Ziyou as well as their interactions with Kang Youwei's reformist group and other sociopolitical forces on both sides of the Pacific. It highlights the efforts of Sun, Feng, and their associates to mobilize the Chinese Freemasons and Christians in North America for anti-Qing revolution and the Revolutionary Alliance's development before and after 1909. Their success in North American Chinatowns started with Sun's effective use of the Chinese Freemasons in his fundraising activities for the Canton uprising on April 27, 1911, the eve of China's Republican Revolution in the same year. The revolutionaries' success resulted not only from their combination of Western-originated republicanism with ethnic Chinese nationalism in fights against the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty, but also from their assimilation of personnel and institutional resources from Kang Youwei's reformist camp.
4.Sun Yat-sen and the Unfinished Chinese Republican Revolution across the Pacific
Chapter 4 concentrates on the different degrees of institutional development of Chinese political parties in North America, especially the Chinese Nationalist League under Sun Yat-sen's leadership, in their interactions with each other and with Yuan Shikai's Beijing regime. It goes beyond most previous studies of the Chinese Republican Revolution around 1911 and examines Sun Yat-sen's continual revolutionary struggles for the fragile Republic of China and his partisans' competition with Kang Youwei's Chinese Reform Party and the Chinese Freemasons in North America up to 1918. This chapter attributes the hegemonic rise of Sun's party in North American Chinatowns and Republican China to its increasing institutionalization and expansion under centralized leadership and other political strategies. But it also shows the internal strife over the centralization of leadership in Sun's parties and their partisans' radical tendency to deal with political opponents with violence, including assassinations.
5.Conclusion
The book concludes that both reform and revolution across North American Chinatowns transformed the transpacific Chinese diaspora through the development of their respective political associations as new diasporic networks between 1898 and 1918. These political associations, especially the Chinese Empire Reform Association under Kang Youwei's leadership and the Chinese Nationalist League under Sun Yat-sen, originated from and centered on the Cantonese-dominated North American Chinatowns, but they also achieved expansion into more diversified overseas Chinese communities across the Pacific Rim with new institutional and ideological norms. Such a broad network revolution originated from Kang's initiation of this reformist association with Chinese migrant activists in 1899, and continued through the rise of Sun's revolutionary parties before, during, and after the 1911 Revolution in China. It fundamentally changed relations of the Chinese in North America with homeland politics, North American political cultures, and their co-ethnic groups across the Pacific Rim.