근대중국의 공화제 실험과 제국일본의 동요

Abstract

This essay explores the ripple effects created by the Chinese republican revolution of 1911 upon Japan. For this purpose, I examine various policies and opinions appeared among political elites from both civil and miliary bureaucracies, activists in society, and opinion leaders in academia and media. More concretely, there developed the following three approaches: 1) to create a north-south division in China by interfering in the Chinese post-revolution politics; 2) to support the southern Chinese revolutionaries while strengthening the emperor system in Japan; and 3) to reform the Japanese political system by learning the lessons from China. Although the three groups differed in their approaches to the Chinese Revolution, they nonetheless shared the sense of crisis in maintaining the legitimacy of Japanese style of constitutional monarchy in Asia. Competitions and conflicts among the three approaches contributed to the relaxation of the Meiji oligarchic system and facilitated the development of “Taisho democracy” in the 1920s.