After China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, a group of civil service examination candidates led by Kang Youwei wrote the “Ten Thousand Word Memorial,” which advocated for a series of reforms aimed at modernizing China along Western lines. After being largely ignored by the Qing government, in 1898 Kang caught the attention of the Guangxu emperor, who granted him an audience with high government officials.
The emperor agreed with the suggestions of Kang and his fellow reformers, and began to issue edicts. If allowed to stand, these edicts would have radically transformed Chinese society, abolishing the civil service examination system, revising the code of law, and promoting western industry and technology. As these reforms directly targeted traditional Chinese power structures, however, they sparked fierce opposition from the ruling classes, who rallied behind empress dowager Cixi and enacted a coup deposing the Guangxu emperor. As a result of this Kang and his student Liang Qichao were forced to flee to Japan to avoid execution, but six of their fellow reformers were not so fortunate. The Hundred Days’ Reform Movement is especially interesting because despite its failure, many of its proposed reforms were later adopted (such as the abolition of the civil service exam system or the adoption of western science and medicine), suggesting that the movement’s failure could have been as much on the part of the reformers to make their suggestions politically viable as it was a reaction of vested interests against social and technological reform.
FURTHER READING
Luke S. K. Kwong. “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days Reform of 1898.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 663–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/313144.