China loves revolutions. What else can explain why the core landmass of Asia has been in nearly constant flux over a series of administration changes? Indeed what the twenty-first century world recognises as a unified ‘China’ was rare before the industrial era. In the pre-industrial era the continent was rarely unified or even amalgamated in some loose form of alliance. Instead life for many elites centred around a ping-pong of cozying up to newer and more powerful elites or plotting to remove other elites.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that records of who came and who stayed and who went are volatile and have at best middling quality. Nevertheless an aggregate of sources suggests the last two millennia witnessed somewhere around thirty ruling arrangements in China. Broadly this translates to a replacement of roughly one dynasty every hundred years. As further evidence for the fragmented nature of the continent it turns out there was actually an advantage in controlling smaller fragments. Dynasties lasted for 97 years if they controlled a ‘united China’ – defined loosely as most of the coastline between the Korean peninsula and southeast Asia plus sizable inland possessions - but smaller power centres with a less expansive coastal presence lasted for 117 years. That's nearly 20% longer. Intuitively this makes sense for it is easier to control what is nearest to you. 

China’s most recent five revolutions illuminate matters obligingly. Two saw one elite replace the other (in 1911 and 1949) and three (1898, 1901 and 1982) created a noteworthy impact in the long-run but in the short run did not unseat anybody. Following is a brief consideration of critical days within each of these five revolutions: What happened? Who lost and who won? Why was it significant? 

Late nineteenth century China was not happy. Fifty years of foreign encroachment had exposed China’s weaknesses ruthlessly. Imperialism was easy. Never mind the great powers of the United Kingdom or the United States even plucky little Belgium fancied their chances against China. 

By 1898 enough was enough. Reform minded elites led by the nephew of the Empress took matters into their own hands with a flurry of reforms. Postal communications, roads, railways, simplification of civil service examinations, education, more education. All told there were nearly fifty edicts. Each was connected by an attack on what enervated China most: break down the claustrophobia of Confucianism and, second, fight corruption.

The thinking was extremely shrewd. Yet Empress Cixi switched her affinity when it became clear some reforms implicitly undermined imperial authority – or so she was advised. In response her reforming nephew is reported to have said of the conservatives: ‘If your Majesty wishes to rely on them for reform, it will be like climbing a tree to seek for fish.’ That, so to speak, was the fish that broke the Empress’s back and on September 21 1898 came this messy and hopelessly ill-considered coup d’etat. 

The reforming nephew was sent into seclusion, remaining there until his death, and half a dozen less fortunate reformers were executed. The Empress took over government personally and shortly afterwards in an even more tragic home goal she warmed to the Boxers who were hissing away like a grenade in the Chinese heartland. As one-by-one the new edicts were rescinded China reverted to what it was: easy pickings even for the likes of Belgium. 

Had reform proceeded, and after all a similar jolt worked in Japan thirty years earlier with the Meiji restoration of 1868, Chinese royalty may have survived in the modern world. Most likely they would have been a constitutional monarchy similar to the Japanese or British royal families: ceremonial more than muscular. Instead on this day the Empress proved beyond all reasonable doubt or faithful optimism that China could not reform from the top down. Change would have to be bottom-up.

The Taiping rebellion in the 1850s confirmed widespread frustrations. Despite leadership from the slightly loopy Hong Xiu-quan, who claimed amongst other things to be related to Jesus Christ, revolt nevertheless spread from Nanking to over a dozen provinces and killed somewhere around twenty millions. Even by China's standards this was a lot. Internal rivalries and a bizarre communal property policy withered the oomph of the Taiping revolution. The later Hundred Days Reform of 1898 and shortly after defeat in the Sino-Japanese war showed that imperials shortcomings still festered. The itch needed scratching.

Just to be sure all possibilities were exhausted it seems somebody in Beijing brainstormed a combination of bottom-up revolution (widespread peasant support) and top-down revolt (support from the Empress). It was an overwhelming blunder because the only feasible glue in this alliance was to target foreign powers seeking trade with China; the Empress could hardly be expected to rebel against herself. 

By the early twentieth century over a dozen treaty ports dotted China like acne, according to the Boxer view. When radicals seized areas around the ports it actually illustrated Qing weakness, not strength, to European powers who had propped up the Qing Emperors provided they maintain a semblance of order. Matters muddied further when the unwashed hordes approached western legations, the ultimate target, and the Empress declared that she believed they could actually dodge bullets. In this regard immutable laws of physics were to disprove many aspirations. 

Immeasurably stronger European and Japanese armies arrived to protect their interests. Empress Cixi fled to Xian and undertook on September 7, 1901 to execute some rebels and pay war reparations. The dramatic turnaround started hissing like a grenade. True, not all Chinese agreed with the Boxer’s brutality but desires to expunge foreigners were nevertheless real and deeply held. The imperial betrayal was a fatal miscalculation. Ultimately the greatest beneficiary was not the Emperors but a British-trained Chinese doctor called Sun Yat-sen. The Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) was set up within a few years and acquired power from the Qing within a decade.

Also within the city were lots of revolutionaries of many different shades, just like elsewhere in China during these turbulent years. Sadly not all revolutionaries were entirely au fait with modern weaponry and a bomb accidentally exploded. Investigating authorities learnt almost accidentally that many of the revolutionaries were also troops within the New Army and moved to arrest the parties. At this point important elements of the army rebelled rather than face imprisonment and it all inflamed from there.

Fatally the Qing elites did not move decisively. By the end of October, a fortnight into the rebellion, Hubei, the outbreak of the revolt, then neighbouring Hunan and Jiangxi and Yunnan had declared for the rebels. As time passed for a consensus to appear in the court it became clear they only wished that the matter be considered as just another mutiny. It would fade away. Meanwhile the army was unimpressed and acted to take over much of southern China. It was a decisive advance. By the end of 1911 all that remained loyal to the Emperors were Henan and Gansu, relatively rural provinces in the centre and west. The entire seaboard had been lost. 

Although the cause is clear quite why this revolt succeeded where others had failed is unclear. Chinese sources emphasise that in 1911 the river Yangtze had overflowed its banks, killing close to 100,000 and taking with it numbers of troops around Wuchang. Rumours swelled that this signified the Emperor’s had lost the mandate of heaven. Perhaps. But by early February in 1912 all of the provinces had declared themselves and the Manchu Emperors who had conquered China and lasted over 250 years were gone. 

On the downside from this day on there was not much good news for the peasantry in whose name the revolution had been conducted. This failure to deliver was all the more tragic because, in simple terms anyway, peasants joined the Communists because of the promise of land distribution. The losing Nationalists had talked of addressing social injustice, it is true, but that was more in the days of Sun Yat-sen. After Dr Sun's death in the 1920s the Nationalists attraction to peasantry was less obvious. After the Yangtze river was crossed by Communists, reaching first Nanking and then Beijing, the peasantry lost their inhibitions and sided solidly with Mao Ze-dong.

Official views expressed in the 1980s where that Mao was basically correct until the late 1950s, which is to say about a decade after this day, but thereafter went seriously awry with first the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. By most reckonings several tens of millions lost their lives during these two successive tragedies and one controversial record put the death toll as high as 70 million.

The tragedy that the Communists created stunned the world. As one worrying insight to Mao’s philosophy he once ruled thus: ‘The more chaos you dish up and the longer it goes on, the better.’ This almost anarchic attitude was frequently stressed over years by newspapers like Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) and Hong qi (Red Flag). Later Mao made some apologies but only after a fashion. He said in 1958 about evaluating the revolutionary chaos sweeping China: '… if you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel the much better for it.' 

This most decisive of China's recent revolutions was also the least violent. In large measure this was because Deng Xiao-ping favoured gradualism and only scattered his authority with a tempered hand. Rather than direction he preferred adages, as repeated on this day, that whether a cat is black or white makes little difference provided it catches mice. People could work out what it meant. Stapled to this pragmatism was a variety of canny ideas like the Special Economic Zones where liberalism and (diluted) shareholder capitalism could be observed at a safe distance.

Shrewdly Deng made sure that he varied his signals to the rest of China. Mr Deng especially made sure the iconoclastic and authoritarian Mao, who died in 1976, lingered around public consciousness. This resolve ran continually to the Tiananmen incident of 1989 when several hundred pro-democracy protestors were killed in Beijing under the portrait of Mao. The symbolism was powerful. Thus under Deng most of China knew that dramatic reform would almost always be a damp squib; the memory of Mao would not be lost.

Thus it was little surprise that as well as a firm hand inside China an iron grip over Tibet never relented under Mr Deng and old European city states in the south were secured under the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula (Hong Kong and Macau). When Taiwan looked to be inching towards a formal declaration of independence Deng launched missiles into the Taiwan Straits as a symbol of Communist displeasure. Like the Tiananmen killings under the portrait of Mao the message was powerfully direct.  

Mercurial and feisty to his marrow Deng had come and gone and then come again, and done it all again for good measure, before becoming head of state. Regardless of the perfidy he faced in his own life Deng realised by the 1970s that economic revolution was best initiated gingerly and when things were going well elsewhere. He therefore started reforming parts of the agricultural sector almost exactly as diplomatic relations with the United States revived (as an insight to priorities in Beijing of the time the normalisation of the frosty relations with the USSR only appeared in the late 1980s). Shortly after Mao’s death Deng ensured China pulled back from its ill-planned invasion of Vietnam in 1979 rather than make a bad decision worse. 

Most deft of all Deng's revolution was based on a crafty network of predators. This ensured the revolution went top-down rather than bottom-up. Commercially this centred around ‘ITICs’ – officially supported capitalist conglomerates dabbling in just about everything. Although Deng removed himself from direct power in the early 1990s carefully selected political protégés like Jiang Ze-min in Beijing and Zhu Rong-ji in Shanghai played out this philosophy. Deng's determination that elites run the show lingered behind the scenes.