Huang Xing

Early Years and the Huaxinghui

Huang Xing, originally named Huang Zhen, courtesy name Keqiang, was born in 1874 in Shanhua county, Changsha prefecture, Hunan. He began studying with his father at five and passed the county-level civil examination at 22. In the spring of 1902 he was selected by the Huguang governor-general Zhang Zhidong to study in Japan, enrolling in the teacher-training course of the Kōbun Institute in Tokyo. Returning in 1903, he taught at the Mingde and Jingzheng schools in Changsha and gathered Chen Tianhua, Song Jiaoren and some twenty others to found the revolutionary Huaxinghui (China Revival Society), which chose him as its head. The society planned a rising in Changsha for the Empress Dowager’s seventieth birthday the following autumn; Huang sold his family’s land to fund it. When the plan leaked he fled to Japan.

The Revolutionary Alliance and the Uprisings

In 1905 Huang met Sun Yat-sen for the first time in Japan; about twenty days later the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui) was founded, and Huang proposed that Sun be acclaimed its leader without an election. Thereafter Sun raised support abroad while Huang acted inside China, repeatedly serving as field commander of uprisings. When the two quarrelled over a national flag—Sun favouring the Blue Sky with a White Sun, Huang a design based on the character jing—Huang angrily threatened to leave the Alliance, but in every military action he later commanded he used Sun’s flag, and he sided with Sun whenever factions within the Alliance turned against him. In the summer of 1908, after defeat at Hekou in Yunnan, he was deported from Hanoi to Singapore, with a Qing bounty of 5,000 dollars on his head. After the failure of the Guangzhou (Huanghuagang) uprising in 1911 he escaped to Hong Kong and for a time resolved to assassinate the Qing commander Li Zhun at the cost of his own life, until Sun and others dissuaded him.

The 1911 Revolution: From Hanyang to Nanjing

After the Wuchang Uprising Huang reached Wuhan on 28 October. On 3 November he was made commander-in-chief of the revolutionary forces; on the 16th he led a crossing of the Han River to counterattack Hankou, failed, and fell back on Hanyang; Qing forces attacked Hanyang on the 21st and took it on the 27th, and the revolutionaries withdrew to Wuchang. On 4 December the delegates of the independent provinces remaining in Shanghai elected him generalissimo with sixteen votes, with Li Yuanhong as deputy with fifteen; when Li objected, Huang declined on the 17th, and the posts were reversed, with Huang acting on Li’s behalf. During the north–south negotiations, through Wang Jingwei’s mediation, Huang replied on 9 December that if Yuan Shikai joined the revolutionaries in swiftly overthrowing the Qing, they would certainly elect him president of the Republic.

When the Provisional Government was founded in Nanjing in January 1912 Huang became Minister of the Army and Chief of the General Staff, holding, as a contemporary put it, all military power in his hands and leading the ministries in all but name. He resigned when Sun stepped down as provisional president. He declined Yuan Shikai’s appointment as chief of the general staff on 30 March and accepted the post of Nanjing Resident-General on the 31st only after repeated urging by Tang Shaoyi and others. On 14 June, having completed the handover, he announced his resignation and left Nanjing. When the Nationalist Party was formed in August he became one of its directors.

The Song Case and the Second Revolution

Huang was accompanying Song Jiaoren into Shanghai station when Song was shot on 20 March 1913. Afterwards he pressed for a legal solution: with the Jiangsu governor Cheng Dequan and others he inspected, sealed and published the correspondence seized from Ying Kuicheng’s house, and he called for a special court, accepting trial by the Shanghai District Court when the Ministry of Justice blocked the proposal. The Fudan historian Dai Angang notes that after the killing Sun favoured armed opposition to Yuan while Huang favoured the legal route. When the Second Revolution broke out in July, Huang went from Shanghai to Nanjing on the 14th, forced the Jiangsu governor to declare independence and became commander-in-chief of the Jiangsu Anti-Yuan Army. After its defeat, with a price on his head, he fled to Japan.

Exile in America and Final Years

Sun blamed the defeat on disobedient party members, Huang above all, and formed the Chinese Revolutionary Party, which required members to swear personal obedience to him. Sun repeatedly asked Huang to be its deputy leader; Huang firmly refused, and also criticised the alliance terms Sun offered Japan in seeking its support. To avoid deepening the rift, Huang left Japan for the United States and was already at sea when the new party was founded on 8 July 1914. In America he did not speak publicly of his differences with Sun, and when supporters urged him to form a party of his own he replied that Sun Yat-sen was the only leader.

After Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915, Huang left San Francisco for Japan in 1916 at Sun’s request, and after Yuan’s death returned to Shanghai, where his first call was on Sun. He died at his residence on Route Ferguson in Shanghai on 31 October 1916. Sun alone signed the announcement of his death sent to supporters at home and abroad.