Song Jiaoren

Early Years and the Huaxinghui

Song Jiaoren, courtesy name Dunchu and pen name Yufu, was born in Taoyuan, Hunan, on 5 April 1882 and received a traditional education. At 21 he met Huang Xing in Wuchang, and the two became close friends. In 1904 he and Huang founded the revolutionary Huaxinghui (China Revival Society) in Changsha, and at the end of that year he went to Japan.

Study in Japan and the Revolutionary Alliance

In Japan Song co-founded the journal Twentieth-Century China and in 1905 entered Hōsei University in Tokyo, later moving to Waseda University. When the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui) was founded in Tokyo in August 1905, he became its chief procurator for judicial affairs and an editor of its organ, the Minbao. According to his diary, in 1906 he translated works on the constitutions and government systems of Japan, Britain, Russia, the United States, Germany and other countries. In the spring and summer of 1907 he went to Andong in Manchuria to recruit local armed bands for an attack on Fengtian, returning to Japan after it failed; there he later wrote The Jiandao Question, arguing that the Jiandao (Kando) and Yanji region belonged to China.

Song’s relations with Sun Yat-sen were uneasy. When Sun and Huang Xing quarrelled over the design of a national flag in February 1907, Song wrote in his diary that the flag was a minor matter and criticised an unnamed person for behaving autocratically; the name was omitted when the diary was published. He also shared the discontent with Sun that swept the Alliance that year, and when Sun returned to Tokyo in 1910, Song and others sought talks on reforming the organisation without result.

The Central China Bureau and the 1911 Revolution

After the failure of the New Army uprising in Guangzhou in early 1910, Song argued for shifting the revolution’s centre to the Yangzi valley, setting out three strategies—a rising in the capital, simultaneous risings in the Yangzi provinces, or risings in the border regions—and proposed a central China branch of the Alliance. Returning to Shanghai at the end of 1910, he wrote extensively under the pen name Yufu. On 31 July 1911 he, Tan Renfeng and Chen Qimei founded the Alliance’s Central China Bureau in Shanghai, with Song as general secretary. After the Wuchang Uprising he went to Wuhan with Huang Xing and, with Ju Zheng and others, drafted the Provisional Constitution of Hubei (E-zhou). When the Provisional Government was formed in Nanjing he headed its Legislative Bureau.

Minister of Agriculture and Forestry and the Nationalist Party

On 30 March 1912 Song became Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in Tang Shaoyi’s cabinet, arriving in Beijing in early April and living in the Changchun Hall at the Agricultural Experiment Station. After Tang was removed as premier on 27 June, Song tendered his resignation on 8 July and was relieved of office on 14 July. He then devoted himself to party organisation: on 25 August the Revolutionary Alliance merged with the United Republican Party, the National Public Party and others at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing to form the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), with Sun Yat-sen as chairman and Song as acting chairman in charge of party affairs. He advocated a responsible cabinet formed by the majority party in parliament as a check on presidential power.

At the end of 1912 Song left Beijing to visit his family in Hunan, speaking at Nationalist gatherings in Hubei, Hunan, Shanghai and Zhejiang and criticising the Yuan Shikai government. In the first parliamentary elections the Nationalists became the largest party in both houses, and Song was regarded as the party’s choice to form a cabinet.

Political Ideas

While in Japan Song had already thought systematically about party politics. In a critique of the platforms of contemporary parties he argued that a platform was the most important element of a political party and that no party with a poor platform could survive in political life. He held that overthrowing the Qing had completed only a racial revolution; what was needed next was a political revolution making the citizens the subject of state politics—pursued not by force but by winning elections and forming a responsible cabinet within the framework of the Provisional Constitution. The Nationalist platform he drafted proposed that the premier be elected by and answerable to the House of Representatives, with the president bearing no responsibility. In June 1912, after Alliance members left the cabinet, Yuan Shikai replied to the Alliance in the Minli bao, praising Song’s talent as surpassing that of his peers.

Assassination

On the evening of 20 March 1913 Song was shot at the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway station in Shanghai as he set out for Beijing, and was taken to the railway hospital. Before he died he entrusted Yu Youren, who was at his side, with three requests—to donate all his books to the Nanjing Library, to ask his comrades to look after his elderly mother, and to urge the living to keep striving—and asked Huang Xing to draft a final telegram to Yuan Shikai urging the president to act with sincerity and fairness, to protect the people’s rights and to let parliament establish a lasting constitution. He died in the early hours of 22 March.

Letters and telegrams seized from the house of Ying Kuicheng, who had hired the gunman, implicated Hong Shuzu, a secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, and Premier Zhao Bingjun, and the case became a key background to the break between the Nationalists and Yuan Shikai and the Second Revolution. Who ordered the killing remains disputed: earlier interpretations have blamed Yuan Shikai, Zhao Bingjun or Chen Qimei, while the Peking University historian Shang Xiaoming concludes in Re-examining the Song Case that the mastermind was Hong Shuzu. Song was buried in Shanghai; his tomb stands in what is now Zhabei Park.