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Doubt has recently been cast on the comment attributed to Zhou Enlai that it was too early to judge the outcome of the French Revolution: it now seems that when he said it was too early to tell, he may have meant 1968 and not 1789.1 Yet, even if Zhou's reluctance to weigh in on the storming of the Bastille no longer has such an air of mystery about it, there is another more recent revolutionary event on which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not yet been able to stamp a definitive set of meanings: the Xinhai revolution (Xinhai geming ...é©...) of 1911. Nor is the Party the only entity that still harbours doubts about the events of that autumn now a century distant: significant thinkers and activists have also remained hesitant in their final judgement on it or have even dismissed it altogether. In 1995, Liu Zaifu ...å[dagger]... and Li Zehou æ...ås, both distinguished Marxist critics, published their controversial book Farewell to Revolution,2 which argued in disillusioned fashion against the legacy of China's 20th-century revolutions, provoking equal ire from social activists and official critics in Beijing. In contrast, one of the most influential public intellectuals in China today, Wang Hui ..., has written repeatedly that China's revolutionary history should be neither forgotten nor misunderstood, and restates the validity of China's revolutionary path, without excusing its many failures.3 These positions provide two useful intellectual poles between which to debate the future (and past) of the Chinese revolution. For on its 100th anniversary, the role of one of the iconic events on that path, the 1911 revolution, in these debates still remains vague and unformed.
Anniversaries have regularly caused trouble for the Chinese authorities, whether 1949 or 1989, but the anniversaries marked in 2011 have been less immediately politically problematic. The 90th anniversary of the founding of the CCP on 1 July 2011 gave rise to a predictable range of party encomia. The centenary of the Xinhai revolution of October 1911, however, presents a different sort of problem, not so much of a difficult or controversial event that needs to be smoothed over, but rather of a historical vessel which is still, a hundred...