The Provincial Elite in Shantung During the Republican Period

Abstract

The 1911 revolution created a situation in China in which a major restructuring of Chinese society became inevitable. The class most capable in terms of experience, education, and recognized social leadership to accomplish these changes was the gentry. This article examines how the upper strata of the Chinese gentry in Shantung exercised political and community leadership in the period from 1850 to 1950. The Qing period (1 644-1911) saw an increasing commercial orientation of the gentry class, combined with an increasing preference for urban residence. Although rural ties became reinforced through militia organizations during the great rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century, these connections had atrophied by the end of the century. In the first decades of the twentieth century, under the impetus of the late Qing reforms, the gentry greatly expanded their political and social power, increasingly focusing their attention on the control of political and economic institutions in their own places of residence. In practice this meant centering attention in provincial capitals