End of Qing and Establishment of the Republic
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Imperialist aggression had intensified during the late Qing and the Qing government, increasingly corrupt, was weak and helpless. Bourgeois democratic thinking gradually developed in the country, and bourgeois revolutionaries headed by Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) appeared. The founding of the Chinese Revolutionary League in 1905 market the beginning of a bourgeois revolutionary party in China. The revolutionaries carried out a series of bitter and heroic armed struggles against the Qing government. On October 10, 1911, an uprising in Wuchang, Hubei Province, succeeded and the next day a military government was established in the province. Other provinces in the south quickly followed suit, declaring their independence from the Qing. On January 1, 1912, the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was founded, with Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) as provisional president, and on February 12, 1912, the last Qing emperor Puyi announced his abdication, ending the feudal monarchic system that had ruled China for more than two thousand years.
Above paragraph and picture courtesy of China-Window.com