When you think Chi­nese Rev­o­lu­tion, sure­ly you think of Mao Zedong and the People’s Repub­lic com­ing to pow­er in 1949, a his­to­ry that over­shad­ows an ear­li­er seis­mic event that over­threw the last impe­r­i­al dynasty and brought the short-lived Repub­lic of Chi­na into being. If your sense of this his­to­ry is some­what vague, you’re not alone—even those who know the events and the prin­ci­ple actors well are hes­i­tant to ascribe any defin­i­tive inter­pre­ta­tions to the 1911, or Xin­hai, Rev­o­lu­tion. “Sig­nif­i­cant thinkers and activists have… remained hes­i­tant in their final judg­ment on it,” writes Oxford University’s Rana Mit­ter: “Its mean­ing con­tin­ues to be high­ly con­test­ed… sep­a­rat­ed from any one path of his­tor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion.”

There is a gen­er­al con­sen­sus, at least, among his­to­ri­ans of the peri­od and con­tem­po­rary chron­i­clers alike that the Xin­hai Rev­o­lu­tion was fore­most a strug­gle to mod­ern­ize the coun­try and get free of colo­nial­ist encroach­ments on Chi­nese self-deter­mi­na­tion. As in Rus­sia around the same time, the con­cept of polit­i­cal mod­ern­iza­tion had many dif­fer­ent mean­ings to the com­pet­ing fac­tions seek­ing to sup­plant the mori­bund impe­r­i­al sys­tem.

“Some hoped for a con­sti­tu­tion­al frame­work, i.e., par­lia­men­tary monar­chy,” notes Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas pro­fes­sor Anna M. Cien­ciala, “while oth­ers worked for a demo­c­ra­t­ic repub­lic. Most want­ed the abo­li­tion of the feu­dal-Con­fu­cian sys­tem; all want­ed the abo­li­tion of for­eign priv­i­lege and the uni­fi­ca­tion of their vast coun­try.”

This last hope would be dashed. The strongest fac­tion suc­ceed­ed in gain­ing sup­port from wealthy Chi­nese liv­ing abroad, who fund­ed the efforts of rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader Sun Yat-sen, a med­ical doc­tor raised in Hawaii who began in the late 19th cen­tu­ry “to devote him­self to polit­i­cal work for the over­throw of the Qing Dynasty” in order to “cre­ate a strong, uni­fied, mod­ern, Chi­nese repub­lic” with a social­ist econ­o­my. Despite sup­port from the mil­i­tary, the Repub­lic estab­lished in 1912 “proved a mis­er­able fail­ure,” Cien­ciala argues, and the coun­try frag­ment­ed under the rule of var­i­ous war­lords, then suf­fered through sev­er­al more upheavals and an attempt­ed Qing restora­tion in the ensu­ing decades while the Com­mu­nists con­sol­i­dat­ed pow­er.

Look­ing back at the events at the time, his­to­ri­an Peter Zarrow has attempt­ed to trace “the moment when the Wuchang Upris­ing became the ‘rev­o­lu­tion’… that is when gen­er­al opin­ion began to regard it as a move­ment that could over­throw the Qing and estab­lish a new gov­ern­ment.” Opin­ions were large­ly shaped, he writes, by Shang­hai news­pa­pers cov­er­ing what Bri­tan­ni­ca Blog calls “a hasti­ly and local­ly orga­nized mutiny” that first began in one of the three areas that make up the city of Wuhan. In cre­at­ing the nar­ra­tive of events, news agen­cies “imme­di­ate­ly print­ed illus­trat­ed sheets for a Chi­nese pub­lic avid for the lat­est news.” So writes the Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Dig­i­tal Library, who house a col­lec­tion of 30 such prints, like­ly “based on upon artists’ imag­i­na­tion.”

News agency reports of the Wuchang Upris­ing and sub­se­quent bat­tles in cities across Chi­na “gen­er­al­ly sup­port the Rev­o­lu­tion as a mod­ern­iz­ing par­ty, and hence some demo­niza­tion of the ene­my occurs in the prints, as was usu­al for pro­pa­gan­da prints of that and ear­li­er peri­ods.” What is notable is the degree to which broad themes of “moder­ni­ty” and “nation” show up, cre­at­ing a tri­umphant sense of uni­ty that seems to have been exag­ger­at­ed.

But this is the way pro­pa­gan­da works, in 1911 and today—“manufacturing con­sent,” to take Noam Chomsky’s phrase. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to see it work in images that seem so quaint to us today, but which, at the time, pushed for­ward a rev­o­lu­tion­ary break with over two thou­sand years of dynas­tic rule.

See many more of these images at Princeton’s Dig­i­tal Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

14,000 Free Images from the French Rev­o­lu­tion Now Avail­able Online

Chi­na: Tra­di­tions and Trans­for­ma­tions (A Free Har­vard Course) 

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Dada demands expla­na­tion, yet it some­how also demands not to be explained. In the near­ly 102 years since its incep­tion, many attempts at sum­ma­ry and analy­sis of that ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean avant-garde move­ment have emerged; as you can see in the relat­ed links at the bot­tom of the post, we’ve fea­tured a fair few of them here on Open Cul­ture. But to tru­ly under­stand Dada, you must, to the extent pos­si­ble, get inside the heads of its founders, and one short­cut to that artis­ti­cal­ly rich des­ti­na­tion takes the form of some­thing any move­ment worth its salt — espe­cial­ly any ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean avant-garde move­ment — will have drawn up: its man­i­festo.

“The mag­ic of a word – Dada – which has brought jour­nal­ists to the gates of a world unfore­seen, is of no impor­tance to us,” wrote Roman­ian-French essay­ist, poet, and per­for­mance artist Tris­tan Tzara almost exact­ly a cen­tu­ry ago.

To put out a man­i­festo you must want: ABC

to ful­mi­nate against 1, 2, 3

to fly into a rage and sharp­en your wings to con­quer and dis­sem­i­nate lit­tle abcs and big ABCs, to sign, shout, swear, to orga­nize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evi­dence, to prove your non plus ultra and main­tain that nov­el­ty resem­bles life just as the lat­est-appear­ance of some whore proves the essence of God. His exis­tence was pre­vi­ous­ly proved by the accor­dion, the land­scape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a nat­ur­al thing — hence deplorable.

In this Dada Man­i­festo of March 23, 1918 (read it online here), Tzara goes on to define “Dada” as “a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bour­geois is a lit­tle play­wright, who invents dif­fer­ent sub­jects and who, instead of sit­u­at­ing suit­able char­ac­ters on the lev­el of his own intel­li­gence, like chrysalis­es on chairs, tries to find caus­es or objects (accord­ing to whichev­er psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic method he prac­tices) to give weight to his plot, a talk­ing and self-defin­ing sto­ry.” And fur­ther down, just in case you haven’t quite got the pic­ture: “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.”

Dif­fer­ent trans­la­tions of Tzara’s words, of which you can hear read­ings in the videos at the top of the post and just above, put it some­what dif­fer­ent­ly: “Dada means noth­ing,” says anoth­er. But what­ev­er it means, exact­ly — or does­n’t mean, exact­ly — Dada burned bright­ly enough dur­ing its brief hey­day to pro­duce not just one man­i­festo, but two. “As in every human endeav­or when two strong per­son­al­i­ties meet, opin­ions may clash and an argu­ment often ensues,” writes Eli Ana­pur at Wide­walls. The Ger­man writer Hugo Ball actu­al­ly wrote his own Dada man­i­festo before Tzara did, in 1916. “Both Man­i­festos are expla­na­tions of the Dada move­ment and its goals, but the con­tent dif­fers as long as the modes of spread­ing the move­ment through­out Europe and ulti­mate­ly world, were con­cerned.”

Ball begins by describ­ing Dada as “a new ten­den­cy in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew any­thing about it, and tomor­row every­one in Zurich will be talk­ing about it.” For the word itself he cites sev­er­al dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tions: “In French it means ‘hob­by horse.’ In Ger­man it means ‘good-by,’ ‘Get off my back,’ ‘Be see­ing you some­time.’ In Roman­ian: ‘Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, def­i­nite­ly, right.’ ” Yet what a use­ful word it can be:

How does one achieve eter­nal bliss? By say­ing dada. How does one become famous? By say­ing dada. With a noble ges­ture and del­i­cate pro­pri­ety. Till one goes crazy. Till one los­es con­scious­ness. How can one get rid of every­thing that smacks of jour­nal­ism, worms, every­thing nice and right, blink­ered, moral­is­tic, euro­peanized, ener­vat­ed? By say­ing dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawn­shop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr. Rubin­er, dada Mr. Kor­ro­di. Dada Mr. Anas­ta­sius Lilien­stein.

One hun­dred years on, the tenets of Dada may not look like an obvi­ous route to eter­nal bliss, fame, or the exci­sion of both­er­some ele­ments of life. But some­thing about the notion at the move­men­t’s core — of mov­ing rad­i­cal­ly beyond sense as a response to the state of the world — still res­onates today. The Europe of 1918 found itself in a bad spot, to put it mild­ly, but most of us in the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry also feel, at least occa­sion­al­ly, sur­round­ed by a real­i­ty that has lost its own sense. How much could it hurt to heed Ball and Tzara’s words and just say dada?

You can read Tzara’s man­i­festo at this Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Jour­nal That Pub­li­cized the Avant-Garde Move­ment a Cen­tu­ry Ago (1917–21)

The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anar­chic, Irra­tional “Anti-Art” Move­ment of Dadaism

Down­load 36 Dadaist Mag­a­zines from the The Dig­i­tal Dada Archive (Plus Oth­er Avant-Garde Books, Leaflets & Ephemera)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.