this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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In what timeline did the Chinese communists overthrow the monarchy?
The first communist party branch in China did not even exist until the 1920s, after the Russian Revolution, and years after the fall of the Qing dynasty.
When the CPC defeated the KMT and took power, it had been 38 years since Puyi had been an emperor (except as some sort of a figurehead under the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo). Nearly two generations of people had grown up without living under monarchy.
The situation was vastly different than the Soviet Union, where Russia transitioned from an imperial power with a Tsar straight into a socialist state.
I think the main thing is that it's a joke, and Puyi was still nominally a little emperor even though you are of course correct that he was just a puppet.
Puyi was a nominal figurehead of the puppet state Manchukuo put up by the Japanese during the occupation, which is in the northeast (Manchuria).
The rest of China had been a Republic since 1911. The point being that there was a 40-year gap between the fall of Qing and the communist taking power. By 1949, nobody gave a damn about the Qing empire, as opposed to the Bolshevik revolution when collective memory of living under the Tsarist rule was still fresh in people’s mind.
The Russian communists did not overthrow the monarchy either.
Edit made after the xiaohongshu made their reply:
As I noted in the reply I made l further down, the bolsheviks replaced the government that replaced the government that overthrew Nicholas. But it also should be noted that Prince Lvov (The first head of state and government after the abdication of Nicholas) was a Kadet who became a Progressists which means that at the time of the revolution he was part of a constitutional monarchist and economic liberal party and abandoned the revolution when it became clear it was republican in nature rather than merely replacing Nicholas with someone competent, and that Kerensky's government and not the monarchy formed the core around which the white movement was initially organised
They still took over the country immediately after the Russian monarchy ended, as opposed to the situation in China where someone born in 1911 would have been nearly 40 years old with grown up kids and they all have no material connection, not even nostalgia, to the Qing monarchy when the CPC finally took power.
The communists overthrew the government that replaced the government that overthrew the monarchy. The Bolsheviks were certainly not monarchists, but it is worth bearing in mind that everyone wanted the Romanovs gone, including at least one Romanov who joined in the movement to overthrow Nicholas.
You’re not getting my point. There was a 40-year gap between the fall of Qing in 1911 and the communists taking power in 1949, at which point nobody gave a damn about the Qing empire anymore.
The Bolshevik situation was very different. Many people living under the new socialist state still had collective memory of living under a Tsarist rule. In China, at least two generations of people had been living under a Republic when the communists came to power.
Your point was that the Chinese Communists did not overthrow the emperor as indeed they would not have been in a position to do so, and I'm telling you that the Russian communists did not overthrow the tsar either, as they were not in a position to do so. There was no direct transition to a socialist state. The liberals remained in power for months, after which the Bolsheviks fought a civil war in which whether or not Russia had a functional state was kind of an open question, transitioning into the NEP, transitioning into socialism.
The two situations are vastly different, but not in the way you originally claimed.
Also, if we care about such distinctions, the Republican government and the KMT recognised Puyi as being Qing emperor until 1924, not 1911. The Articles of Favourable Treatment explicitly recognises the Qing emperor as emperor, just not as ruling China.
I don’t know why we’re splitting hairs here.
Maybe I did not iterate my point well enough above, but what I’m saying is that communists taking power in the span of months (when the memory of Tsarist rule was still very much fresh in the people’s mind) is very different from the communists taking power after two whole generations of people had grown up living under a Republic who barely had any memory of living under the Qing emperors.
Hairs are being split because you are the one splitting them my comrade