this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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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