What 1911 means to Chinese
Sure, you have to be a history reader of Asia to know what 1911 means to China and to Chinese.
The Manchus (originally the Jurchen tribes) once ruled a portion of northeastern China as the foreign Chin dynasty, alongside another foreign dynasty, Xia Xia, and the native Chinese Song Dynasty to the south. Genghis Khan and the mongols destroyed the Jurchen Chin dynasty.
The Chinese regained control of China under the brilliant, famous Ming Dynasty from Mongol control and for the next 260 years ruled the Chinese empire.
But like a phoenix rising from its ashes, the Jurchens arose again, unified and became the Manchus of Manchuria. Unlike their ancestor Chin Dynasty, the Manchurians were not content to establish a dynasty in one-third of China. This time they would take it all, which they did. For the next two-hundred and forty years China entered its own Dark Ages.
True, for the first one-hundred years, the Manchurian China grew to its largest extent ever, finally extinguishing the two-thousand year Mongol threat. The troublesome Tibetan empire on its southwestern flank was absorbed. But the Chinese were still an conquerored people in their occupied homeland. Chinese civilization, culture, trade, commerce, technological advance, sciences, all went into decline. By the time the Europeans entered China, the Chinese were a superstitious, backward, pig-tailed race of people. The pigtail was a galling embarassment to modern Chinese. The shaven male head adorned with a long pigtail is an ancient northeast Asian tradition, but not indigenous to ancient Chinese. The shaven head and pigtail even migrated eastward with ancient northeastern Asians into North America which was the hairstyle of the Iroquois, Mohawks, and others. The Chinese however, learned to cope with shaven heads and pigtails and it became part of their culture, even though the white people never stopped ridiculing the Chinese for that hairstyle, even today. The ancient Chinese men wore a hairstyle that would be recognized in America as the 'librarian' hairdo, most recognized from the 40s and 50s, the hair worn long then pulled tightly behind and rolled up into a bun or ball. The ancient Germans had a similar hairstyle known as the Suebian knot.
Okay, maybe I might be boring you by now. To make a long story short, 1911 was when China finally threw off the yoke of foreign Asian occupation, the Manchus. In the ensuing few years, China stood briefly on the brink of establishing a new Chinese dynasty under corrupt warlord, Yuan Shi-Kai. But the clock could not be turned back and in the early twentieth century monarchies were on the decline as ideals of democracies and self-government by the people took hold around many parts of the world. 1911 was somewhat anticlimatic. By then the Manchu Qing dynasty was defunct in all but name. Foreign western powers were largely in control of almost all of China except its deep western hinterlands. Only World War I and World War II, where the Western powers destroyed one another, freed China completely. Regrettably, in the ensuing civil war for Chinese control of China, the communists won and that is where China is today.