History of the Republic of China
On the other hand, since the failure of the Second Revolution, Sun Yat-sen and his allies were trying to rebuild the revolutionary movement. In July 1914 Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party (). He felt that his failures at building a consistent revolutionary movement stemmed from the lack of cohesiveness among its members. To that end, Sun required that party members to be totally loyal to Sun and follow a series of rather harsh rules. Some of his earlier associates, including Huang Xing, balked at the idea of such authoritarian organization and refused to join Sun. However, they agreed that the republic must not revert to imperial rule.
Modern Chinese poetry
Modern Chinese poetry developed within a context of major socio-political changes, and some of the poets were directly involved with these as members or leaders of some of the parties involved in consciously influencing the course of historical developments. The nineteenth century had been one of upset to traditional Chinese ideas and institutions, as China went through a period of successive loss of sovereign control and self-determination as a nation and internal struggles for political power of an often violent military nature. The First Opium War (1839–42) fought between Great Britain and China resulted in the Treaty of Nanking (1842), which ceded Chinese control of five treaty ports and all of Hong Kong Island to the British. After the Second Opium War (1856 to 1860), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), and other conflicts China had lost control of important parts of its territory to Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Russia, Portugal, Germany, and other colonial powers, which are documented in a series of unequal treaties: these areas included all of Taiwan and many of the most important eastern cities. In the meantime, various rebellions (or civil war) arose, included among other were the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864) and the Boxer Rebellion (1898–1901), and although the latter of which was largely directed against foreign powers and influence, both showed the weakness of the Qing court. These nineteenth century events in China resulted in an aftermath in which tens of millions of the population had died during the various conflicts, a significant part of the cultural legacy of China having been looted or destroyed (for example the Old Summer Palace and its contents, including the burning of the library), and that the Qing government increasingly having been viewed as less and less viable as a political institution, together with the Qing experiencing a demonstrable and ongoing erosion of territorial control.