page_title: Yuan Shikai
section_title: Evaluation and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Yuan Shikai / Evaluation and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: The villa of Yuan Shikai in Tianjin, at the area now known as the "Austrian Style Walkway"
context_page_description: Yuan Shikai was a Chinese military and government official who rose to power during the late Qing dynasty, and He was also the Emperor of the Empire of China. He tried to save the dynasty with a number of modernization projects including bureaucratic, fiscal, judicial, educational, and other reforms, despite playing a key part in the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform. He established the first modern army and a more efficient provincial government in North China in the last years of the Qing dynasty before the abdication of the Xuantong Emperor, the last monarch of the Qing dynasty, in 1912. Through negotiation, he became the first official president of the Republic of China in 1912. This army and bureaucratic control were the foundation of his autocratic rule as the first formal President of the Republic of China. He was frustrated in a short-lived attempt to restore hereditary monarchy in China, with himself as the Hongxian Emperor. His death shortly after his abdication formalized the fragmentation of the Chinese political system and the end of the Beiyang government as China's central authority.
context_section_description: Historians in China have considered Yuan's rule mostly negatively. He introduced far-ranging modernizations in law and social areas, and trained and organized one of China's first modern armies. But the loyalty Yuan had fostered in the armed forces dissolved after
  his death, undermining the authority of the central government. Yuan financed his regime through large foreign loans, and is criticized for weakening Chinese morale and international prestige, and for allowing the Japanese to gain broad concessions over China.
  Jonathan Spence, however, notes in his influential survey that Yuan was "ambitious, both for his country and for himself", and that "even as he subverted the constitution, paradoxically he sought to build on late-Qing attempts at reforms and to develop institutions that would bring strong and stable government to China." To gain foreign confidence and end the hated system of extraterritoriality, Yuan strengthened the court system and invited foreign advisers to reform the penal system.
  After Yuan's death, there was an effort by Li Yuanhong to revive the Republic by recalling the legislators who had been ejected in 1913, but this effort was confused and ineffective in asserting central control. Li lacked any support from the military. There was a short-lived effort in 1917 to revive the Qing dynasty led by the loyalist general Zhang Xun, but his forces were defeated by rival warlords later that year.
  After the collapse of Zhang's movement, all pretense of strength from the central government collapsed, and China descended into a period of warlordism. Over the next several decades, the offices of both the president and parliament became the tools of militarists, and the politicians in Peking became dependent on regional governors for their support and political survival. For this reason, Yuan is sometimes called "the Father of the Warlords". However, it is not accurate to attribute China's subsequent age of warlordism as a personal preference, since in his career as a military reformer he had attempted to forge a modern army based on the Japanese model. Throughout his lifetime, he demonstrated an understanding of staffing, military education, and regular transfers of officer personnel, combining these skills to create China's first modern military organisation. After his return to power in 1911, however, he seemed willing to sacrifice his legacy of military reform for imperial ambitions, and instead ruled by a combination of violence and bribery that destroyed the idealism of the early Republican movement.
  In the CCTV Production Towards the Republic, Yuan is portrayed through most of his early years as an able administrator, although a very skilled manipulator of political situations. His self-proclamation as Emperor is largely depicted as being influenced by external forces, especially that of his son, prince Yuan Keding.
  A bixi (stone tortoise) with a stele in honor of Yuan Shikai, which was installed in Anyang's Huanyuan Park soon after his death, was (partly) restored in 1993.
caption: The villa of Yuan in Tianjin
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