Today, October 10, is the one hundredth “Double Ten,” a hundred years on from the outbreak of China’s Xinhai Revolution. The revolution culminated, a few months later, in the founding of the Republic of China and abdication of the Emperor. There is an adequate Wikipedia entry here.
Double Ten is the National Day for Republican China, which is to say Taiwan. There is a big military parade scheduled in Taipei.
On the mainland, the ChiComs acknowledge Double Ten, but somewhat grudgingly. In ChiCom historiography the Xinhai was a “bourgeois revolution” — a nice try, but regrettably incomplete because not informed by the true revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninisn-Mao-Tse-tung-Thought.
My own view of the matter, argued endlessly across the Derb family dinner table, is that the Xinhai revolutionaries should have moved to constitutional monarchy, either retaining the Manchu Emperor or reinstating the previous Chinese dynasty, the Ming. Alas, as the Chinese saying has it, “the wood has been made into a boat.”