ABSTRACT
The Anfu regime (1918–20) in Republican China has often been regarded as a vile presence, being a clientelist grouping formed of compromised politicians who possessed neither the vision and the will nor the means to develop the country. This chapter is one of several to be released with the aim of rectifying this historical verdict based on rarely used or newly discovered documents. It concerns the birth of the Anfu regime, or more precisely, the “Progressive-Anfu System” after the “Corrective Revolution” of July 1917, in which General Duan Qirui toppled the Manchu restoration attempt and restored the Republic. Since 1912–1913, Duan's political ally, Liang Qichao, had been making arguments similar to those of François Guizot, envisioning a political order that constitutionally empowers the mandarin-literati class to take the reins of the Republic, in order to pave the way for the traditional elites to transform themselves into an industrializing elite. The political chaos of 1916–17, in which multiple factions engaged in a power grab, gave pluralism a very bad name; the “Progressive-Anfu System” provided for a monolithic party regime that would have become the stable foundations upon which massive industrialization could take place. Mention is made particularly of the Senate reform bill which would have turned it into East Asia's first corporatist parliamentary chamber, based on the advocacies of German (and Swiss) jurists Johann Caspar Bluntschli and Albert Schäffle. The Anfu Club itself was mostly formed of men who had studied abroad. It possessed a coherent internal structure including a Club Council (Central Committee) and a Political Investigation Committee (policy think tank), and planned on building provincial and prefectural branches. The Club was internally corporatist, with its sub-sections representing different factions and professional strata. The Anfu regime possessed all the prerequisites to becoming a successful developmentalist single-party state, the first in East Asia.
