The last Emperor of China, Yuan Shikai, abdicates the throne and the Republic of China is restored.
Yuan Shikai (Chinese: ; pinyin: Yun Shki; 16 September 1859 6 June 1916) was a Chinese military and government official who rose to power during the late Qing dynasty and eventually ended the Qing dynasty rule of China in 1912, later becoming the Emperor of China. He first 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 during the last years of the Qing dynasty before forcing the abdication of the Xuantong Emperor, the last monarch of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Through negotiation, he became the first President of the Republic of China in 1912. This army and bureaucratic control were the foundation of his autocratic rule. In 1915 he attempted to restore the hereditary monarchy in China, with himself as the Hongxian Emperor (Chinese: ). His death in 1916 shortly after his abdication led to the fragmentation of the Chinese political system and the end of the Beiyang government as China's central authority.
The Emperor of China, or Huángdì (Chinese: 皇帝), was the monarch of China during the imperial period of Chinese history. In traditional Chinese political theory, the emperor was considered the Son of Heaven and the autocrat of All under Heaven. Under the Han dynasty, Confucianism replaced Legalism as the official political theory and succession theoretically followed agnatic primogeniture. The succession of emperors in a paternal family line constituted a dynasty.
The absolute authority of the emperor came with a variety of governing duties and moral obligations; failure to uphold these was thought to remove the dynasty's Mandate of Heaven and to justify its overthrow. In practice, emperors sometimes avoided the strict rules of succession and dynasties' ostensible "failures" were detailed in official histories written by their successful replacements. The power of the emperor was also limited by the imperial bureaucracy, which was staffed by scholar-officials and in some dynasties eunuchs. An emperor was also constrained by filial obligations to his ancestors' policies and dynastic traditions, such as those detailed in the Ming dynasty's Ancestral Instructions.