Chapter 21   The Imperial World Order, 1757-1914

While Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands extended their influence in southeast Asia, the great prize for European merchants was the China trade. By the early 1800s, European and American merchants were anxious to force open the Qing Empire to trade with the outside world. Japan was also opened to outside influences in the mid-1850s. Both China and Japan underwent enormous changes in response to western advances.

The Decline of the Qing Empire

By the late 1700s the Qing dynasty was decaying. The civil service system had grown so corrupt that wealthy parents could buy jobs for their sons, regardless of their abilities. This corruption led to a neglect of the basic functions of government. The ill-maintained dikes along the Yellow River allowed vast areas to flood in the mid-1800s, leaving millions of peasants without homes, their fields and livestock destroyed. The army fell apart, and bandits roamed the countryside.

            In addition, China’s population had grown at an alarming rate since the mid-1600s, partly due to new food crops from the Americas. Between 1750 and 1850, the population more than doubled to 430 million people.[151] Confronted by such rapid growth, the corrupt bureaucracy could not cope.

“Foreign devils.” China also faced new challenges from outside—particularly from the European “barbarians.” By the end of the 1700s, European merchants were eager to obtain Chinese goods. The British had become particularly interested in obtaining Chinese tea, which had become an enormously popular drink in Britain.[152]

            However, the ailing Qing dynasty feared foreign contacts. As an alien dynasty themselves (see page xxx), they were aware of the disruptive power of foreign influences. Moreover, the Chinese, who had little need for European products, saw the Europeans as barbarians. Among themselves, they referred to Europeans as fan-kei, or “foreign devils.”

            Under pressure from Europeans and some Chinese merchants, the Qing eventually permitted a strictly limited trade through the port city of Guangzhou. Only members of a tightly controlled merchant guild, the co-hong, could trade in Guangzhou, and they had to pay for Chinese goods with silver. However, European trade goods held little attraction for the Chinese, which created a great imbalance of trade in China’s favor.

The Opium War. Eventually, British and American merchants discovered a product that the Chinese would themselves pay silver to buy in increasingly large quantities—opium.[153] Western merchants bought opium from India, where opium poppies were legally grown, and smuggled it into China in exchange for silver.[154] They then used the silver to buy Chinese silks, teas, and other goods in Guangzhou. By the 1830s opium sales had grown so dramatically that the imbalance of trade had reversed itself, with huge amounts of silver flowing out of China into British pockets.[155]

            By the 1830s opium had created such health and economic problems in China that Chinese authorities tried to stop the opium trade. In 1839[156] Lin Zexu, the imperial commissioner sent to Guangzhou to end the illegal trade,[157] wrote a letter chastising Queen Victoria: 

“Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused.”[158 

However, the British were not easily dissuaded. So long as the Chinese insisted on being paid only with silver, powerful trading companies pressured the British government into military action to keep the opium trade alive,[159] and in 1839 the British launched the so-called Opium War. After three years of warfare, they crushed the Chinese and forced them to accept a humiliating treaty, which included the payment of a large war indemnity and the cession of the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain.[160]

            Even in the face of such defeat, however, the Chinese continued to drag their feet in implementing the terms of the treaty. In 1858 and 1860, the Europeans again used force to open China to the outside world.  In what became known as the Arrow War, named for China’s seizure of a ship named the Arrow, which was supposedly protected by the British flag, Britain, supported by France, once again invaded China. In 1860, combined British and French armies took Beijing itself. In retaliation for Chinese atrocities against envoys under a flag of truce, the British commander, Lord Elgin, ordered the destruction of the emperor’s splendid summer palace – some 90 square miles of pleasure park, palaces, temples, and other buildings. Although Elgin’s object was to show the Chinese people that he did not hold them responsible for the atrocities of the emperor, the act of retaliation only convinced all Chinese that the Europeans were indeed barbarians.

The unequal treaties. Meanwhile, with British gunboats threatening their coastal cities and European armies occupying their capital, the Chinese signed a series of treaties with Britain, France, the United States, and Russia. In addition to trading rights, these agreements gave Westerners extraterritoriality, or exemption from Chinese law.[161] They could only be tried in European courts under European law. The agreements became known as the “unequal treaties.” 

The Taiping rebellion. While China suffered direct European military intervention, western culture also fueled the discontent that many Chinese people felt toward their government. As the Qing continued to lose power and prestige to the Europeans, a southern Chinese man named Hong Xiuquan emerged to lead a rebellion.[162] Hong Xiuquan, who had been exposed to Christianity by missionaries, believed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and that God had commanded him to save mankind.[163]

            Hong Xiuquan preached a message of social equality, including equality for women, an end to foot-binding, and a call for strict moral behavior.[164] He and his followers rebelled against the Qing emperor in 1850 and proclaimed a new dynasty, Taiping, or “Heavenly Peace.”[165] The Taiping rebellion swept through nearly half of China.

            The Qing proved incapable of defending themselves. Eventually the desperate Chinese government appealed to the Europeans for help in suppressing the rebellion[166]—a move that only further eroded the prestige of the dynasty. Meanwhile, according to some estimates, over 20 million people may have died during the revolt.[167]

            The devastation left behind after the Taiping rebellion furthered weakened China’s position against the Europeans. In exchange for European assistance in stopping the bloodshed, the Chinese were forced to make economic agreements called concessions, which benefited Europeans.[168] More Chinese ports were opened to foreign trade and Catholic missionaries were given the right to buy land and build churches.[169] The traditional order of China was changing, for unlike earlier “barbarians,” the Europeans were forcing China to adopt aspects of their culture, rather than adopting Chinese culture themselves.

Chinese Responses to Western Influence

Both the series of foreign interventions and the Taiping rebellion finally convinced many Chinese scholar-officials that China could only be saved through reform. China underwent a major reform program, which became known as the Qing Restoration.[170]

            Major reform efforts included lowering farm taxes[171] and undertaking water control projects, such as repairing and maintaining dikes.[172] China tried to build a modern military to protect itself,[173] improved its communication and transportation systems, and translated western textbooks in technology and international law into Chinese.[174]

            Through all these reform efforts, the Confucian officials hoped that adapting western methods of education and technology could help preserve China’s traditional culture from destruction by the West.[175] Despite efforts to eradicate corruption from the civil service, however, the reforms only affected the upper levels of the bureaucracy.[176] 

Conservative reaction. At the imperial court, reforms and foreign intervention were met by a strongly conservative reaction led by the Empress Dowager, Cixi. Born in 1835,[177] Cixi had witnessed the effects of the Opium War and the Taiping rebellion while growing up in the imperial court. She was also present when the British and French occupied Beijing in 1860 and destroyed the emperor’s splendid summer palace. Thereafter she seems to have remained a bitter opponent of the Europeans and westernizing reforms.

            Cixi dominated China for the next 40 years, acting as regent for the emperors. Cixi remained conservative and often stalled many reforms. For example, she diverted the funds for China’s new navy in the late 1880s in order to rebuild the summer palace.[178] In place of the navy, she had a magnificent marble pavilion constructed in the lake of the new Summer Palace—in the shape of a boat.[179] The Empress Dowager, or Old Buddha as she was often called by westerners, retired from public life in 1889,[180] but returned in 1898 when the emperor began to implement new, more far-reaching reforms.[181] Cixi gained the support of those who feared the effects of western culture and technology on China.           

The Boxer rebellion. Some of those who reacted against the influence of the West were members of a secret society, the Society of the Harmonious Fists. Called Boxers by the Europeans, they rose in revolt in 1900, wanting to cleanse China of foreign influences: 

“The Catholics. . .have conspired with foreigners, have caused China trouble, wasted our national revenue, broken up our monasteries, destroyed Buddhist images, and seized our people’s graveyards. . . . Now . . . all the spirits have descended. . .to teach our young men their magic boxing so they can . . . extinguish the foreigners . . . .”[182] 

            The movement spread quickly across North China as the Boxers called on all Chinese to “support the Qing, destroy the foreign.”[183] For eight weeks the Boxers attacked missionaries and journalists and even laid siege to the diplomatic community in Beijing.[184] Cixi supported their actions, declaring war on all the western powers represented in China.[185] “China is weak,” she declared, “The only thing we can depend upon is the hearts of the people. If we lose them, how can we maintain our country?”[186]

            A German-led international army arrived to suppress the violence[187] and found thousands of foreign civilians and Chinese Christians slain by the Boxers.[188] As the Boxers fell before the western guns, the Empress Dowager fled the capital and went into exile.[189] She returned to power once more in 1902, but as the empire crumbled around her, the Empress Dowager finally accepted the need for reform and promised a constitutional government in 1906.[190] Two years later she died,[191] leaving the empire in the hands of a three-year-old child.[192] He was to be the last emperor of China.[193]

The end of the Qing dynasty. A new generation of western-educated Chinese leaders concluded that the adoption of western ideas was the only means to restore China’s independence. The most influential of these leaders was Sun Yatsen.[194] He formed a revolutionary society in 1905 aimed at overthrowing the Qing and establishing a constitutional government.[195]

            That same year, the examination system for the civil service was abolished.[196] Now, western-educated Chinese students no longer had to conform themselves to the traditional system in order to get a government job, and they began to spread western ideas at an ever more rapid rate.[197] The next few years were riddled with rebellions against the Qing government.[198]

            In 1911 the new revolutionaries began a rebellion that resulted in the abdication of the last Qing emperor and the end of the last Chinese dynasty.[199] The revolutionaries set up a western-style republic with Sun Yatsen as its president.[200] Sun Yatsen resigned shortly thereafter in favor of a military commander, Yuan Shikai, and China entered a turbulent period of rule by warlords.[201]

Japan and the West

While the British were forcing China open, the United States pursued a similar goal in Japan. Since the 1600s, Japan had remained largely isolated under the Tokugawa shoguns. 

Isolation under the Tokugawa. For nearly 350 years,  Japan had kept out most foreign influences.[202] There was some minor trade with the Dutch, but as late as 1825 an imperial edict ordered Japanese officials to drive off all foreign ships. Such regulations offended many European countries, particularly those whose sailors were shipwrecked along the Japanese coast. In the 1800s, whaling vessels from the western nations also resented Japanese refusals to allow them to land and resupply or repair their ships after storms at sea. The United States in particular became determined to open Japan to the outside world. 

The “opening” of Japan. After the United States won California from Mexico in the Mexican-American War in 1848, Americans became interested in the Pacific, particularly in Japan. In 1851 the American president Millard Fillmore commanded Commodore Matthew Perry to begin negotiations with the Japanese aimed at establishing diplomatic relations.[203]  In 1853 Perry’s squadron anchored in Tokyo Bay,[204] and Perry demanded that the Japanese enter into immediate negotiations with the United States. The demand caused a crisis in the shogunate.

            Unable to resist the threat of a naval bombardment, the shogun gave in to Perry’s demands. Within months representatives from Great Britain, France, and Russia demanded similar recognition. Like China, Japan had to accept a series of unequal treaties with the western powers,[205] and the disgrace of the shogun’s capitulation weakened the power of the shogunate.[206] 

Japanese Responses to Imperialism

Perry’s demands threw Japan into a state of crisis. Many of the Japanese aristocracy believed that unless Japan could rapidly acquire the same technology that the westerners possessed, it was only a matter of time before the country was swallowed up completely by the Europeans.

The Meiji restoration. While the Tokugawa shoguns resisted reforms, a number of leading aristocrats came together in the 1860s demanding reform along western lines. In 1868 these aristocrats overthrew the shogunate and restored the emperor to power in what became known as the Meiji Restoration, named after the Meiji emperor.[207] With the emperor’s approval, they instituted wide-reaching reforms. They abolished feudalism,[208] adopted a western-style representative government, and established a daily newspaper.[209] 

            Japan also began to build its defense and its industrial base. Prince Ito Hirobumi, the architect of Japan’s transformation,  explained Japan’s method of modernization: 

“Being faced, from the outset, with a need for experts, we sent talented young students to Europe and America to master various fields of science and technology, and, when this task was accomplished, we established all kinds of schools in Japan . . . . We adopted the European judiciary system, enacted [necessary] laws and strengthened our military forces. The Europeans could have no objection.”[210] 

            Ito compared westernization in Japan to the traditional Japanese Noh theater, in which the actors wore different masks to portray different characters and emotions. Like the Noh masks, Ito said, Japan was putting on western forms, while retaining the essential Japanese spirit underneath.[211] Industrialization, for example, was carried out from the top down. Aristocratic Japanese, known as zaibatsu, became the founders of major companies and dominated whole industries. The Japanese government assisted and encouraged the process. 

Japanese imperialism. By imitating the West Japan not only remained independent but also became an imperial power in its own right. Japan defeated China in the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese war. In the peace treaty China lost Taiwan to Japan, gave Japan all privileges awarded to European powers in China,[212] and recognized Korea’s independence.[213]

            Korea feared that it would be the first building block of Japan’s empire, so it turned to Russia as a balance against Japanese power.[214] However, this made Japan fear that the Russians might enlist other Europeans to limit Japanese expansion.[215] Consequently, Japan sought an alliance with Great Britain.[216] In the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, each nation agreed to support the other if it were attacked by two or more countries.[217] This alliance meant that Japan had been accepted finally as an equal by the West.[218]

            Then in 1904 Japan clashed with the Russian Empire.[219] Russia had expanded eastward to the Pacific Ocean during the 1800s, just as the United States was expanding west.[220] This expansion had brought Russia and Japan into competition for the spoils of the crumbling Chinese Empire.[221] The Japanese soundly defeated the Russians,[222] sinking their entire fleet in the Tsushima Strait.[223] For the first time in modern history, a non-European power had defeated a European power.[224] Japan had become an imperial world power.

SECTION 4 REVIEW

IDENTIFY and explain the significance of the following:

Opium War

extraterritoriality

Taiping Rebellion

concessions

Qing Restoration

Cixi

Boxers

Meiji Restoration

Sino-Japanese War

LOCATE and explain the importance of the following:

Guangzhou

Tokyo Bay

1.      Main Idea  What effects did Western imperialism and cultural influences have in China?

2.      Main Idea   What were the reponses to westernizing reforms within the Qing Empire?

3.      Cross-Cultural Interaction  How did the Japanese respond to the threat of western imperialism? 

4.      Writing to Persuade  Imagine that you are a Japanese aristocrat. Write a short speech trying to convince your fellow aristocrats to advocate westernizing reform as a means of fighting off the Europeans.

5.      Hypothesizing  Should China have reacted to western influences the way that Japan did?  What might have happened if China had taken a different course?

From the following list, choose the term that correctly matches the definition:

concessions

extraterritoriality

Meiji Restoration

Qing Restoration

raj

spheres of influence

1. a period of reform in China undertaken to strengthen the country against western intervention

2. agreements in which the Chinese allowed Europeans certain economic benefits, such as the opening of more Chinese ports to European trade

3. the period of Japanese history in which the shogunate was overthrown, the emperor was placed on the throne once more, and many western-style reforms were implemented

4. the right of Europeans to be exempt from Chinese law

5. the rule of the British in India, which was first applied to the East Indian Company, and later to the British government

REVIEWING CHRONOLOGY

List the following events in their correct chronological order:

1. Britain launches the Opium War against China.

2. Japan wins the Sino-Japanese War.

3. Revolutionaries overthrow the Qing dynasty, bringing imperial rule in China to an end.

4. The Boxers rise in rebellion against the Europeans in northern China.

5. The Taiping rebellion against the Qing dynasty erupts.[225]

UNDERSTANDING THE MAIN IDEA

1. What changes occurred around 1870 that caused European nations to become interested in imperialism once more?

2. How did Africans respond to European imperialism?

3. Why did the Indian Mutiny occur, and what effect did it have on both the Indians and the British?

4. What impact did western imperialism and cultural influences have on China?

5. How successful were the Japanese in their response to western imperialism?

Chapter 21 Bibliography

Andrea, Alfred J. and James H. Overfield.  The Human Record: Sources of  Global History, Vol. II.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.  (Travis's)

Austen, Ralph A., ed., Modern Imperialism: Western Overseas Expansion and Its Aftermath (Travis's)

Beales, Derek.  From Castlereagh to Gladstone, 1815-1885.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1969. (Tracy's)

Carey, John, ed.  Eyewitness to History.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1987.

            (in-house)

Fairbank, John King.  China: A New History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1992. (in-house)

Harris, Joseph E. Africans and Their History, Revised Edition.  New York: New American Library, 1987. (Travis's)

Hopkirk, Peter.  The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia.  New York: Kodansha International, 1992. (in-house)

Katzenellenbogen, The Copper Mines of Katanga, Oxford (Travis's)  

Morris, Jan. Pax Britannica: the Climax of an Empire (Travis's)

Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912.  New York: Avon Books, 1991.  (in-house)

Prall, Stuart E. and David Harris Wilson.  A History of England, Volume II: 1603 to the Present.  Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1991. (in-house)

Roberts, J.M. History of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (in-house)

Schirokauer, Conrad.  A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations.  San Diego: HBJ, 1978. (in-house)

Stearns, Raymond Phineas.  Pageant of Europe: Sources and Selections from the Renaissance to the Present Day.  New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1961. (in-house)

Teng, Ssu-yu and John K. Fairbank, eds., China's Response to the West, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1954. (Travis's)

Webster, J. B. and A. A. Boahen, The Revolutionary Years: West Africa Since 1800. London: Longman, 1980. (Travis's)

Wolpert, Stanley.  A New History of India, 4th Edition.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (in-house)