A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

(Jacob Rumans) #1
About one-fifth of humanity lives in China, the
most populous nation of the world. But until the
nineteenth century, though in touch with the
West, China followed its own path of historical
development unaffected by Western contact. The
chronological cycle of eastern Asian developments
did not coincide with that of Europe, nor did the
First World War mark the great break of ‘before’
and ‘after’ in Chinese history. The war simply
intensified the ongoing disintegration.
The hugeness of China in land area and
population makes it all the more extraordinary
that for more than a thousand years a concept of
unity had been maintained. Other peoples were
absorbed as China expanded. The ethnic origin
of some of these peoples survives to the present
day in the form of national minorities with which
about one in eighteen Chinese identify – though
intermarriage has obliterated the majority. In tra-
ditional China, to be considered Chinese was not
a matter of race or nationality in the Western
sense but depended on an acceptance of Chinese
customs and culture. Those who did not accept
them – even people within Chinese frontiers –
were considered ‘barbarian’. The living traditions
of Chinese culture were so strong that they
absorbed the alien peoples who conquered China
and so turned them into Chinese. These included
the Mongol dynasty and, in the mid-seventeenth
century, the Manchus who ruled from then until
the revolution of 1911 as the Ch’ing dynasty.
Foreign peoples were incorporated by conquest

or else absorbed by China when they conquered
the empire from without. The political and cul-
tural continuity of China persisted, overcoming
periods of internal rebellion and war. Integration,
not disintegration, was the dominant theme of
more than a millennium of Chinese history until
the mid-nineteenth century. But how should his-
torians interpret the century that followed?
If we stop the clock in 1925 it would certainly
seem that the disintegration of China had pro-
ceeded so far that the long tradition of the
national unity of the Chinese Empire could never
be restored. It was then a country torn by internal
strife, economically bound to the West and Japan,
yet without significant progress, as far as the mass
of Chinese were concerned, to show for Western
economic penetration, politically divided, and
with parts of China dominated by foreign powers.
From the later Ch’ing period in the 1840s until
the close of the civil war in 1949, China knew no
peace and passed through a number of phases of
disintegration which no single ruler who followed
the Ch’ing dynasty after 1911 could halt. Today,
the Chinese Empire is unified once more and has
reasserted its right to recover territories that were
once Chinese or over which suzerainty was
asserted.

In the nineteenth century a double crisis threat-
ened the cohesion and stability of China and
undermined traditional China and the rule of the
Ch’ing dynasty. A great blow to central authority

(^1) Chapter 6
CHINA IN DISINTEGRATION, 1900–29

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