was the defeat of the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty by
the invasion of the ‘barbarians’ of the West. The
West saw an opportunity to trade in China and
made wars to force their way in. The British
fought the Opium Wars (1839–42) and China
ceded its territory (Hong Kong) and was forced to
accept the opening of its trade to Britain. An even
more fundamental cause of unrest was that popu-
lation growth was no longer matched by an
increase in the lands under cultivation. Amid the
general distress occurred the greatest rising in
world history – the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64
which led to huge destruction and to the loss of
between 20 and 30 million lives. The rising was
mastered in the end by gentry-led regional armies.
China was thereby pushed along a path where
regional independence and strength asserted
themselves against central authority. During this
period and later in the nineteenth century other
Western nations followed the British example and
secured concessions; and so began a process
whereby the Western powers acquired territorial
settlements, colonies, leases, rights to trade in
‘treaty ports’, and concessions in some eighty
towns on the coast and inland. The foreigners not
only enjoyed immunity from Chinese government
but in their settlements, in effect, ruled over the
Chinese inhabitants as well. The largest, the for-
eign settlements of Shanghai, in 1928 comprised a
Chinese population of more than 1 million subor-
dinated to 35,000 Westerners. China was not only
defeated and forced to accept the ‘unequal
treaties’ by the West, but during the last decade
of the nineteenth century was attacked by Japan as
well.
The impact of the West and Japan, as well as
China’s internal upheavals, led Chinese intellec-
tuals to question China’s future role. Yet their
initial reaction was to seek to preserve Chinese
traditions. China should strengthen itself through
the adoption of Western industrial and military
techniques. But little real headway could be made
materially. It was not Confucian tradition that
blocked the path but economic reality. China
remained a peasant society with a surface scratch
of industrial development, largely in the foreign-
dominated enclaves. The movement of ‘self-
strengthening’ was nowhere near sufficient to
counter the forces of disintegration. The Ch’ing
dynasty under the formidable Empress Dowager
Tz’u-hsi attempted in a last spasm to adopt
Western techniques in government and educa-
tion, but always with the underlying conservative
purpose of strengthening traditional China. The
reforms were undertaken in the wake of the dis-
astrous Boxer rising of 1900, which attempted to
throw out Western influence – economic, polit-
ical, territorial and religious – by force and was,
in its turn, crushed by a Western international
army joined by the Japanese. China was placed
further in debt to the West and lost control over
even more territory since the Russians refused to
leave northern China and Manchuria. Then the
Chinese had to stand aside as Russia and Japan in
1904 and 1905 fought each other for dominance
over this portion of China. China was breaking
apart into foreign spheres of influence; simulta-
neously the regions were asserting their auton-
omy from central government. In 1908 the
empress died and the strength of the Ch’ing
dynasty was spent. If the misery of the condition
of the country and its people could prove such a
thing, then the Ch’ing dynasty had lost its
Heavenly Mandate.Among the small group of conservative intellec-
tuals and administrators there were some who,
under the impact of the experience of their own
lifetime, looked at the world beyond China more
realistically and knowledgeably. They contrasted
Japanese success in maintaining national inde-
pendence, in throwing off discriminatory treaties
in their homeland and in inflicting military defeat
on a great Western power with China’s weakness
and helplessness. China had, in theory, preserved
its sovereignty over all but small portions of its
empire. The reality, however, was different since
foreigners controlled its commerce, built its rail-
ways and established industries under their own-
ership. Here, though, it is necessary to distinguish
the few Westerners who were dedicated to serving
the interests of China as they saw them. These
were officials like Robert Hart, head of the
Maritime Customs Service, who warned in the
aftermath of the Boxer rising that the Western
powers should take care how they treated the