carved up the world into competing empires, and seemed intent on
carving up China too. No wonder the regime struggled desperately to
avoid such a fate by clinging for as long as possible to its own world
order, and to the strategic protection afforded by the ring of tributary
states along its borders.
It is ironic to think that had the Qing regime been stronger, it
might more easily have become a player in this world of competing
empires. Its own phase of (Manchu) imperial expansion had drawn to
a close over a century earlier, however, and Japan rather than China
learned the lesson that the Western world order was in reality an arena
of aggressively competitive empires. In the 1890s, when Britain,
France and Holland were ruthlessly bringing the last autonomous parts
of Burma, Indochina and Indonesia under their control, Japan set out
to create its own empire, at the expense of its nearest neighbours,
Korea and China.
Even after China’s humiliating defeat by Japan in the
Sino–Japanese War of 1895, however, the Meiji restoration in Japan
and the success of Japanese modernisation still provided an attractive
model for Chinese reformers. But the ruling elite was divided in China,
and the reform movement of 1898 was nipped in the bud. Suppression
of the Boxer uprising (1898–1901) by a combined Western and Japan-
ese force again demonstrated Qing weakness. Only the support of
Western powers that profited from China’s infirmity prevented the col-
lapse of the dynasty. In 1905 the core of the old order was fatally
undermined by the abolition of the Confucian examination system.
Even so, a new flurry of reform was too little too late.
In the end, the Qing dynasty was blown away by the revolution
of 1911–12. But the transition to a modern nation-state was not easy.
Deep-seated traditional beliefs persisted about how Chinese society
should be governed, and about China’s relations with the rest of the
world. Where China stood at the time, vis-à-vis the major powers—its
own powerlessness, its humiliation—was implicitly contrasted with
where it should stand—given its size, its culture and its history, and the
The changing world order