The Boxer Uprising in 1900, which received the tacit support of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who held de facto power over the Qing government between 1861 and 1908, was occasioned by growing anti-Western sentiment and resulted in widespread attacks on foreign missionaries and other Westerners. Eventually a joint foreign army drawn from British, Japanese, French and American troops marched on Beijing, suppressed the uprising and then proceeded to base itself in the Forbidden City for over a year. Further concessions were extracted from the Chinese authorities, including another round of reparations. Although China was not colonized, in effect it became a semi-colony, with foreign troops free to roam its territory, the treaty ports resembling micro-colonies, missionaries enjoying licence to proselytize Western values wherever they went, [257] and foreign companies able to establish subsidiaries with barely any taxation or duties. China was humiliated and impoverished. [258] The fact, however, that it never became a colony, even though the Japanese were later to occupy Manchuria and then conquer lands much further to the south, was of great importance for China ’s ability to revive after 1949.

Major Unequal Treaties Imposed on China

Treaty of Nanjing (1842) with the United Kingdom

Treaty of the Bogue (1843) with the United Kingdom

Treaty of Wanghia (1844) with the United States

Treaty of Whampoa (1844) with France

Treaty of Aigun (1858) with Russia

Treaty of Tianjin (1858) with France, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States

Convention of Peking (1860) with the United Kingdom, France and Russia

Treaty of Tientsin (1861) with Prussia and the German Customs Union

Chefoo Convention (1876) with the United Kingdom

Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking (1887) with Portugal

Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) with Japan

Li-Lobanov Treaty (1896) with Russia

Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory (1898) with the United Kingdom

Boxer Protocol (1901) with the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands

Twenty-One Demands (1915) with Japan

China ’s impotence in the face of growing foreign intervention stimulated a movement for reform aimed at modernizing the country. Unlike in Japan, however, it failed to command anything like a consensus, its base never extending beyond a small elite, with the consequence that reform was always a hesitant and piecemeal process. It was driven by a small coterie of imperial civil servants, together with various writers and scholars, such as Kang Youwei, a well-connected man adept at showing how new ways of thinking were compatible with traditional Confucian texts. [259] The imperial government for the most part, however, neither understood nor accepted the necessity, let alone the urgency, of modernization, remaining passive or actively opposed — unlike in post-1868 Japan, where the state was the key agent of modernization. Nonetheless, there was some reform of the armed forces and various ministries, including the establishment for the first time of a diplomatic presence in major capitals like London and Paris, while the educational curriculum was revised after the turn of the century to include Western disciplines. In 1898 the reform movement reached its apogee when it finally received the formal blessing of the imperial hierarchy, but the imprimatur only lasted for a few months. [260]

One of the major problems facing the reformers was that modernization became intimately associated with the West at a time when the latter was colonizing and humiliating the country: far from being seen as patriots, they were regarded as tainted by the West or, worse, as traitors. As a result, the growing hostility amongst the Chinese towards the West was to work against the process of reform. The fact that China enjoyed such a unitary and centralized system of government also conspired to inhibit and stifle the development of alternative reforming impulses, in contrast to Japan, where authority was more dispersed. This problem was compounded by the hegemony enjoyed by Confucian thought, which made it very difficult for other ways of thinking to gain ground and influence. Until around 1900 the idea of reform was virtually always articulated within a Confucian framework — with an insistence on the distinction between Chinese ‘essence’ and Western ‘method’ (or, in the famous phrase of Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), ‘Chinese learning for the essential principles, Western learning for the practical applications’). [261] After the turn of the century, other modes of thought began to acquire some traction, including socialist and Marxist ideas amongst sections of the intelligentsia, [262] a process that culminated in the 1911 Revolution largely being inspired by Western thinking. [263] Although Confucianism certainly declined during this period, it did not die. Nor should it be regarded as having been, or being, inherently incompatible with, or fundamentally antithetical to, change and reform. [264] However, it was in urgent need of revitalization through a process of cross-fertilization with other ways of thinking, as had happened to it in earlier periods of history with Buddhism and Taoism.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the Qing dynasty faced an intensifying crisis of authority. Constantly required to seek the approval of the occupying powers, it enjoyed only very limited sovereignty over its territory. Its economic situation, exacerbated by the enormous reparations that it was forced to pay, which required the government to depend on loans from foreign banks in order to meet its obligations, meant that it was permanently in dire financial straits. The armies that it had depended on to crush the various rebellions, notably the Taiping Uprising, behaved in an increasingly independent manner, and the regime faced gathering disaffection and disillusionment amongst growing sections of the population, with a rising tide of anti-Manchu sentiment directed against the Qing. The Qing finally fell following the 1911 Revolution, after 266 years in power, bringing down the curtain on over two millennia of dynastic government — the most enduring political system in world history. It was replaced by the republican government of Sun Yat-sen, but, far from ushering in a new and more hopeful era, Sun’s regime proved the prelude to a further Balkanization of China, in which limited sovereignty gave way to something much worse: a chronic multiple and divided sovereignty. Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang (or Nationalist) Party was in a very weak situation, with no troops at its command or effective state apparatus at its disposal. He sought to strike a deal with the country’s most powerful military overlord, Yuan Shih-kai, but the result was to render Yuan the real power in the land and to sideline Sun. After Yuan’s death in 1916, the military governors that he had installed in the provinces quarrelled and shared out China between them, with the support of various foreign powers. The years 1916-28 were the period of warlordism. Not only was the country now — de facto if not de jure — divided, but also, for the first time for many centuries, military power, together with the continuing foreign presence, became the arbiter of China ’s future. [265]