Three Fundamental Themes and Four Lessons in Learning Modern Chinese History
1. The Opium Wars and China’s Decline
China and the World before 1840
In 1840 the British Empire launched the dirty First Opium War (1840–1842) against China. This war forcibly stopped the historical course in which China enjoyed a fully independent development, and marked the beginning of modern Chinese history. Chinese society gradually became semi-feudal and semi-colonial. A brief discussion of the global situation before the First Opium War follows.
Revolutions broke out in Britain in 1640 and in France in 1789 that led to the dawn of the capitalist system. Thereafter, the capitalist countries of Europe attempted to colonize the world. Using various means such as piracy, robbery, the slave trade, drug (opium) smuggling, wars of aggression, and so on, these colonialists plundered a large amount of wealth from Asia, Africa, and America. This looted wealth constituted a major source of capital and contributed decisively to the growth of European capitalism. History has proven that European capitalist civilization relied heavily on the colonial loot and plunder that it had taken from Asian, African, and American countries and their people, even though it did help to advance humankind. As a consequence, during the seventeenth century, the capitalist countries grew richer and richer while those in the colonized lands became poorer and poorer.
The 1760s saw the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which embodied the vibrant growth of capitalism in Europe. The following five decades in Britain, France, and the United States witnessed the growth of machine production in their economies. Britain, for example, accounted for 50% of the total industrial production in the world and 70% of global coal production in the 1820s. As a consequence, Europe’s social productivity grew by leaps and bounds. The rising empires then scrambled to grab colonies around the globe. By the 1830s, the north and south of Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand as well as Southwest and Southeast Asia were all colonized by the capitalist powers. However, as a great number of nations were being forcibly thrown into capitalism, China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1912) was still independent in Asia. The British Empire, however, set its sights on Qing and began smuggling opium into China. It was under such circumstances that new events took place one after another in China.
Britain and France in the early nineteenth century were the acknowledged leaders of the capitalist world. Old powers such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands had declined as early as the seventeenth century. The old powers’ colonies were either taken away by the new hegemons or managed to get rid of their colonial oppressors. Many countries in Latin America, which had been brutally ruled by Spain and Portugal, gained their independence in the 1820s. Some went further, developing into bourgeois republics in a single decade or so.
Yet Spain still ruled over the Philippines; Portugal controlled African states such as Angola; and the Netherlands governed the East Indies (present-day Indonesia).
Bourgeois revolution and the Industrial Revolution made Britain and France the most advanced industrial countries in the world. The British Empire grabbed lands and turned them into markets through aggressive wars and colonial aggrandizement. As early as the seventeenth century, the English (later British) East India Company had colonized Madras, Bombay, Calcutta and Bengal in India. By the 1830s, with the exception of several native states in the center and the north, all of India was reduced to a British colony. The British Empire benefited immensely from the colonization of India and, moreover, used India as a base for the invasion of other Asian countries. The British began smuggling opium produced in Bengal into China, some of which was dispatched from India. The British also occupied Penang in Malaysia, merged Malacca and Singapore and, in 1824, Britain set up the Straits Settlement in Southeast Asia. Canada and Australia were colonized in the eighteenth century by the British. The British Empire, on which the sun never set, then established colonial rule in Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) and Cape Town in the early nineteenth century, and in New Zealand in 1839. As a consequence, Britain created a huge colonial empire that covered a total area of 2,000,000 square kilometers and a population of 100,000,000 people.
France was next only to Britain in its colonial quest thanks to the all-powerful French Revolution and the staggering growth of industrial production within France. Nevertheless, France’s colonies in North America and India were almost completely lost to Britain in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). In spite of these losses, France still had Senegal and Guyana and in 1830 colonized Algeria by military force. In Asia, France occupied Vietnam, which became France’s new base to invade China.
The United States was originally one of Britain’s colonies; however, it later won the War of Independence (1775–1783) and became an independent country. In comparison to Britain and France, the United States was a latecomer to the club of capitalist countries but grew rapidly. In 1803 and 1819, the United States purchased huge amounts of fertile land from France and Spain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States had the longest railroad network in the world. American traders began moving all over the world and, before long, America’s capitalist class became the British Empire’s accomplice in invading China.
For quite a long time Russia was a European country known to the world for its serfdom. As late as the early nineteenth century, a feudal economy still predominated in Russia. However, Tsarist Russia started to expand as early as the late sixteenth century. In the mid-seventeenth century, Russia annexed Ukraine, conquered Siberia and cast its eyes on China’s Black Dragon River. In 1689, Russia and Qing signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which defined the eastern border between the two countries. Thirty-eight years later, the middle part of the Sino-Russian border was drawn in accordance with the Treaty of Kyakhta. Then, in the eighteenth century, Belarus and the Baltic region merged with Russia. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Poland, Finland, Ciscaucasia and Bessarabia were occupied by the Russian Empire. By the 1840s, Tsarist Russia began to show interest in the northeastern part of China.
Britain, France, the United States and Tsarist Russia were early modern China’s main aggressors. Germany, however, also saw massive growth in the 1830s before the dawn of the German Reich. Japan, one of China’s neighbors, had been ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate since the seventeenth century, but capitalism in Meiji-era Japan in the 1860s and 1870s grew rapidly. Japan, shocked by China’s failure in the Opium War, started to reform. Soon, both Germany and Japan were enrolled in the group of China’s invaders.
At that time, some countries still remained proudly independent. Among them, Qing China was the largest. Qing, the last feudal dynasty of China, was in the twilight of its life. With the exception of its northern neighbor, China’s neighboring countries in the east, south and southwest were either colonized or about to be colonized. The colossal Ottoman Empire (1299–1922), which stretched over Asia, Africa and Europe, was suffering a great decline. Greece gained its independence in 1830, when Algeria was fully colonized by the French Empire. Egypt would soon get rid of Ottoman control. Additionally, the Ottoman Empire itself was subject to the capitalist powers’ aggression.
The remaining great tracts of land that had not been occupied by the Western colonists were the African desert and China. China had not always been the country lying at the center of the world. The traditional Chinese perception of the world—the civilized Chinese are fundamentally different from the barbarians—was hopelessly outdated. Qing’s heyday had gone forever. Many of Qing’s shortcomings and disadvantages grew increasingly obvious. Worst of all, its ossified feudal institutions and conceptions put a stranglehold on China’s productivity growth. According to some demographic studies, the Chinese population increased
