The New Penguin History of the World (157 page)

Then there were territorial losses as the century wore on. In the 1870s the Russians seized the Ili valley (though they later handed much of it back) and in the next decade the French established a protectorate in Annam. Loosely asserted but ancient Chinese suzerainty was being swept away; the French began to absorb Indo-China and the British annexed Burma in 1886. The worst blow came from another Asiatic state; in the war of 1894–5 the Japanese took Formosa and the Pescadores, while
China had to recognize the independence of Korea, from which they had received tribute since the seventeenth century. Following the Japanese success came further encroachments by other powers, provoked by the Russians, who established themselves in Port Arthur. England, France and Germany all extracted long leases of ports at the end of the century. Before this, the Portuguese, who had been in China longer than any other Europeans, converted their tenure of Macao into outright ownership. Even the Italians were in the market, though they did not actually get anything. And long before this, concessions, loans and agreements had been exacted by western powers to protect and foster their own economic and financial interests. It is hardly surprising that when a British prime minister spoke at the end of the century of two classes of nation, the ‘living and the dying’, China was regarded as an outstanding example of the second. Statesmen began to envisage her partition.

Before the end of the nineteenth century it became clear to many Chinese intellectuals and civil servants that the traditional order would not generate the energy necessary to resist the new barbarians. Attempts along the old lines had failed. New tendencies began to appear. A ‘society for the study of self-strengthening’ was founded to consider Western ideas and inventions which might be helpful. Its leaders cited the achievements of Peter the Great and, more significantly, those of contemporary reformers in Japan, an example all the more telling because of the superiority shown by the Japanese over China in war in 1895. Yet the would-be reformers still hoped that they would be able to root change in the Confucian tradition, albeit one purified and invigorated. They were members of the gentry and they succeeded in obtaining the ear of the emperor; they were thus working within the traditional framework and machinery of power to obtain administrative and technological reform without compromising the fundamentals of Chinese culture and ideology.

Unfortunately this meant that the Hundred Days of Reform of 1898 (as the brief ascendancy of the reformers came to be known) was almost at once tangled up in the court politics of the rivalry between the emperor and the dowager empress, to say nothing of Chinese–Manchu antagonism. Though a stream of reform edicts was published, they were swiftly overtaken by a
coup d’état
by the empress, who locked up the emperor. The basic cause of the reformers’ failure was the provocation offered by their inept political behaviour. Yet although they had failed, it was important that their initiative had taken place at all. It was to be a great stimulus to wider and deeper thinking about China’s future.

For the moment, though, China seemed to have turned back to older methods of confronting the threat from outside, as a dramatic episode, the
‘Boxer movement’, showed. Exploited by the empress, this was essentially a backward-looking and xenophobic popular upheaval, which was given official encouragement. Missionaries and converts were murdered, a German minister killed and the foreign legations at Peking besieged; the Boxers once more revealed the hatred of foreigners which was waiting to be tapped. Yet their efforts showed how little could be hoped for from the old structure, for its most conservative forces had dominated the movement, not the few reformers who became involved in it. The Boxers were in due course suppressed by a military intervention which provides the only example in history of the armed forces of all the great powers operating under the same commander (a German, as it happened) and the sequel was yet another diplomatic humiliation for China; an enormous indemnity was settled on customs henceforth under foreign direction.

The ending of the Boxer movement left China still more unstable. Reform had failed in 1898; so now had reaction. Perhaps only revolution lay ahead. Officers in the parts of the army which had undergone reorganization and training on western lines began to think about it. Students in exile had already begun to meet and discuss their country’s future, above all in Tokyo. The Japanese were happy to encourage subversive movements which might weaken their neighbour; in 1898 they had set up an ‘East Asian Cultural Union’ from which emerged the slogan ‘Asia for the Asians’. The Japanese had great prestige in the eyes of the young Chinese radicals as Asians who were escaping from the trap of traditional backwardness which had been fatal to India and seemed to be about to engulf China. Japan could confront the West on terms of equality. Other students looked elsewhere for support, some to the long-enduring secret societies. One of them was a young man called Sun Yat-sen. His achievement has often been exaggerated, but nevertheless he attempted revolution ten times altogether. In the 1890s, he and others were asking only for a constitutional monarchy, but that was a very radical demand at the time.

Discontented exiles drew on support from Chinese businessmen abroad, of whom there were many, for the Chinese had always been great traders. They helped Sun Yat-sen to form in 1905 in Japan a revolutionary alliance aiming at the expulsion of the Manchus and the initiation of Chinese rule, a republican constitution, land reform. It sought to conciliate the foreigners, at this stage a wise tactical move. Its programme showed the influence of western thinkers (notably that of the English radical John Stuart Mill and the American economic reformer Henry George). Once again the West was providing the stimulus and some of the ideological baggage of a Chinese reform movement and it was the launching of the party eventually to emerge as dominant in the Chinese Republic.

Its formation, though, may well be thought less significant than another event of the same year, the abolition of the traditional examination system. More than any other institution, the examination system had held Chinese civilization together by providing the bureaucracy it recruited with its internal homogeneity and cohesion. This would not quickly wane, but the distinction between the mass of Chinese subjects and the privileged ruling class was now gone. Meanwhile, returning students from abroad, dissatisfied with what they found and no longer under the necessity of accommodating themselves to it by going through the examination procedure if they wished to enter government service, exercised a profoundly disturbing influence. They much increased the rate at which Chinese society began to be irradiated by western ideas. Together with the soldiers in a modernized army, more and more of them looked to revolution for a way ahead.

There were a number of rebellions (some directed by Sun Yat-sen from Indo-China with French connivance) before the empress and her puppet emperor died on successive days in 1908. The event raised new hopes but the Manchu government continued to drag its feet over reform. On the one hand it made important concessions of principle and promoted the flow of students abroad; on the other it showed that it could not achieve a decisive break with the past or surrender any of the imperial privileges of the Manchus. Perhaps more could not have been asked for. By 1911, the situation had deteriorated badly. The gentry class showed signs of losing its cohesion: it was no longer to back the dynasty in the face of subversion as it had done in the past. Governmentally, there existed a near-stalemate of internal power, the dynasty effectively controlling only a part of China. In October a revolutionary headquarters was discovered at Hankow. There had already been revolts which had been more or less contained earlier in the year. This precipitated one which at last turned into a successful revolution. Sun Yat-sen, whose name was used by the early rebels, was in the United States at the time and was taken by surprise.

The course of the revolution was decided by the defection from the regime of its military commanders. The most important of these was Yuan Shih-k’ai; when he turned on the Manchus, the dynasty was lost. The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ had been withdrawn and on 12 February 1912 the six-year-old – and last – Manchu emperor abdicated. A republic had already been proclaimed, with Sun Yat-sen its president, and a new nationalist party soon appeared behind him. In March he resigned the presidency to Yüan Shih-k’ai, thus acknowledging where power really lay in the new Republic and inaugurating a new phase of Chinese government, in which an ineffective constitutional regime at Peking disputed the practical government of China by warlords. China had still a long way to travel before
she would be a modern nation-state. None the less, she had begun the half-century’s march which would recover for her an independence lost in the nineteenth century to foreigners.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was little to show a superficial observer that Japan might adapt more successfully than China to challenges from the West. She was to all appearances deeply conservative. Yet much had already changed since the establishment of the shogunate and there were signs that the changes would cut deeper and faster as the years went by. It was a paradox that this was in part attributable to the success of the Tokugawa era itself. It had brought peace. An obvious result was that Japan’s military system became old-fashioned and inefficient. The
samurai
themselves were evidently a parasitic class; warriors, there was nothing for them to do except to cluster in the castle-towns of their lords, consumers without employment, a social and economic problem. The prolonged peace also led to the surge of growth which was the most profound consequence of the Tokugawa era. Japan was already a semi-developed, diversifying society, with a money economy, the beginnings of a quasi-capitalist structure in agriculture, which eroded the old feudal relationships, and a growing urban population. Osaka, the greatest mercantile centre, had between three and four hundred thousand inhabitants in the last years of the shogunate. Edo may have had a million. These great centres of consumption were sustained by financial and mercantile arrangements which had grown enormously in scale and complication since the seventeenth century. They made a mockery of the old notion of the inferiority of the merchant order. Even their techniques of salesmanship were modern; the eighteenth-century house of Mitsui (two centuries later still a pillar of Japanese capitalism) gave free umbrellas decorated with their trademark to customers caught in their shops by the rain.

Many of these changes registered the creation of new wealth from which the shogunate had not itself benefited, largely because it was unable to tap it at a rate which kept pace with its own growing needs. The main revenue was the rice tax which flowed through the lords, and the rate at which the tax was levied remained fixed at the level of a seventeenth-century assessment. Taxation therefore did not take away the new wealth arising from better cultivation and land reclamation and, because this remained in the hands of the better-off peasants and village leaders, this led to sharpening contrasts in the countryside. The poorer peasantry was often driven to the labour markets of the towns. This was another sign of disintegration in the feudal society. In the towns, which suffered from an inflation made worse by the shogunate’s debasement of the coinage, only the merchants seemed to prosper. A last effort of economic reform failed in the
1840s. The lords grew poorer and their retainers lost confidence; before the end of the Tokugawa, some
samurai
were beginning to dabble in trade. Their share of their lord’s tax yield was still only that of their seventeenth-century predecessors; everywhere could be found impoverished, politically discontented swordsmen – and some aggrieved families of great lords who recalled the days when their race had stood on equal terms with the Tokugawa.

The obvious danger of this potential instability was all the greater because insulation against western ideas had long since ceased to be complete. A few learned men had interested themselves in books which entered Japan through the narrow aperture of the Dutch trade. Japan was very different from China in its technical receptivity. ‘The Japanese are sharp-witted and quickly learn anything they see,’ said a sixteenth-century Dutchman. They had soon grasped and exploited, as the Chinese never did, the advantages of European firearms, and began to make them in quantity. They copied the European clocks, which the Chinese treated as toys. They were eager to learn from Europeans, as unhampered by their traditions as the Chinese seemed bogged down in theirs. On the great fiefs there were notable schools or research centres of ‘Dutch studies’. The shogunate itself had authorized the translation of foreign books, an important step in so literate a society, for education in Tokugawa Japan had been almost too successful: even young
samurai
were beginning to enquire about western ideas. The islands were relatively small and communications good, so that new ideas got about easily. Thus, Japan’s posture when she suddenly had to face a new and unprecedented challenge from the West was less disadvantageous than that of China.

The first period of western contact with Japan had ended in the seventeenth century, with the exclusion of all but a few Dutchmen allowed to conduct trade from an island at Nagasaki. Europeans had not then been able to challenge this outcome. That this was not likely to continue to be the case was shown in the 1840s by the fate of China, which some of Japan’s rulers observed with increasing alarm. The Europeans and North Americans seemed to have both a new interest in breaking into Asian trade and new and irresistible strength to do it. The Dutch King warned the shogun that exclusion was no longer a realistic policy. But there was no agreement among Japan’s rulers about whether resistance or concession was the better. Finally, in 1851 the President of the United States sent a naval officer, Commodore Perry, to open relations with Japan. Under him, the first foreign squadron to sail into Japanese waters entered Edo Bay in 1853. In the following year it returned and the first of a series of treaties with foreign powers was made by the shogunate.