Self-Strengthening

In 1861 the Xianfeng (shyen-fung) emperor died and was succeeded by a young son. The child’s uncle, Prince Gong
(gung), and his mother, Empress Dowager Cixi (tsih-shee), served as regents. A change in emperor normally meant a
change in chancellors and other high officials, making it easier for the court to take new directions. Certainly, new
policies were needed; much of the most productive parts of the country had been laid waste by the rebellions, none of
which was yet suppressed, and the British and French had only recently left Beijing after extracting new concessions.
Empress Dowager Cixi

During the self-strengthening period, the most pow-erful person at court was Empress Dowager Cixi. In 1875, when
her son, the Tongzhi (tung-jih) emperor, was nineteen, he died of smallpox, barely having had a chance to rule on
his own. Cixi chose his cous-in to succeed him, who is known as the Guangxu (gwahng-shyew) emperor (r. 1875–
1908). By select-ing a boy of four, Cixi could continue in power as regent for many years to come.

Cixi was a skillful political operator. She recog-nized the Manchu establishment’s fears that they were being
sidelined and presented herself to them as a staunch defender of Manchu privileges. She need-ed modernizers like Li
Hongzhang and cajoled them with titles and honors, but she kept them in check by also encouraging their
conservative critics.

It was under Cixi’s watch that the old tribute system was finally dismantled. Three neighbor-ing countries—
Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and Vietnam—had been regular, loyal tributaries,

making them seem to Westerners not fully inde-pendent countries. Japan forced the Ryukyus away from China in
the 1870s. In the 1880s, France forced Vietnam away.
Cixi officially retired in 1889 when the Guangxu emperor was nineteen sui and she was fifty-five. She insisted,
however, on reading all memorials and approving key appointments. Because the court was filled with her
supporters, the emperor had little room to go his own way, even after he began to form his own views about reform.

Foreigners in China

After 1860 the number of Westerners in China grew steadily, and a distinct treaty port culture evolved. The foreign
concessions at treaty ports were areas carved out of existing Chinese cities. They had foreign police and foreign law
courts and collected their own taxes, a situation the Qing accepted with little protest, even though most of the
population within the concessions continued to be Chinese

By 1900 there were one hundred treaty ports, but only Shanghai, Tianjin, Hankou, Guangzhou, and Dalian (at the
southern tip of Manchuria) became major centers of foreign residence. (Hong Kong was counted not as a treaty port
but as a colony.) The streetlights and tall buildings in the Western- dominated parts of these cities showed Chinese
what Western “progress” was all about

By 1900 there were 886 Catholic and about 3,000 Protestant missionaries in China, more than half of them
women. Over the course of the nineteenth cen-tury, more and more missionaries concentrated on medicine or
education, which were better received by the Chinese than preaching. By 1905 there were about three hundred fully
qualified physicians doing medical missionary work, and the 250 mission hospi-tals and dispensaries treated about 2
million patients. Missionary hospitals in Hong Kong also ran a medi-cal school that trained hundreds of Chinese as
phy-sicians. At their schools, missionaries helped spread Western learning. For their elementary schools, mis-
sionaries produced textbooks in Chinese on a full range of subjects. They translated dozens of standard works into
Chinese, especially in the natural sciences, mathematics, history, and international law. By 1906 there were nearly
sixty thousand students attending twenty-four hundred Christian schools. Most of this activity was supported by -
contributions sent from the United States and Britain. Missionaries in China
had more success in spreading Western learning than in gaining converts: by 1900 fewer than 1 million Chinese
were Christians.
The Failures of Reform

Despite the enormous efforts it put into trying to catch up, the end of the nineteenth century brought China
more humiliation. First came the discovery that Japan had so successfully modernized that it posed a threat to
China. Japan had not been much of a concern to China since Hideoyoshi’s invasion of Korea in the late Ming
period. In the 1870s, Japan began making demands on China and in the 1890s seemed to be looking for a
pretext for war.

Korea provided the

pretext. When an insurrection broke out in Korea in 1894, both China and Japan rushed to send troops. After Japan
sank a steamship carrying Chinese troops, both countries declared war. The results proved that the past decade of
accelerated efforts to upgrade the military were still not enough.

The mixture of fear and outrage that many of the educated class felt as China suffered blow after blow began to give
rise to attitudes that can be labeled na-tionalism. The two most important intellectual lead-ers to give shape to these
feelings were Kang Youwei (kahng yoe-way) (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (lyang chee-chow) (1873–1929), both
from Guang-dong province. Kang was a committed Confucian, dedicated to the ideals of personal virtue and service
to society. He reinterpreted the classics to justify re-form, arguing that Confucius had been a reformer, not a mere
transmitter as he had portrayed himself in the Analects. Liang, fifteen years younger, was Kang’s most brilliant
follower and went even further than Kang in advocating political change. Liang con-tended that self-strengthening
efforts had focused too narrowly on technology and ignored the need for cultural and political change. The
examination system should be scrapped and a national school sys-tem instituted. China needed a stronger sense of
na-tional solidarity and a new type of state in which the people participated in rule. In 1895 Kang, Liang, and like-
minded men began setting up study societies in several large cities. In Hunan province, for instance, fourteen study
societies were founded in 1897 and 1898, the largest with more than twelve hundred members.

In the spring of 1895, provincial graduates in Beijing for the triennial jinshi examinations submit-ted petitions on
how to respond to the crisis caused by the war with Japan. Some twelve hundred signed the “ten-thousand word
petition” written by Kang Youwei. Kang called for an assembly elected by the general populace.

In January 1898 the emperor invited Kang Youwei to discuss his ideas with the high officials at court. Afterward
Kang sent the emperor three

memorials on constitutions, national assemblies, and political reform. Kang even implied that the Qing rulers should
abandon the queue, noting that Western dress had been adopted in Japan and that the Japanese emperor had cut his
hair short.

After three months, Empress Dowager Cixi had had enough and staged a coup with the help of Yuan Shikai’s
army. She had the Guangxu emperor locked up and executed those reformers she could capture. All the reform
edicts were revoked. Kang and Liang,
safely out of Beijing at the time, fled to Japan, where each lived for years.
THE DECLINE OF THE QING EMPIRE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Late Qing reformers often urged the court to follow in the footsteps of Japan, which had adopted not merely
Western technology but also Western ideas about political organization and even Western dress.
 Ever since, it has been common to compare the fates of Qing China and Edo Japan and ask why Japan was so
much more successful at modernizing its government and economy.

The main arguments for lumping China and Japan together are that they were geographically close (both
were “the Far East” to Europeans), and some significant features of Japanese culture had been de-rived from
China, such as Confucianism and the use of Chinese characters in writing. The differences, however, should not
be minimized. China in the nineteenth century was not an independent country but rather part of the multiethnic
empire of the Man-chus, making it more similar to other large multieth-nic empires, like the Mughals in India,
the Ottomans

in the Middle East, the Romanovs in Russia, and even the Hapsburgs in eastern Europe. Even if only the China
proper part of the Qing is considered, it was a much larger country than Japan in both ter-ritory and population, with
all that that implied in terms of political structure.

Better comparisons for the Qing Dynasty during this period are probably the Ottoman and Russian empires. All
three were multiethnic, land-based Eur-asian empires, with long experience with mounted horsemen of the steppe—
and in the case of both the Ottomans and the Qing, currently ruled by groups that claimed this tradition themselves.
All three knew how to deal with problems of defending long land borders but were not naval powers. During the
eighteenth century, all had experienced rapid popu-lation growth that had reduced the standard of living for much of
the population by the mid-nineteenth century. By then the military pressure put on each of them both by internal
unrest and foreign pressure forced them to spend more on military preparedness at the cost of deficit financing.

In each of these empires during the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, the elites were divided be-tween Westernizers
and traditionalists, each look-ing for ways to strengthen the government. Urban merchants were usually more
willing to see changes made than were the imperial elite, who had the big-gest stake in the existing power structure.
Even when modernizers won out, improvements were generally too little or too late to make much difference when
the next confrontation with Western powers came. Reform programs could not outpace the destructive effect of
economic decline, social turmoil, and the in-trusion of the West. Foreign powers did not encour-age domestic
challenges to the dynastic rulers, per-haps fearing that they would lose the privileges they had gained through
treaties. Thus, many of those who sought radical change came to oppose both the foreign powers and the ruling
dynasty, giving rise to modern nationalism.