After the Second Opium War, detectable changes started to take place in the Chinese government. In our last readings, we came across the establishments of a language school and the Chinese equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Prince Gong. Leading Chinese reformers often came from government officials who directly dealt with the British/French troops, the Taiping, Nien rebels, or other areas of problems that were facilitated by the use of Western weapons, technology, military training, foreign languages, and other aspects of Western learning.

The defeat of the Taipings was the rsult of the combined powers of the Qing government and foreign forces. The Qing forces led by Li Hongzhang and Zen Guofan were trained in the Western way and equipped with Western weapons. Militarily they enjoyed an edge over the Taipings. While the Taiping rebellion severely weakened the Qing imperial rule, along with foreign aggressions, it also pushed for greater internal reforms by the Qing government, including military reforms.

After the establishment of the language school and some subsequent military schools, Chinese officials also opened up some shipyards and munitions factories in various provinces in the hope to catch up with the "practical learning" of the West. China, however, did not change fast enough to fend off the confrontations with foreign powers. Between 1860 and 1900, China fought several more wars, all ending in its own defeat and ceding more territories to foreign powers. Most notably were the Sino-French War (1884-1885), when the French controlled southwestern China (including the area where  Hong Xiuquan spread Christianity), and the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), when China lost to the newly modernized Japanese navy Korea, a Chinese tributary state, and Taiwan, a Chinese province.

Rebellions and reforms significantly weakened Confucian orthodoxy, while government discussions of reform (qingyi) eventually led to a short lived, 100 day reform movement in 1898. The result was precipitation of China onto a road of more radical reform that eventually led to the overthrow of the Qing government.

1. Continuation of wars with foreign powers

The Sino-French War (1883-1885)

A war fought over Vietnam, traditionally a Chinese protectorate. It ended in Chinese failure and recognition of a joint protectorate in Vietnam between China and France.

The Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)

A war fought with Japan over Korea, traditionally a Chinese protectorate. It ended in Chinese failure and Japanese colonization of Korea and the Chinese province of Taiwan. In the Treaty of Shimonoseki signed at the end of the war, made China pay an indemnity of 200,000,000 taels (about $200 million) to Japan; and to open the ports of Sha-shih, Ch'ung-ch'ing, Soochow, and K'ang-chow to Japanese trade. The Triple Intervention (1895), secured by Russia, France, and Germany, subsequently required Japan to retrocede the Liaotung Peninsula to China in return for an additional indemnity of 30,000,000 taels. Li Hongzhang, the Chinese envoy to Japan to negotiate with the Japanese prime minister Ito Hirobumi on China's terms of defeat, was shot by a Japanese fanatic on the leg. The terms of their discussion showed the Chinese government was not in a position to defend Chinese national sovereignty. (Cheng/Spence, 10.2, pp.172-178)

The Boxer Uprising and the Eight Allied Forces Intervention

In 1900, A Chinese peasant movement called the Boxers started to target foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians. They called themselves I-ho ch'uan, or “Righteous and Harmonious Fists.” They practiced boxing skills that they believed made them impervious to bullets. (The female counterpart to the male Boxer movement was called the "Shining Red Lantern," see Cheng, 10.5.) It was a nativist, xenophobic movement tacitly supported by the Chinese government to leverage the foreign presence in China. For a moment, the Boxers besieged the foreign legations in Beijing, leading to the joint intervention of the troops of six European countries, plus Japan and the U.S. The ultimate Boxer Protocol China signed with these foreign countries allowed the latter to station troops in China at key points. The Chinese government was to pay $330 million in gold to the countries involved to cover their war cost, plus many more fees in hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover other expenses incurred by the war.

2. Qingyi and other forms of discussions of reform

China's humiliating defeats in numerous wars with foreign countries led to extensive discussions among Chinese officials and scholars over what kind of reforms China should take. The qingyi movement, or discussion of reform, lasted from 1875 to 1898, "in the course of which it enlarged its scope of demands by lower- and middle-grade metropolitan officials for a broader distribution of political power and contributed to the formation of public opinion. This evolution was attended by the rise of analogous demands for political restructuring by men in two other environments: extrabureaucratic managerial and scholarly circles and the treaty ports. Militant patriotism mobilized and eventually united different groups, stimulating nationally conscious opinion that was alienated from the political leadership. The failure of government leaders to accommodate new political initiatives redirected qingyi into provincial movements and set the stage for the competition between centralizing bureaucratic and societally based programs for change that led to the 1911 revolution." (abstract from Mary Backus Rankin, "Public opinion" and Political Power: Qingyi in Late Nineteenth Century China, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3 (May, 1982), pp. 453-484)

3. The 1895 Chinese scholars' petition for reform

 In 1895, upon hearing China's defeat by Japan, formerly a country that had looked up to China, many Chinese scholars petitioned the Chinese government for reform. Prior to this, limited reforms had been carried out, primarily in establishing some sporadic schools: naval shipyards, schools specializing in mechanics, and translation and interpretation. The effort was not nation wide because China did not have a nation wide educational system. The traditional form of education was private tutorials, and the Imperial Examination System that selected government officials based on primarily a familiarity with classical Confucian texts on human cultivation.

The Imperial Examination System

Historically, from around 7th century A.D., China started a civil service examination whereby they selected government officials based on a variety of subjects, chiefly Confucian learning texts. By the time of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), only two subjects remained in the examination: a civics part, focusing on Confucian learning, and a military part (consisting of horse riding, archery, etc.), reserved only for Manchu descendents (the Manchus were nomadic tribes that conquered China in 1644 and established their rulership in China, the Manchu, or Qing, Dynasty. The word Qing, meaning pure, sounds eeriely Muslim, suggesting their connections with the Central Asian Muslim tribes, but they quickly Sinicized, converting into Confucianism in China and became exemplary Confucian rulers, although succumbing from time to time to Buddhist influences). Science and technology, although developed earlier in China, were ignored by the state.

After the Western encroachments into China, more and more Chinese reformers advocated a reform of the imperial examination system, adding subjects such as mathematics and astronomy. Also, many petitioned for establishing government sponsored schools in China to teach Western subjects of science and astronomy. It was under such circumstances that emperor Guang Xu, the nephew of Empress Cixi and Emperor Xian Feng, the emperor who was forced to flee Beijing (Peking) during the Second Opium War and who died a year after the war came to an end in 1861, decided to launch a series of reforms in China.

4.The Hundred Day Reform (1898)

In 1898 Emperor Guang Xu, together with his reform advisers, formulated a series of reform proposals. This planning process, however, only lasted for around 100 days, and the emperor's aunt Empress Dowager Cixi expressed disagreement with some of the drastic measures of reform. Of six chief advisers of the emperor, four of them were beheaded, and two fled to Japan upon the decision of the empress dowager. The reform was aborted. Some of its decisions, however, were eventually carried out, such as establishing an imperial university in Peking (Beijing) to serve as the state's organ for an eventual educational reform and as a means to train government officials with a combination of Chinese and Western learning. Larger scale reform would be put underway after the Boxer Uprising in 1902.

Kang Youwei, the mastermind behind the reform, had hoped to unify China to establish an ancient ideal of a unified community, with Confucian learning as a new religion to rally the Chinese. As time went on, Kang's idea became more and more obsolete, and despite that Kang himself had to flee to Japan to save his life, the pace of reform quickened after the Boxer Uprising was crushed.

After 1900, the Chinese government quickened its reforms, which were no longer confined to the scattered schools that taught Western learning and the factories/shipyards that manufactured Western style weapons and ships in the 19th century, but included a nationwide Western educational system from the primary to the tertiary in 1902. Co-education was also introduced, although its implementation in most parts of China was not realized until the 1920s. China also started to train its army in the Western way, and sent many imperial officials and students to the West to study foreign ways of science, technology, and politics. The imperial examination system was abolished in 1905 to encourage people to go into the new educational system. By 1910, the Chinese government was seriously considering establishing a parliamentary monarchy, although it was not ready to do it yet. The slowness of parliamentary government preparation, plus a series of government policies that elicited national anger, finally led to a military coup in central China in October 1911, and widespread response from the rest of China. The Manchu government was overthrown.

1. Building a Racial Rhetoric Against the Manchu government:

Gradually, the radical reformers locked their dissatisfaction with the Manchu government. There were conflicts of interests between local and central government on several issues, but now the differences between the local and central governments were interpreted as the result of racial confrontation. In order to forge forward with more radical political changes, Chinese reformers wanted to leave the Manchu government behind by evoking the new Social Darwinian argument about nation and race, arguing that the Manchus were a race (first time such definition was applied to Chinese nationalities) that was hostile to the Han Chinese. Books and pamphlets were circulated that condemned Manchu massacre of the Hans at the beginning of the Manchu conquest of China, such as the Ten Day Massacre of Yangzhou, and Three Massacres of Jiading. In fact, the very term for the major Chinese nationality, Han, was determined in the late 19th century by Sun Yatsen, based on the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD), one of the longest lasting and most prosperous dynasties in Chinese history. Distinctions of peoples by race/nationality was used to achieve the political goal of nationalism and radical social change.

Many Han soldiers in the Manchu army, such as Feng Yuxiang (Cheng, 11.2), were influenced by propaganda of this kind. Feng later converted to Christianity in republican China and was called the "Christian general," who baptized his soldiers with a water hose. Racial rhetoric undermined Han loyalty in the Manchu army. One of the most fervent propagators of the historically rooted hostility between Manchus and Han Chinese was called Zou Rong (Cheng, 11.3), a young newspaper editor who propagated stories like early Manchu massacres of the Han. His radical editorials in his newspaper Subao finally led to his arrest by the Qing government, and he died of illness in jail. Even Sun Yatsen joined in the racial rhetoric against the Manchus in the revolutionary anti-Manchu secret society he organized in 1905, called the Tongmenghui.(Cheng, 11.4) All these reformers had the utopian vision that China's backwardness would be completely rid of once the Manchus were swept out of the way. Regime change would lead to social transformation.