East Asia [individual assignment]
EAST ASIA
Japan
As for Japan, the Tokugawa shogunate had sealed itself from the wider world: Christianity had been banned since the 1600s, and only through the port of Nagasaki did the regime allow a trickle of foreign trade.
All this changed in 1853, when the American gunships captained by Commodore Matthew Perry appeared. With the threat of force Perry asked the Japanese to open up to trade. Once the shogun agreed other Western fleets made similar demands.
It appeared that Japan might suffer the fate of colony, but in 1867-68 a coalition of samurai clans abolished the office of shogun and restored the emperor – a symbolic figurehead since the 1200s – to a position of full authority.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868, named after the new emperor, began Japan’s modern age. Meiji, who ruled until 1912, rapidly industrialized Japan’s economy and modernized political and social life. To build popular allegiance, Meiji and his successors turned to Japan’s ancient faith, creating an Office of Shinto Worship in 1872. All priests became state employees and emphasized the veneration of the emperor as a descendant of the gods. By the 1930s and 1940s, this form of “State Shinto” was used to justify a sense of Japanese racial superiority and blind obedience to government.
Meiji swept away the feudal social hierarchy of the Tokugawa era. In the 1870s, the samurai lost their hereditary privileges, including their immunity from taxation and right to wear swords in public. Access to political positions depended on merit and civil service examinations.
Industrialization increased the size and influence of the merchant and middle classes, and the feudal prejudice against trade faded away. The lower classes gained access to public education and were allowed to serve in the military.
Meiji’s Constitution of 1890 created an elected parliament, the Diet, and the Civil Code of 1898 updated Japan’s legal system. Owing to property qualifications and other restrictions, only about 5 percent of the population could vote for the Diet, and the emperor exercised a great deal of control over it. The civil code also made little room for the rights of women, who were largely confined to a secondary status.
The Meiji regime excelled at Westernization, economic efficiency, and militarization. From Britain and Germany, the Japanese navy and army adopted not just industrial-era technology, but also Western tactics and organizational methods.
Japan took Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea from China, gained concessions in Manchuria, and took half the island of Sakhalin from Russia. The Russo-Japanese War (1904– 1905), the first large-scale conflict of the modern era in which a non-Western state defeated a European power.
Russia’s imperial and railroad-building ambitions in eastern Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchuria collided with Japan’s plans for expansion. Instead of negotiating spheres of influence with the Japanese, the tsar pushed ahead with foolish overconfidence. Equipped just as well as the Russians were, and fighting close to home – while the Russians struggled to supply their war via the Trans-Siberian Railway, several thousand miles long – the Japanese chocked their foes. Victory gave them the Kurile islands and southern Sakhalin, and Japan strengthened its position in Korea and mainland China.
China
China never became a colony; The Qing dynasty hung on until 1911 to 1912. Qing China in the late 1700s still enjoyed wealth.
Qianlong (1763–95) is remembered as the Qing dynasty’s last truly capable ruler. Confucian-based social stratification remained rigid. The cost of defending China’s frontiers (north and west) combined with too-rapid population growth (from 300 million in 1799 to 400 million a century later) burdened the economy.
Popular discontent erupted in uprisings like the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804). The government grew more corrupt and incompetent after Qianlong’s death. The Europeans could trade only in several cities (especially in Canton).
The Qing continued to believe that China was the Middle Kingdom and that all outsiders were barbarians. What they failed to recognize was that China had already fallen behind the West when it came to science and technology, and that it could not hope to match the stronger navies, better weapons, and more effective armies.
In the meantime the British and other Western nations, including the United States, embarked on a campaign of economic imperialism (pressuring weaker nations to offer favorable trade terms) by flooding China with opium from British India. The opium trade overwhelmingly reversed the economic balance of power: instead of flowing into China, silver bullion now flowed out at an alarming rate. Opium addiction became widespread. Millions of farmers and workers were too incapacitated to work.
Chinese attempts to stop opium trade led to the First Opium War (1839–1842) and Second Opium War (1856–1860). The war ended with the Treaty of Nanking, the first of many “unequal treaties” forced on China by the Western powers. The Qing surrendered Hong Kong to Britain.
The coerced collaboration of the Qing with Britain and the United States led to history’s largest civil war, the Taiping Rebellion against colonizers, from 1850 to 1864, in which 20 to 30 million Chinese died.
France seized Indochina after a short conflict with China in 1883. Japan thrashed China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), occupying Korea and Taiwan. In 1899, the United States’ Open Door Policy arranged equal access to Chinese markets for all Western nations.
In 1900, China was shaken by the Boxer Rebellion (so called because many of the rebels were martial artists) encouraged by Empress Cixi. The Boxers unleashed their rage against Westerners in major cities like Beijing, but were put down after weeks of violence by foreign troops. In revenge, the Western powers burned a number of Chinese temples and forced the Qing to pay heavy reparations.
Empress Cixi now recognized the need for change and formed a committee to investigate the possibility of writing a constitution. She died in 1908, leaving Henry Puyi, China’s last emperor, to take up the reform effort. Unfortunately for him, revolution destroyed the Qing regime in 1911–1912, leading to the rise of the Chinese Republic.
Questions for experts
1. What factors influenced on East Asia’s history?
2. What were the differences and similarities between China and Japan?
3. What distinguishes given East Asian states (China and Japan) from other regions considered in this topic? (Before answering read about other region in the topic 9).