Questions on the Reading

Week 12

Introduction to "Rebellion, War, and Revolution in China."

Although European merchants and missionaries had sailed the waters and trod the land of successive Chinese empires and although European nations had sent envoys to present increasingly pressing demands for diplomatic equality and equitable trade, never had these posed a genuine threat. The imperial government confined Western settlement to the city of Canton (as the Tokugawa government limited Western settlement to Nagasaki) and imposed all manner of other restrictions on trade. But the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath created a radically new balance of power. Propelled by powerful technology, imperialist powers colonized large parts of the world in search of resources and markets for their developing industries.

The government of Great Britain, which had first attempted to reverse its negative trade balance with the Qing empire by shipping large quantities of opium from India to Canton, used Qing resistance to the opium trade as an excuse for a full-fledged war (the Opium War, 1839-1842). The Qing army and navy suffered crushing defeats, and the government had to submit to the humiliating Treaty of Nanking (1842). Other Western nations followed the British example, gradually dividing the Qing empire into "spheres of influence."

The readings for this week show how the encroachment of imperialist nations does not only cause practical problems, but it poses a fundamental challenge to all traditional knowledge. It does not merely threaten sovereignty, it threatens the validity of epistemological categories.

1. How do the debates in the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century differ from debates about reform in the Han, Song, and early Qing? How do the selected texts view "China" and "the Chinese" (history, culture, place in the world)? What do reformers and revolutionaries want to change, and what do they want to maintain?

2. What are the political and ideological foundations of the Republic of China? What has changed with the fall of the Empire?

3. What are the most important differences between the Chinese and the Japanese debates? What are the similarities? How has "East Asia" changed from the nineteenth into the twentieth century?