China in the Twentieth Century: Nationalism and Revolution

In the year 1900 it would not have been hard to forecast India’s political future; and Japan, in the preceding half century, had moved even farther than India in reaction to the West. But anyone then looking at the scene in China would have found prophecy indeed difficult. Today, only half a century later, it is in India and Japan where lies the doubt, in China the certainty.

The old isolationist pride of China was still alive in 1900; in places the cumbersome cannon of the past were yet hopefully manned, but, in fact, the flag of surrender was already being run up. A knowledge of the West, which was self-sought and not merely an acceptance of what was imposed, had already begun to spread. Yen Fu in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the first of many translators of western thought and literature; Chinese students were going abroad to study; and a utopian reformer, K’ang Yu-wei, had seen his brief ascendancy over the Emperor flare into startling reforms in 1898, though they were quickly snuffed out.