Overview of China & Japan

European Imperialism had a deep and lasting impact on the parts of the world that the Europeans took over and made into colonies. Before the Europeans took over, the societies in these places had sophisticated cultures that stretched back thousands of years and controlled regions larger than most European countries. Cities in these regions, like Beijing in China, Delhi in India and Cairo in Egypt, had for centuries been larger with healthier populations than any city in Europe. Even in the 18th century, the lifestyle of people in these regions was higher than that of people in Europe. However, the Industrial Revolution changed this situation because the technology of the Industrial Revolution gave the Europeans the ability to produce more and improve their standard to living. In addition, the Industrial Revolution changed the way Europeans interacted with the rest of the world by giving Europeans the interest in getting resources from the rest of the world and the military power to take over large parts of the world. The imperialistic invasions by Europeans disrupted the societies in the regions they took over. The Europeans defeated their armies, took away the power of these people to rule themselves and forced them to accept European culture. The short amount of time it took the Europeans to take over these regions shocked the people who lived in these places.

The impact of European imperialism sparked conflict in places where the Europeans pushed aside the traditional societies and took over. Many societies were divided about how to react to European rule. The reality was that while being conquered and ruled by Europeans was deeply humiliating, European rule also brought benefits like modern medicine and technology, such as railroads, to these societies. In general, the societies taken over by the Europeans could be divided into three groups based on how they reacted to European imperialism. The first group was the people who benefited from European rule and worked with and supported European imperialism. These people often converted to European Christianity and worked with the Europeans in running the colonies as soldiers and administrators. The second group was people who lost their power and status or believed that their traditional society was superior to the European ways. These people often resisted the Europeans and fought back in open rebellion against the Europeans. The third group was people who resented being ruled by the Europeans but recognized that they could not defeat the Europeans because the Europeans had superior weapons and technology. These people chose to work with the Europeans so as to learn European technology and ideas so that they could use them to make their country strong and win their independence at a later date. The conflicts between these groups as they reacted to European imperialism played out in many different ways around the world.

Imperialism in China & Japan

The countries of China and Japan provide a contrast in how non-European societies reacted to European Imperialism and how this has affected their development into modern societies. Generally, China tried to maintain its systems by ignoring Western Powers while Japan chose to change and adopt Western systems with the goal of maintaining its independence. The Chinese Imperial government tried to keep the Europeans out of China by allowing them to only do business in the city of Canton and would only allow the Europeans to buy Chinese goods with silver. The Chinese looked down on the Europeans and did not want to buy any European goods. The British began to smuggle opium into China to trade for Chinese goods. The Chinese emperor reacted by having all the captured opium destroyed. This sparked the First Opium War in 1839, in which the British used modern steam powered gunships to sink the Chinese navy and forced the Chinese to open themselves to trade with Europe. The Chinese government reacted to the defeat in the Opium War by holding to its traditions and refusing to adopt modern technology and ideas. The Europeans then fought several more “Opium Wars” with the Chinese to force the Chinese to give the Europeans more benefits and trading rights. Many Chinese were humiliated that the Europeans had beaten them and that now the Europeans could freely do whatever they wanted in China. China was troubled with several rebellions against both the Chinese government and the Europeans powers in China. The first of these major rebellions was the Taiping Rebellion which lasted from 1850 to 1864 and consumed most of southeastern China. It is estimated that up to 20 million people died in this rebellion. The Chinese government was only able to put down the rebellion with the assistance of European and American military leadership and weapons. After this, the Chinese government became dependent on American and European support and the Europeans began to directly take over some parts of China. Throughout this period, the Chinese government worked with the Europeans and did not try to modernize the way it ruled China. When the Emperor tried to start a process of modernization, he was removed from power by his mother, the Empress Dowager Cixi had him removed from power and the reforms stopped. This only increased Chinese anger and 1898 the Boxer Rebellion swept across China. Groups of Chinese attacked Europeans and Americans living in China. In response, Europe and America sent a combined army to China and defeated the Boxers. After this, the Europeans and Americans stationed armies in China and the Chinese had to pay these armies. The combination of the weakness of the Chinese government and the anger of the Chinese over European Imperialism lead to the Xinhai Revolution in 1912 that overthrew the Chinese government.

The reaction of Japan to European imperialism stands in contrast to that of China. For centuries, the government of Japan had ruled that the country be isolated from the rest of the world. During this time, Japan was dominated by the shogun, or “imperial general” who ruled the country with the loyal support of the noble samurai warriors. Japan did have an emperor, but he only had symbolic power. The shogun believed that if Japan did not have any contact with the rest of the world then it would not be taken over. However, in 1853 the American navy arrived in Japan and demanded that it open itself up to the world. Unlike China, which did not change in response to the rest of the world, Japan opened itself up to the rest of the world and embarked on a process of rapid modernization based on copying Europe and America. The Japanese call this process the Meiji Restoration because it began with the shogun losing his power and emperor becoming the ruler of Japan. After this, Japan sent experts to study European and American governments, industries and militaries. When they returned they wrote a new constitution for the government based on Germany, built factories based on American and British models and created a modern military. In the space of a few decades, Japan was transformed from a weak traditional society into a modern country that was of equal strength to any European country. Japan also began to act like a European country by using its newly developed industrial power and military to build an empire in Asia. Similar to the Europeans, the Japanese were interested in taking over other places to get resources, like coal and iron, which they did not have in their own country. The Japanese used their new military power to take over Korea and parts of China – working with the Europeans to defeat the Boxer Rebellion in China. Japan’s military power made it equal to many European powers, which can be seen in the fact that Japan signed a military alliance with England in 1902 and defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

Twentieth Century China & Japan

The long and violent process of turning China into a modern country began with Chinese Revolution in 1912 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. The revolutionary forces in China were unable to organize a new government and the country descended into warlordism in which the country was divided into regions controlled by private armies. In these condition, the leader Sun Yat-sen organized the Koumintang (KMT) to take over China and turn it into a modern republic following the Western model based on individual rights, democracy and capitalism. However, in 1919, the Versailles Treaty gave Japan control of the parts of China that had been run by Germany. This set off a set of protests in China called the Fourth of May Movement in which Chinese reformists turned away from the Western Democratic model because it was viewed as imperialistic. Instead, Sun turned to the newly established Soviet Union for assistance in building the KMT army in return for allowing a communist movement to begin organizing in China. The Soviet support helped the KMT build a strong army and take over China in 1927. However, by this time, Sun was dead and his successor Chiang Kai-shek opposed communism and massacred the Chinese communists. The Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong survived the massacre by hiding in the rural countryside where he began to build a peasant communist army. In 1933, Chiang tried to destroy the Mao's communist army, but Mao was able to save it by retreating to the far north of China in an event called the Long March. In contrast to China, Japan emerged from World War One being very interested in Western culture and becoming more liberal. However, Japan was confronted by the difficulty it had in building it modern industrial economy with limited natural resources, like oil, coal and iron. This lead to a struggle in Japan as its liberal government came into conflict with Japanese military and industry that looked to the rest of Asia as a source of natural resources for its economy. This conflict resulted in the military and industry taking over the country so as to build a larger Asian empire to secure resources for the Japanese economy. After this, Japan began to expand into northern China. Chiang Kai-shek ignored Japanese expansion to focus on destroying Mao's communists. Similar to Nazi aggression in Europe, Chiang's inaction to Japanese aggression had the effect of further encouraging Japanese expansion. World War Two in Asia began in 1937 when Japan invaded and conquered all of coastal China, pushing Chiang's KMT government into the interior of China. After capturing coastal China, in 1941, the Japanese continued to expand southward to conquer the European colonies in South East Asia and Indonesia. At this point, the Japanese attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor because it was the only power that could challenge Japan's ambitions for building a Pacific Empire. This event brought the United States into World War Two. While Japan portrayed itself as fighting Western Imperialism, in reality it treated the conquered people in its empire similar to way its Nazi allies treated the conquered people in Europe. The brutality of the Japanese occupation of China resulted in Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong forming an uneasy alliance of the KMT and communist forces against the Japanese.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States and Japan fought a naval war across the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of the war, the United States began to move island by island across the Pacific closer to Japan while at the same time bombing the cities of Japan. As the United States closed in on Japan, the Japanese soldiers and civilians put up a suicidal defense against the American forces. At the same time, the United States tested the first atomic bomb and made the decision to drop it on Japan as a way of ending the war. In August 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and Japan surrendered unconditionally to the United States.

Following the war, the United States took over Japan and turned it into a democracy that would be a pacifist country defended by the United States military, which built permanent military bases in Japan. After the war, Japan turned its economy so that it focused on importing raw materials that it would use to manufacture finished goods, like cars and electronics, for export to the rest of the world. Japan rebuilt its economy in a process that is described as the "authoritarian development" model. This was different from the capitalistic approach of America and Europe where the government does not work closely with business. In the Japanese "authoritarian development" model was based on the government directly helping Japanese companies to develop products for export and dominate foreign markets. This collaboration of private companies and government helped Japan become the second largest economy in the world, after the United States. The success of Japan caused many other Asian countries, like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, to imitate the Japanese "authoritarian development" model and become wealthy by becoming export oriented economies. The success of these countries in developing their economies resulted in them becoming known as the Asian Tiger Economies.

After World War Two, the Cold War became a dominant issue in Asia. The start of the Cold War in Asia was different from how it started in Europe. In Europe, World War Two ended with the American and Soviet militaries confronting each other in occupied Germany and the control of the continent was clearly divided between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the end of World War Two in Asia neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had much direct control over the region. American and Soviet influence came into the region because the Europeans were unable to reassert their imperial influence in the region, Japanese had to surrender control over Korea (which was divided into two countries) and internal conflicts within the countries of Asia made the region a Cold War battleground. The Cold War began in Asia with the Chinese Civil War between Chiang Kia-shek's KMT and Mao Zedong's communists in the wake of the defeat of Japan. Mao's communist army emerged from World War Two stronger than Chiang's KMT and in 1949, the communists were able to drive the KMT out of mainland China (the KMT took over Taiwan) and Mao declared it to be the People's Republic of China. After China became communist, the United States became determined to block the further expansion of communism in Asia with military force - this expanded the policy of Containment to Asia. The United States fought both the Korean and Vietnam wars to prevent the expansion of communism. The United States was successful in protecting South Korea (which went on to become one of the Asia Tiger Economies) but lost the Vietnam War, which ended with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos becoming communist countries.

The Cold War in Asia took a different shape than the conflict in Europe against the Soviet Union because of an ideological split between Mao's ideas of Communism and that of the Soviet Union. This division went back to the 1930's and was based in the doctrine of the Soviet Union being that communism was a movement of urban industrial workers and Mao's idea of organizing a peasant communist movement. After the death of Joseph Stalin, Mao and the Soviet government came into conflict over the legacy of Stalin which caused the Soviet Union to withdraw all of its support for China. After this, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, a radical program to turn China into a modern industrial country by having farmers over plant their fields and make steel in backyard furnaces. This resulted in a massive famine that killed upwards of 40 million people. In the wake of the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Mao empowered Deng Xiaoping to fix the economy. Unlike Mao, who was a committed communist idealist, Deng was much more pragmatic in his approach to reforming China. Mao was threatened by Deng's success and rejected it because it was not sufficiently communist. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution that sought to overturn Chinese society and make it a purely communist society. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao supported radical communist students, called the Red Guard, in destroying traditional parts of Chinese society and attacking any person in authority who did not seem idealistic enough. Deng lost power in this event and was persecuted by the Red Guard. After a few years, Mao realized that the Cultural Revolution had gone too far and the country was on the verge of chaos. He recalled Deng and returned him to power. As Mao's health failed in the early 1970's, Deng and other pragmatic reformers fought Mao's idealistic supporters for control of China. Deng prevailed in this struggle.

In the midst of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and America's failing war in Vietnam, the United States and the People's Republic of China began to build diplomatic ties, which culminated in the visit of American president Richard Nixon to China in 1972. The United States reached out to China as a Cold War tactic of exploiting the division between the Soviet Union and China. The opening up of relations between the United States and China paved the way for Deng's reform of the Chinese economy from one focused on building an peasant communist society to becoming a global economic power. Violating all communist ideals, Deng created Special Economic Zones in coastal China in which Western companies could build factories to take advantage of employing inexpensive Chinese workers. This set in motion a process of economic growth in China that over the course of forty years would lift hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty and make China the second largest economy in the world (by 2020 it will be the largest economy in the world).

In many ways the process of economic development begun by Deng was an imitation of the Japanese model that was used by the Asia Tigers, only on a much larger scale. One significant question is whether this process of economic development would bring democracy and human rights to China. The Asian Tiger economies, similar to China under Deng, began the process of economic reform as authoritarian governments. It was the process of economic development that raised people's standard of living which turned them into democracies. In contrast, Deng and the Chinese government opposed any reforms that would change China into democracy. For example, Deng used military power to violently crush the pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen Square in 1989. As a result, unlike the Soviet Union where the process of economic reform resulted in the collapse of communism (and the Soviet Union), the Chinese communist government has firmly controlled the orderly transformation of China's economy from a centrally planned economy to a market oriented economy. While this has allowed China to grow its economy at a rapid pace for almost forty years, it is clear that this growth has come at the expense of significant human rights violations.