Meiji+Japan

=**Modern Japan: 1853 – 1914**=

Bakumatsu - the End of the Tokugawa Shogunate
The change that Japan underwent between 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry first arrived in Uraga Bay with his "black ships" and 1914, when Japan, fully accepted by the West as a first class world power joined the ranks of the allies in World War I was nothing short of stunning. The beginnings of that change, while triggered by Perry's arrival, had their roots in internal problems. Those problems were simply worsened by the great stresses accompanied by the need to confront a more powerful West and either change or be conquered. Japan chose to change in the face of western pressure. The stresses related to the changes made, and to the pressure of the West itself, were the drivers of Japan's social,political, cultural, and economic organization throughout the 20th century. In 1853, Commodore Perry sailed into Uraga Bay with four ships – two steamers, and two war frigates. The Edo he saw was a part of a centralized feudal order run by the Tokugawa Shoguns that had stood for nearly 300 years. In that order, everyone in society had a place, and there was almost no social mobility. Each person was classified as either warrior, farmer, artisan, or merchant, and dressed, ate, lived, and worked according to strict laws that governed each class. This rank had nothing to do with wealth, but was concerned with social status as the chief indicator of rights and responsibilities. What was true about the overall social order was also true for order within the ruling class – the warriors. Within the warrior group, daimyo, (literally "great names") were at the top. These men governed entire fiefs held by grant of the Shogun, who controlled all land in Japan, and literally owned ¼ of Japan by himself. The Shogun could command the daimyo to wait on him in Edo, to limit the number of castles in each fief to one, and could even move daimyo from one fief to another at a whim. However, the Shogun could not control the taxes, laws, or policies of daimyo within his domain. Therefore, we can say that the Tokugawa regime functioned as a kind of "centralized feudalism" in which overarching concerns about policy, law, and defense fell to the shogun, and concerns of local politics to the daimyo, who were his vassals. Since the shogun could not trust all of his vassals equally, he arranged their fiefs to reflect their relative trustworthiness. The most trustworthy, his closest allies, he named "fudai daimyo" and placed in a ring of fiefs that surrounded the central Tokugawa lands and Edo (present day Tokyo). Beyond that first ring were the next most trustworthy, and so on until, in the outermost ring, he placed his most important enemies – the "tozama daimyo". These last were far enough away that it would cost them money, time, and many battles with shogunal allies in the inner rings before an insurrection could reach the shogun himself. To complement this defensive arrangement of landholding, the shoguns also instituted a policy of "alternate attendance" (//sankin kotai//) in which every daimyo was required to be in attendance upon the shogun in his Edo palace for six months of every year. This annual trip to and from Edo, requiring as it did the transport of large numbers of retainers, personal assistants, personal items and symbols of status, cost so much that most daimyo could not afford to mount any kind of military resistance at all. To boot, the system also functioned as a hostage system, since the family of each daimyo was required to stay in Edo all year 'round, only minute's run from the shogun's palace, at immediate risk of execution should a daimyo begin to rebel. Needless to say, many daimyo chafed at this strict regulation of their movements and actions. Since the shogun held his office by the will of the emperor, however, they had no ideological excuse to rebel, and so the system maintained itself over the years, stresses notwithstanding. When Commodore Perry arrived in 1853, then returned in 1854 to receive an answer as to whether Japan would open up trade with the United States, the shogunate was aware that the power his ships wielded was unstoppable with then current Japanese military technology. Rather than suffer invasion by the barbarians, they signed a treaty with the Americans against the wishes of the emperor and most of the daimyo, none of whom had seen the American ships, or had the slightest idea of western military power. When the shogun signed against the emperor's will, other diamyo could then suggest that he had gone against the emperor's wishes and so no longer enjoyed the mandate of the imperial will. They then had an ideological basis for a challenge to the shogun's right to rule. With this in hand, some samurai of Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa provinces (among others) formed a western style army, collected the 16-year-old emperor on their way through Kyoto, and marched on the shogun's capital at Edo. They defeated the shogun's army just outside of Kyoto, and the last Tokugawa Shogun resigned his position voluntarily in 1868. At the same time as the samurai were changing rulers, they were subject to class pressures that had nearly turned Japan's orderly society upside down by the 1840's. These were largely due to the fact that the "moral economy" on which the Tokugawa had based their rule was incompatible with the economic realities of the time. The samurai were considered to be the most important members of society, since they protected, and ruled. They were paid in annual stipends of rice by the warrior upper class – the daimyo. By the 1840's, though, were receiving lower than expected tax payments because farmers were experiencing bad weather and low harvests. This meant that daimyo had to borrow rice from merchants – the lowest rung of society – to make those payments. Most daimyo by the 1840's were in heavy debt to merchants, and this led both daimyo and farmers to suspect something was wrong. Both groups protested – the samurai by talking with the shogun, who often forgave debts, and the farmers by holding rebellions that were conservative in nature – looking for a return to the old order. Thus, when the samurai from Tosa, Satsuma, and Choshu were able to replace the shogun's government with one nominally headed by the emperor, many in society were ready for the change. Thus in 1868, with the shogun's abdication, the arrival of the new Emperor Meiji in his new capital, renamed "Tokyo" (or Western Capital), the Meiji Revolution had begun. Its success, however, depended on a number of unpredictable factors.

Meiji Japan, 1868-1912
But just as not all the wars and conflicts over national identity and national organization were European, so they were not all Western, either. Japan and China endured major political conflicts at the end of the 19th century as well, and in many ways these were directly connected both to the arrival of Western (European and American) powers in Asia, and to the ideas of Nationalism and Classical Liberalism coming from the West. In 1853, even as the Kansas-Nebraska Act was disrupting the U.S. politics at home, President Millard Fillmore sent a fleet under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan to open up trade, and particularly to get Japan to agree to serve as a coaling station for U.S. steam-powered vessels trading with China. The Japanese had a set of laws that made it both illegal for a Japanese to leave the country and return, and for a foreigner to enter, except for Chinese, Koreans, or Dutch, and for the Dutch, only twice per year at specified times, and only at Deshima, on the southern island of Kyushu. When the Americans arrived with their "black ships" (as the Japanese called them because they were steam-powered and their smokestacks constantly bellowed black coal smoke), they steamed straight into Uraga Bay, near Edo (now called Tokyo ), and immediately demanded to talk to the Shogun. Along with a miniature-sized train just big enough for a few people to ride on, and other gifts of technology, Commodore Perry presented the Shogunal representatives with letters from himself and from President Fillmore requesting the opening of Japan for trade. The power of the ships Perry brought (the Japanese were aware of Western technology, but had never seen ships as powerful as these), and the interesting technology, as well as the inability of the Shogun to stop them, sent Japan into a maelstrom of political confusion. Perry serenely sailed off to Okinawa, Taiwan , and the Philippines and promised to return for an answer in 1854. When Perry did return, with more ships and more men, he was able to land, and negotiations began with the Japanese Shogun, whom Perry mistakenly thought to be the Emperor, over opening of trade. Between 1853 and 1854, Japan, which was already on the cusp of important changes, went over the political edge. The shogunate, which had essentially ruled Japan since 1600 as a military house was aware of the power that Perry's ships and soldiers represented, and aware that Japan would be unable to withstand that power. However, changes occurring with Japan 's social, political, and economic structure during this period meant that the Shogunate was very unpopular among the Emperor, his court, and the daimyo – the other noble samurai of the same social rank as the shogun. The Shogun realized that it had to sign the treaty, but also recognized that to do so would be to reverse its own policy, set in the 1630's, of avoiding contact with Western Powers. As a consequence, the Shogunate held a kind of plebiscite, asking the daimyo and the emperor whether it should accept the treaty. The daimyo, at least, seem to have understood the military threat to some degree, the emperor, Kome, heir to a sedentary and ceremonial throne, apparently did not understand at all. The daimyo, though, were ready to play a political game. They understood that the treaty was necessary, but also recognized that to tell the Shogun not to accept it would put him and his government between a rock and a hard place, as it were. He could not easily move against the wishes of other members of the ruling class, but had not choice but to accept or be attacked by the Americans. Many daimyo hoped that this would weaken, or at least confuse, the Shogunal government. The ploy of the daimyo worked – the Shogun did accept the treaty, but this left his government vulnerable to much deep political and ideological criticism. The emperor claimed that Japan was sacred ground, home of the descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, and not to be violated by foreign feet. The emperor's supporters – political opportunists and true believers alike, agreed and were willing to die for the emperor – some Samurai even abandoned their daimyo to serve the emperor directly as //shi shi// – men of high purpose and action. These samurai pressured the Shogunate to refuse the foreigners, and attempted to whip up anti-foreign fervor, claiming that Japanese spirit could defeat the U.S. guns, regardless of the higher technology. As the United States negotiated further treaties with the Japanese, these //shi shi// began attacking foreigners in Japan. The treaties reached included formal diplomatic ties, and trade rights that allowed the U.S. to import to Japan any goods, and denied the Japanese the right to tax, bar, or even examine the imports, a law that gave the United States jurisdiction over its citizens on Japanese soil (Japan could not arrest, try, or even fine US citizens in Japan for any reason, even though they were on Japanese soil – they were not subject to Japanese law), and Japan had to accept U.S. and eventually British steamers carrying Japanese mail and taxes on the coastal routes, etc. British treaties soon followed. These treaties came to be known in Japan as the "unequal treaties," and their acceptance by the Shogunate was almost universally reviled, even by Japanese who had not been politically conscious prior to this time. In the 1860's, some of the //shi shi// (the title means "men of high purpose") began attacking foreign representatives in Japan. These attacks did little good in terms of getting the Europeans and Americans to leave, but they did continue to tighten the bind that the Shogunate found itself in. The Western powers demanded that the //shi shi// responsible for the attacks be captured and punished, and that the Shogunate pay huge indemnities for the damage done. The Shogunate was not really capable of doing either. It did pay the subsidies, and made attempts, at least, to apprehend the samurai responsible for the attacks, but the payments were so large as to nearly bankrupt the Shugun's treasury, and the samurai being hunted all belonged to non-Tokugawa controlled domains, where they could often retreat and live freely under the protection of their own daimyo, who was often as interested as they were in making life difficult for the Shogun's government. Eventually, a group of young Samurai from the domains of Satsuma (in Kyushu), Choshu, in Southwest Honshu, and Tosa, in Shikoku, formed a ragtag army of samurai and former farmers, whom they armed with weapons, and went to Kyoto to stage. There, in 1868, they invited the 16-year-old recently crowned emperor to come with them to attack the Shogun in Edo. When they arrived in Edo, the Shogun relinquished power without a fight (though some supporters of the Shogun fortified themselves in southern Hokkaido and attempted to fight for some time). The Tokugawa regime was at an end, and a new government had to be formed. In 1868 the young samurai who had led the expedition to Edo took charge, and became personal counselors to the emperor, whom they formally restored (hence the term Meiji Restoration) as the sole ruler of Japan. The emperor then granted them special status as his advisors, and with the imperial seal and the imperial will behind them, they began to change Japan. Their first goal was to get the so-called "unequal treaties" revised in Japan 's favor. To do that, they knew, they would have to prove to the Western powers that not only was Japan a modern, and civilized (by Western standards) state, but that it could defend itself, and posed enough of a threat that the Western powers would take it seriously at the negotiating table. This, it was clear, required a number of reforms. First and foremost, they needed to consolidate their power, and the control by their new imperial government of all of Japan. This was quite different from the organization of the Tokugawa period, which historians have called "centralized feudalism." In that regime, the Tokugawa Shogunate had virtually no control over what happened in the //han// – the domains of the various other daimyo. The Tokugawa controlled only their own lands, and the actions of the daimyo on a state-wide basis. The Shogun could tell a daimyo whom he could marry, but could not legally tax either the daimyo or the people living in his domain. The new leaders needed a central government that had control over all of the resources and people of Japan in order to modernize and impress the Western powers. They settled on the Emperor as the head of state, and formed their government around him. Thus, since the Emperor had taken the term Meiji as the name of his period of rule, a term which meant brightness and openness, the 1868 return of the Emperor to power is called the Meiji Restoration, and the period from 1868-1912, the life of the Meiji Emperor, is called the Meiji Period. With a centralized government in place, it was also necessary to both distinguish that government from the Tokugawa, and to remove the power of the daimyo, which was the single biggest limit on the effectiveness of the new Meiji regime. In order to distinguish themselves from the Tokugawa, the Meiji leaders changed the name of the Tokugawa's great capitol city from Edo to Tokyo, and moved the Imperial Court there. They then went about reducing the power of the daimyo and the samurai by, essentially, buying them off. Laws were made which removed the social distinction of the samurai class, and samurai were required to stop wearing their swords, and to cut off the topknot hairstyle that had distinguished them from other Japanese. They were paid a one-time retirement fee, and were released from service. Samurai were encouraged to go into business or a trade, but had to become common people by status. Daimyo were mostly allowed to stay in their palaces and continue the day to day ruling of their own domains, with the exception that the domains, and the taxes they produced, not belonged to the Meiji state, and not to the daimyo. The daimyo worked as governors – representatives of the Meiji state, but no longer army-wielding land-owning warriors. This destruction of the samurai also had the effect of removing the social hierarchy that had been so characteristic of Japan. In its place, the Meiji government offered citizenship in the Japanese state. To make this work – to provide legitimacy and authority for itself, and make the centralization work, the Japanese government had to work very hard to help the Japanese people for the first time feel some sense of belonging to the single nation of Japan. Like Bismark's Prussia, this became a kind of conservative Nationalism – the government, with the conservative goal of administering the entire population of Japan under its traditional (Imperial) political structure worked hard to help the Japanese people see themselves as speaking a single common language (though they really did not – the dialects were even more pronounced than they are now), having a common history, and sharing a common culture. This meant that the Meiji government had to create a national school system, a national postal system, a national military, and promoted nationalist music, linguistic standardization, the formation of a national police force, a centralized Treasury where taxes were collected and government expenditures made. All of this was designed in part to administer the nation, and in part to help Japanese "buy in" to the concept that Japan was in fact a nation. Much of it was successful, to the point where Japanese people themselves began to take to heart the ideas of nationalism, but attempt to claim some say in the way government worked based on the fact that they contributed labor and taxes to the success of the nation (seen Iwasaki Yataro's letter to Mitsubishi Employees in the Reilly textbook, page 268, for an excellent example of this idea that labor contributes to the nation). Many of these people thought deeply about democracy, and read Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and other champions of European Classical Liberalism. Eventually, they created a movement in the 1890's known as the People's Rights Movement, which was Liberal Nationalist to its core, and whose main aim was to see the writing of a constitution and the creation of an elected legislature – both of which they received in 1898. So, in many ways, nationalism was easily transferred to Japan as it went through revolutionary social and political changes of its own in the late 19th century.

Taisho Japan 1912-1923
In 1912, the Titanic embarked upon its maiden and final voyage, the Republic of China was established, and New Mexico became the 47th state in the United States. Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel, Fenway Park opened in Boston, Tiger Park in Detroit, the Summer Olympics were held in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Mayor of Tokyo, Yukio Ozaki, made a friendship gift to the United States of 300 Japanese Cherry trees to be planted on the Mall in Washington, D.C.. In July of 1912, the Meiji Emperor of Japan died, and was replaced by his son, the Taisho Emperor. In this event, Japan saw the changing of an era, and although the late Meiji period certainly showed trends in the directions toward which Japan and Japanese culture would move in the next 14 years, the Taisho period can also be seen as a break with the realities of Meiji and the beginning of a new global and domestic context for the Japanese people. The Taisho era is popularly characterized in Japan as the era of "Taisho Democracy." This story emphasizes the fact that Japan began to undergo some serious political changes in the Taisho period. Perhaps most clearly laid out, in English, in Tetsuo Najita's book //Hara Kei and the Politics of Compromise//, the Taisho Democracy story makes the case that the Meiji Constitution, which was not a document "of the people, by the people, and for the people," but a gift to the Japanese People from their emperor (and so presumably one that could be taken away) made no provisions for a democratic system in which elected officials could actually influence real policy. A growing movement within Japan of people and politicians who wanted to change that, and to create a party political state, recognized that to change the constitution itself would be nearly impossible, and certainly politically suicidal. They did, however, succeed in created a kind of democratic power, and even were able to gain control of the prime minister's position and the appointment of the cabinet for a short time in the 1920's and early 1930's through what Najita calls the "politics of compromise". The primary compromise that is related in Najita's work, and that of Butow, and other historians of the era, was one of fiscal power for political power. This exchange of power was based on the provisions of the Meiji Constitution. The constitution had been written primarily by Ito Hirobumi, one of the group that had designed the Meiji Restoration and the policies of the Meiji government afterward who were called the "Genro" or "elder statesmen" of Japan, and who held not only the emperor's ear, but all the real governmental power in Japan. Ito had been killed in 1909 in Korea by "freedom fighters" protesting Japan's occupation and control of Korea as a colony. His most lasting work as genro, however was his constitution, promulgated in February of 1889. To gather information and to understand how constitutions work, Ito had spent 18 months in Europe studying the constitutions of nations he felt had similar political conditions to those in Japan at the time. He finally settled on his primary model: the constitution of Prussia. In many ways, Ito changed the ideas in Prussia's constitution, but in some critical ways he kept things the same. One primary similarity was the limited power of the elected parliament (the Diet). These representatives were elected to debate, to give some semblance of power to the people through (limited) elections. However, the one power that, like Prussia, Ito did confer on the new Diet was the power to control the purse of the nation. This power was not unlimited. In fact, the Diet did not have the ability to stop funding for the government. It's approval was required, however, in order to increase the budget. If the approval of the Diet was not received for increases in expenditures, then the government was legally bound to use the same budget as the previous cycle. In the Taisho period, astute politicians such as Hara Kei (also known as Hara Takashi) were able to turn this to their advantage for the simple reason that Japan's prosperity was increasing, and the government desired to increase the size of the military and increase expenditures on other budget items as well. Politicians such as Hara were able, by finding ways to compromise, or not, with the genro of the time, was able to gain the emperor's appointment as Prime Minister in 1918, and remained in office until 1921. Hara was the first commoner prime minister of Japan, and the first who was there due to the popular success of his political party, the //Rikken Seiyukai//. Hara was followed by other Prime Ministers who were also representatives of their respective political parties, but his administration was the first to achieve this compromise. The story of Taisho Democracy continues to follow the path of various party administrations, with the basic understanding that these administrations achieved a kind of democratic process in the leadership of Japan. To some degree, though, this story is incomplete. First, the achievement of democracy was much more limited than the story of Taisho Democracy leads us to believe. At no point during the Taisho or early Showa eras was the Prime Minister appointed by his popularly elected colleagues in the Diet. The Emperor (and so the genro) maintained control over the appointment of Prime Minister at all times. The appointment of party politicians was usually seen by this powerful group as a compromise in order to gain increases in the budget. Once the Prime Minister had received his mandate from the emperor to form a government, he named ministers to each seat in the cabinet. The Meiji Constitution specified, though, that the ministers of the Army and the Navy were special members of the cabinet - appointed by the Prime Minister, but not bound by his direction. The only direct line of command for the military was from the emperor to commanders. Civilian leadership was never permitted a role in governing the military in any way. Still, there was a new atmosphere in the Taisho period, and a new historical context to go along with it. If the political changes were really only superficial, that was not unusual in the world at the time. In many European countries, even as late as 1912, democracy was something the political elite used to placate a growing middle class whose money they needed but whose voices they did not want to hear too loudly. In Germany in 1912, the Reichstag was an elected body, but like its Prussian predecessor and that system's other political progeny in Japan, power to the German body was severely restricted, and the Kaiser seems to have regarded it as little more than an advisory body - and a noisy and inconvenient one at that. The Russian Duma was even more constrained - it was legally no more than a group of elected representatives whose sole legal function was to give advice to the Czar, and he rarely listened, let alone acted upon the advice given. Again like Germany and Russia, Japan's Diet was elected from individuals who paid a certain high level of taxes, and those who were allowed to vote were again property holders who paid above a specified level of taxes. So any representative body, limited as it may be in power, was also limited by the fact that the electorate probably more closely identified with the non-elected ruling elite than they did with the larger "people" of the nation, in Japan as well as Germany and Russia. So if Japan was not, politically speaking, unique in the world during the Taisho period, what was going on that makes this period one to talk about? In fact, quite a large number of things, most of them cultural and economic in focus. In terms of global history, perhaps the first most important event after the 1912 change in China from the Qing Dynasty to a Republic, was the advent, in 1914 Summer, of the First World War. The impact of this war on the world, even though it was fought only in Europe and the Ottoman Empire/Balkans areas, cannot be overstated. It was global in terms of involvement, if not in terms of geographic location. As the war became a clear stalemate on the Western Front, the belligerent powers looked for allies in other parts of the world that could help alleviate some of the strain of total war. For the Germans, the primary non-Western ally was the Ottoman Empire. For the English, it was India, and for France its African colonies. These colonized territories were asked to send combat engineers and to participate in the growing of food and the manufacture of war materiel to supply those fighting. In hopes of regaining control of much of its territory, China sent 100,000 men to work as combat engineers for the Allied side, and these men worked under fire, for long hours in horrible conditions to assist with victory in the war. Ironically, Japan declared war against Germany as well, in 1914 - this is partly because of friendship and defensive treaties signed with Great Britain, but also partly because it provided Japan with the opportunity to fight directly against Germany by consfiscating all of Germany's East Asian possessions, including those in China.

China:
China reached its own modernity in the Ming period. Ming government was well-organized, and in large part the rule of law provided for social peace. The destruction of the Ming in 1644 did not end this modern state, but instead provided for continuity. The Qing (Manchu) rulers were able to adapt their government to Chinese norms and ideas successfully. Their ability to avoid tremendous social upheaval during the conquest, and to keep the economy and population growing after led to great success between 1644 and the early eighteenth century.

One of the key challenges in the eighteenth century was the expansion of western traders into the Pacific Ocean and Asia. During this century, China participated in trade with Great Britain and India. The British purchased large quantities of Chinese tea. The Chinese purchased Indian cotton for textiles, and the Indians purchased British manufactured goods. This system, though, was most beneficial to China. Chinese tea and other goods were both highly prized in Europe, and expensive. The British in particular paid large sums to China for its tea and other materials. Sales of British goods to India, and Indian cotton to China did not make up the balance. In order to improve this trade balance issue, British traders began buying opium in India and selling it to China. By the first years of the 19th century, Opium was the single largest money-maker in the international market.

This accomplished the goal of Great Britain. The balance of trade was reversed. Opium was particularly attractive to the children of the gentry - an intellectual upper class that owed its status to success in the Confucian Examinations and employment in the bureaucracy. It was also used by managers of labor forces. Opium had the effect of helping starving Chinese workers to continue to work long and hard despite the pain of hunger, blisters, and other work-related ailments.

The number of opium addicts exloded in the 1830's. The Chinese government, recognizing the detrimental social effects of opium, banned its sale in 1836. Chinese opium dealers and smokers were subject to the death penalty if caught. In 1839, the Chinese government appointed Lin Zexu, an imperial commissioner, to enforce the ban on Opium and solve the problem of Opium smuggling. Commissioner Lin carried out reform attempts in several directions. He enforced the death penalty on Chinese sellers and smokers of opium. He sent a letter to Queen Victoria alerting her to the fact that her subjects were behaving in an immoral fashion in selling opium in China and appealing to her better judgment (he gave this letter to some English merchants, who never delivered it to the queen), and he extended the death penalty to include English wholesalers of opium, but gave them a year-long grace period in which he assumed any sales of opium were mistakes (and while the opium would be confiscated and destroyed, the wholesalers' lives would be spared). He then confiscated 20,000 chests of opium from wholesalers and destroyed them in a public act by dissolving them in a canal built specially for the purpose.

The reaction of the British wholesalers of opium was to demand that the British Government confront China and secure restitution for the business losses constituted by Lin's destruction of their opium. Although there was a political disagreement in England as to whether this was the best course of action, in 1839, the British sent a force of ships and soldiers against China. Several battles and blockades later, in 1842, the English had forced China to sue for peace in this "Opium War" by blockading the Grand Canal and thus access of Beijing to taxes and goods using a steam ship that could sail upriver against the current. China then agreed to the creation of several treaty ports in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which gave the British control of Hong Kong, a large indemnity for the costs of the war, and estraterritoriality for British citizens in China. By the time of the end of the second Opium War (1856-1860), there were 15 treaty ports in which foreigners could live and do business without interference from the Chinese government, a reduction in tariffs to a level at which Chinese goods could not compete in the market with foreign goods, and legal agreements to allow Christian missionaries in the interior of China, and a legalization of the Opium Trade.

At the same time that it was dealing with the opium problem and wars with Great Britain, the Chinese government also had to contend with the Taiping Rebellion. In 1850, a teacher by the name of Hong Xiuquan (1814-1864) became the leader of a group heavily influenced by Protestant ideas. Hong, recovering from a bout of fever, claimed to have seen visions in which he learned that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. On a mission from God, he said, to remove Confucians, Manchus, Daoists, and Buddhists, and create an egalitarian society based on mutual respect, in which all people were equal (including gender equality), Hong formed an army of followers who rebelled against the Qing Dynasty. By the time the rebellion was finally ended in 1860, up to 30 million Chinese may have been killed. The Manchu and Chinese armies were unable to put down the Taipings, and the job fell to Zheng Guofan (1811-1932), who used local gentry, and their connections to local people, to create an army that could stop the Taiping advance. By 1860, after Zheng had assisted in the formation of other local, gentry-led armies modeled on his own, the Taipings were finally stopped, and in 1864 Hong himself died, and the movement slowly faded away.

China dealth with two other major rebellions at the time. The Nian Rebellion, which began about 1850 and lasted until 1868, and the the Muslim Rebellion, which lasted until 1873. All of these were ended by Zheng's new local armies, led by officials who became important parts of the revived Manchu government under the Qing, among them Li Hongzheng (1823-1901) who became Grand Councillor, and a major proponent of modernizing reforms to the Chinese society, economy, and military. Zheng and Li, however, had to contend with new problems, including a court led by Empress Dowager Cixi, which was uninterested in solving China's problems, and mostly attempted to maintain its power and status at the center of the Chinese state. This meant that major reforms in Chinese society from 1860 to 1912 were carried out in the provinces, planned and attended to by local governors, with the permission, but not the oversight or control of the central court.

The success of these local governors, each of whom had an army and a large bureaucratic staff, at restoring infrasturcture and rebuilding the state of the Dynasty was nothing short of amazing. While the population of China did not recover from the massive death toll of the Taiping Rebellion during the remaining life of the Qing Dynasty, China itself was able to restore agricultural production, efficient operations of government (at least on a local level) and the economy. The local governors also undertook huge tasks to modernize China. They built ports, railroads, and modern factories, and imported and began to manufacture modern weapons and warships. However, China's population and size were so huge, and the advances of the already more modern Western powers so much faster, that despite the major strides in modernization made during this "Self-Strengthening movement," China could not modernize quickly enough and found itself, in relative terms, further and further behind the Western powers, making it that much more vulnerable to imperialism and trade depredations.

In 1894-95, Japan and China went to war over the fate of Korea. The Japanese, who had successfully modernized their economy and army, defeated the Chinese quickly, and the powers signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. This defeat by Japan, a state that had long been a distant client state of China, provided a wake-up call that the wars with the Western powers had not. Chinese reformers such as Kang Youwei (1858-1927) urged major moves toward modernization, and in the so-called "100 Days of Reform" the Chinese emperor proclaimed a series of reforms that were to overhaul Chinese instutitions in every area of society. Conservatives and allies of Empress Dowager Cixi (afraid of losing their power, more than of the reforms themselves), were able to outmaneuver the reformers, forcing most of them to leave China for the safety of Japan.

This failure to modernize left China open to the predatory trade policies of the Western powers, and Chinese trade ports were soon carved up into "concessions" where western powers ruled, and spheres of influence within China where their rights and trade were supposed to be guaranteed. The Chinese government no longer had effective control of its territory in many places. The United States, which was in the midts of wars in the Philippines and administrative issues in taking control of Guam and Hawaii at this time was unable to support more than forays into China, and so American Policy was to call for the "Open Door" - a policy in which all foreign powers would have equali, and priveleged (meaning not encumbered by Chinese government concerns) access to trade in China. Japan, still unable to face Western powers in a military sense, supported this Open Door policy.

In response to the growing foreign presence, even in its interior, many Chinese became jingoistic. One group of anti-foreign activists calling themselves //The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists// (shortened for translation to English as the "boxers") identified Christians in particular as an insidious foreign influence. The boxers believed that their ritual martial-arts style mass dancing made its participants invulnerable to Western bullets. In 1899, these boxers began attacking Chinese Christians, Western missionaries, and then Western delegations even within China's biggest cities. At first the Qing government believed it could use the boxers to remove the Western presence from China. Eventually, the Qing found that they were unable to control the boxers, and joined the Western powers in putting them down. The Qing armies were unable to finish the job, and eventually British, German, and French marines, and a small contingent of American Maries, were used to put down the Boxer Rebellion.

The failure of the Dynasty to reform, both before, and then after the Boxer Rebellion (even though it did, finally, try to do so) led to disaffection of the all-important gentry who provided the Confucian scholars for the imperial bureaucracy, and were the mainstay of administration, law, and tax collection at the local level. The Qing military commanders, also recognizing the ineffectiveness of the Dynasty, declared themselves independent, and taking their armies with them, ruled the provinces they controlled as independent fiefdoms. China was atomized into local states nominally related but no longer under the control of the Qing Dynasty.

At this same time, Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) (1866-1925), who had learned English and become a Christian in Hawaii (he studied at 'Iolani School) used Tokyo as a base to organize a Revolutionary Alliance in 1905, enunciating the famous "Three Principles of the People." These included Minzu - the idea of creating a people's government by building a civic nationalism no predicated on ethnic or linguistic similarity, but on loyalty to China as a civic nation; Minquan, or "people's government" - a vague idea of constitutional democracy; and Minsheng - people's livelihood, in which the government would promote free trade, but also find ways to support an adequate living standard for all Chinese people. By 1925, Sun was also associated with the formation of the Chinese Nationalist Party - the Guomindang.

In 1911/1912, touched off by a government plan to nationalize the railways, a popular revolution led to the abdication of the last Qing Emperor, Aisin Gyoro Pu-yi. Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist party won an election for the creation of a new Republican government, and Sun was made president of the Republic. Former Imperial Army commander Yuan Shikai (1859-1916) destroyed the leadership of the Nationalist Party, and Sun fled to Japan Yuan then attempted to make himself emperor and proclaim a new dynasty. He failed due to opposition from nearly every part of China's political system, and China, with no functional central government, came to ruled by the regional warlords until the lat 1920's.