ON THE FRINGES of big Chinese cities the shadows of lofty factory chimneys fall across fields still tilled with wooden prows. On the wharves of seaports modern liners unload goods carried away on the backs of men or shipped inland on primitive barges. In the streets great trucks and jangling trams roar past carts drawn by men harnessed like animals to their loads. Automobiles toot angrily at man drawn rickshas and barrows which thread their way through the lanes of traffic. Streets are lined with shops where men and women and children still fashion their wares with bare hands and simple tools. On some of these streets are huge mills run by humming dynamos. Airplanes and railroads cut across vast regions linked otherwise only by footpaths and canals a thousand years old. Modern steamers ply the coasts and rivers' churning past junks of ancient design. Throughout the towns and villages and on the tired land of the great river valleys that stretch from the sea to the heart of Asia, these contradictions and contrasts multiply. They embody the struggle of nearly half a billion people for existence and survival.

The pattern of Chinese life is jagged, torn, and irregular. Modern forms of production' transport, and finance are superimposed upon and only partially woven into the worn and threadbare pattern of the past. That ancient fabric was already giving way just over a century ago when the West invaded China with its commodities' its guns' its greed' and its ideas. The result of that impact was catastrophic and revolutionary. Chinese economy was forcibly transformed. Classes of society, for so long stable' entered upon a period of violent change. Forms of government' habits, the entire social equilibrium were upset. China was faced with the immense historical task of finding a new framework in which its productive forces could thrive. The new pressures on the old Chinese society generated conflicts which soon accumulated, gathered momentum, and drove the country and its people convulsively forward in search of new solutions.

The backwardness of Chinese economy was determined primarily by the stagnation of productive forces over a prolonged historical period. Introduction of the iron plow led, some two thousand years ago, to an increase in agricultural productivity. Partially as a result of this impetus, land was at that time converted into private property. Land held in fief or cleared by imperial grant became alienable, i.e., it could be bought and sold. Labor thus released and capital thus acquired were in part absorbed by the State in the construction of great public works' dams, canals, palaces, walls' and fortifications. But capitalist modes of production did not develop. Feudal forms of exploitation were perpetuated in the villages. Chinese society remained organized in small agricultural units. Home or local handicraft industries supplied the major supplementary needs of the community. The State took direct part in trade and manufacture. It exercised monopolies, for example, in salt and iron. Both the system of production and the internal market were rigidly controlled by the State bureaucracy and all-embracing guilds of merchants and artisans. Urban centers of production and commerce grew up but seem to have been restricted to luxury products and regional specialties, fine silks' lacquer, chinaware, carvings, Ironwork.

The whole structure rested solidly on the mass of peasants who paid rent to the landlords, interest to the merchants and moneylenders, and taxes' in labor' kind' and money' to the State. The latter was represented by a bureaucracy of local officials joined in a hierarchy reaching through the provincial viceroys to the Emperor. These officials joined with the landlords and merchants in exploiting the peasantry. To meet ever increasing tax demands' the landlords multiplied their exactions from the men who worked the soil. Small landholders mortgaged themselves to the moneylenders and were gradually reduced to the status of tenants or agricultural laborers. As each succeeding dynasty passed its peak and went into decline' its financial demands increased and the corruption of its officials deepened. When the burden of accumulated rent' debts, and taxes became intolerable and the prevailing hardships were' as often happened' multiplied by natural disasters' local revolts against rent and tax collectors would often begin to take place and frequently broadened into great peasant wars.

Military cliques' headed by ambitious landholding nobles' took the field at the head of scattered peasant bands and provincial soldiery, overthrew the dynasty, and fought for primacy among themselves.

Attempts at social and agrarian reforms usually featured the period of civil war and confusion which often lasted decades and at one time several centuries. The most famous of these were the attempted reforms of Wang Mang after the fall of the Han Dynasty at the beginning of the first century of the Christian era, and those advocated by Wang An-shih after the collapse of the T'ang Dynasty and the rise of the Sung at the end of the tenth century. Some of their proposals went as far as abolition of private property rights in the land and its reversion to its original owner, the State. Others provided for the establishment of an embryonic state capitalism. None of these reforms matured. The peasant wars which provoked them invariably exhausted themselves. One of the warring cliques would finally assert its supremacy and erect a new dynasty. While the new Emperor and his immediate descendants consolidated their power and gradually suppressed all rival claimants to the throne, the original social forms in the village were reproduced and the same gradual process of expropriation resumed.1

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Manchus came to power by taking advantage of one of these peasant rebellions. Once established as alien rulers, they had a natural interest in preserving China from any other external contact while they completed the subjugation of the country. During this period Europe was locked in the bitter wars which accompanied the birth of Western capitalism and the modern national states. European contacts with Cathay were occasional and episodic. The early Manchu emperors were able to enjoy the period of their ascendancy. With the passing of another two centuries' however' a remarkable growth of population brought renewed pressure on the land. The Manchu Dynasty had already entered upon its decline. Its power was beginning to disintegrate and it had been compelled to make severe levies on the population to meet repeated revolts in different parts of its domain. Chinese society was on the brink of a new era of political breakdown and chaos when the first waves of expanding Western capitalism broke against China's shores. The advent of the new barbarians who came from across the seas deepened' transformed' and complicated the inner divisions in the classes of Chinese society. Their coming meant that the old solutions' arrived at in the old manner' would no longer suffice.

Driving forward irresistibly toward the expansion of trade and the accumulation of capital resources, the Western nations smashed the barriers that had until now divided the Celestial Empire from the rest of the world. Out of this impact profound economic, social, and political changes had at last to come. Capitalist economy had begun to draw the whole world into its orbit. China's isolation was irretrievably at an end. For Capital was a new type of conqueror, hitherto unknown in Chinese history. Invading hordes which had swept down across the northern frontiers had in the past been assimilated with little difficulty into the more highly organized framework of the older Chinese civilization. These new barbarians possessed technical equipment and a material superiority which nothing in China could match. Mere traditions could not cope with cannon, any more than the hand could cope with the machine or the palanquin with the railroad. Against the driving force and weapons of the Western barbarians, China could pit only the sheer weight of its age, its size, its numbers. These could determine the length and agony of this uneven conflict, not its outcome.

The Chinese economic and social structure, already in crisis, reacted swiftly at top and at bottom to the corrosive influence of the foreign invasion. Economically, China was laid prostrate. With the help of opium, the foreign traders established a balance of trade permanently in their favor. Silver, heavily imported during the first period of the foreign trade, began draining away as early as 1826. Ten years later opium replaced silver as the medium of payment for Chinese tea and silk.2 Through the breach made by the drug and widened by British and French cannon in the Opium Wars of 1842 and 1858, manufactured commodities made their way. As British cotton goods came in, the export of Chinese woven cloth (nankeens) began to fall off and disappeared almost entirely by 1833. The curve of Chinese exports dropped sharply with the corresponding spectacular rise of opium imports during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Cotton imports rose steadily, and by 1870 cotton goods accounted for 31 percent of China's imports and a few years later replaced opium at the top of the list. The rapid strides in industrial organization and technique in the West, the opening of the Suez Canal, and the development of steam navigation stimulated the China trade, which doubled between 1885 and 1894. The flow of commodities was soon followed by capital investment and loans. Foreign shipping companies, cotton mills, railways, and telegraph lines occupied by the end of the century all the commanding positions in Chinese economic life.

This economic conquest was accompanied by the establishment of foreign political control. The Manchu regime was reduced to impotence Its early attempts to check the silver drain by restricting the opium trade were beaten down in a series of wars in which it suffered humiliating defeats and for which it had to pay heavy penalties. Humbled by the Westerners, the Manchu court lost immeasurably in prestige and authority over the Chinese. Treaties exacted by the foreigners at the cannon's mouth provided for the free propagation of Christianity and legalized the trade in opium. To the Chinese, the Gospel and the drug, in the words of a British historian, "came together, have been fought for together, and were finally legalized together."3 These treaties also opened coastal and river ports to trade, limited the Chinese tariff to a nominal 5 percent, granted territorial footholds and concessions whence later came the different foreign "spheres of influence," and set up the system of extraterritoriality which exempted foreigners from the jurisdiction of Chinese law and the payment of Chinese taxes. China became in all but name a subject land, saved from outright dismemberment or colonization only by the acute rivalries among the imperialist freebooters.

The spread of opium, the drain of silver, and the influx of machine made commodities greatly aggravated the crisis in the countryside, which arose primarily from the rapid growth of population and the shortage of cultivable land.4 The widespread use of opium caused a flow of wealth from the countryside to the towns and led to an alarming contraction of the internal market.5 The silver shortage caused by the drain resulted in a 20 to 30 percent depreciation of the copper currency in common use and a sharp rise in the cost of living. Debased coinage came into use.3 Foreign cotton goods and other commodities drove Chinese handicrafts to the wall, especially in the southern provinces. The weavers who had produced the 3,359,000 pieces of cloth exported in 1819 lost their means of livelihood when the exports dropped to 30,600 pieces in 1833 and almost to zero in the next three decades.7 Finally, as if man and his works were not sufficiently malignant, nature joined in the physical destruction of the old order of things. Scarcely a year passed in the middle decades of the nineteenth century without its quota of floods and famines, droughts and plagues, in the great river valleys and beyond.

The accumulative result of all these agencies of dissolution was mass pauperization and the creation of a large floating population.

Sporadic revolts among the minority Miao tribes in the Southwest and the Moslems in the Northwest heralded the beginning of a new period of civil war. In the traditional course of events it would have confirmed the exhaustion of Heaven's mandate to the ruling dynasty and led to the rise of a new reigning house. But while agrarian revolt was brewing in the provinces, the Chinese ruling class was finding resources for renewing itself by participating, directly and indirectly, in the profits of the foreign trade.

Merchants and officials in the seaports had begun to acquire large fortunes through their dealings with the foreigners. Prior to 1830, when foreign ships still arrived at Canton laden with silver dollars to pay for the tea and silk carried back to Europe and the United States,8 little of this wealth had found its way back to the ultimate producers. Most of it remained in the hands of the port merchants and mandarins. Members of the co-hongs, special merchant monopolies officially established to deal with the foreigners, and local officials who had a free hand in levying special taxes and "contributions" profited handsomely from all the new dealings, especially in the contraband opium trade. Membership in the co-hong was often worth as much as 200,000 taels, then equivalent to about 250,000 American silver dollars.

Among these merchants and officials, a new class took shape, the class of compradores, brokers for foreign capital on the Chinese market. This was one of the first direct effects of the imperialist invasion on the fabric of Chinese society. The commanding economic positions the foreigners occupied blocked the channel of indigenous, independent capitalist development. The wealth accumulated by these Chinese merchants and officials went not into capitalist enterprise but back into land. Most of these individuals stemmed to begin with from the landed gentry and they used their money to increase their family holdings. This process visibly hastened the growth of large landed estates and the expropriation of smaller landholders.9 Landlords sent their sons into the cities to join the lucrative business of compradoring. It was the rare compradore who was not also an absentee landlord. The profits went back not only into land purchase but into loans at usurious rates to the peasants, who increasingly had to borrow to bridge the gap between their decreasing incomes and their rising costs and taxes. Because they were unable to compete with the superior force and material technique of the foreigners, the old landlord-merchant ruling class was transformed, in significant degree, into a class of brokers, moneylenders, and speculators, with interests divided between town and country and directly tied to foreign interests.

This process helped hasten the disintegration of the State structure. The Manchus had been defeated by the British in the Opium Wars "with an ease that shook their own confidence in the prowess and destiny of their race and completely dispelled its prestige of military power in the eyes of the subject Chinese.''10 Broken by military defeats, the Manchu bureaucracy was soon undermined by bribery and the attractive profits from opium smuggling. Edicts from Peking often remained inoperative. Peking was far away, its authority was reduced, and the clink of foreign silver was near and enticing. Chinese officialdom, theoretically virtuous, already had an ancient tradition of corruption. The dependence of officials on tax revenues for their own sustenance had from time immemorial placed a premium on official honesty. The riches of the foreign trade crowned this tradition with a new source of illegitimate income. With the decline of the dynasty, the falling off of revenue to the center, and growing financial stringency, all pretence at virtue was thrown to the winds and official position became an object of open barter. The plums of power were acquired not by the learned but by those who had the price. Naturally it was the wealthy merchant or compradore who could buy his son or brother a mandarin's button. As the practice became common, the merchants, landlords, and officials became even more indistinguishably the branches of the same class tree. This class, vitally concerned with preserving all the inequalities on the land from which it profited, became one of the chief instruments of foreign penetration and control.

The imperialists, on their part, having battered the Manchu court into submission and adapted the upper strata of Chinese society to their own uses, became the protectors of the Chinese rulers against the wrath of the people. This was to become the basic formula of imperialist control in semicolonial China. The whole Chinese economic, social, and political structure had been thrown into solution by the impact of the Westerners; but new elements had barely begun to form when the Westerners found it necessary to join with everything conservative, oppressive, and backward in the nation to resist agencies of revolutionary change.

This relationship crystallized during the Taiping rebellion, which threatened to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. Repeated revolts, brought on by insupportable economic hardships, culminated in 1850 in a mighty antidynastic peasant rebellion. It swept northward from Kwangsi and established its power for a period of eleven years in the Yangtze Valley. Beginning as a tiny religious sect of neo-Christian "God worshipers" who came into conflict with local authority in the south, the Taiping movement developed swiftly into a social upheaval of the first magnitude. All the discontented and rebellious of the land flocked to its standard. Ancient anti-Manchu secret societies, never entirely extinguished, came once more to life. Chinese intellectuals and members of the lesser gentry, dispossessed from their land, weary of Manchu exactions, and angered by Manchu racial discrimination, joined its leading ranks. In the flush of anti-Manchu feeling, the queue, badge of subjection, was abolished, and the old Ming costume restored. But above all and primarily, the great masses of pauperized peasants, migrating artisans and seekers of land, rebels against the authority of local officials, landlords, and tax collectors, gave the movement its flesh and blood and stamped it with the traditional features of the peasant uprisings which in the past had led to dynastic changes.

Taiping military successes were rapid and spectacular. Manchu authority was swept from the provinces of the south and the Yangtze Valley. Taiping armies reached almost to the gates of Peking itself. Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, the fanatically religious leader of the movement, assumed the title of T'ien Wang, or Heavenly King, and established his capital at Nanking. At its height, the rebellion was marked by the seizure of land by the peasants in many places. This fundamental agrarian radical tendency was not supported at the top, although its pressure produced unenforced decrees for the destruction of land titles and plans for a collective sharing of landed property.1l It is also a significant fact that wherever the Taiping regime was relatively stabilized, partially successful efforts were made to suppress the opium trade, check the silver drain, stimulate the internal market, standardize taxation, and increase agricultural productivity. It is a fact of the utmost interest, for example, that during the Taiping period the export of silk from Kiangsu districts to the coast reached new high levels. The Taipings, according to some accounts, made repeated efforts to conciliate the foreigners on a basis of a free exchange of goods and suppression of the ruinous opium trade. Thus the Taiping rebellion, primarily a peasant war of the primitive or traditional variety, also revealed tendencies, neither too directly nor clearly, but unmistakably, toward "normal" bourgeois development.

The Taiping movement came into collision with all the forces of privilege on the land and in the cities. The rebellion destroyed the authority and position of the old official class. The radical actions of the peasants brought them into direct conflict with the landlords and with the compradores and merchants who were so heavily involved in landed property as owners, and as holders of mortgages at high rates of interest. "The destructiveness of the Taipings," says a standard history, "antagonized the influential classes.''12 The "influential" Chinese classes were ranged solidly on the side of the Manchus.

To the imperialists the Taipings first appeared as possibly desirable successors to the Manchus as the rulers of China. The Christian character of the movement aroused a certain sympathy among some missionaries. The Taipings, moreover, gave some promise of stimulating trade and restoring the tranquillity which the Manchus were unable to preserve. Nevertheless, the foreigners soon threw their full weight to the side of the Manchus. The opium trade, it must be remembered, was still the most lucrative part of the China trade for the dominant foreign interests. It supplied wealth for accumulation and for development which only at a later date would make the marketing of more legitimate commodities more profitable. The fact that the Taipings opposed the trade in the drug placed them in opposition to the immediate interests of the foreigners.

The civil war gave the imperialists an excellent opportunity to strengthen their grip and extend their economic and political positions. In 1854 foreign guns prevented the anti-Manchu Triads from capturing Shanghai. The foreigners took advantage of the complete collapse of local authority to assume control of the customs administration l. and extend the domain of the foreign settlement. In 1858, French and British guns hammered away at the weakened Manchu forces in the north and forced the signature of new treaties fully satisfactory to foreign interests. The opium trade was legalized and the entire country was thrown open to foreign penetration. With the signing of these treaties, the foreigners had a definite stake in the preservation of the existing regime. The subjugation of the government was completed by the campaign of 1860 with its brutal sacking of the Summer Palace near Peking. Now a fully pliable instrument, the dynasty became an asset definitely worth protecting. The Taipings were transformed in the eyes of the foreigners "from possibly friendly successors to the Manchus into mere rebels who interfered with the carrying out of the new agreement. The Taiping version of Christianity, hitherto looked upon with a certain curious interest, was promptly perceived to be the rankest blasphemy. The Christian General Gordon took the field with the fervor of a crusader and stopped at nothing, treachery included, to deal with the Taipings as Jehovah's Chosen People dealt with the Amalekites and all the worshipers of Baal. British and French forces, throwing aside all formal pretence at "neutrality," intervened actively in the conflict with decisive results.

The battle for the preservation of the Manchu Dynasty was fought and won by two Chinese statesmen, Tseng Kuo-fan, representative of the landed interests, and Li Hung-chang, spokesman and leader of the new compradore class. They organized and led the defense of the Dragon Throne, and they succeeded mainly because foreign military and naval forces swamped the ill-armed Taipings before whom the Manchu troops were helpless.

Final defeat and dispersal of the Taipings in 1865 took place when the movement was already itself internally exhausted. The ravages of the civil war, which cost heavily in lives and laid waste large sections of the land, dissipated the resources of the peasant war. The leaders of the Taiping movement were unable to give a consistent lead to the agrarian revolt which degenerated, inevitably, into sporadic partisan warfare and banditry. The leadership split into warring cliques of hopeless adventurers. The great Taiping rebellion failed and the status quo was preserved because none of the older classes in Chinese society was capable of leading the country out of its impasse and because the new factor of imperialist pressure choked off the growth of new and more progressive forces. The weight of imperialism at the same time made forever impossible a repetition of the old cycle of peasant war, dissolution, and dynastic change.

Such were the terms of the central contradiction around which the history of China was doomed to revolve for nearly a century to come. The advent of Western imperialism, the end of Chinese isolation, and the appearance of the machine-made commodity on the Chinese market inexorably decreed the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society. But, once entrenched, Western imperialism defended itself by supporting all that was archaic, conservative, and backward in that society. To put agricultural production on a new and more fruitful basis China obviously had to do away with the old system of land- holding and give its farmers a greater stake in the product of their toil. The imperialists, however, joined in propping up the sway of the landlords, merchants, and officials who kept the mass of peasants in bondage. To relieve population pressure and to create a new relationship between town and country, successful industrialization by indigenous capital was needed. But the commanding position of foreign interests, the enforcement by treaty of the superior competitive position of foreign products and foreign enterprise, blocked this road for decades and forced a subordinate and dependent role upon Chinese capital. To meet its problems, the country obviously had to be unified to ensure maximum use of its resources. But the rivalries of the different Western powers fed on separatist conflicts which undermined the central authority and encouraged provincial and regional satrapies which corresponded roughly to the "spheres of influence" carved out by the contending Western interests. Effective social and economic progress was contingent, in short, on the national independence of the country while the maintenance of imperialist privilege demanded continued subjection. Such were the terms of Chinese history for nearly a hundred years.

The Taiping rebellion was the last attempt to respond to the need for change in the traditional Chinese manner. It failed because the path to that solution was cut off by the new conditions created by the imperialist invasion. Exhausted by twenty years of revolt and defeat, the masses of Chinese people had to await renewal in a new generation in entirely new circumstances before they could again intervene in affairs. At the base of Chinese society in the ensuing decades all the causes of chronic poverty were profoundly aggravated. The concentration of land continued. The flow of commodities and commercial capital into the villages broadened and governed the lives of the people, while denying them any chance to increase their own productivity in any significant degree. Meanwhile, at the top of the social structure and in the developing urban centers, other changes were taking place, giving new form and new content to the struggle for China's future.

From the fight against the Taipings and other outbreaks which lasted until 1880, the Manchu Dynasty emerged a spent force. Having barely sustained the shocks of internal rebellion, famines, and repeated natural disasters, it had again to face blows from without. Confronted by a new imperialist offensive on the fringes of the Empire, it was helpless. France occupied Cambodia and Annam in the late 'sixties and "legalized" its acquisitions by a brief war against China in 1884-85. The next year Britain added Burma to its Indian Empire. These countries in the south had, loosely speaking, recognized Chinese suzerainty. Across Asia on the northern frontier Czarist Russia laid the course of a new railroad and established its "sphere of influence" in northern Manchuria. In these same years Japan, responding more unifiedly and more quickly to the imperialist impact, had modified its feudal structure and with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 had embarked upon its remarkable course of adaptation to Western modes of production and organization and international relations. It quickly joined in the expansionist scramble, reaching across the narrow Sea of Japan in search of a continental foothold. In 1894 the new island power inflicted a humiliating defeat upon its aged and hitherto venerated neighbor. The amputation of Korea and the establishment of Japanese influence in South Manchuria signaled a new scrimmage among the Great Powers for territories and concessions. Buffeted and helpless, the Imperial Court signed treaty after treaty. The dismemberment of China and the absorption of its several parts into the colonial empires of the Western nations seemed imminent as the nineteenth century came to a close.

Renewed imperialist pressure, however, brought to life new movements of reform and revolution quite different in character and class origin from the great mass revolts of the mid-century years. These new agencies of change developed in the upper strata of Chinese society. Foreign political and economic pressure had molded the Chinese ruling class into a shape fitting imperialist requirements, and foreign privilege closed most doors to native capitalist development. Nevertheless, the accumulation of wealth by this class could not fail in the nature of things to stimulate efforts to compete with the foreigners on their own ground. Imperialism had destroyed the old economic base. It could hinder but not entirely prevent the erection of a new one. Li Hung-chang, compradore-in-chief, himself initiated the first independent Chinese capitalist enterprises. The first rice-cleaning mill was built in Shanghai in 1863. The Kiangnan shipyard was established in 1865. Seven years later the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company was organized to compete with the foreign monopoly in coastal and river shipping. The next year the first modern silk filature was built, and in 1876 the first railroad, a twelve-mile span from Shanghai to Woosung, came to confound the spirits of the ancestors Of frightened peasants. A modern coal mine began operations at Kaiping in 1878, and in 1890 the first cotton-spinning and -weaving mill was built at Shanghai and the first ironworks at Wuchang. Match factories and flour mills had followed by 1896. The industrialization of China had begun.16

China's trade position, especially in cotton and cotton goods, visibly improved during this same period. An unfavorable balance in raw cotton was transformed into an export excess in 1888. The export of locally woven cotton cloth, which had dropped almost to zero after 1833, recovered ground after 1868, rising from 238 piculs* that year to 30,100 piculs in 1900, the sharpest rise occurring after 1883, although the import of manufactured cotton goods enjoyed at the same time an uninterrupted growth.17 Alongside these gains in industry and trade came development in transport, communications, and banking facilities. A modern postal system came into existence in 1878. A telegraph line was laid between Shanghai and Tientsin in 1881. The Commercial Bank of China was organized in 1896 with all-Chinese capital. Other lines, other banks, soon followed in increasing numbers.

From the outset, however, Chinese capital fought a losing battle against foreign competition. The Treaty of Shimonoseki, which concluded the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, established the right of foreigners to build industrial plants in China. Enterprises quickly sprang up to enjoy the benefits of cheap and plentiful Chinese labor. The superior technical equipment and knowledge of the foreigners, together with the special economic and political privileges they enjoyed, placed their Chinese rivals at an immediate disadvantage. In addition to being subject to technical limitations and tax burdens from which the foreigners were free, the Chinese were dependent upon the foreign market for credit facilities, machinery, and the great variety of manufactured products which China could not yet produce. The budding Chinese industrialists tried to overcome these handicaps by exploiting their labor more intensively. But it was not long before the desire to create more favorable conditions for the operations of Chinese capital also forced its way into the political arena, taking the form of agitation for changes in a regime that no longer corresponded to the needs of the newly growing economic interests.

* One picul equals 133 1/3 Ibs.

In the years following the defeat of the Taiping rebellion, Li Hung-chang sponsored a series of limited attempts to modernize the regime. Initiating new industrial enterprises on the one hand, Li also introduced the beginnings of a modern army and navy, urged changes in the schools, and sent student groups abroad to acquire for China the secrets of Western economic and political power. These efforts were cut short by the Japanese attack in 1894. The defeat, the new loss of territory, and the new drive of the Powers which followed brought new political tendencies to the surface. Quicker and more drastic changes were sought.

Two distinct currents dominated Chinese political life after 1895. The first hoped to reform the Imperial Court and adapt it to the new requirements. It dreamed of an emperor who would play the role of Peter the Great and of a government that would resemble England's constitutional monarchy. The second advocated the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty and the establishment of a Chinese Republic along American or French lines. Entering upon the final period of its decline, the Manchu rulers gradually gave way before the reformers and brought closer the day of its abdication in favor of the revolutionists.

The reformers began by revising Confucius. They daringly represented him not as the classic defender of the status quo, but as a progressive liberal. Into the old molds of Chinese social, political, and economic thought, they tried to pour the ideas of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Huxley, whose works began to appear in Chinese translations. They believed the nation could be transformed by imperial rescript and thought their cause won when in 1898 they gained the ear of the young Emperor Kuang Hsu and launched the famous "Hundred Days" of reform. A series of sweeping decrees were issued to transform the archaic government of the Manchus into a modern state instrument. They called for the establishment of schools, election machinery, the elimination of tax abuses and official corruption. They ordered state aid to industry and agriculture and the democratization of the regime.

Unhappily for the reformers, the stream of new ideas that flowed out of the austere gates of the Forbidden City swirled into the moat and there stagnated. To the old mandarins and magistrates, it appeared that the Emperor had gone mad, for his orders seemed designed to strip them of all the perquisites of office and to destroy all the institutions canonized by centuries of usage. Edict after edict begged that the Imperial will be obeyed, but the officials who received them now doubted strongly whether the Imperial will any longer enjoyed the necessary sanction of Heaven. These doubts were soon confirmed at the Imperial Court itself where resistance to the reforms crystallized around the Empress Dowager. In September 1898, she imprisoned her nephew and with a few strokes of her brush effaced all the reforms he had sponsored. Some of his advisers she executed. Others, including the leaders K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, barely escaped into exile with their lives. These intellectuals had attempted during the "Hundred Days" to adapt the Manchu regime to Western ideas by working from the top down. They hoped to find, in an enlightened monarch, a substitute for a class in society capable of carrying out the necessary changes. Unfortunately, the "Imperial will" proved impotent as an instrument of social change. The Emperor, after all, only personified his own State apparatus. When he commanded it to destroy itself, it is not strange that it stolidly resisted. Against the inertia of the mandarinate, the reformers were helpless.18

The conservative Manchu bureaucracy could check the thin trickle of reforms supported only by a few individuals, but it could not resist the powerful and varied factors that were encompassing its doom. It was staggered by blow after blow from the Western imperialists. The closing years of the century were marked by the predatory exaction of territorial, trade, and railway concessions by one power after another.19 Within the country, the destruction of the old handicraft economy, the high cost of living, new floods and droughts had upset all the normal conditions of life and led to widespread mass discontent. Out of these conditions and moods rose another primitive mass revolt, this time in the Northern provinces, where ancient secret societies revived and flourished and turned the wrath of the people against all the foreign barbarians, Manchu and Western alike. Recoiling from the reform movement, the Manchu bureaucracy, headed by the Empress Dowager, fell back on the dangerous expedient of turning this anti-Manchu revolt into a weapon against the hated foreigners. Open official support was given to the I Ho Ch'uan (Fists for the Protection of Public Peace), the insurgent society that became known to the foreigners as "Boxers." The rebels changed their slogan from

Down with the Manchus! Protect the Chinese!" to "Down with the Foreigners! Long Live the Imperial Dynasty!"90 The result was a new disaster. The fierce, primitive local uprisings were crushed by allied foreign arms. Heavy penalties were imposed upon China by the victors, including an indemnity of $350,000,000 (U.S.) and the exaction of new military advantages for foreign forces under the Boxer Protocol of 1901.

In ensuing years, China became the helpless spectator and victim of the rivalries and conflicts and demands of the Powers. The fate of railways, of concessions, and of whole Chinese provinces was decided in European chancelleries. Control of Manchuria and Korea was determined by a war fought across Chinese territory by Russia and Japan in 1905 and settled by a treaty which freely bartered Chinese possessions without consulting the Chinese government. The Manchu Court no longer effectively represented any section of the Chinese population, nor could it offer any resistance to the gradual destruction of its power and its sovereignty.

From hopes in reform, the Chinese intelligentsia turned to propaganda for revolution. The realization that the dynasty had outlived itself took firm root. Students and intellectuals turned their backs on the refo.mer K'ang Yu-wei and began to listen more closely to the voice of another exile, Sun Yat-sen. Sun had been among those who in 1895 had addressed reform memorials to the Emperor. His political development, however, differed radically from that of the more prominent reformers of that day. Born in a village near Canton the year after the final suppression of the Taiping rebellion, Sun in his youth and early manhood came into contact with unreconstructed radicals steeped in the Taiping tradition of armed revolt. Sent as a youth to Honolulu, Sun became a Christian. He returned to China to begin a long career as a revolutionary conspirator who aimed at the overthrow of the dynasty. His first attempt in 1895 failed and Sun went into foreign exile, seeking and winning support among overseas Chinese for his revolutionary program.

The overseas Chinese played a key role in the development of the Chinese revolution. Most of the Chinese who had emigrated abroad lived out hard lives as contract laborers, some of them eventually returning to China with small savings. Others rose to wealth in trade in the Indies, the South Seas, Europe, and the United States. The strong protection afforded foreign nationals in China contrasted sharply with the defencelessness of overseas Chinese in the face of economic and racial discrimination and abuse. Among them strong nationalist feeling grew long before it developed in China itself, where the same factors that hindered the growth of Chinese capitalism also hindered the rise of an effective bourgeois national revolutionary movement. Powerful racial, family, and traditional ties bound the overseas emigrants to their native land and from them came the first financial and moral support for the revolutionary movement. It is interesting that only a few of the more wealthy overseas Chinese joined in the struggle for a strong and independent Chinese republic. Most of the money Sun raised came in small sums from contract workers and petty merchants who proved ready before anyone else to support his program.

This was a program for the overthrow of the monarchy by military insurrection. It began to attract many of the disillusioned reformers and most of the new generation of students, especially those who flocked to Japan after 1895 and in much greater numbers after 1900. In China, the movement forged links with the old secret societies. The new elements from the intelligentsia of town and country gave these ancient organizations a nationalist and democratic coloration they had never before possessed. Students who went abroad and returned bulging with new ideas and radical fervor found ready listeners everywhere. Discontent with the existing order of things grew. Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 had made the West seem less invincible. The 1905 revolution in Russia made an impression on the Chinese intellectuals and had a specific influence in driving the Court toward concessions.21 Chinese merchants and capitalists began to assert themselves more boldly. Nothing showed this more clearly than the boycotts against the United States in 1905 and against Japan in 1908.

These boycotts took on a broad, popular character. They were supported by the merchant guilds and the newly grown popular press The anti-American boycott began in reaction to the abusive attitude toward Chinese immigrants in the United States. It revealed the rise of a new spirit of confidence and solidarity among the merchants and petty capitalists along the China coast. The boycott campaign tightened the bonds between the Chinese in the United States and those at home. It helped break down sectional barriers. The boycott was strongest in Canton, most of the Chinese in America having come from that area, but it was also notably successful in Shanghai and Tientsin, as well as overseas in Singapore. Perhaps most significant was the open defiance of imperial authority which had, in response to American diplomatic pressure, issued an edict against the boycott. The anti-Japanese boycott in 1908 was even more specifically anti-governmental in character. It arose from the Chinese authorities' cringing submission to Japan in connection with a shipping incident. Merchants burned Japanese merchandise and workers at the docks refused to unload from Japanese vessels, marking perhaps the first direct participation of Chinese workers in the anti-imperialist struggle of the present century.22

One of the demands that arose in connection with the anti-American boycott had been for the cancellation of the concession granted to an American firm for construction of the Canton-Hankow railway. It was around the issue of railway concessions that opposition to the Imperial Court now developed among the wealthy provincial merchants and gentry. Plans to build railways linking Canton, Hankow, Changsha, and Chengtu had already been drawn up and companies had been established with Chinese capital to carry the plans through. The Peking government, now little more than a band of venal officials battening on the profits derived from granting concessions to foreign interests, used foreign money to buy up Chinese holdings already invested in various railway schemes in order to turn the projects over to the foreigners. Resistance to this flared among the incipient Chinese railroad magnates, especially in Hunan, Hupeh, and Szechwan. The underground revolutionary societies23 made a great deal out of the issue, which helped identify the Manchu regime with the hated foreign rivals. This drew new strata of the upper classes into the fight against the monarchy. It was an outbreak over precisely this issue, in Szechwan, which finally provoked open rebellion.

The threat of total collapse was present during the whole last decade of the dynasty's existence. It was put off only by surrender to the pressure for reforms. The Empress Dowager and her advisers were forced to compromise with the critical unrest that grew after the Boxer episode. It was a matter of giving in or going down. In 1906, the Manchu Court, absolute ruler of the Celestial Empire for nearly two hundred fifty years, grudgingly recognized the "principle" of constitutional government. The dynasty's last vigorous representative, the Empress Dowager, died at the end of 1908. She took with her to the grave the imprisoned Emperor Kuang Hsu.

Her oldest advisers soon followed. On the Dragon Throne sat the three-year-old Emperor Hsuan T'ung.* A foolish and incompetent man reigned as regent. The court degenerated into a Swamp of petty nepotism and clique rivalries. Paper reforms, more numerous but also more niggardly and unreal, were granted. In 1910, provincial viceregal assemblies, resembling the zemstvos under the Czar in Russia, came into existence as a result of rigorously limited "popular" elections.24 These had only the right to debate, and to debate only the topics prescribed by the Throne. But even these carefully picked "long-gowned" assemblies came into conflict with the Court. They urged that broader, more responsible government could alone preserve the monarchy. Delegates of the provincial assemblies joined in a national body at Peking and over Court resistance tried desperately to hasten parliamentary reform. Some changes were introduced, but the hand of the old regime, still heavy upon the new bodies, reduced them to hopeless fictions. The assembly, composed of imperial appointees and eminently safe friends of the viceroys, argued over the amount of parliamentarism that could save the monarchy. While they wrangled, revolution overtook them and the Court they hoped to save.

A local outbreak against the Imperial officials in Szechwan in September 1911 was followed in October by the revolt of the garrison at Wuchang. When Imperial troops stationed at Lanchow refused to march against the rebels, the days of Manchu rule were at long last numbered. While the revolt spread, the Court abjectly offered to surrender all claims to authority in return for the semblance of rule. But it was too late. The Empire fell apart. With it went the ''national assembly" whose banner it had tried feebly to wave in the face of its oncoming fate.

Internal corrosion had already reduced the dynasty to a cipher. Only a tiny push was needed to erase it. The revolution of 1911 generated enough energy to produce this tiny push, no more. No class or group emerged from it capable of directing the transformation of the country, of solving the agrarian crisis, of regaining national independence and building strength to resist the pressure and incursions of the imperialist Powers. In the earlier classic bourgeois revolutions of the West, the nascent capitalist class had been able to win and consolidate power by terminating feudal relations on the land. But in China this class was too closely identified with these relations to lead the impoverished peasantry out of its difficulties None of the revolutionists of 1911 even tried to do so. The masses of the peasantry played no role in the overthrow of the dynasty. Their passivity made it possible for the old provincial military and civilian apparatus to continue in power on a local basis, minus only the dynastic sanction, which had in any case long since lost its authority. One of the few popular manifestations of the change was the gradual disappearance of the queue, imposed on the people centuries earlier as a badge of subjection by the Manchu conquerors.

* Otherwise known as Henry Pu Yi, destined to rise again and fall again as Emperor K'ang Te of Japan's puppet state of Manchukno.

With the disappearance of nominal central authority, power passed into the hands of provincial or regional satraps committed to the preservation of the existing social system. Through them, the squeeze on the peasants was not loosened but tightened. The foreign stranglehold on the country's political and economic life was made even stronger. The regional powers that came into existence corresponded in the main to the respective "spheres of influence" of the Great Powers. Militarists in Yunnan and southern Kwangsi were subject to the influence and control of France. The river valleys economically controlled by Hongkong and Shanghai passed more definitely under British influence. The provinces of Manchuria were divided, by secret treaties, between Russia and Japan. The civil wars that soon began to take place among these rival militarists and rival governments came to reflect in considerable measure the conflicts among the principal imperialist Powers jockeying for key economic positions. It is this fact which distinguishes the post-1911 period from similar periods of division, civil wars, and confusion following the collapse of earlier dynasties.

The revolutionary intellectuals who had conspired so fervidly to bring the monarchy down were helplessly sidetracked in the developments that followed. There had been no authentic popular movement from which they might have drawn strength. The revolution had occurred almost independently of their efforts. Afterward they became mere appendages of the militarists who seized power. The parliaments and constitutions they now elaborated were not organs of any actual political power but window dressing tolerated or utilized at will by the militarists they depended upon for protection. Thus Sun Yat-sen, who had returned from exile in triumph and had been named first president of the Chinese Republic, was quickly compelled to give way to Yuan Shih-k'ai, a general of the old regime who took command in Peking and who soon began to see himself as the founder of a new dynasty. Those intellectuals who did not become secretaries or jobholders under illiterate generals fell away from politics into passive despair. Sun Yat-sen and the remains of his party, the Kuomintang, wrote on their party banner the slogan: "Protect the Constitution." But the only protection they sought was in the camp of one set of generals pitted against another. At this game they lost with consistent regularity. Only the generals won.

The downfall of the monarchy seemed to have brought the country from bad to worse. The civil wars and the reign of the generals deepened the misery in the countryside. Exactions increased. Land was laid waste. Agricultural production declined. China was compelled to begin importing rice and wheat. Famines and unchecked floods took heavy tolls in human life. Millions of peasants, driven off the land, swelled the hordes of the militarist armies or took to banditry, often much the same thing. Harsh taxation and militarist requisitions hastened the destruction of Chinese rural economy and condemned the majority of the population to chronic starvation. It seemed as though domestic industry would never be able to absorb the large labor surplus that crowded into the cities. But it was precisely in this sphere that spectacular changes began to take place as a direct result of the outbreak of the first World War.

That war absorbed the attention and full industrial output of the Western nations. Chinese producers suddenly found themselves with a great market open before them in their own country in circumstances temporarily relieved of the constant pressure of foreign competition Thanks to the war's demands, China's unfavorable trade balance dropped abruptly to record lows, amounting to only 16,000,000 taels in 1919, mainly as a result of a sharp increase in exports. Taking 1913 as 100, imports were 91.6 in 1914 and 105.9 in 1919. Exports rose from 83.8 in 1914 to 140.1 in 1919.25 Even more significant was the spurt of industrial growth. Imports of industrial machinery rose from 4,380,749 taels in 1915 to 56,578,535 taels in 1921. Cotton mills increased from 42 in 1916 to 120 in 1923, spindles from 1,145,000 to 3,550,000. Silk filatures rose from 56 in 1915 to 93 in 1927. Four cigarette factories in 1915 grew to 182 by 1927.26 Again with 1913 as 100, we have the following figures for 1923: coal production, 183.5; iron ore production, 180.6; silk exports, 152.3; bean oil exports, 432.5; cotton spindles, 403.9. At the same time there were smaller but significant increases in land transport and shipping facilities.

Along with this growth came extensive alterations in the Chinese business structure. Corporate forms were more widely adopted. Banks multiplied. As machines replaced handicraft production in steadily increasing measure, the old master-journeyman-apprentice relationship began to give way in decisive economic sectors to the stockholder-manager-worker relationship.