When China Rules the World полностью

The intervention of the Western nations, with the British, American, French and Dutch fleets actively involved, was bitterly resented and led to a huge wave of anti-foreigner (or anti-barbarian, as Westerners were known) sentiment. [138] In the face of growing tumult and unrest, the Tokugawa regime was beleaguered and paralysed. During a process lasting two years, culminating in 1868, the shogunate was overthrown by the combined forces of the Satsuma and Choshu clans, and a new government, dominated by former samurai, installed. The samurai were the prime movers in the fall of the shogunate and the chief instigators of the new Meiji regime (named after the emperor who reigned between 1868 and 1912). Part of the price the samurai paid for their new-found power and prominence in a government committed to the building of a modern state was the forfeiture of their old feudal-style privileges, namely their monopoly of the right to bear arms and their previous payments in kind – with the payments being commuted to cash and rapidly diminishing in value. [139]

This dramatic political change – bringing to an end two and a half centuries of shogunate rule – was driven by no political blueprint, goal or vision. In the early stages, the popular mood had been dominated by anti-Western sentiment. However, it became increasingly clear to a growing section of the ruling elite that isolation was no longer a serious option: if Japan was to be saved from the barbarians, it would have to respond to the challenge posed by the West rather than ignore it. The emergent ruling elite, which had previously shared these xenophobic and isolationist sentiments, underwent a remarkable political transformation, rapidly acquiring a very powerful sense of what needed to be done and implementing it with extraordinary speed. A modern imperial state was instituted, with a chief minister ‘advising’ the emperor, but with effective power concentrated in the former’s hands. By 1869 universal freedom of choice was introduced in marriage and occupation. By 1871 the feudal order had effectively been disbanded. In 1873 universal conscription was decreed, rendering the old samurai privilege to bear arms redundant. Almost immediately the government started to establish factories run mainly by former samurai, thereby ushering in a new and very different economic era. [140]

If Japan had previously been shaped and influenced by its exposure to Chinese civilization, the threat from the West persuaded the new ruling elite that it had to learn from the West as quickly as possible if it was to preserve the country’s independence and forestall the fate that had befallen China after the Opium Wars, with its progressive loss of sovereignty. The speed, single-mindedness and comprehensiveness with which the new government went about this task, particularly in the absence of any prior commitment or programme, is a remarkable historical phenomenon. During a breathtaking period of two decades, it drew hugely on Western experience in the construction of a range of new institutions. It sent envoys and missions to Europe and also to the United States in order to study what might be learnt, borrowed and assimilated. [141] This was done in a highly systematic way, with the object of establishing which country had most to offer in which particular area. The results were almost immediate. The education system introduced in 1873 was modelled on the French system of school districts. The navy was based on Britain ’s, the army on France ’s, and later also on Germany ’s. The railways followed the British example but the universities the American. Between 1871 and 1876 around 300 European experts were brought to Japan by interested institutions and government departments to assist in the process of design and construction. [142] The result was a patchwork of foreign influences that – in what became a typically Japanese manner – were somehow articulated into a distinctively Japanese whole.

From the late 1870s the government began to sell off its newly created factories. By so doing, it created a capitalist class. Many were former samurai who used the bonds that they had been given by the government – which had replaced the monetary stipends that they had previously received, which in turn had replaced their former feudal payments in kind – to buy the new companies. From the outset, then, the new capitalist owners had two distinguishing characteristics which have remained a hallmark of post-Meiji Japan to this day: first, they owed their existence and position to the largesse and patronage of the government, thereby creating a powerful bond of obligation; and second, the new owners were by background, training and temperament administrators rather than entrepreneurs.