Convention of Peking (1860) with the United Kingdom, France and Russia
Treaty of Tientsin (1861) with Prussia and the German Customs Union
Chefoo Convention (1876) with the United Kingdom
Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking (1887) with Portugal
Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) with Japan
Li-Lobanov Treaty (1896) with Russia
Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory (1898) with the United Kingdom
Boxer Protocol (1901) with the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands
Twenty-One Demands (1915) with Japan
China ’s impotence in the face of growing foreign intervention stimulated a movement for reform aimed at modernizing the country. Unlike in Japan, however, it failed to command anything like a consensus, its base never extending beyond a small elite, with the consequence that reform was always a hesitant and piecemeal process. It was driven by a small coterie of imperial civil servants, together with various writers and scholars, such as Kang Youwei, a well-connected man adept at showing how new ways of thinking were compatible with traditional Confucian texts. [259] The imperial government for the most part, however, neither understood nor accepted the necessity, let alone the urgency, of modernization, remaining passive or actively opposed – unlike in post-1868 Japan, where the state was the key agent of modernization. Nonetheless, there was some reform of the armed forces and various ministries, including the establishment for the first time of a diplomatic presence in major capitals like London and Paris, while the educational curriculum was revised after the turn of the century to include Western disciplines. In 1898 the reform movement reached its apogee when it finally received the formal blessing of the imperial hierarchy, but the imprimatur only lasted for a few months. [260]
One of the major problems facing the reformers was that modernization became intimately associated with the West at a time when the latter was colonizing and humiliating the country: far from being seen as patriots, they were regarded as tainted by the West or, worse, as traitors. As a result, the growing hostility amongst the Chinese towards the West was to work against the process of reform. The fact that China enjoyed such a unitary and centralized system of government also conspired to inhibit and stifle the development of alternative reforming impulses, in contrast to Japan, where authority was more dispersed. This problem was compounded by the hegemony enjoyed by Confucian thought, which made it very difficult for other ways of thinking to gain ground and influence. Until around 1900 the idea of reform was virtually always articulated within a Confucian framework – with an insistence on the distinction between Chinese ‘essence’ and Western ‘method’ (or, in the famous phrase of Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909), ‘Chinese learning for the essential principles, Western learning for the practical applications’). [261] After the turn of the century, other modes of thought began to acquire some traction, including socialist and Marxist ideas amongst sections of the intelligentsia, [262] a process that culminated in the 1911 Revolution largely being inspired by Western thinking. [263] Although Confucianism certainly declined during this period, it did not die. Nor should it be regarded as having been, or being, inherently incompatible with, or fundamentally antithetical to, change and reform. [264] However, it was in urgent need of revitalization through a process of cross-fertilization with other ways of thinking, as had happened to it in earlier periods of history with Buddhism and Taoism.
