Century of humiliation

Major powers plan to cut up China for themselves; US, Germany, Italy, UK, France, Russia, Austria are represented by Wilhelm II, Umberto I, John Bull, Franz Joseph I (in rear), Uncle Sam, Nicholas II, and Émile Loubet. Puck Aug 23, 1899, by J. S. Pughe

A political cartoon depicting Queen Victoria (Britain), Kaiser Wilhelm II (Germany), Tsar Nicholas II (Russia), Marianne (France) and a samurai (Japan) dividing China.

The century of humiliation, also known as the hundred years of national humiliation, is the term used in China to describe the period of intervention and subjugation of the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China by Western powers and Japan from 1839 to 1949.^[1]

The term arose in 1915, in the atmosphere of rising Chinese nationalism opposing the Twenty-One Demands made by the Japanese government and their acceptance by Yuan Shikai, with the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and Chinese Communist Party both subsequently popularizing the characterization.

History[]

Chinese nationalists in the 1920s and the 1930s dated the Century of Humiliation to the mid-19th century, on the eve of the First Opium War^[2] amidst the political unraveling of Qing China that followed.^[3]

Defeats by foreign powers cited as part of the Century of Humiliation include the following:

• Defeat in the First Opium War (1839–1842) by the British
• The unequal treaties (in particular Nanking, Whampoa, Aigun and Shimonoseki)
• Defeat in the Second Opium War (1856–1860) and the sacking of the Old Summer Palace by British and French forces.
• The signing of the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and Treaty of Peking (1860) during the Second Opium War, which ceded Outer Manchuria to Russia.
• The partial defeat during the Sino-French War (1884-1885), which lost its suzerainty over Vietnam and its the influence in the Indochina Peninsula.
• Defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) by Japan
• The Eight-Nation Alliance invasion to suppress the Boxer uprising (1899–1901) and the resulting Boxer Protocol which imposed reparations in excess of the government's annual tax revenue.^[4]
• The simultaneous Russian invasion of Manchuria (1900)^[5][6]
• The British expedition to Tibet (1903–1904)^[7]
• The Twenty-One Demands (1915) for an advantageous loan and local government control by Japan
• The Treaty of Versailles (1919) in which German territory in China was handed to Japan and led to the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement.
• The Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931–1932)
• The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945)

In that period, China suffered major internal fragmentation, lost almost all of the wars that it fought, and was often forced to give major concessions to the great powers in unequal treaties.^[8] In many cases, China was forced to pay large amounts of reparations, open up ports for trade, lease or cede territories (such as Outer Manchuria, parts of Northwest China and Sakhalin to the Russian Empire, Jiaozhou Bay to Germany, Hong Kong to Great Britain, Macau to Portugal, Zhanjiang to France, and Taiwan and Dalian to Japan) and make various other concessions of sovereignty to foreign "spheres of influence" after military defeats.

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  The Qing dynasty in ca. 1820, when it was regarded as the Celestial Empire and the center of Tributary System in East Asia

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  A British steamship destroying Chinese war junks at the Second Battle of Chuenpi during the First Opium War, 7 January 1841

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  Ruins of the Old Summer Palace, which was looted and destroyed by Anglo-French troops during the Second Opium War in 1860

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  Map showing China's loss of Outer Manchuria to Russia in the treaties of Aigun 1858 (beige) and Peking 1860 (red)

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  French troops capture a Chinese fort at the Battle of Nui Bop during the Sino-French War, 1885

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  Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese prisoners during the First Sino-Japanese War, 1894

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  American troops scaling the burning Beijing city walls during the Boxer Rebellion, 1900

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  In the 1900, thousands of Chinese residents in the former Chinese territory of Outer Manchuria were massacred by Russian forces

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  Imperialism 1900: The bear represents Russia, the lion Britain, the frog France, the sun Japan, and the eagle the United States

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  Soldiers of the Eight-Nation Alliance in the Forbidden City following the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion, 1900

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  Chinese opium smokers, 1902

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  The corpses of Chinese civilians killed by the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre

End of humiliation[]

Already during the conclusion of the Boxer Protocol in 1901, some of the Western powers believed they had acted in excess and that the Protocol was too humiliating. As a result, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay formulated the Open Door Policy, which prevented the colonial powers from directly carving up China into de jure colonies, and guaranteed universal trade access to markets in China. Intended to weaken Germany, Japan, and Russia, it was only somewhat enforced and was gradually broken by the following warlord era and Japanese interventions.^[9] The semi-contradictory nature of the Open Door policy was noted early, as although it preserved the territorial integrity of China from foreign powers, it also led to trade exploitation by the same countries. With the Root–Takahira Agreement in 1908, the U.S. and Japan upheld the Open Door Policy, but other factors (such as immigration restrictions, and the assignment of the Boxer Indemnity to a managed Boxer Indemnity Scholarship instead of directly returned to the Qing government) led to a continuation in humiliation from the Chinese perspective.^[10] Open Door was ultimately dissolved in WWII when Japan invaded China.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction and other privileges were abandoned by the United Kingdom and the United States in 1943. During World War II, Vichy France retained control over French concessions in China but was coerced into handing them over to the collaborationist Wang Jingwei regime. The postwar Sino-French Accord of February 1946 affirmed Chinese sovereignty over the concessions.

Both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong declared the end of the Century of Humiliation in the aftermath of World War II, with Chiang promoting his wartime resistance to Japanese rule and China's place among the Big Four in the victorious Allies in 1945, and Mao declared it with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Chinese politicians and writers,^[who?] however, have continued to portray later events as the true end of humiliation. Its end was declared in the repulsion of UN forces during the Korean War, the 1997 reunification with Hong Kong, the 1999 reunification with Macau, and even the hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Others^[who?] claim that humiliation will not end until the People's Republic of China controls Taiwan.^[11]

In 2021, coinciding with the United States–China talks in Alaska, the Chinese government began referring to the period as 120 years of humiliation, a reference to the 1901 Boxer Protocol in which the Qing Dynasty was forced to pay large reparation to members of the Eight-Nation Alliance.^[12]

Implications[]

The usage of the Century of Humiliation in the Chinese Communist Party's historiography and modern Chinese nationalism, with its focus on the "sovereignty and integrity of [Chinese] territory,"^[13] has been invoked in incidents such as the US bombing of the Chinese Belgrade embassy, the Hainan Island incident, and protests for Tibetan independence along the 2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay.^[14] Some analysts have pointed to its use in deflecting foreign criticism of human rights abuses in China and domestic attention from issues of corruption and bolstering its territorial claims and general economic and political rise.^[11][15][16]

Commentary and criticism[]

criticized the allegation that China refused to modernize or was unable to defeat Western armies as simplistic by noting that China embarked on a massive military modernization in the late 1800s after several defeats, bought weapons from Western countries and manufactured its own at arsenals, such as the Hanyang Arsenal during the Boxer Rebellion. In addition, Elliott questioned the claim that Chinese society was traumatized by the Western victories, as many Chinese peasants (then 90% of the population) lived outside the concessions and continued about their daily lives uninterrupted and without any feeling of "humiliation".^[17]

Historians have judged the Qing dynasty's vulnerability and weakness to foreign imperialism in the 19th century to be based mainly on its maritime naval weakness, but it achieved military success against Westerners on land. The historian Edward L. Dreyer stated, "China's nineteenth-century humiliations were strongly related to her weakness and failure at sea. At the start of the First Opium War, China had no unified navy and not a sense of how vulnerable she was to attack from the sea. British navy forces sailed and steamed wherever they wanted to go. In the Arrow War (1856–60), the Chinese had no way to prevent the Anglo-French navy expedition of 1860 from sailing into the Gulf of Zhili and landing as near as possible to Beijing. Meanwhile, new but not exactly modern Chinese armies suppressed the midcentury rebellions, bluffed Russia into a peaceful settlement of disputed frontiers in Central Asia, and defeated the French forces on land in the Sino-French War (1884–85). But the defeat at sea, and the resulting threat to steamship traffic to Taiwan, forced China to conclude peace on unfavorable terms."^[18][19]

Similar usage[]

In a 2019 speech, Indian Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar has used the term in a local context by saying, "India had two centuries of humiliation by West."^[20][21]

See also[]

• Anti-Western sentiment in China
• Anti-Japanese sentiment in China
• Revanchism
• Unequal treaty
• Concessions in China
• List of Chinese treaty ports
• Sick man of Asia

References[]