CHINA The modern history of China has revolved around the question of how to regain sovereignty, end the humiliation of foreign occupation and bring about equality and development. Chinese debates were marked by the views of three groups. The early reformers such as Kang Youwei ( - ) or Liang Qichao ( - ) tried to use traditional ideas in new and different ways to meet the challenges posed by the West. Second, republican revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the republic, were inspired by ideas from Japan and the West.
The third, the Communist Party of China (CCP) wanted to end age-old inequalities and drive out the foreigners. The beginning of modern China can be traced to its first encounter with the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Jesuit missionaries introduced Western sciences such as astronomy and mathematics. Limited though its immediate impact was, it set in motion events that gathered momentum in the nineteenth century when Britain Tokyo before and after the Second World War. P ATHS TO M ODERNISATION T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY used force to expand its lucrative trade in opium leading to the first Opium War ( - ).
This undermined the ruling Qing dynasty and strengthened demands for reform and change. Qing reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao realised the need to strengthen the system and initiated policies to build a modern administrative system, a new army and an educational system, and set up local assemblies to establish constitutional government. They saw the need to protect China from colonisation. The negative example of colonised countries worked powerfully on Chinese thinkers.
The partition of Poland in the eighteenth century was a much-discussed example. So much so that by the late 1890s it came to be used as a verb: ‘to Poland us’ ( bolan wo ). India was another such example. In , the thinker Liang Qichao, who believed that only by making people aware that China was a nation would they be able to resist the West, wrote that India was ‘a country that was destroyed by a non-country