A Hypothetical Debate - Essay Example

full A Hypothetical Debate (between a Chinese Qing official and a Japanese Meiji official) 06 February Introduction The world in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries saw the rise of Western powers. This was the period of imperialism and colonialism in which Western countries like the Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain sought new lands in other parts of the world. They conquered these lands, colonized the native peoples, and exploited their natural resources to support their home markets and further fuel the Industrial Revolution. In other words, the world was rapidly changing due to these developments and so countries had to also adjust in order to survive this new world order. The Western countries exercised hegemonic ambitions and even fought among themselves for prized colonies as their possessions. This period also saw two contrasting approaches in how to deal with the new world order. China had been a regional power for several millennia at around this time and saw no need to modernize itself. It prided itself on its technological, scientific, and military advances, discoveries, inventions, and innovations and thereby did not feel threatened by the growing influx of Western influence into Asia. China got complacent due to this imperial hubris and so did not take the appropriate steps to turn back European aggression into East Asia. Japan before the Meiji Restoration (September 1868 to July 1912) had been always a country that was mainly agricultural (poor), beset with local wars (due to the feudal system in which samurai clans had held attachment to their ancestral lands), weak militarily, and little or no technological development to speak of. Young reformers during the onset of the Meiji era saw Western expansionism as a threat and acted accordingly. They introduced reforms to the countrys political and social systems by adopting Western ideas to modernize Japan. Discussion China for several centuries had gotten used to being the regional power in the central Asian region. It had attained a high degree of development in its civilization by a number of world firsts, such as the civil service system, the invention of gunpowder, a unique system of writing, and an imperial system of highly-regarded examinations for entrance to government service. Its Confucian values and centralized, bureaucratic government allowed it to control large tracts of lands and its tributary system allowed it to collect raxes from the neighboring countries to help support its government bureaucracy and imperial treasury. In other words, the high civilization of China was attained without any significant external help or influences. This was a prevailing view at the time, that China is the center of the world; China does not need the world but the world instead needs China. It had developed its own civilization almost single-handedly, attained a highly-refined social culture, a system of political control through the government bureaucracy via imperial edicts, and all the other hallmarks of a truly great civilization. It saw other nations as illiterates and barbarians; China saw no need to deal with foreigners and viewed these intruders as bad influences. This isolationist policy by China even in that time of great danger was best shown by its massive Great Wall of China. This wall was built over a long period of time at a great cost to help deter foreign invaders. This kind of mentality was still prevalent even in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) which was further fostered by the impressive achievements, intially, of this last imperial dynasty in China before the country became a democratic republic. This kind of mentality was in retrospect short-sighted because it deprived China of new or modern ideas as it was during this time when many scientific discoveries and technological developments took place in Europe during the great Industrial Revolution. History showed this approach to foreign influences was wrong as China became weak and got occupied by Western powers. This xenophobia (fear of anything foreign or strange) turned out to be bad for China. It deprived the country of progressive ideas which could have helped to modernize a country like China which was very huge in terms of population and land area. The transistion to more modern society could have been eased by adoption of some Western ideas which are found to be appropriate or necessary, depending on the local circumstances or as warranted. Japanese reformers in the Meiji period embraced Western ideas but only sparingly or selectively. Those reformers in China who wanted to reverse their countrys decline came to the scene too late; they advised to follow the footsteps of Japan in using newer ideas (Ebrey & Walthall 330). This inward-looking policy of the Qing dynasty eventually led to its demise because it became a weak country in the eyes of the expansionist Western powers out to grab a prized territory for themselves. China is a multi-ethnic country (similar to the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, the Mughals in India, and the Romanov Dynasty in Russia) and its sheer size in terms of population and land area made effective government administration doubly difficult. The Qing Dynastry, like the Ottoman and Russian empires, was basically a land power in the center of the Eurasian land mass and was not able to appreciate the strategic importance of the new advantages of being a naval power like Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, or France. Crucial previous experience in defending long land borders no longer counted in the new age. Japan, on the other hand, saw the virtues of adopting Western ideas to modernize the country and keep in step with new world developments. Japan was also beset by the domestic troubles common to both countries of China and Japan (a rapidly-growing population that was still largely reliant on agriculture) but the response of Japan to domestic problems and also the growing foreign pressure had been entirely different. It assessed the situation accurately and it hurriedly undertook crucial reforms in an effort to catch up, so to speak. Japan created highly-centralized government, improved its transport system, and most importantly, its military. The collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate provided the Meiji Era reformers a clean slate to start things right by improving everything in Japan to be at par with the Western world and a good example of this possitive reform was the transformation of the main transportation from the palanquin to the rickshaw to railroads and taxis in Japan (Ebrey & Walthall 341). This improvement greatly enhanced the lives of ordinary Japanese who used to walk only. The Meiji emperor established an industrial sector, created a powerful army and navy, and he also undertook massive social reforms, in particular educating the common people to attain a high level of literacy and abolished the samurais link to land by doing away with feudalism as this had been the usual cause of many local conflicts resulting in too much distraction from a more important task, that of nation-building and repelling any perceived foreign threats. This pragmatic approach by Meiji Japan is like that of a small living organism that is forced to be flexible and adaptive in order to survive while China can be like a dinosaur that refused to evolve with the changing environment and eventually became an extinct species. In the case of Japan at this period in its history, the emperor and his advisers were progressives. They did not view new or foreign ideas as threats but as opportunities to modernize Japan. A lot of historians and academicians always make this comparison between two Far East nations with contrasting responses to the same Western threat of imperialist agression with Japan able to adjust successfuly and even dreamed of being an imperialist power itself while China was made to sign and suffer unequal treaties and trade concessions to Great Britain. Japan became a modern industrial and military power because its ruling elite were a set of open-minded intellectuals who saw a strategic importance of weaning the country away from an agricultural and feudal system to a modern-society system patterned after the West. A limited land area with a big population (densely populated country) forced it to be innovative as it had no mineral resources to speak of, at least in significant amount to be useful. This Meiji restoration in Japan was a revolution of national redemption, in which the affected sectors cooperated and set aside local politics to achieve a long-term and long-lasting socio-economic and political change to improve Japans standing in the world. The magnitude of the changes attained and reforms implemented by the Meiji restoration in Japan can be compared to the French Revolution that overthrew the monarchy and established democracy. One fundamental transformation was a real land reform in land-scarce Japan (Canlon 50). The incentive for Japan to adopt Western ways was expressed succinctly by Fukuzawa who advise his compatriots to turn its back on its Asian neighbors of China and Korea because these two countries are seen as backward, barbaric, mean-spirited, autocratic, and shameless by the Westerners. The advise he gave was that Japan did not have the luxury of time “to wait for the enlightenment of our neighbors . . . toward the development of Asia. It is better for us to leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with the civilized nations of the West.” Conclusion A hypothetical debate between a high-ranked Chinese Qing official with his Japanese Meiji counterpart could go like this, discussing the merits and demerits of their approaches: Qing Official: “Western influence is bad as it can pollute the Chinese culture.” Meiji Official: “Western ideas are modern and progressive so these should be used.” Qing Official: “China had survived for several millennia without external influence.” Meiji Official: “Japan needs to be open-minded and adopt newer Western ideas.” China feared alien ideas and strictly prohibited outside contacts of its citizens while the reformers in Japan encouraged the opposite to gain new ideas and Japan followed the idea of Western imperialist countries to establish trading outposts and acquire colonies too (like in Manchuria). China got complacent and considered itself self-sufficient as Chinese emperors claimed divinity (Steindorff 228) while Japan earnestly took reforms to modernize itself. Works Cited Canlon, Thomas D. State of War: The Violent Order of 14th-century Japan. Ann Arbor, MI, USA: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Print. Ebrey, Patricia, and Anne Walthall. East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History. Boston, MA, USA: Wadsworth, 2014. Print. Steindorff, Ludwig. Religion and Integration in Russland. Weisbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz Publishing House, 2010. Print. Read More