The growing Western presence in China during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the
imperial government with an opportunity to benefit
from the situation. The results, however, were meager.
Although foreign concession areas in the coastal cities
provided a conduit for the importation of Western technology
and modern manufacturing methods, the Chinese
borrowed less than they might have. Foreign manufacturing
enterprises could not legally operate in China until
the last decade of the nineteenth century, and their methods
had little influence beyond the concession areas. Chinese
efforts to imitateWestern methods, notably in shipbuilding
and weapons manufacture, were dominated by
the government and often suffered from mismanagement.
Equally serious problems persisted in the countryside.
The rapid increase in population had led to smaller plots
and growing numbers of tenant farmers. Whether per
capita consumption of food was on the decline is not
clear from the available evidence, but apparently, rice as
a staple of the diet was increasingly being replaced by less
nutritious foods. Some farmers benefited from switching
to commercial agriculture to supply the markets of the
growing coastal cities. The shift entailed a sizable investment,
however, and many farmers went so deeply into
debt that they eventually lost their land. At the same
time, the traditional patron-client relationship was frayed
as landlords moved to the cities to take advantage of the
glittering urban lifestyle.
Most important, perhaps, the Qing dynasty was still
locked into a traditional mind-set that discouraged commercial
activities and prized the time-honored virtues of
preindustrial agrarian society. China also lacked the European
tradition of a vigorous and self-confident merchant
class based in cities that were autonomous or even
independent of the feudal political leadership of the surrounding
areas.
In any event, the advent of the imperialist era in the
second half of the nineteenth century made such questions
academic; imperialism created serious distortions in
the local economy that resulted in massive changes in
Chinese society during the twentieth century. Whether
the Western intrusion was beneficial or harmful is debated
to this day. The Western presence undoubtedly accelerated
the development of the Chinese economy in
some ways: the introduction of modern means of production,
transport, and communications; the appearance of
an export market; and the steady integration of the Chinese
market into the nineteenth-century global economy.
To many Westerners at the time, it was self-evident
that such changes would ultimately benefit the Chinese
people. Critics retorted that Western imperialism actually
hindered the process of structural change in preindustrial
societies because it thwarted the rise of a local industrial
and commercial sector so as to maintain colonies
and semicolonies as a market for Western manufactured
goods and a source of cheap labor and materials. If the
West had not intervened, some argued, China would
have found its own road to becoming an advanced industrial
society.
Many historians today would say that the encounters
with the West did both harm and good. By shaking China
out of its traditional mind-set, Western imperialism accelerated
the process of change that had begun in the late
Ming and early Qing periods and forced the Chinese to
adopt new ways of thinking and acting. At the same time,
China paid a heavy price in the destruction of its local industry,
while many of the profits flowed abroad. Although
industrial revolution is a painful process whenever and
wherever it occurs, the Chinese found the experience
doubly painful because it was foisted on China from the
outside.
World History
