Century of humiliation

Chinese nationalists in the 1920s and the 1930s dated the Century of Humiliation to the mid-19th century, on the eve of the

• Western and Japanese trade in opium to China (1800s–1940s)
• Defeat in the First Opium War (1839–1842) by the British and the occupation of Hong Kong.
• The
  Nanjing, Whampoa, Aigun, and Shimonoseki
  )
• Defeat in the Second Opium War (1856–1860) and the sacking and looting of the Old Summer Palace by Anglo-French forces.^[6]: 24
• The signing of the "unequal treaties" of
  Russia
  .
• The partial defeat during the Sino-French War (1884–1885), which resulted in losing suzerainty over Vietnam and influence in the Indochinese Peninsula.
• The British Sikkim expedition (1888).
• Defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) by Japan, which resulted in the Japanese colonization of Taiwan and suzerainty over Korea.
• The
  Liaodong
  (1898).
• 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.^[7]
• The simultaneous Russian invasion of Manchuria (1900), which resulted in anti-Chinese pogroms and the subsequent expulsion or killing of all Qing subjects in the Sixty-Four Villages East of the River.^[8][9]
• The Japanese invasion of Liaodong during the Russo-Japanese War (1905).
• The British expedition to Tibet (1903–1904)^[10]
• The Twenty-One Demands (1915) by Japan, which would have greatly extended Japanese control of China.
• The
  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 Soviet invasion of Xinjiang (January– April 1934)
• The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), during which numerous and widespread war crimes were committed by Japanese forces, most infamously the Nanjing Massacre^[6]: 24 and lethal human experimentation by Unit 731.

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

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[12] 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 being directly returned to the Qing government) led to a continuation in humiliation from the Chinese perspective.^[13] In the Republic of China mainland era, the 1922 Nine-Power Treaty was also a major attempt to reaffirm Chinese sovereignty, though it failed to check Japan's expansionism and had a limited effect on extraterritoriality.^[14][15] Open Door was ultimately dissolved in WWII when Japan invaded China.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction and other privileges were

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 were forced to pay large reparations to members of the Eight-Nation Alliance.^[17]

Implications

Part of People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

Outline of the Chinese Civil War

Origins Context Century of Humiliation 1911 Revolution Warlord Era Ideas Nationalism Anarchism Marxism Movements New Culture Movement May Fourth Movement Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement

Early history First United Front Founding of the Communist Party Far Eastern Bureau of the Communist International Sun–Joffe Manifesto Left Kuomintang Peasant Movement Training Institute Canton Coup 28 Bolsheviks Labor organizing 1922 seamen's strike May Thirtieth Movement Canton–Hong Kong strike Northern Expedition Wuhan Government Hunan Report Hankou incident Nanjing Incident Shanghai Commune Break with the KMT

Civil War Aftermath of purge Nanchang Little Long March Autumn Harvest Guangzhou Internal Purges AB League Incident Futian incident Chinese Soviet Republic Jiangxi Soviet Chinese Red Army Long March Zunyi Conference Anti-Japanese resistance Xi'an Incident

Second United Front Second Sino-Japanese War New Fourth Army Eighth Route Army East River Column Hundred Regiments Offensive New Fourth Army Incident Communist base areas Yan'an Soviet Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region Yan'an Rectification Campaign Yan'an Forum Women's movement

Resumed Civil War Military conflict "Millet plus rifles" People's Liberation Army Operation Beleaguer Liaoshen campaign Huaihai campaign Pingjin campaign Retreat of the ROC to Taiwan Urban support for Communists China Democratic League Shen Chong case Jiaochangkou incident Yu Zisan Incident Revolutionary Committee of the KMT

Forming the People's Republic Government Central People's Government Writing the Constitution 1954 Constitution Reforms Land Reform New Marriage Law First five-year plan Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns Suppression of counterrevolutionaries Foreign relations Sino-Soviet Cooperation Annexation of Tibet Intervention in Korea Intervention in Vietnam

Mao Zedong Thought Marxism–Leninism–Maoism National Day 100th Anniversary of the CCP

China portal  Communism portal

v t e

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,"^[18] 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.^[19] 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.^[16][20][21]

Commentary and criticism

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 Second Opium 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."^[22][23]

The historian Jane E. Elliott 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".^[24]

Similar usage

In a 2019 speech, Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar used the term in a local context, referring to the British Empire's Company rule in India and subsequent British Raj, saying, "India had two centuries of humiliation by the West."^[25][26]

See also

• Anti-Japanese sentiment in China
• Anti-Western sentiment in China
• Chinese Century
• Chinese concession of Incheon
• Foreign concessions in China
• Hurting the feelings of the Chinese people
• List of Chinese treaty ports
• Revanchism
• Scramble for China
• Sick man of Asia
• Unequal treaty
• Western imperialism in Asia

References