The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

West. This sentiment runs deep and has got the Chinese
into a state of contradiction that on the one hand,
they must learn from the West to modernize China,
but on the other, they have to reject, resist, or hold reservations
about aspects of modernization, especially
the cultural aspects and the methods of government.
Chinese learning from the West therefore has always
been selective at best, and distorted or misguided at
its worst. It is with this contradiction that China has
agonized with its modernization process since 1840.
1840-1910: From Misguided Development to
Revolution.
“Yangwu”: Foreign Affairs and Business Promotion
(洋务运动). 6 Although the First Opium War of 1840
launched by Great Britain against China marked the
beginning of China’s modern history, it did not push
start China’s modernization process right away. In
fact, only a handful of concerned Chinese, most notably
Lin Zexu (林则徐), the commanding officer who
lost the opium war to the British; provincial high officials
such as Zeng Guofan (曾国藩), Li Hongzhang
(李鸿章), Zuo Zongtang (左宗棠), and Zhang Zhidong
(张之洞); and gentry scholars such as Wei Yuan (魏源)
and Feng Guifen (冯桂芬), took it as a wakeup call, investigated
the significance of this humiliating encounter
with a Western power, and “opened their eyes to
see the outside world” (Wei’s influential work, 海国
图志 [The Illustrated Treatise of the Maritime Kingdoms],
was one of China’s first books on foreign nations). 7
Most of the corrupt Qing rulers continued to dismiss
the outside world, paid no attention to the challenges
China was facing, and made no effort to improve China’s
deteriorating economic and security conditions
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