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

that had been going on for decades prior to the arrival
of the Western powers. Their poor conduct made
China all the more vulnerable to colonial advance. In
1856, China was to lose the Second Opium War to the
combined forces of Great Britain and France.
The humiliating defeat in the Second Opium War
finally got the Qing rulers to see that the fate of the
Middle Kingdom was at stake. They were forced to
take measures to save the nation. By that time, there
was a consensus among most Qing high officials that
the Western powers were more advanced and stronger
than China, but China could learn from the West
to restore its supremacy, because they believed that
the Western intruders were merely superior in their
fighting capability but still inferior culturally and
politically to the Chinese civilization. 8 Wei Yuan put
it categorically, the West had three advantages: warships,
firearms, and military training; China could
learn and acquire these advanced capabilities and
skills from the West and use them to check the West
(师夷长技以制夷). With endorsement from key high
officials, Wei’s observation was to become the rallying
call for China’s 30-plus years of guarded opening
to the outside world (Yangwu) and self-strengthening
movement from 1860 to the mid 1890s.
It is also possible that those pro-change officials
(“Yangwu officials” [“洋务官员”]) made this case as
a roundabout effort to get the Qing rulers to allow
learning and imports from the West. They knew that
the Qing rulers cared mostly about the preservation
of their dynastic rule of China. By placing the reform
movement under the principle of “Chinese learning as
the fundamentals, Western learning for practical use
(中学为体, 西学为用),” 9 they excluded learning of political
and cultural practices from the West and made
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