Week 5: China’s History

Topic 4:

CHINA’S HISTORY

About China

One of the earliest civilizations in the world, China is the only ancient
civilization in world history with no interruption. The Chinese people have
inherited a common culture and history longer than have any other people on earth.
Separated from the western civilization by mountains, deserts, and oceans, China is
geographically independent. Fertile farmlands, prairies, and coastal areas for
fishing and trading are spreading over a vast space.

China’s territory is the third largest in the world today, and up until the
modern age, it had always been the largest. Its population was one-third of the
global total over a fairly long time in history.

Living in East Asia’s northern temperate zone, China’s ancestors nurtured an

agrarian economy. They stepped into the threshold of civilization from a stable
agricultural community, and their clan chiefs grew into a new ruling class. Thus,
kindred ties and a state administrative system fused into an underlying social
structure, resulting in a tradition that emphasizes inwardness, community, human
relations, and centralized power.

Intensive cultivation marked with the use of iron tools developed in the
Yellow and Yangtze river basins in ancient China, forging an individual farming
economy, private land ownership, and tenant contractual relationships.

The Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties

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The Chinese called their emperor the 'son of heaven' and described their
country as the ‘middle kingdom'. They believed that the people outside the middle
kingdom were barbarians and the Zhou people built walls to keep them out. In
221BC, a man called Zheng gave himself the title ‘The First Emperor" and started
the Qin dynasty. He ordered 300,000 peasants to go to the north and join a series of
walls into one, the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall was made longer in the
Han dynasty to protect the way to the Silk Road. Merchants from Arabia and Asia
used this track to carry silk from China over mountains and deserts into the Roman
Empire. In the year AD 2, the Han emperors had a count of all the people in China.
There were 59 million, more than in all the countries of the Roman Empire.

Foreign devil

The Portuguese were the first foreign devils to reach China by sea, in the
early 16th century. Then Dutch and British trading ships came. The Chinese said
they could build warehouses on the water’s edge but not travel about through the
country. Few Chinese could afford English – made goods and in any case, they did
not see the need for them.

The British began to smuggle opium, grown in poppy; in India to sell. The
Chinese forbade this because opium was a drug that ruined the health of people
who became addicted and mace a misery of the lives of their trades by sending
warships and troops to force China to accept the opium. In the Opium War (1839-
1842), British steamships sank the Chinese fleet of sailing vessels and soldiers
occupied Shanghai in south China. The emperor was forced to hand over the island
of Hong Kong to Britain and let her carry out trade there and in ether ports.

This was the start of the “opening of China’. Britain asked for more
business rights and France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the USA wanted the
same. European traders and missionaries were eventually allowed to travel
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anywhere. They built railways and sent the money they made back home, and even
collected taxes from the Chinese.

Worst of all, Europeans often treated the Chinese as inferior people, good
only for hard work as ‘coolies’. In 1900 the anger of some Chinese was so great
that they joined in attacks on Europeans, led by the Boxers, which was the
European name for the Society of Harmonious Fists. Six European states and the
USA and Japan sent troops to deal with the Boxers.

End of the empire

The Chinese often blamed their emperors for the misery caused by the
foreign devils. They already hated the Qing rulers because they came from
Manchuria in the far north, which the Chinese looked on more as a barbarian land
than part of the true China. It was the Manzhou (Manchus) who made all Chinese
men follow their custom of wearing pigtails.

The Revolution of 1911 led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing
Dynasty, and helped the spread of concepts such as democracy and republic. Next,
the revolution guided by the Communist Party of China won the great victory of
national independence and people’s liberation. October 1, 1949 witnessed the
founding of the People’s Republic of China, inaugurating a new era toward
socialist modernization.

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