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The Historic Background of China's Perception of the West - by Carl Zha
May 05, 2018
The Historic Background of China's Perception of the West - by Carl Zha
Carl Zha publishes the Clash of civilizations and empires podcast.
This illustrated history was originally tweeted yesterday, May 4th 2018. It is slightly edited and republished here with the author's permission.
How the West’s betrayal of China in Versailles after World War I led to the long Chinese Revolution that shaped today's Chinese perception of the West
(Click on the pictures to enlarge)
99 years ago, on May 4th 1919, the original Tiananmen student protest broke out. The students protested the Allied Powers' betrayal at Versailles: The German Shangdong colony was given to Japan instead of returning it to China. This despite China's sending of 140,000 men to work on the Western front.
The story begins with the first Sino-Japanese War 1894-95. Japan, after going through a full westernization program, decisively defeated China which had a half-hearted 'Self-Strengthening' modernization program that tried to preserve Confucian traditions while adopting Western technology.
Japan defeating China triggered a new round of Imperial Powers scramble to carve up China. Germany was particularly eager to not be left out.
Germany took the port city of Qingdao (Tsingtao) on the Shangdong Peninsula where they brought over beer tech giving birth to Tsingtao Beer.
Qingdao(Tsingtao) became the major German base for its newly acquired Pacific colonies until the eve of World War I.
In 1890 Germany played a leading role in attacking the Chinese capital Beijing to suppress the Boxer Rebellion together with the 8 Nation Alliance of Britain, France, United States, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and Austria-Hungary.
Britain viewed German presence as threat to its colonies in China. After World War I broke out, Britain allied with Japan to besiege Qingdao. 23,000 Japanese and 1,500 British troops attacked 3,650 Germans and 324 Austro-Hungarians. Woodblock print and the Japanese flagship Suwo.
Britain promised the German Pacific colonies to Japan including Qingdao. Students explore a scale model of the Qingdao area depicting the city during the siege of the city by British and Japanese forces in October and November 1914.
As World War I wore on longer than anybody expected, the Allied Powers faced acute labor shortages. Britain came up with a scheme to recruit Chinese labors. But China was neutral so she had to be persuaded to join the war
China wanted to have the German Shangdong colony returned. Entered U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson asked China to join the war and promised support for China to gain Shangdong back after Germany’s defeat.
While the young republican China sees Britain and France as ruthless Imperial Powers, it has an enormous regard for the U.S. which it hopes to model itself after. Top Chinese diplomat was the American educated Wellington Koo. Madam Koo, an international style icon, popularized Cheongsam/Qipao dresses.
China did as Wilson asked, entered the war against Germany and send 340,000 men to help with the Allied war effort. 140,000 went to the Western Front, 200,000 went to Russia. Chinese comprised the largest non-European labor force on the Allied side during World War I.
On the Western front, the 140,000 Chinese labor were know as the Chinese Labour Corp. They dug trenches, worked in timber yards, build steamers, repair railroads. 6,000 were even sent to Iraq to work in Basra.
Chinese Labour Corp men load 9.2-inch shells onto a railway wagon at Boulogne for transport to the front line, August 1917.
Chinese Labour Corps men and a British soldier cannibalize a wrecked Mark IV tank for spare parts at the central stores of the Tank Corps, Teneur, spring 1918.
Chinese Labour Corps workers washing a Mark V tank at the Tank Corps Central Workshops, Erin, France, February 1918.
In other cases, Chinese workers staffed munitions factory during World War I.
Chinese Labour Corp men practice martial arts with swords in Crecy Forest, 27 January 1918.
200,000 Chinese men toiled in Russia. 10,000 Chinese build the Murmansk railway in the Arctic Circle. After the October revolution, 40,000+ Chinese would join the Red Army in the Russian Civil War.
The bulk of the 340,000 Chinese men sent to work in the World War I frontlines were recruited from Shangdong province, where Germany's colony of Qingdao was located. The map shows British and French transport routes for Chinese workers to Europe. Little is known about routes to the Middle East and Russia.
Unbeknownst to China, while China joined the war on the allied side at the U.S. urging, hoping to gain back Shangdong province, the U.S. and Japan signed the secret Lansing-Ishii Agreement in 1917 where they recognized each other’s special 'interests' in China. Japan’s interest is the German colony Qingdao.
Fully believing Woodrow Wilson’s promise of self-determination, the top Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo, who won the Columbia-Cornell Debating Medal in his American school days, argued passionately for the return of the Shangdong Peninsula at the Paris Peace Conference.
Opposite of Wellington Koo is the Japanese diplomat Baron Makino, a skilled go player. Makino played his hand tactically. He knew Wilson’s baby is the League of Nations. He proposed a racial equality clause knowing full well that the U.S., with its Jim Crow Laws, would oppose it.
Japan then threaten to veto the League of Nations, which would not work without Japan, unless ... the U.S. agreed to give Germany’s former Shangdong colony to Japan. Wilson dutifully complied and decide to honor the Lansing-Ishii agreement, selling the Chinese down the river.
Wellington Koo is not the only Chinese diplomat in Paris. There is Trinidad born Eugene Chen who does not speak Chinese but represent another Chinese government because China was divided between a Beijing government in the north and a Canton(Guangzhou) government in the south.
Eugene Chen was a Hakka Chinese born in Trinidad to a former Taiping rebel who fled to the Caribbean. Eugene became a lawyer and married the French creole girl Agatha Alphosin Ganteaume. But he 'returned' to China after the 1911 Revolution overthrew the Qing Imperial government.
Growing disappointed with the Beijing government, Eugene Chen went to join Sun Yatsen’s Canton (Guangzhou) government in the south. Here is Sun Yatsen with a very young Chiang Kai-shek.
The October Revolution broke out towards the end of World War I. Suddenly an alternative political model appeared to the Chinese.
40,000 Chinese labor trapped in Russia joined the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. A White Army propaganda poster depicts Trotsky as Satan wearing a Pentagram, and portrays the Bolsheviks' Chinese supporters as mass murderers. The caption reads "Peace and Liberty in Sovdepiya".
The Soviets saw a chance to draw China away from the West and into their camp. They leaked details of the secret U.S.-Japan Lansing-Ishii agreement to Eugene Chen in Paris, who then leaked it to the Chinese press. Furious Chinese students took to street to protest at this betrayal especially by the U.S.
Previously young Chinese had looked up to the U.S. as a beacon of democracy. The Versailles Treaty made them realize that the U.S. only pays lip service to freedom and democracy while ruthlessly pursuing its self-interests.The May 4th movement is born to protest the weakness of the Chinese government and calls for reform.
Young people wanted to make China strong so it would not be bullied. They demand fundamental cultural and political changes to make it happen. There is a sense that Confucian traditions had failed China. China must welcome democracy and science and embrace modernity to move forward.
The seminal May 4th movement witnesses an upsurge of Chinese nationalism. New Chinese nationalists call for a rejection of traditional values and the selective adoption of the Western ideals of "Mr. Science" (賽先生) and "Mr. Democracy" (德先生) in order to strengthen the new nation.
Disillusioned with the West and seeking for an alternative political model leads some to look to the newly found Soviet Union. Two leading intellectuals of the May 4th movement, Li Dazhao (left) and Chen Duxiu(right), co-founded the Chinese Communist Party.
While heading the Peking University library, Chinese Communist Party co-founder Li Dazhao would influence a young student working there. His name was Mao Zedong.
The other leading intellectual of the May 4th Movement is Hu Shih, a classical liberal, who parted ways with the Communists. But the bourgeois soil upon which liberalism thrives is scarce in China, limiting their impact to the small number of educated urban elites.
The anti-traditionalism of the May 4th movement eventually reached its logical conclusion during the campaign to eradicate Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas in the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966 which aimed to destroy all aspects of traditional Chinese culture.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square students protest was the last echo of the May 4th movement, and of the century long Chinese revolution. Students demanded political change to make the nation strong and prosper. Afterwards pragmatism would replace idealism.
China has come full circle. New found confidence enables the people to embrace tradition again. In 2011, a Confucius statue even appeared in Tiananmen Square. But the controversy remained. It was removed after 100 days without explanation.
After the Cultural Revolution, China experience a brief honeymoon with the West in the 1980s. Chinese youth hungered to learn about the outside world. There was a lot of goodwill towards the U.S. This period lasted beyond the Tiananmen protest of 1989.
A big turning point in Chinese public opinion was the 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade where three Chinese journalists were killed. No one in China believed the U.S. claim of an accidental bombing due to faulty maps.
Adding fuel to the fire was the collision of a U.S. spy plane near Hainan Island with a Chinese PLA J-8 fighter plane which caused the J8 to crash and an emergency landing of U.S. spy plane on Hainan Island. Previous pro-American sentiment of Chinese youth decidedly turned.
After the Arab Spring, many Chinese viewed the U.S. just as their elders in the May 4th movement did: paying lip service to freedom and democracy while ruthlessly pursuing naked self-interests. Many sympathized when the Geneva conference on Syria had no Syrians (except the waiter) because that was China’s lot 99 years ago.
May 4th is now the official Youth Day in China. A relief on the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square depicting the May 4th movement.
Thank you for reading this long thread.
May the 4th be with you!
Posted by b on May 5, 2018 at 01:39 PM | Permalink
Comments
Thanks for the history. I recently read a book called "Wolf Totem" describing native Mongolians whose indigenous life was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. It was my first book about a civilization wiping out a native culture outside of the Americas. It gives an interesting inside-look into the Cultural Revolution and how indigenous and deep-rural people responded to the Four Olds program and the huge pressure to conform to the new beliefs and ways even as the new things clearly made no sense in the context of their own lives. I highly recommend it, but it's about as saddening as any honest look at civilized-vs-indigenous conflict.
Posted by: A | May 5, 2018 2:20:41 PM | 3
May the 4th be with you!
Obi-Wan only had to say it once.
And Luke never looked back.
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | May 5, 2018 2:37:02 PM | 4
"In 1890 Germany played a leading role in attacking the Chinese capital Beijing to suppress the Boxer Rebellion together with the 8 Nation Alliance of Britain, France, United States, Germany, Italy, Russia
The Russian Empire was an important part of the forces seeking to dismember and loot China. It was part of the imperialist "wolfpack", so to speak, and took lots of land from China.
You can still see the russian Czar in one of the pictures. The picture where a gang of imperialists are dining with China. The text should reflect more about Russia's role in all of that.
Posted by: Hmm | May 5, 2018 2:38:50 PM | 5
re Treaty of Versailles...claimed by George Seldes to be the the scoop of the century, as the secret terms ere made public in the usa before Congress could vote to ratify; result was Congress after multiple vote refused to ratify.
But the scoop was wrongly credited to the wrong person!
George Seldes , a newspaperman at the Paris meetings, promised to keep secret how the scoop occurred until the death of the 2 prime actors. Namely, by prior arrangement, Spearman Lewis [another newsman] made a copy of the copy that China's representative was taking back to China for official action there. They created a fake taxi accident at Place de la Concorde to obtain and make the copy and return it to the rwp in the ensuing traffic jam.
Seldes quickly figured out who got it and the ruse. Spearman Lewis confirmed and Seldes promised to keep the secret until both Lewis and China's rep had died.
Spearman gave the copy to Frazier Hunt to hand-carry back to the USA.
Hunt passed it to the NY Times and they published the entire secret terms.
The outrage in China involved organized student protests and one of the student leaders was Mao Zedong!; later Chairman Mao.
Posted by: chu teh | May 5, 2018 2:58:21 PM | 6
One might have expected the "Christian" West to have learnt, from its History of self-inflicted wounds, that back-stabbing ought to be abandoned as its No 1 priority...
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | May 5, 2018 3:14:22 PM | 7
Posted by: Hmm | May 5, 2018 2:38:50 PM | 5
Sorry, Hmm. As soon as the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, the Russians took a bow and departed China. The others stayed.
A radical improvement in Russian Chinese relations took place following the October 1917 revolution caused by the decision of the new Bolshevik government to renounce the extra territorial privileges Russia had obtained in China as a result of the unequal treaties. The USSR became the strongest supporter during this period of Sun Ya-tsen’s Chinese nationalist republican movement and of the Guomindang government in Nanjing that Sun Ya-tsen eventually set up. Sun Ya-tsen for his part was a staunch friend and supporter of the USSR. Though many are aware of the very close relationship between the USSR and China in the 1950s few in my experience know of the equally strong and arguably more genuine friendship between their two governments in the 1920s.
http://akarlin.com/2014/05/a-very-brief-history-of-chinese-russian-relations/
As I said, sorry.
Posted by: Lea | May 5, 2018 3:16:16 PM | 8
The 1989 Tiananmen Square students protest was the last echo of the May 4th movement, and of the century long Chinese revolution. Students demanded political change to make the nation strong and prosper. Afterwards pragmatism would replace idealism.
1989 was clearly an attempt to do a color revolution in China, alongside the wave of decommunization of East Europe in the same year. It was the farsical version of 1919. Just read the six points of revindication of those "students" and you can easily see their aim was capitalist restoration in China, not revolution: it was, therefore, a counter-revolution.
Posted by: vk | May 5, 2018 3:23:09 PM | 9
Thanks for the interesting history lesson. It reminds me that "There is nothing new under the sun." Empires come and go. The State is always all about oppressing, destroying, deceiving and pursuing power and tyranny--all in the name of spreading "democracy and freedom" to other hapless countries. The only difference now is, we have a much more sophisticated weaponry to efficiently kill vast populations of people in a short time.
Posted by: Eric | May 5, 2018 3:24:23 PM | 10
fascinating post and overview here b.. thank you.. the treaty of versailles is such a critical turning point in so much of world politics even into today.. i really appreciate this post and having light shined on aspects of world politics that have eluded me..
Posted by: james | May 5, 2018 3:29:58 PM | 11
Hmm @5
Russia has been through two major changes since that time. Britain and US are still the same.
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | May 5, 2018 3:30:15 PM | 12
Yah, I noticed this one, too, b.
Seems like you and I are re-posting a lot of the same Twitter feeds, lately.
Posted by: Pacifica_Advocate | May 5, 2018 4:06:01 PM | 14
This is extremely helpful, thank you. Incidentally, what was the ostensible motive ascribed to the US bombing of the Belgrade Chinese embassy in 1999? And is there a consensus view on the matter of whether the incident was accidental (as the US claims) or not (as most Chinese are reported to believe)?
Posted by: WJ | May 5, 2018 4:27:19 PM | 15
Don't forget the heavy US involvement supporting Chiang Kai Shek against the Communists for the decades between World War I and World War II, of which the Flying Tigers was one example.
And the abandoned Nationalist armies that were sent into the Korea War to fight American soldiers.
China's view of American policies is far more than just the Shandong incident, although that one is quite prominent.
There is also no mention of the long-standing Taiwan issue. The Nationalist government fled there with China's arts and treasury.
Posted by: c1ue | May 5, 2018 4:51:42 PM | 17
That's a nicely illustrated recapitulation of official Chinese government history. The stated premise -- that Chinese youth, Chinese intellectuals, nee all of China itself, was on the verge of siding with the Americans/"the West" but a few diplomatic blunders wrecked it -- should strike the casual reader as rather thin. Indeed, China's antipathy to foreigners (look back to Owen Lattimore for this) makes any rapprochement virtually inconceivable. The very definition of "Chinese" is "the people of the valley" -- the hydraulic civilization that needs a strong central government to regulate water flows for rice production. The waigouren, the people of the mountain, the nomads, the herders . . . those are perennially the enemy, to be conquered by civilization, sinicized.
The narrative here is that the West could be China's friend, if only it were better behaved. That is very fanciful indeed, and wishful thinking at best. The historical slant here is polemical, designed to appeal to a conscience eager to perceive itself as guilty (and therefore implicitly quite powerful, always a flattering hidden premise). One of the primary tensions of that time was the hatred between the Chinese and their Qing (Nomadic or at least formerly so) overlords. The Chinese wanted to rule themselves, for once, and resented the play the little runt devils were making to seize the mantle of heaven.
Mao was nothing if not a great student of Chinese Dynastic history. His efforts were to found a new dynasty, and appearing as Communist to the outside world was but one of the tools he used to forge that dynasty. When his son died in what we call the Korean war, it became clear that leadership could not be based on hereditary succession, and yet in every other way what you are dealing with here is a dynasty. Make of it what you will. I think it's healthy and helpful to see it on it's own terms. There are no easy conclusions, then. The kind of romanticized projection embalmed in this potted history, though, is more likely to be misleading than insightful.
Posted by: Rhetoric | May 5, 2018 4:59:22 PM | 18
Thanks B for this important post.
I'm still in the process of absorbing information about the Indian subcontinent's contribution in world War I (also major league and just as little known as China's contribution) so discovering that Chinese labour built trenches on the Western Front and helped build the railway to Murmansk (which I surmise US invasion forces had planned to use in 1919, when pro-monarchist forces fought the Bolsheviks) came as a huge surprise. It's going to take a while to sink in.
Thanks also to Lea for reminding me of Anatoly Karlin's post on Chinese-Russian relations since the 1600s.
Posted by: Jen | May 5, 2018 5:19:14 PM | 19
Post-WWII double crossing continued by the US.
The dispute over the Daiyou Islands whereby the US granted administrative control over the East China Sea islands to Japan was meant to engender hostility and to keep the Chinese bottled inside the inner island line. It was a clear betrayal of prior agreements.
It double-crossed the Nationalists, the Communists and rewarded the war criminals of Tokyo.
This robbed not only Beijing of the islands but Taiwan. Using the Japanese as as instrument of conflict is particularly bitter for the Chinese.
Now that Abe has freed all military constraints that kept the Japanese military a defense force, the true Imperialistic propensity is part of the new Indo-Pacific Quad strategy confronting China.
Double-cross is the way of the Hegemon.
The world should study the 480 treaties the US government signed with Native American nations and tribes. Not one treaty was kept. All were breeched by the land-hungry, resource-robbing, racist government in D.C.
Posted by: Red Ryder | May 5, 2018 5:29:48 PM | 20
re chu teh @ 6
I forgot to explain that the protest was that the Treaty Of Versailles secretly awarded Germany's China colony in Shandung to Japan as reward for Japan not entering WW1 against the allies.
Posted by: chu teh | May 5, 2018 5:40:29 PM | 21
That peace treaty in Versailles was the reason fro world war 2 and still causing problems in the world.
No other country suffered more than Hungary, though
Lost 75% of it's territory and millions of it's countryman...
Posted by: Azember | May 5, 2018 5:53:44 PM | 22
re China's revolution from foreign occupiers to sovereign self-government; it was homegrown based on the realities of that time. That is why it succeeded.
Here is Edgar Snow, American journalist about a year before meeting Mao and introducing Mao to American readers on Saturday Evening Post.Snow recalls this incident before hearing rumors of the rebel Mao.
[Snow and Washington Wu, a government official and translator who had studied in America. After travelling with Wu and witnessing scenes of death and famine and starvation in northwest China, Snow recalls this dialog:
[Wu] "Terrible! Terrible!" he suddenly muttered one day when we discussed what we had seen. "I had been in America so many years I forgot about things like this. What a miserable , miserable country our China is!"
[ES]I felt a bond of sympathy with Wu when I first I heard him concede some evil in China apart from the sins of the white imperialists. His facade of arrogance and false pride cracked. There was a new spirit of protest against injustice in his voice, a new sense of humility and personal responsibility.
[Wu] "We must, we must do something to save China--quickly", he said. "But how?"
[ES]"There you sit with 30 centuries of experience behind you," said I. As an American, I can trace my origins a few generations. How can I answer that question for China!"
"There has to be a new birth," he said thoughtfully. "It can only come out of our own body--the body of our own history."
Wu was silent for a long time, locked by his thoughts, as I was by mine.
Posted by: chu teh | May 5, 2018 6:22:29 PM | 24
1890 not 1990
Posted by: Albertde | May 5, 2018 1:57:13 PM | 1