 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Okay, back with John David at History Professor at HBU and we're going to talk today about China and about the limitations of what? Limitations of? Limitations of? Limits of westernization. Westernization of China. That's the title of my book of the last year and there it is and yeah so we're going to look at China today and look at really. China is so important today, right? Because China is the second largest economy in the world and the Trump administration has made China an enemy. We just heard this morning that the Trump administration is going to abrogate the Postal Treaty with China. Well, Trump himself, I'm not sure he consults with anybody, he's going to abrogate it with the Postal Treaty with China Postal Treaty of 1874, I guess that's been dwelling on his mind for some time and he's got lots of time to spend reviewing the China Postal Treaty of 1874. It's a little bizarre. It is bizarre. It's a little bizarre because it's not going to affect U.S.-China relations at all. So when we think about China, we have to understand that China today is a recent development. It's not the China of the 19th century. Now when we look at China in the really long view of history, we can see a China that was incredibly strong and powerful in the period between about 1500 and about 1800. Those 300 years, China, of course, went through two dynasties. Right after Christopher Columbus. That's right. But the Ming dynasty and the 1500s, China was quite strong. And then again, in the Qing dynasty from 1644 until 1911, at times was quite strong. So China was clearly the largest economy in the world in that time period, 1500 to 1800. Was it as big as it is today geographically? It came to be bigger, actually, by the late 18th century, by the late 1700s. China had actually expanded into Mongolia and its western borders expanded dramatically. So it was right up against the Russian Empire. And the Mongols were kind of, they fought a significant war against the Mongols in that time period and defeated the Mongols and took over their territory. What made them so strong and what made them so imperialistic? Their economy is very important in that time period because their trade is so lucrative with the West. Silk Road. That's the silk route and yeah, the silk road and then of course there's trade via the port of Canton as well. And China controls the trade very carefully. They're sending out tea because the British become enamored of tea and the whole nation drinks tea by the late 18th century. They're sending out silks because the Chinese make world-renowned silk clothing and silk, silk all kinds of things. And porcelain. And porcelain is the third thing. They're sending out lots of porcelain. The porcelain that China makes is so valued that in Europe there are factories that make knockoffs in this time period. It's true. Germany and France factories are built to make China or Chinowhees porcelain, right? And so you can actually go to museums and see the comparison of the two. I think the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts has both the German knockoff and the Chinese original. Well, this is 17th century or 18th century? This is actually from the 1500s onward. The trade is constant. I have a question about the trade, though. In order to get there from Canton to Europe, you had a jump from one country to another. There was no pure ocean route. You wound up going into a port in Southeast Asia, into a port in India, and so forth. So they must have also been trading, like the Bermuda Triangle, right, trading from China ports to Indian ports, and then from Indian ports to European ports? Jay, you're just getting so complicated now. This is actually very complicated. What happens, most of the traders in the early days of the China trade from Canton are not Europeans. They're actually Arabs. And the Arab traders end up near Baghdad. They go into the Persian Gulf from Canton. They run down below the Indian subcontinent and enter the Persian Gulf. And their goods go to Baghdad. And from Baghdad, they're trans shipped up through Europe. So that's also where the Silk Road ends as well. So it's kind of this common meeting point for all the goods coming out of China. Very interesting. Very interesting. So the Chinese, in the long run, when we look at the last 500 years of history actually, China has been preeminent more than it's been down on its luck. But of course, in the 19th century, what happened to China? And wait, it declined. It did decline. And the jury needs to know why it declined and when it declined. That's right. So at the end of the 18th century, China is suffering from some real problems. Their trade, the Europeans are tired of this one-way trade. Because China doesn't actually accept goods from Europe. They're only sending out goods, which means the inflow of silver is tremendous. The Chinese use silver as their currency. They need silver. And so they're not going to allow silver to go out. They want the silver to come in, the British pay in silver. So the trade is one way this really makes the European powers angry. The British send a representative, Lord McCartney, to China in 1793 to beg the emperor to open up trade to British goods. The emperor says, nice guy, not interested. After McCartney does the kowtow, actually, he doesn't do the kowtow. The Chinese emperor says, you have to do the kowtow before they meet. This is negotiated. McCartney says, there's no way that I'm going to bow before an Asiatic prince. And so McCartney agrees to bend on one knee and bend like that before the emperor. And so the kowtow, by the way, was common practice for any diplomat who visited, who got an audience with the Chinese emperor. The kowtow consisted of nine different bows done in proper order, including a full prostration in front of the emperor. That's it, facedown on the floor in front of the emperor. So the kowtow was quite the thing. It was the symbolic expression of Chinese dominance. It was part of the tributary system that we talked about last time. China was considered the center of the universe for many other nations in East Asia. So McCartney gets nothing. But at the same time, the British are penetrating into Chinese markets illegally, opium. The opium is coming in via boat, and it's illegal. Gunboat. Not gunboat at this point. Just regular, it's East Asian, the British East India Company is shipping in opium illegally. There's nobody to stop them. Well, there's a law against it. But well, and in the port itself, what happens is the British East India Company drops the goods off on an island outside of Canton. Then pirates actually pick up the goods and bring them into the port. Contract pilots. That's right. But it becomes so open that in the early 19th century, there are all these warehouses, what are called factories, at the port of Canton, owned by European merchants. And they're filled to the brim with opium balls. These big opium balls, that's how opium is shipped. So the problem for China here is not just the trade, it's the addiction. The bureaucratic class, the civil bureaucrats, the scholar bureaucrat class of China is now addicted. We think a quarter of the scholar bureaucrat class was addicted to opium. So opium is coming from outside China? It's coming from, yeah, it's coming from the British Empire. It's coming from Pakistan and Afghanistan. That's right, which is a part of the British Empire by this time period. And there are a few other places coming from Turkey as well. So China gets into trouble. The British attack China because of the Chinese decide to take down the warehouses, burn them, burn the opium everything. The British come back in and say, no, you can't do that. That's our property. The British send gun boats. This is when the gun boats come in. The British send steam-powered gun boats to China. And they subdue China. China is forced to sign an unequal treaty in which everything that China does with the British now is favorable to the British and unfavorable to the Chinese. This is middle 19th century. This is 1842. And then what happens after that is a series of unequal treaties, a series of foreign incursions, unequal treaties. And by the end of the 19th century, then China is divided up by the Europeans. Spears of influence. Spears of influence. That's right. So into the 20th century, then you have China really on its knees. It's a devastated power. The central government doesn't have complete control over the countryside. A warlord control develops in the provinces, in the regions of China. And the British probably wanted that because they divide and conquer. That's right. It's a very divided place. And so China needs help. It needs help. And in the 1910s, starting in about 1915 during World War I, then young Chinese begin to be aware. They become conscious that China is strapped. China is in big trouble. And they begin to think about how they can help China. Intellectuals? These are intellectuals. It starts with the New Culture Movement in 1917, in which it's proposed that the Chinese language is way too complicated. And so these intellectuals actually create a simple kind of peasant-style version of the Chinese language so that peasants can actually read newspapers and magazines and such. How does that play with the decline of the emperor and the emperor's ship? Well, in 1911, the emperor was overthrown. That's because he was weak. He couldn't control his foreign incursion. That's right. The Qing dynasty was corrupt and decrepit and had really lost its ability to rule by the time the emperor was overthrown. So it was bound to happen eventually because the emperor had lost legitimacy not just among people who opposed him, but among the wealthy, the powerful, the army. They had lost legitimacy among all the people. So he'd become a kind of figurehead by that time anyway. Well, yes, pretty much powerless. So these young intellectuals, that's good context, by the way. You're getting this. That's good. Just listening to you, John. And you know what? Yes. This reminds me we have to take a break. Already. Really on a roll. Yeah. Why start? This is John David Ann, and this is Lens of History, History Lens. And we're talking about U.S., China, and Japan, a search for modernity today in the limits of westernization. Take a look at that book. Part two. We'll be back in a matter of seconds. The history of a matter of seconds. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? 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So I'm talking about intellectuals in China in the first 20 years of 20th century. They emerged and my thought during, which I was wrong, my thought during the break was that they must have come from the notion of intellectuals in Europe. But no. No, that's not true. Chinese intellectual life actually has a much longer history than contact with the West. And so the scholar bureaucrats for centuries had intellectual salons. They met with one another. They would propose new ideas. They debated Confucianism. And they actually developed Neo-Confucianism. We'll come back to that in a second. But so in the early 20th century, no, there's this long history of Chinese intellectual life. And so a couple of very important intellectuals emerge. One of them is Liang Qichao. If we can bring Liang up. Liang is a young man travels, widely travels to the United States. That's actually Wang Yangming. Can we bring Liang up the first picture there? There he is, Liang Qichao. And he becomes really the first Chinese nationalist intellectual because he wants to rebuild the Chinese nation. That's an European outfit he's wearing. Dressed in a European outfit that the queue or the pigtail is gone. He has accepted this part. Travels to Europe, travels to the United States, travels to Australia. And his takeaway of traveling to these places is that imitating them blindly would be a mistake. There are things that the Europeans do well, and the Americans do, especially the Americans do well. And there are other things that they don't do well. Liang criticized the incredible poverty and the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the United States. He was disgusted by this. But he liked the political participation. He met with President Theodore Roosevelt. He met with J.P. Morgan, believe it or not. He was good. He was a prominent Chinese. Smoking English? Yes, his English was flawless. He wrote in English as well. So he met with important officials, but he liked American political discourse. He liked that there was disagreement, that Americans seemed to be civically minded, patriotic. This is a big problem in China. China is corrupt. You have an addicted scholar, bureaucrat class. The emperor has lost legitimacy. You have all of these warlords. And nobody talks about it. That's right. Before this time, nobody had really identified that publicly as a problem. So Liang comes along and says, wait, we need to be loyal to the nation. We need to understand ourselves as loyal to the nation. A kind of nationalism. Yes, it's an early patriotism. So where was Sun Yat-sen when all this was going on? Well, Sun Yat-sen was still around actually. He was a contemporary of Liang. Sun Yat-sen was busy building the nation. In fact, one of the pillars of Sun Yat-sen thought was nationalism, Chinese nationalism. And Westerners have described this as Westernism. And it's not. It's actually Chinese nationalism. Sounds like critical thinking to me. The limits of Westernization. There you go. True. This is really important to find the boundary. That's right. So Liang does not say we should imitate the West blindly by being more patriotic. He says we should look into our own past. And that's where Wang Yong-ming comes in. If we can pull a picture of Wang Yong-ming. He's not dressed in western clothing. That's right. He's this ancient Confucian sage. That first picture we saw. So Wang Yong-ming lives in the same time period as Machiavelli. He's almost an exact contemporary of Machiavelli. Late 1400s, early 1500s. Wang Yong-ming believes that China has to be more ethical. That it has to be more civically minded than it is. There's a lot of corruption at court in that time period. The eunuchs. China has all of these leaders at court who are eunuchs. The eunuchs are allied with the emperor. They're trying to seek the approval of the emperor. They become quite corrupt. And so Wang Yong-ming is kind of a voice in the wilderness, really. He's a prominent scholar, bureaucrat. Passes all of the exams. He's given important positions. Why do we know him today? If he was a voice in the wilderness. How did he perpetuate his message? That's right. So his message was that the Chinese needed to consider not just the proper dress of a Confucian scholar or the proper sayings of a Confucian scholar. The externalities of Confucianism. But needed to consider the ethical basis for the empire. And the ethical basis was to connect ethical thought into ethical action. That was his philosophy. Who has Confucius in this? Well, Confucianism. This is a neo-Confucianism. So he's actually making a change to Confucianism. Confucianism was all. I mean, Wang Yong-ming did not reject the idea that the state should be run in an orderly fashion. That there should be an emperor. That the eldest male should be the head of household. He didn't reject these basic Confucian premises. But he added something which was really against standard Confucianism was that thought into action and loyalty and civic responsibility goes above and beyond any sense of Confucian loyalty. Loyalty to the household. Let's say your father says it's a bad idea for you to go out and participate in this march. The march is a patriotic march. You could do, under Wang Yong-ming thought, you could actually do that in spite of the fact you're disobeying your father, which is against traditional Confucianism. But Wang Yong-ming said for the sake of the nation, you can actually participate in that march because it's the right thing to do. So did that remake Confucianism for China? It for some it did. It became one of the schools of Confucianism and it competed against other schools of Confucianism. But the importance of Wang Yong-ming, so Wang Yong-ming puts down two rebellions in his time period. And these rebellions are because the emperor is not doing the service of his people. They're actually kind of these popular rebellions. He does it by putting thought into action through his civic loyalty to the emperor and the empire so he demonstrates his ideas as a scholar bureaucrat and as a leader of the Chinese Armory in putting down these rebellions. So Wang Yong-ming thought comes into the early 20th century. Liang, who we saw earlier, is very interested in Wang Yong-ming. He's interested in the idea that Wang Yong-ming says that we should be civically loyal, larger than ourselves. He translates some of Wang Yong-ming's work and calls Wang Yong-ming's conclusion civic virtue. The idea that citizens should be active in the life of their nation or their empire, that they should contribute to the nation or empire. And they should think in their minds. This is related to Foucazal last time. They should think in their minds. They should be independent thinkers about the good of the nation. So all of this idea of civic duty is it doesn't come from the west. Actually, it comes from Wang Yong-ming thought, which is a big surprise actually. I think most scholars today, if I was to just make this statement that it comes from Wang Yong-ming thought, not from the west, they would be shocked by it. And that's part of why the book is important, I think. And this began to change the way China thought. This had extension, this had traction, and you can still see it, am I right? Exactly. So there's another intellectual, Huxer, if we can bring him up, he's the next guy in line there. So Huxer is actually, he's a full-on westernizer. He goes to the United States. There's Huxer. He studies in... He looks very western. Yes, he studies at Cornell University and then Columbia University. Studies under John Dewey at Columbia University. Gets his PhD in philosophy under Dewey. Eventually he becomes the ambassador to the United States during World War II. He's a very prominent guy. So he goes back to China and he's the one who starts the new culture movement in 1917. He proposes this new language, which is the language of the peasants, not the scholar bureaucrats, right? And so that common people can read about this. And he's one of the activists involved in the May 4 movement. May 4, 1919, Chinese intellectuals take to the streets. They protest against the injustice that the Treaty of Versailles has done to China. The Treaty of Versailles gives the Shantung Province to Japan. These intellectuals say, hey, this is terrible. You're being usurped again by the European powers and now by Japan as well. So this protest movement begins. They were action. The intellectuals were men of action. Absolutely. Yeah, they were out in the street. They stopped traffic. They occupied Peking University, so the school had to shut down. They caused considerable distress among the leadership of China. And you'd have officials going out to beg, please go home. And these young students would say, forget about it. We're staying out here. So protesters often come and go without having a long-term effect. Did Ming have a long-term effect? Yeah, so for one thing, who sure comes into it, he becomes an important official in the Chinese government by the time he becomes ambassador to the United States. And many of these intellectuals become more radicalized. Mao Zedong is a very young man at this point and really kind of dismissed by the upper-level intellectuals. But intellectuals begin to look at Marxism. They become very interested in the Bolshevik Revolution when it happens in 1917. And by 1921 there is, in fact, a Chinese Communist Party. Li Dashao is really kind of the founder of the Chinese Communist Party. He's a librarian at Peking University. It's running a parallel to Russia, the intellectuals and Marxism. That's right. Wow. And so China has got this new life that's being breathed into them. But here's an interesting problem for these intellectuals. Li Dashao is a good friend of Hu Shuo. Hu Shuo is a westernizer liberal. Li Dashao is a Marxist radical. And they start to split, these westernized intellectuals and Marxist radicals split. Hu Shuo and his crowd argue that the place of the intellectual is in writing and in giving talks. It's not in protesting. It's not in politics. This is an issue for Hu Shuo because Hu Shuo was so powerful in the early 20s if he had agreed to be more engaged in politics. I think he could have had a bigger impact. Maybe China doesn't go the communist route. Now that's a big statement and there's a lot of other factors involved. It's hypothetical, yeah. Yeah, it's hypothetical. But so Hu Shuo had this major this potential impact but he withdrew from politics. Interesting anecdote. When he's getting his PhD at Columbia University there's this big women's march, 1915, very famous women's march for suffrage. John Dewey joins the march as it runs past Columbia University. Hu Shuo is looking out the window of his dorm room. He sees John Dewey joining the march and he writes, what a terrible thing for an intellectual to run out of protest. Compromise his position as an intellectual. Yes, this is beneath Dr. Dewey. So Hu Shuo was somebody who was not interested in politics, the rough and tumble of politics and I think it hurt him. It hurt the possibility that China would become more westernized but in fact it represents a real limit on westernization in China in this time period. There's so many lessons that come from that. So where are we in the continuum, John? We're almost out of time. Place us at a year point. Place us at a period and then we can go forward from that next time. We're in the early 1920s and China has become a republic. China has this new intellectual class that's clamoring for change but China is still dominated by the western powers. The British, the Americans, the French, they all have troops in China. And that continued until the Second World War, didn't it? That continued right until the Second World War. The unequal treaties continue right until the brink of the Second World War for China. So China's still got these incredible problems and now Japan enters the scene in the early 1920s because Japan, during World War I, actually takes possessions, they take Pacific Islands and they also take possessions in China and they have their most important possession, Manchuria, which is in northern China. A war even in the 20s, right? In the 30s. So that's the stage for kind of the next act of these young intellectuals and honestly what happens next is a looming crisis of thought. Along with the economic crisis, the Great Depression and the wars of the 1930s. Don't tell them anymore. Make it a cliffhanger. Intellectuals will, they become crisis-ridden themselves. Ah! They're confused by the 1930s about whether modernity is going to work. This is going to be a final exam. The intellectuals become crisis-ridden themselves. We've set the stage for another great discussion with John David and coming soon. I think you would pass with a high B. Thank you, John.