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of Guangdong, it mixed traditional peasant rebellion with a semi-mystical, messianic-style movement. Hong claimed he was the brother of Jesus Christ, setting up a Heavenly Kingdom based in Nanjing. From idealistic beginnings, the rebellion evolved into a civil war. Its destructiveness was compounded by the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860, one that resulted in the creation of more treaty ports and foreign concessions open to Western powers.

The Key Chinese Modernizers

Many within China acknowledged the critically dangerous position of their country after these crises and the urgent need for modernization to overcome this. Core figures in this modernization effort were Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Kang Youwei (1858–1927), who supplied key ideas that inspired the 100-day 1898 Minor Reform movement. Their ambitious list of proposals, inspired in part by the example of Japan reforming under the Meiji Restoration, embraced the abolition of the centuries-old examination system, the creation of new universities, the adoption of Western free-market-orientated economic models, and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. These proposals failed. The sitting emperor Guangxu was placed under a form of house arrest, his powers largely taken from him by the Empress Dowager Ci Xi (1835–1908). Kang and Liang fled to Japan to continue their reformist work. Despite this, these events left a powerful memory, one that remains haunting to this day. ‘After the defeat by Japan [in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5],’ Liang was to comment many years later, ‘people with good minds in the nation really seemed to have met a thunderbolt in a dream. Accordingly, they wondered why the great and grand China should have declined to such a degree, and discovered it was all due to her bad political system.’⁹ Within two years, however, the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), another hybrid uprising, this time more targeted at foreigners accused of having too much influence in China, resulted in even more punitive indemnities. A decade later, the Qing finally collapsed. China’s long imperial history had ended.

      The ‘100 Days’ reform’s most powerful legacy was the notion of China needing once more to be a wealthy, powerful nation. ‘Fuqiang Guojia’ was the Chinese expression of this. It gave birth to a sense of nationalism that transcended all social and political boundaries. The founder of the Nationalist Party and, for a brief period, the President of the new Republic, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), gave this even sharper definition, along with figures like early Communist movement activist and academic Chen Duxiu (1879–1942). The aim for both was the same: to create a place that was unified, powerful, strong, and no longer victimized. This vision has endured, figuring in the work of Mao Zedong (1894–1976), Chiang Kai-shek, and in writings by intellectuals as disparate as the great author Lu Xun (1881–1936) and the polymath Hu Shih (1881–1962). In this interpretation, China’s cultural uniqueness, its extraordinary ancient civilization, was a source not of weakness but of strength. The key task was to modernize and renew it.

Competing Visions: Sun, Chiang, and Mao

      In the three decades after the collapse of the Qing, China experienced a period of fragmentation, political instability, and intense aggression from outsiders. Most of this was under the Republican government led, eventually, by Chiang Kai-shek. By the 1930s, the country was called the sick man of Asia. Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong offered three competing visions of what needed to be done. Sun had spent less than a hundred days as provisional President of China from January to March 1912, but his influence remains to this day. Writing in ‘The Three Principles of the People’, he declared in 1922: ‘Considering the law of survival of ancient and modern races, if we want to save China and to preserve the Chinese race, we must certainly promote Nationalism.’ The key issue was that the Chinese people were disunited:

      We ought to be advancing in line with the nations of Europe and America. But the Chinese people have only family and clan groups; there is no national spirit. Consequently, in spite of four hundred million people gathered together in one China, we are in fact but a sheet of loose sand. We are the poorest and weakest state in the world, occupying the lowest position in international affairs; the rest of mankind is the carving knife and the serving dish, while we are the fish and the meat.¹⁰

The country’s greatest challenge was its internal disunity. There was no loyalty to the larger notion of a nation. Sun continued: ‘If we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred millions into a strong nation, we face a tragedy – the loss of our country and the destruction of our race.’¹¹

      Chiang Kai-shek, as Sun’s effective successor after the latter’s death in 1925, continued the Nationalist Party’s mission. Writing in China’s Destiny, he declared: ‘Thus the opportunity for the recovery of the nation and the hope of the rebirth of the state are now presented to the citizens of the entire country.’¹² Chiang was also keen to address what he called the country’s ‘moral deterioration’. The splendid legacy of a long, continuous civilized history had been degraded by the impact of outsiders in modern times. But Chinese people took ultimate responsibility for this. Foreigners had exploited weaknesses which were already present:

      The [foreign] concessions were not only the source of drugs, but were havens for prostitutes, gamblers, thieves, and bandits. When economic conditions in the interior were poor, the people migrated to the cities. But it was difficult to find employment and they were therefore forced to sell their sons and daughters and fell into the evil habits of prostitution. Thus, during the past hundred years, beautiful and prosperous cities became hells of misery and chaos.¹³

In this account, Chinese people had thus betrayed their own history and their identity and moral values.

Chiang’s commitment to nationalism chimed with that of Communist leader Mao Zedong, though their diagnosis of their country’s problems and how to solve them radically differed. Mao had adopted a sinified Marxist-Leninist analysis of why the country was in such poor shape after the collapse of the Qing, and how it would get out of this. Despite being from a similar background to Chiang, as the son of a reasonably well-off landlord, Mao set himself against the Confucian traditions of order and hierarchy that Chiang seemed to embrace. For Mao, these were the problem, not the solution. Marxist dialectics gave him the tools to analyse Chinese history as a story not of moral decline and victimization by foreigners, but instead of the clash between different classes internally, and the rising influence of powerful capitalist forces, many of them coming from outside actors like companies or governments. This was history with a scientific rationale, with a structure that was determined and predictable. The feudalist past was now moving towards a socialist, utopian outcome. As Mao wrote in 1939: ‘The extreme poverty and backwardness of the peasants resulting from ruthless landlord exploitation and oppression is the basic reason why Chinese society remained at the same stage of socio-economic development for several thousands of years.’¹⁴ He continued: ‘The purpose of the Chinese revolution at the present stage is to change the existing colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal state of society, i.e. to strive for the completion of a new democratic revolution.’¹⁵ Mao’s China had a destiny, but in contrast to Chiang’s vision, it was one that would be fulfilled through socialism and class struggle, not the spiritual nationalist recommitment to Confucian ethics sponsored by the Nationalist government’s ‘New Culture’ movement of the 1930s.

Risen from the Ashes: China at War and After

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) was the most catastrophic moment in modern Chinese history. Japan’s expansionism under its leaders from the 1930s was one cause. Another was the deterioration of the global economy following the Wall Street Collapse of 1929. Japan’s noxious ideology of racial superiority towards neighbouring countries, particularly China, only added to the brewing conflict. From 1937, the two major countries of north-east Asia were pitched against each other in what was to be one of the most devastating wars in modern history. Before its attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japan was in control of large swathes of coastal China, with a puppet regime doing its bidding installed both in the north-east in Manchuria, and in Shanghai. It had conducted

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