How Did Western Influence Surge in China?

By the nineteenth century, China began to face significant pressure from Western societies that had advanced to the stage of industrialization. Many scholars have argued that labor in China was cheap and more than abundant, so the labor-saving inventions pioneered in the European Industrial Revolution did not need to be invented in China. This, no doubt, inhibited the drive for further technological innovation.

If China did not focus on labor-saving technology, it did, nonetheless, produce innovations, particularly those that saved on fuel. China led the way in the use of coal fuel in producing iron, glass, beer, and other products. Although China’s economy was still rural-based and agrarian, it was highly commercialized through the support of town and city governments.?

Soon, though, China was facing exactly the situation that nations face when they cannot match the innovation going on in other parts of the world. Despite a long and illustrious history of technology, commerce, trade, and agricultural productivity, China fell behind in the sort of rapidly advancing systems of technology and the new business ventures the industrialized world created in Europe and its offspring colonies.?

But industrialization was a radical break with the past, one that in Europe and America worked in tandem with trade, immigration, population diversity, educational freedom, private intellectual life, and continual competition among cities, states, and empires. China’s very imperial dominance of its vast territory thus worked against it in this regard.

Sensing these deficits, China’s leaders after 1860 tried to embark on a policy of self-strengthening. Their goal was to imitate and learn from the West, particularly its advances in armaments such as canon, iron ships, and other crucial implements of military defense, as well as engineering and machinery production. It was a step too far.?

In part the effort failed because the needed intellectual and educational infrastructure had not been built, making Chinese industry dependent on expensive western workers and managers. China’s strong intellectual and educational institutions were not oriented to the deep discoveries of nature that helped to promote the further industrialization of the late nineteenth century in chemicals, medicine and pharmaceuticals, petroleum, metals and electronics that pushed the United States to the top rank of innovators.?

Western powers instituted a treaty system that forbade the Chinese from conducting trade and foreign affairs on an equal footing. Military defeats exacerbated the growing economic crisis. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the import of opium drained the nation’s precious silver resources. Realizing that opium imports were one way to pay for the export of tea and other valuable commodities out of China, the British in the nineteenth century forced the Chinese to accept the drug, which was cultivated and manufactured in British held India. Indian profits from opium in turn were used to buy British exports, such as manufactured goods. Despite high numbers of addicted opium users disrupting social life, China was unable to resist the pressures of the mandated opium trade. It had suffered a humiliating loss of sovereignty at the hand of the Western powers.

China was at a low point by the end of the nineteenth century, under the thumb of Western imperialism. Even so, its economy had not completely stagnated. There were still signs of the vibrant commercial culture and inventiveness that had been part of Chinese history for many centuries. In the mid-eighteenth century, the government had allowed a group of licensed merchants to trade with a chartered group of European traders.?

From these trade relationships, Chinese merchants gained new skills, new ideas for starting businesses, new ways of organizing their businesses, new sources of capital through Western banks, and a new understanding of Western legal and administrative systems. Some of these merchants began to travel abroad and enter business in the West. They brought their new ways of entrepreneurship back home where they founded the first Western-style businesses in the 1870s. The social status of merchants and their relations with government were also improving.?