Japan and China free essay sample

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, westerners were heavily industrializing and practicing imperialism, and since both China and Japan wanted to retain their cultures and traditions, they figured the best way to do so was to instate policies restricting trade with foreigners. For hundreds of years, both societies were isolated and only concerned themselves with internal issues and developments, so once westerners began to try and imperialize eastern Asia, they in turn began to block off their nation to preserve their cultures and protect themselves from threat of the west. China started to become addicted to drugs, due to the opium being sold to them for silver by the British, not only were they illegally trading being foreigners, but they were taking China’s silver so that they could become more wealthy, meanwhile Japan had a dirt poor and starving population full of destitution, and the Europeans were trying to come in to stimulate the economy, but mostly to their own benefit and profit. Both of these intrusions into Japan and China caused the government to restrict their population from trading with the Europeans and Americans so that they would not lose their own heritage and traditions to adapt to the ways of the westerners. As the nineteenth century went on, westerners continued to penetrate and attack Japan and China with the intentions to imperialize these regions and make them another region they could exploit in order to make a larger profit with little to no cost. The British went into China, and with their military attacked the Grand Canal making them vulnerable and forced them to sign the Treaty of Nanjing, giving them extraterritorial status, ceding Hong Kong to the British, opening up five new ports to Britain, and giving Britain most-favored-nation status. Much like in Japan when Matthew Perry of the United States came in and insisted in having Japan open up its ports to diplomatic and commercial relations with the US, and since the shogun felt he had no other option, he complied with Perry’s order. As the westerners had their way with both east Asian nations, the threat of western industrialization became a reality, and due to the amount of hunger and economic depression in their societies, their people began to crave industrialization seeing the amount of success in the western societies that were industrialized. There began to be an increased amount of rebellion, and a fight for change in these two nations, but the results that came from these rebellions and the main argument for these rebellions differed. Once these societies were flowing with western influence and ideas in their societies, the people of China and Japan began to try and adopt to these ideas and become big industrial societies as well. In China, these ideas were supported by the people although their government tried to diminish these ideas, while in Japan, the government felt that they had no other choice but to reform, so they began to embrace western development. In Japan the reforms made after the Tokugawa rebellion were the restoration of the emperor, the use of a constitutional government, the removal of the daimyo, the fixing of the money tax, and the beginning of the study of western civilization. Japan realized they needed a powerful economy and worked to become the power in the east asian region with the aid and the permission of their government, while China on the other hand, could have headed in the same direction if they weren’t sabotaged by their own government. While the majority of the Chinese population was fighting for change and looking for new ways to boost their dying economy due to poverty, drug addictions, and hunger, the government wanted to retain their Confucian values and stay away from western influence. Therefore, reformers promoted their ideas for reform to those against it by saying that we can have confucianism and industrialism, in that we practice chinese traditions for ourselves although we use western ideas to stay powerful and successful. However after the Taiping rebellion, the self strengthening movement, and the hundred days reform, Emperor Xianfeng and Empress Cixi still did not believe in industrializing China, so she stopped all reforms and blew all the government funds that could have been used for the reform on luxury items, just to demonstrate their power and the fact that they were not going to change China. In these two regions, their decisions either towards industrialism or away from it would affect their global position in the future. During the nineteenth century, in the the two east asian regions of China and Japan, westerners felt the need to penetrate their societies in order to improve their own economies, causing both the Japanese and the Chinese to try and enforce foreign policy laws restricting access to their lands, and therefore restricting their ability to influence their societies. Then once they were penetrated by the westerners and forced to open their lands to foreigners who weakened their power and tried to push industrialism on them, they reacted very differently. Although both of their economies were in bad shape and their people wanted reform, their governments held highly different opinions on how to act. Japan’s people and their government felt it was best to reform their society, conform to western ways, and become both an industrial and imperialistic society, while China’s government held the view that they needed to retain Chinese tradition and culture, which they believed could not be done with industrialism supporting their society, so there were constant rebellions by the people who were suffering and who wanted change.