The negative example of colonised countries worked powerfully on Chinese thinkers. Explain the statement.
The negative example of colonised countries worked powerfully on Chinese thinkers. The partition of Poland in the eighteenth century was a much discussed example. So much so that by the late 1890s it came to be used as a verb: 'to Poland us' (bolan wo).
India was another such example. In 1903, the thinker Liang Qichao, who believed that only by making people aware that China was a nation would they be able to resist the West, wrote that India was 'a country that was destroyed by a non-country that is the East India Company'.
He criticised Indians for being cruel to their own people and subservient to the British. Such arguments carried a powerful appeal as ordinary Chinese could see that the British used Indian soldiers in their wars on China.
Above all many felt that traditional ways of thinking had to be changed. Confucianism, developed from the teachings of Confucius (551-479 BCE) and his disciples, was concerned with good conduct, practical wisdom and proper social relationships.
It influenced the Chinese attitude toward life, provided social standards and laid the basis for political theories and institutions. It was now seen as a major barrier to new ideas and institutions.
To train people in modern subjects students were sent to study in Japan, Britain and France and bring back new ideas. Many Chinese students went to Japan in the 1890s.
They not only brought back new ideas but many became leading republicans. The Chinese borrowed even Japanese translations of European words such as justice, rights, and revolution because they used the same ideographic script, a reversal of the traditional relationship.
In 1905, just after the Russo-Japanese war (a war fought on Chinese soil and over Chinese territory) the centuries old Chinese examination system that gave candidates entry into the elite ruling class was abolished.
