A History of East Asia From the Origins of Civilization to the Twenty-First Century

Industrialization and the Rise of New Great Powers

The world was fundamentally transformed in the nineteenth century by the Promethean new powers unleashed by the industrial and scientific revolutions. Modern transportation and communications technologies, such as the steamship, the railway, and the telegraph (a telegraphic link between China and Europe was first established in 1871), knit the planet together more tightly than ever before. New military technologies – including ironclad steam warships and machine guns – gave industrialized countries unprecedented military superiority over nonindustrialized peoples. The power and wealth of these industrialized countries also made them widely attractive models, although a perceptible time lag occurred before many peoples outside the early-industrializing core perceived the apparent irresistibility of modernization, and many never welcomed it. “From 1860 to 1914, the web of steel [railways] spread throughout the world, and so did the political, financial, and engineering techniques that had evolved along with it,” yet “among non-Western peoples, only the Japanese showed real enthusiasm for railways,” and even in Japan, the first eighteen-mile stretch of rail line was not laid until 1872 (see Figure 8.1). In China, the first short rail line was built by a British firm in 1876, and then was purchased by the local Chinese government the following year and dismantled.

Despite this delayed start, by the end of the nineteenth century a virtual tidal wave of Westernization was beginning to sweep the world. Consciously Western-style clothing and hairstyles became widely fashionable, especially among elites. In the 1870s, for example, Japanese samurai cut their topknots and tentatively began adopting Western fashions. By 1900, it is said that most Japanese men owned at least one Western-style suit and hat. Representative democratic government also seemed to be the irresistible trend of the times by the end of the century. By 1890, Japan had a written modern Western-style constitution and an elected legislature (called the Diet in English, kokkai in Japanese). Soon after the turn into the twentieth century, even China adopted a formal constitution and held elections for provincial assemblies, and in 1912–1913, China experimented with its first nationwide democratic elections.

In many ways, this nineteenth-century wave of Westernization foreshadowed the current phenomenon of globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Transportation and communications became not only much more rapid but also more standardized.