1The idea in one paragraph

By 1860 China and Japan faced the same problem: western powers with steam warships forced them to open ports, give up control of their tariffs and let foreigners live under their own consuls' law. Japan answered with a revolution from above. In 1868 samurai from the outer domains overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate in the emperor's name, then dismantled their own feudal order, built a conscript army, a cash tax, schools, railways and factories, wrote a constitution in 1889, and by 1910 had beaten China and Russia and taken Taiwan and Korea. Qing China answered with reform from inside an old dynasty. Self-Strengthening bought weapons without changing the institutions around them; defeat by Japan in 1895 exposed it; the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898 was crushed by the Empress Dowager Cixi; the Boxer Rebellion ended with foreign troops in Beijing; and the serious reforms after 1901 raised expectations the dynasty could not meet. The 1911 Revolution ended the empire but failed to build a working republic. Figure 1 sets the two stories side by side.

2The starting line: the treaty system

Britain's victory in the First Opium War produced the Treaty of Nanjing (1842): Hong Kong ceded, five treaty ports opened, an indemnity paid. Later treaties added extraterritoriality (foreigners tried in their own consular courts), fixed low tariffs, and the most-favoured-nation clause, which passed any privilege given to one power to all. The Second Opium War (1856–1860) ended with British and French troops burning the Summer Palace and the Convention of Peking, while the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) cost tens of millions of lives. In 1853 the American Commodore Perry brought warships into Edo Bay; the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854) and the Harris Treaty (1858) gave Japan the same package. Escaping these unequal treaties was Japan's first foreign-policy aim; failing to escape them was China's story.

3Japan: why the Tokugawa fell (1853–1868)

From 1603 the shogun, the hereditary military ruler of the Tokugawa family, governed from Edo; the emperor in Kyoto had prestige and no power. Some 260 domains (han) were run by lords (daimyō) with their own samurai and taxes, and society was frozen in law into four classes: samurai, peasants, artisans, merchants.

Long-term weaknesses. The system assumed a rice economy in a country that now ran on money. Samurai on fixed rice stipends fell into debt to merchants; famine in the 1830s brought peasant risings. Scholars of national learning and the Mito school taught that the emperor, not the shogun, was Japan's true centre. The outer lords, above all Satsuma and Chōshū, had been on the losing side in 1600, were excluded from government, and had reformed their finances and armies.

The foreign trigger. Perry exposed that a regime whose claim was military could not defend the country. The shogunate asked the daimyō for advice, inviting open criticism; in 1858 its chief minister Ii Naosuke signed the Harris Treaty without the emperor's approval and was murdered in 1860. The slogan sonnō jōi, "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians", united radical samurai against the shogun.

Why expulsion became reform. In 1863 the British bombarded Kagoshima, Satsuma's capital; in 1864 an allied fleet destroyed Chōshū's forts at Shimonoseki. Both domains concluded that Japan could not expel the West without western weapons. Early in 1866 Satsuma and Chōshū made a secret alliance, and that summer Chōshū's rifle units of samurai and commoners beat the shogun's punitive expedition. The last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, handed his powers to the emperor in November 1867, hoping to lead what followed. On 3 January 1868 Satsuma and Chōshū troops seized the palace in Kyoto and proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule under the fifteen-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito (reign name Meiji, "enlightened rule"). The shogun's supporters were beaten in the Boshin War (1868–1869), and Edo became Tokyo.

The historians. E. H. Norman (1940) saw a revolution from above by lower samurai allied with merchants, leaving feudal remnants that fed later militarism. W. G. Beasley stressed nationalism and the foreign threat as what turned discontent into revolution. Albert Craig, studying Chōshū, found its leaders driven by traditional loyalty to domain and emperor, not by class. Thomas C. Smith called it an "aristocratic revolution", because samurai abolished their own privileges.

The foreign threat did not create the Tokugawa's weaknesses; it made them fatal. Weigh the trigger (Perry, the treaties) against the conditions (samurai debt, the outer domains, emperor-centred ideas).

4Japan: rebuilding the state (1868–1878)

A small group of samurai and court nobles ran the new government: Ōkubo Toshimichi and Saigō Takamori of Satsuma, Kido Takayoshi, Itō Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo of Chōshū, and Iwakura Tomomi. Their slogan was fukoku kyōhei, "rich country, strong army". Figure 2 shows how each reform answered a specific weakness.

The Charter Oath (April 1868). Its five articles, issued in the emperor's name, promised assemblies and decisions by public discussion; all classes united in running the country; freedom for commoners to pursue their callings; an end to the "evil customs" of the past; and knowledge sought throughout the world to strengthen imperial rule. Vague by design, to reassure the daimyō, its last article became the programme of the era, and its first was quoted for twenty years by people demanding an assembly.

Abolishing the domains. In 1869 the lords "returned" their domain registers to the emperor, led by Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and Hizen, and stayed on as governors. In August 1871, backed by an imperial guard of about 10,000 men, the government abolished the domains and replaced them with prefectures run from Tokyo; the lords were pensioned off and the state took over their debts.

Abolishing the samurai. In 1869–1871 the four classes were abolished in law: commoners could take surnames and choose their work, and outcaste status was ended on paper, though discrimination went on. Samurai stipends, a heavy charge on the budget, were cut and in 1876 compulsorily turned into government bonds; the same year the wearing of swords was banned.

Conscription and the land tax (1873). Yamagata's conscription law made men liable at twenty for three years' service, with exemptions for heads of households and those who could pay; it gave the samurai's function to peasants. The land tax replaced rice dues with 3% of the assessed value of land, paid in cash by owners who received certificates of title. It gave the state most of its revenue for two decades; protests forced a cut to 2.5% in 1877.

The Iwakura Mission (1871–1873). Half the government toured the United States and Europe, failed to open talks on the treaties, and came home convinced that industry, law and schools must come first. Its leaders therefore blocked Saigō's plan to force Korea open by war (the Korea debate of 1873), and Saigō resigned.

The samurai's last stand. Discontented samurai rose several times, most seriously in Satsuma in 1877 under Saigō himself. The conscript army crushed the Satsuma Rebellion in eight months: peasants with rifles had beaten the warrior class.

5Japan: the 1889 Constitution

Why a constitution? The Freedom and People's Rights Movement, begun in 1874 by Itagaki Taisuke's call for an elected assembly, drew in ex-samurai, landlords and townsmen. In 1881 the government expelled Ōkuma Shigenobu, who wanted a British-style parliament, and issued an imperial promise of an assembly by 1890, which let the oligarchs choose the model and the timing. A constitution was also a condition of treaty revision: the powers would not hand their citizens to Japanese courts without western-style law.

How it was made. Itō studied constitutions in Europe in 1882–1883 and chose the Prussian model of a strong monarch whose ministers stood above parliament; a peerage, a cabinet (1885) and a Privy Council came first. The constitution was presented on 11 February 1889 as the emperor's gift to his people.

What it said. The emperor was "sacred and inviolable", sovereign, supreme commander of the army and navy (Article 11), with power to declare war and make treaties; ministers answered to him, not to the Diet. The Imperial Diet had an appointed and hereditary House of Peers and a House of Representatives elected by men over 25 paying at least 15 yen in direct tax: about 450,000 voters in 1890, roughly 1% of the population. The Diet approved laws and budgets, but if it rejected a budget the previous year's continued (Article 71). Rights existed "within the limits of law", and informal elder statesmen, the genrō, chose prime ministers.

Judging it. It was Asia's first working constitution, and the Diet's power to block new spending forced governments of the 1890s to bargain with the parties; in 1900 Itō himself founded one. But sovereignty lay with the emperor, and the right of supreme command made the army and navy answerable to the throne, not the cabinet. With a 1900 rule that service ministers must be serving officers, the military gained a veto over governments. Historians of the 1930s start here.

6Japan: social, cultural and economic developments

The state starts, private firms take over. With no capital market, the government built the first modern enterprises itself: the Tokyo–Yokohama railway (1872), telegraphs, mines, shipyards and the Tomioka silk mill (1872), with French machinery and experts. Spending ran ahead of revenue. From 1881 the finance minister Matsukata Masayoshi cut spending, founded the Bank of Japan (1882) and sold most state enterprises cheaply to private firms. The buyers, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and others, grew into the zaibatsu, family conglomerates close to the state. Textiles led growth: raw silk was the main export, and cotton spinning grew so fast after the Osaka Spinning Company (1883) that by the late 1890s Japan exported yarn. Heavy industry came with state help: the Yawata ironworks, partly paid for by the Chinese indemnity, began production in 1901.

Who paid. The Matsukata deflation drove farmers into debt and tenancy; indebted farmers at Chichibu rose in armed revolt in 1884. The mills were worked largely by young women from poor villages on long shifts.

Society and education. The 1872 education law aimed at schooling for every child, and by the early 1900s over nine in ten were enrolled. The Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), read in every school, taught loyalty to the emperor and Confucian obedience: western methods, Japanese values. Legal equality replaced class, but the Civil Code of 1898 gave the male household head authority over the family, and women were held to the ideal of "good wife, wise mother".

Culture. The 1870s fashion was bunmei kaika, "civilisation and enlightenment": western dress for officials, the solar calendar (1873), newspapers, and Fukuzawa Yukichi's argument that an independent Japan needed independent-minded citizens. The ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873. By the late 1880s imitation provoked a reaction, and Shinto was promoted as a state cult around the emperor. Carol Gluck has shown how the late Meiji state built an ideology of emperor, family and nation through schools and ritual, much of it new though presented as tradition.

Treaty revision. Law codes, a constitution and a modern army gave Japan the case the Iwakura Mission had lacked. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation (July 1894) ended extraterritoriality from 1899, and tariff autonomy followed in 1911. Japan was the first non-western state to escape the unequal treaties, by making itself look, in law and in power, like the states that imposed them.

7China: the Tongzhi Restoration and Self-Strengthening (1861–1894)

The coup of 1861. The Xianfeng Emperor died in 1861, leaving a five-year-old son, the Tongzhi Emperor. The boy's mother, Cixi, with the senior empress dowager and the emperor's uncle Prince Gong, overthrew the regents he had named. The two empresses ruled "from behind the screen"; Prince Gong, who had negotiated with the British and French in 1860, ran government and foreign affairs.

The Tongzhi Restoration. This meant restoring Confucian order after the Taiping catastrophe: crushing the rebellions (Nanjing was retaken in 1864), reviving farming, cutting taxes in the ruined Yangzi provinces, reopening the examinations. It was led by provincial officials who had raised their own armies: Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang. Prince Gong created the Zongli Yamen (1861), China's first foreign office, and a school for interpreters. Mary Wright (1957) called the Restoration "the last stand of Chinese conservatism": a sincere, able attempt that failed because a modern state's needs ran against Confucian values.

Self-Strengthening. The aim was to learn western technology to defend Chinese civilisation: "Chinese learning as the essence, western learning for practical use". First came arms: the Jiangnan Arsenal (1865) and the Fuzhou Navy Yard (1866). Then enterprises to create the wealth arms needed, under "government supervision, merchant management": the China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company (1872), coal mines, telegraphs, cotton mills. Students sent to the United States in 1872 were recalled in 1881. In 1888 Li's Beiyang Fleet was formally established.

Why it achieved so little. It was provincial: governors with their own armies, arsenals and fleets, and no central plan. It was narrow: weapons changed, but not the examinations, the bureaucracy or the economy. Its firms suffered from official interference, as Albert Feuerwerker showed in his study of Sheng Xuanhuai. It faced conservative opposition to any western learning. And it lacked money: in the late 1880s naval funds were diverted to rebuilding the Summer Palace for Cixi, and the fleet gained no major warships after 1888. Defeat by France (1884–1885), when the Fuzhou squadron was destroyed at anchor, was a warning; Cixi used it to dismiss Prince Gong.

Cixi. When Tongzhi died in 1875 she broke the succession rules to enthrone her three-year-old nephew as the Guangxu Emperor, and ruled as regent until 1889. Her image as a scheming reactionary came largely from her enemies, the reformers of 1898, and from Edmund Backhouse, whose key source, a diary, was later exposed as his forgery. Jung Chang (2013) presented her instead as China's moderniser, which most academic historians think overstated. A defensible line: she backed reforms that strengthened the dynasty and her power, and blocked those that threatened either.

8Korea and the Sino-Japanese War (1876–1895)

Korean isolation. Joseon Korea was a Qing tributary, closed to the West. From 1864 the regent, the Daewongun, father of the boy-king Gojong, persecuted Catholics and drove off French and American expeditions. When Gojong came of age in 1873, power passed to the family of his wife, Queen Min, who favoured cautious opening.

Opening (1876). Japan did to Korea what Perry had done to Japan. After a clash off Ganghwa Island in 1875, it sent warships and imposed the Treaty of Ganghwa (February 1876): Korea was called an "autonomous state" (a phrase meant to deny Chinese overlordship), three ports opened and Japanese residents gained extraterritoriality. China tightened its grip: after a mutiny in 1882 and a failed pro-Japanese coup in 1884, both put down by Chinese troops, Yuan Shikai became China's resident in Seoul. In 1885 Li Hongzhang and Itō agreed that each side would notify the other before sending troops.

The Tonghak Rebellion (1894). Tonghak ("Eastern Learning") was a religious movement set against western learning. In 1894 its followers led a peasant rising against corrupt officials and foreigners. Korea asked China for troops; Japan, citing 1885, sent more, refused to withdraw after the rebels made a truce, seized the royal palace in July and went to war.

The war. Japan won on land at Pyongyang and at sea off the Yalu (September 1894), then took Port Arthur and Weihaiwei. China fought largely with Li Hongzhang's northern forces. The Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 April 1895) made China recognise Korean independence, cede Taiwan, the Pescadores and the Liaodong peninsula, pay 200 million taels and open more ports to foreign factories. Six days later Russia, Germany and France forced Japan to return Liaodong (the Triple Intervention) for another 30 million taels.

Impact on China. Defeat by a country Chinese officials had looked down on was far more shocking than defeat by Britain. It showed that Self-Strengthening had failed, forced the government to borrow abroad, and began the scramble for concessions: in 1897–1898 Germany took Jiaozhou Bay, Russia leased Port Arthur, Britain took Weihaiwei and the New Territories, and France Guangzhouwan, each with a sphere of influence for railways and mines.

Impact on Japan. Japan gained its first colony and a huge indemnity, spent mostly on the army and navy, some on Yawata and the gold standard (1897). The Triple Intervention taught that victory needed allies, and the public watched Russia lease the very peninsula Japan had been made to give back.

Figure 3 follows Korea from Chinese tributary to Japanese colony.

9The Hundred Days' Reform (1898)

In 1895 Kang Youwei led more than a thousand examination candidates in a petition against Shimonoseki and for reform. Kang argued that Confucius had himself been a reformer, and held up Peter the Great and Meiji Japan as rulers who had saved their countries from above; his student Liang Qichao spread the ideas in print. The young Guangxu Emperor was persuaded.

The reforms. From 11 June to 21 September 1898 Guangxu issued a flood of decrees: the examinations were to test practical subjects instead of the formal "eight-legged essay"; an Imperial University was founded in Beijing; modern schools, army reform, railways and commerce were promoted; sinecure offices were abolished; officials and commoners could petition the throne directly.

The coup. Almost everyone with power had a reason to resist: officials whose posts were cut, scholars whose years of study were wasted, Manchu nobles, and provincial governors who ignored the decrees. When the reformers were rumoured to be plotting against Cixi's ally Ronglu, and Yuan Shikai, whose troops they hoped would act, did not, Cixi resumed the regency on 21 September and confined Guangxu for life. Six reformers were executed; Kang and Liang escaped to Japan; only the university survived.

Why it failed. Too much, too fast, from too narrow a base: an emperor without real power and advisers without office, against a bureaucracy and a regent who controlled appointments and troops. Luke Kwong has argued that Kang's later writings exaggerated his own role. The failure convinced many young Chinese that reform within the Qing was impossible.

10The Boxer Rebellion (1900–1901) and the late Qing reforms (1901–1911)

Causes. The Boxers ("Righteous and Harmonious Fists") rose in north-western Shandong, hit by Yellow River floods in 1898 and then drought. They believed their martial arts and spirit possession made them bullet-proof, and blamed foreigners, above all missionaries and Chinese Christians protected by the treaties. Their slogan was "Support the Qing, destroy the foreign". Joseph Esherick traced the movement to the social conditions of western Shandong; Paul Cohen has shown how it was later remade as a myth, patriotic or superstitious depending on the teller.

Course. In 1900 the Boxers spread towards Beijing, killing Christians. When allied warships took the Dagu forts in June, the court, where Cixi had been persuaded the Boxers could be used, declared war on the powers. Boxers and imperial troops besieged the foreign legations in Beijing for 55 days. The governors of the south and east, among them Li Hongzhang and Zhang Zhidong, ignored the declaration. An eight-nation force, Japanese and Russian troops the largest contingents, relieved the legations in August; Cixi fled to Xi'an and Beijing was looted. Russia occupied Manchuria.

The Boxer Protocol (September 1901). China agreed to pay 450 million taels over 39 years, to punish officials who had backed the Boxers, to allow foreign troops in the legation quarter and along the railway to the sea, and to destroy the Dagu forts. The powers kept the dynasty because a weak Qing was cheaper than governing China themselves.

The late Qing reforms (the New Policies). From Xi'an in 1901 Cixi called for proposals, and the next decade went far beyond 1898. The examination system was abolished in 1905, ending the link between Confucian learning and office; modern schools opened and thousands of students went to Japan. The New Army, trained on Japanese and German lines, with Yuan Shikai's northern divisions its strongest part, replaced the old forces. After constitutional Japan beat autocratic Russia, the court promised a constitution (1906) and in 1908 published an outline modelled on the Meiji Constitution, with a nine-year timetable. Provincial assemblies met in 1909 and a partly elected National Assembly in 1910. Douglas Reynolds has called these years a revolution in institutions, modelled on Japan.

Why they did not save the dynasty. Each reform created a group that wanted more: nationalist students, New Army officers open to revolution, assemblies demanding a parliament at once. Reform also raised taxes and provoked riots. Cixi and Guangxu died on consecutive days in November 1908, leaving the two-year-old Puyi as emperor under his father, Prince Chun, as regent. Chun dismissed Yuan Shikai and in May 1911 named a cabinet dominated by Manchu princes, telling Han reformers that a constitution would not share power. It fits Tocqueville's observation on France: a bad government is most at risk when it begins to reform.

11Sun Yixian and the 1911 Xinhai Revolution

Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen, 1866–1925) stood outside the Confucian elite: schooled in Hawaii, trained as a doctor in Hong Kong. He founded the Revive China Society in 1894, failed in a rising at Guangzhou in 1895, and became famous when the Chinese legation in London held him captive in 1896 and was forced to release him. In Tokyo in 1905 he united several groups in the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance), pledged to expel the Manchus, found a republic and equalise land rights, ideas he later framed as the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood. Its small risings in the south all failed.

Causes. Long-term: defeat after defeat, from the Opium Wars to Shimonoseki and the Boxer Protocol, destroyed the dynasty's claim to rule, and Han nationalism turned on the Manchus as foreigners. Medium-term: the New Policies created the New Army, the students and the assemblies; the deaths of 1908 left a weak regency. Short-term: in May 1911 the government nationalised provincial railway companies, in which local gentry had invested, to build lines with a foreign loan. The Railway Protection Movement in Sichuan became an armed revolt, and troops were moved from Hubei to crush it. On 9 October a bomb went off by accident in a revolutionary workshop in Hankou; police found membership lists, and on 10 October revolutionary soldiers of the New Army in Wuchang rose to save themselves. Within weeks most provinces of central and southern China declared independence, usually led by their assemblies and New Army commanders.

The outcome. Sun was in the United States when Wuchang rose. He returned in December and was elected provisional president by delegates of the rebel provinces; the Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 January 1912. But the Qing had recalled Yuan Shikai, who commanded the strongest army. Yuan arranged Puyi's abdication on 12 February 1912, and Sun stood down so that Yuan could become president.

Why it failed. The revolutionaries were weak: no army, little money, no hold on the provinces, and an alliance united only against the Manchus. Real power lay elsewhere, with generals and provincial elites who wanted order and local control, not social change; Joseph Esherick's study of Hunan and Hubei shows urban reformist elites taking over the revolution there. Yuan wanted power: when the new Guomindang won the elections of 1912–1913, its leader Song Jiaoren was assassinated (March 1913), a "Second Revolution" was crushed and parliament was dissolved; Yuan tried to make himself emperor and died in 1916, leaving China to the warlords. The powers backed Yuan as the man of order, with a £25 million loan in 1913. And the peasants were untouched: in the Chinese Communist reading, a "bourgeois" revolution failed because its leaders compromised with the old elites and never mobilised the countryside.

12Japan the great power: Russia, Korea and the region (1895–1910)

Road to war. After 1895 Russia built a railway across Manchuria, leased Port Arthur (1898), and occupied Manchuria in the Boxer crisis and stayed, threatening Korea. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902), the first equal alliance between a western power and an Asian state, kept other powers from joining Russia. Talks trading Manchuria for Korea failed, and in February 1904 Japan attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Port Arthur fell after a costly siege, Japan won the land battle of Mukden (March 1905), and Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō destroyed Russia's Baltic Fleet at Tsushima (May 1905). Both sides were exhausted; President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth (September 1905). Russia recognised Japan's paramount interest in Korea and handed over its Liaodong lease, the southern branch of its Manchurian railway and southern Sakhalin. There was no indemnity, and Tokyo crowds rioted.

Korea annexed. Queen Min turned to Russia to balance Japan after 1895, and on 8 October 1895 she was murdered in her palace by Japanese agents acting under the Japanese minister, Miura Gorō. With Russia beaten, Japan made Korea a protectorate (1905), with Itō as Resident-General. When Gojong sent envoys to the Hague peace conference in 1907, Japan forced him to abdicate and disbanded the Korean army; guerrilla "righteous armies" fought on. After a Korean nationalist assassinated Itō in 1909, Japan annexed Korea in August 1910.

Impact on the region. An Asian state had beaten a European great power, and nationalists across Asia took heart; the Qing promised a constitution within a year. But Japan joined the imperial powers rather than leading Asia against them: it held Taiwan and Korea, and in southern Manchuria it ran the leased territory and the South Manchuria Railway with its own troops. The United States now watched Japan as a Pacific rival. The balance of East Asia had shifted from China to Japan.

13Why Japan and not China?

Figure 4 sets out the comparison Paper 3 most often invites.

Structure. In Japan the old regime fell first, and abolishing the domains in 1871 gave Tokyo the tax and the army. In China reformers served the dynasty that needed reforming, power had drained to provincial governors during the Taiping war, and a Manchu court feared both Han officials and change.

Scope and elites. Japan borrowed institutions, law and schooling; China kept reform to the arsenal until 1901. Samurai officials gave up their stipends; Chinese scholar-officials owed their status to the learning that thorough reform would devalue.

Scale and timing. Japan was smaller, more compact and less of a prize, and met the West a decade after China had taken the first blows. China fought the Taipings while foreign troops were in Beijing, and the indemnities of 1895 and 1901 drained money that might have paid for reform.

The historians. John K. Fairbank and Teng Ssu-yü (1954) framed the story as "China's response to the West"; Paul Cohen (1984) criticised that approach for making China passive and urged a search for internal causes of change. The modernisation historians of the 1960s, such as Marius Jansen, presented Meiji Japan as a model of success, against Norman's view that its success was incomplete and dangerous. Both debates warn against a simple success-and-failure essay: Japan's success had costs in rural poverty, repression and an army beyond civilian control, and China's "failure" left arsenals, schools, a New Army and a generation of nationalists for the republic to inherit.