Paths to Modernisation — Class 11 History

This theme contrasts how China and Japan, the two great powers of East Asia, faced the Western challenge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and took very different paths to becoming modern nation-states. Japan, a string of islands ruled by Tokugawa shoguns and daimyo with samurai as the elite, was "opened" by Commodore Perry's "black ships" (1853–54). The Meiji Restoration (1868) brought the emperor to the renamed capital Tokyo and launched the slogan "fukoku kyohei" (rich country, strong army): compulsory schooling, a modern army, railways, banks, and family-controlled zaibatsu firms built an industrial economy. Aggressive nationalism led to wars with China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05) and a colonial empire (Taiwan, Korea), ending in defeat in 1945; under US Occupation Japan democratised and re-emerged as a global economic power. China, ruled by the Qing dynasty, was weakened by the Opium Wars; reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, then republican Sun Yat-sen (Three Principles), then the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong (Long March, peasant-based revolution) sought to regain sovereignty. The People's Republic was founded in 1949; after the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping's reforms from 1978 brought a socialist market economy. The chapter also sketches the modern stories of Taiwan and Korea.