As a zealous young Sun Yat-sen put it in an unanswered 8,000-word letter to Li Hongzhang in 1894, “With China’s population and material strength, if we were to imitate the West and adopt reforms, we could catch up and surpass Europe within 20 years.” These individuals and the broader nationalist discourse of which they were a part, were dedicated to rejuvenating China and catching up with the West, and their words and deeds formed the soil in which China’s Communist Party would grow. That defeat proved traumatic for Chinese scholars like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, as well as nationalist revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen, who were each spurred on to offer their own paths for China to pursue, all with the ultimate aim of self-strengthening. Only two decades after Feng Guifen’s death, Japan shocked China by defeating it in the first Sino-Japanese War, and his self-strengthening disciple Li was dispatched to Tokyo accept China’s defeat. He influenced a generation of scholars, including the general and statesman Li Hongzhang, but little improved. Wei Yuan’s intellectual successor, Feng Guifen, watched some key events of the century of humiliation-the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion that almost toppled the Qing-and launched the so-called self-strengthening movement to reverse China’s slide. But it also gave rise to generations of scholars and activists who built on Wei Yuan’s “wealth and power” foundations. The century of humiliation saw China suffer a series of traumatic defeats that cracked the edifice of the Qing dynasty. This article is adapted from The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi (Oxford University Press, 432 pp., $27.95, July 2021). This work was completed before his government service, is based entirely on open sources, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. The following is an excerpt from The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by former Brookings fellow Rush Doshi. As Orville Schell and John Delury note in their sweeping intellectual history, Wei Yuan’s resurrection of the 2000-year-old phrase “wealth and power” came at the right time, and it has “remained something of a North Star for Chinese intellectual and political leaders” ever since. When China’s ongoing domestic decay collided with European imperial ambition in the disastrous First Opium War, China’s “century of humiliation” began-launching a search among many to find the means to recapture past glory. Concerned by the Qing dynasty’s slide, officials like Wei Yuan began to urgently resurrect a tradition in Chinese intellectual history that focused on the state’s pursuit of “wealth and power” (富强) as opposed to the more typical Confucian tradition of “rule of the virtuous”(德治). But over the next few decades, repeated provincial unrest, foreign depredations, and a sclerotic government led some officials to sense that China was entering decline. In the 1790s, as President George Washington was settling into his first term of office in the United States, the Qing dynasty was at its height. The party’s nationalist orientation is embedded in a long, historical line that connects the party of today with the patriotic ferment of the late Qing decline. But the reality is much more complicated. This can be a controversial point today, particularly among those who see the party’s focus on nationalist themes mainly as an instrument to retain power after the tarnishing of Communist ideology. For a century, the Chinese Communist Party has been a nationalist party.
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