![]() ![]() Japan went on to abuse China for decades herself. Resistance to westernisation from inside the regime, which as a foreign conquest state was anxious about its own legitimacy, made a stark contrast with the unified determination of Japan's Meiji state-led industrialisation and military reforms. In one pathetic incident, a new Chinese fleet was entirely and ignominiously sunk by French ships within minutes. Rapacious predations by foreign forces and devastating internal civil wars denied China time and space to carry out the needed development. The Qing state made efforts to modernise the economy and military, sending students abroad, recruiting Western armaments experts, building railways, and so on. This book shows how China's efforts to respond to her encounter with the imperial industrial powers from the 1840s to the 1970s were an unmitigated disaster. ![]()
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