| Century of humiliation | |||||||||||||||
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 Territorial losses of the late Qing dynasty due to annexations by foreign powers | |||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 百年國恥 | ||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 百年国耻 | ||||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | 100 years of national humiliation | ||||||||||||||
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Thecentury of humiliation was a period inChinese history beginning with theFirst Opium War (1839–1842), and ending in 1945 with China (then theRepublic of China) emerging out of theSecond World War as one of theBig Four and established as apermanent member of theUnited Nations Security Council, or alternately, ending in 1949 with thefounding of thePeople's Republic of China. The century-long period is typified by the decline, defeat and political fragmentation of theQing dynasty and the subsequent Republic of China, which led to demoralizingforeign intervention,annexation andsubjugation of China byWestern powers,Russia, andJapan.[1]
The characterization of the period as a "humiliation" arose with an atmosphere ofChinese nationalism following China's defeat in theFirst Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 and the subsequent events including thescramble for concessions in the late 1890s. Since then the idea of national humiliation became a focus of discussions among many Chinese writers and scholars, although they differed somewhat in their understandings of national humiliation; ordinary scholars and constitutionalists also had different understanding of their home country from theanti-Qing revolutionaries in the late Qing period. The idea of national humiliation was also mentioned in late Qing textbooks.[2]
After the establishment of the Republic of China, the national humiliation idea grew further in opposition to theTwenty-One Demands made by theJapanese government in 1915, and with protests against China's poor treatment in theTreaty of Versailles in 1919. Both theKuomintang andChinese Communist Party popularized the characterization in the 1920s, protesting theunequal treaties and loss of Chinese territory to foreign colonies. During the 1930s and 1940s, the term became common due to theJapanese invasion of Chinaproper.[3] Although formal treaty provisions were ended, the epoch remains central to concepts of Chinese nationalism, and the term is widely used in bothpolitical rhetoric andpopular culture.[4]
Chinese nationalists in the 1920s and the 1930s dated the century of humiliation to the mid-19th century, on the eve of theFirst Opium War[5] amidst the dramatic political unraveling ofQing China that followed.[6]
Defeats by foreign powers cited as part of the century of humiliation include the following:
In that period, China suffered major internal fragmentation, lost almost all of the wars that it fought, and was often forced to give major concessions to thegreat powers inunequal treaties.[12] In many cases, China was forced to pay large amounts ofreparations, open up ports for trade,lease or cede territories (such asOuter Manchuria, parts ofManchuria (Northwest China) andSakhalin to theRussian Empire,Jiaozhou Bay to theGerman Empire, Hong Kong andWeihai to the British Empire,Macau to thePortuguese Empire,Zhanjiang toFrance, andTaiwan andDalian to Japan), and make various other concessions of sovereignty to foreign "spheres of influence" after military defeats.
Already during the conclusion of theBoxer Protocol in 1901, some of the Western powers believed they had acted in excess and that the Protocol was too humiliating.[citation needed] As a result, U.S. Secretary of StateJohn Hay formulated theOpen Door Policy, which prevented the colonial powers from directly carving up China intode jure colonies, and guaranteed universal trade access to markets in China. Intended to weaken Germany, Japan, and Russia, it was only somewhat enforced and was gradually broken by the followingwarlord era and Japanese interventions.[13] The semi-contradictory nature of the Open Door policy was noted early, as although it preserved the territorial integrity of China from foreign powers, it also led to trade exploitation by the same countries. With theRoot–Takahira Agreement in 1908, the U.S. and Japan upheld the Open Door Policy, but other factors (such as immigration restrictions, and the assignment of the Boxer Indemnity to a managedBoxer Indemnity Scholarship instead of being directly returned to theQing government) led to a continuation in humiliation from the Chinese perspective.[14] In the Republic of China mainland era, the 1922Nine-Power Treaty was also a major attempt to reaffirm Chinese sovereignty, though it failed to check Japan's expansionism and had a limited effect on extraterritoriality.[15][16]Open Door was ultimately dissolved inWWII when Japaninvaded China.
Extraterritorial jurisdiction and other privileges wereabandoned by the United Kingdom andthe United States in 1943. DuringWorld War II,Vichy France retained control over French concessions inChina but was coerced into handing them over to the collaborationistWang Jingwei regime. The postwar Sino-French Accord of February 1946 affirmed Chinese sovereignty over the concessions.
Chiang Kai-shek declared the end of the Century of Humiliation in 1943 with the repeal of all the unequal treaties and Mao Zedong declared its end in theaftermath of World War II, with Chiang promoting his wartime resistance to Japanese rule and China's place among theBig Four in the victoriousAllies in 1945, and Mao declared it with theestablishment of thePeople's Republic of China in 1949.
Chinese politicians and writers, however, have continued to portray later events as the true end of humiliation. Its end was declared in therepulsion of UN forces during the Korean War, the 1997reunification with Hong Kong, the 1999reunification with Macau, and even the hosting of the2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. SomeChinese nationalists claim that humiliation will not end until the People's Republic of Chinacontrols Taiwan.[17]
In 2021, coinciding with theUnited States–China talks in Alaska, theChinese government began referring to the period as 120 years of humiliation, a reference to the 1901Boxer Protocol in which the Qing were forced to pay large reparations to members of theEight-Nation Alliance.[18]
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The usage of the Century of Humiliation in theChinese Communist Party'shistoriography and modern Chinese nationalism, with its focus on the "sovereignty and integrity of [Chinese] territory,"[19] has been invoked in incidents such as theUS bombing of the Chinese Belgrade embassy, theHainan Island incident, and protests forTibetan independence along the2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay.[20] Some analysts have pointed to its use indeflecting foreign criticism ofhuman rights abuses in China and domestic attention from issues ofcorruption and bolstering itsterritorial claims andgeneral economic and political rise.[17][21][22]
Historians have judged the Qing dynasty's vulnerability and weakness to foreign imperialism in the 19th century to be based mainly on its maritime naval weakness, but it achieved military success against Westerners on land. The historianEdward L. Dreyer stated, "China's nineteenth-century humiliations were strongly related to her weakness and failure at sea. At the start of the First Opium War, China had no unified navy and not a sense of how vulnerable she was to attack from the sea. British navy forces sailed and steamed wherever they wanted to go. In theSecond Opium War (1856–1860), the Chinese had no way to prevent the Anglo-French navy expedition of 1860 from sailing into the Gulf of Zhili and landing as near as possible to Beijing. Meanwhile, new but not exactly modern Chinese armies suppressed the midcenturyrebellions,bluffed Russia into a peaceful settlement of disputed frontiers in Central Asia, anddefeated the French forces on land in the Sino-French War (1884–85). But the defeat at sea, and the resulting threat to steamship traffic to Taiwan, forced China to conclude peace on unfavorable terms."[23][24]
The historian Jane E. Elliott criticized the allegation that China refused to modernize or was unable to defeat Western armies as simplistic by noting that China embarked on a massive military modernization in the late 1800s after several defeats, bought weapons from Western countries, and manufactured its own at arsenals, such as theHanyang Arsenal during theBoxer Rebellion. In addition, Elliott questioned the claim that Chinese society was traumatized by the Western victories, as many Chinese peasants (then 90% of the population) lived outside the concessions and continued about their daily lives uninterrupted and without any feeling of "humiliation".[25]
Media related toCentury of Humiliation at Wikimedia Commons
