Chinese nationalists in the 1920s and the 1930s dated the Century of Humiliation to the mid-19th century, on the eve of the First Opium War[4] amidst the dramatic political unraveling of Qing China that followed.[5]
Defeats by foreign powers cited as part of the Century of Humiliation include the following:
Already during the conclusion of the Boxer 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 State John Hay formulated the Open Door Policy, which prevented the colonial powers from directly carving up China into de 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 following warlord era and Japanese interventions.[12] 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 the Root–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 managed Boxer Indemnity Scholarship instead of being directly returned to the Qing government) led to a continuation in humiliation from the Chinese perspective.[13] In the Republic of China mainland era, the 1922 Nine-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.[14][15]Open Door was ultimately dissolved in WWII when Japan invaded China.
Extraterritorial jurisdiction and other privileges were abandoned by the United Kingdom and the United States in 1943. During World War II, Vichy France retained control over French concessions in China but was coerced into handing them over to the collaborationist Wang 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 abrogation of all the unequal treaties and Mao Zedong declared its end in the aftermath of World War II, with Chiang promoting his wartime resistance to Japanese rule and China's place among the Big Four in the victorious Allies in 1945, and Mao declared it with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
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 historian Edward 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 the Second Opium War (1856–60), 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 midcentury rebellions, bluffed Russia into a peaceful settlement of disputed frontiers in Central Asia, and defeated 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."[22][23]
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 the Hanyang Arsenal during the Boxer 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".[24]
^Adcock Kaufman, Alison (2010). "The "Century of Humiliation," Then and Now: Chinese Perceptions of the International Order". Pacific Focus. 25 (1): 1–33. doi:10.1111/j.1976-5118.2010.01039.x.
^Chang, Maria Hsia (2001). Return of the dragon: China'z wounded nationalism. Westview Press. pp. 69–70. ISBN978-0-8133-3856-9.
^ abŠebok, Filip (2023). "Historical Legacy". In Kironska, Kristina; Turscanyi, Richard Q. (eds.). Contemporary China: a New Superpower?. Routledge. ISBN978-1-03-239508-1.
^Jayshree Bajoria (April 23, 2008). "Nationalism in China". Council on Foreign Relations. Archived from the original on 2009-10-14. Retrieved 2009-11-12.
^"External Affairs Minister's remarks at Atlantic Council, Washington D.C. on 1 October 2019". www.mea.gov.in. Archived from the original on 2020-09-21. Retrieved 2021-02-23. many of you would have heard in another country the term, a century of humiliation. India actually had [two centuries of humiliation by the West because the West, kind of in its predatory form came into India in the mid 18th century and continued for almost 190 years after that.
Hevia, James L. (2007), "Remembering the Century of Humiliation: The Yuanming Gardens and Dagu Forts Museums", in Jager, Sheila (ed.), Ruptured histories, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, pp. 192–208
Lovell, Julia (2013), "The Opium War and China's 'Century of Humiliation'", in Standen, Naomi (ed.), Demystifying China: New understandings of Chinese history, vol. 16, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 153–160, ISBN9781442208957
Wang, Zheng (2012). Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN9780231148900.
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