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This chapter examines the Chinese views on India in late Qing Chinese travel writings. There were two distinct modes of observation and critical reflection. On the one hand, by observing and analyzing India, the Chinese authors tried to gain knowledge of the British rule in India and the Western culture. On the other hand, seeing a reflection of China in India, they pondered China’s own international crisis. Huang Maocai, the first official sent by Qing government to British India, utterly praised British governance in India, but the observers after Huang were more eager to find out the reasons why India became colonized by the British Empire. By studying these travelogues, this chapter reveals a key transition of Chinese intellectuals’ views towards Western colonial power in the nineteenth century, from ‘positive confrontationism’ to ‘resistant nationalism’.

Chapter Six examines continuities and changes in Chinese views on mining from the imperial period through the Republican era. During the late Qing period, control over natural resources became a symbol of sovereignty against foreign encroachment. The study of geology became a means of resistance against imperialism. In the Chinese discourse the positivist views of Western geology in this period transformed into a matter of anti-imperialist struggle with strong social Darwinian undertones. Republican era geologists actively tried to construct a history of geology motivated by Han nationalism, with the efforts of the late-Qing period largely erased from their revision.

This chapter focuses on the history of the period from the 1860s to the fall of the empire in 1911–12. The chapter details through minute analysis of books, journals, and the press, the extent to which the wider Chinese community distanced itself from any belief that Confucian values could be matched by Western international law that could have a simple ethical foundation. All that counted in international relations was military power, and the industrial strength which grounded it. Confucian ideals of world order, above all Kang Youwei’s, were too idealist. The other great intellectual of the turn of the century, Liang Qichao, believed that international law was a product of power.

Some political leader's speeches were given then, as now, in person to much smaller groups of party members, activists, contributors, journalists, and the curious. The image of the political leader in modern China begins with Kang Youwei at Songyun'an speaking to a few thousand literati and leads to a variety of set-piece scenes. These include Sun Yat-sen on a tour of the Chinese diaspora, protest leaders speaking to crowds in the 1905 anti-American boycott movement and during the railway recovery movements of the first decade of the century, and popular movements of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. So powerful in China was the image of the leader speaking directly to the assembled crowd that at least one Chinese student of public speaking insisted that only a speech made while literally “facing the masses” could really be called oratory. Chinese republicanism was forged, broken, and recast in unifying small thoughts of opinion and sentiment.

By the turn of the twentieth century, both the methods of translation Lin Shu and his collaborators employed and the language they used to write their translations had come to be regarded by many as inadequate for the tasks they faced. They were, it seemed, broken tools of limited use in the mighty labors of acquiring modern knowledge and promoting political and cultural reform. By moving beyond the disavowal of these purportedly failed practices and engaging with their historical origins, this chapter lays the groundwork for understanding how Lin Shu and his collaborators built up institutional and cultural positions and how the literary writings they produced reflect back on the questionable means employed to make them. In the cases of both “tandem translation” (duiyi) and ancient-style prose (guwen), the chapter places the problem of their legitimacy as tools for transmitting and apprehending knowledge in a global context with links to other colonized and semicolonized spaces in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world.

This chapter concentrates on the boundary-crossing movement of ideas and the development of pan-Asianism during and after the war. Many Asians, probably most, saw the Great War as simply a war of white people, a European war, and a war between Western countries. But they got involved, and the war and its aftermath forced them to think about who they were and what kind of positions they held in the world. Indians, Chinese, and Japanese were all consumed with rethinking the relationship between Asia and the West, between Eastern civilizations and Western civilizations, and what direction they should move in after the war. The war and its destruction had discredited the moral values of Western civilization, and what happened at the Paris Peace Conference fundamentally diminished Asians’ expectations and respect for the Western Powers. This chapter addresses the cultural effects and civilizational significance of the Great War for Asians.