EUROPE INVADES CHINA
The story of China during the few remaining years of the century may be briefly told. The evidence of its weakness yielded by the war with Japan was quickly taken advantage of by the great Powers of Europe, and China was in danger of going to pieces under their attacks, which grew so decided and ominous that rumors of a partition between these Powers of the most ancient and populous empire of the world filled the air.
In 1898 decided steps in this direction were taken. Russia leased from China for ninety-nine years Port Arthur and Talien Wan, and took practical possession of Manchuria, through which a railroad was built connecting with the Trans-Siberian road, while Port Arthur afforded her an ice-free harbor for her Pacific fleet. Great Britain, jealous of this movement on the part of Russia, forced from the unwilling hands of China the port of Wei Hai Wei, and Germany demanded and obtained the cession of a port at Kiau Chau, farther down the coast, in retribution for the murder of some missionaries. France, not to be outdone by her neighbors, gained concessions of territory in the south, adjoining her Indo-China possessions, and Italy, last of all, came into the Eastern market with a demand for a share of the nearly defunct empire.
The nations appeared to be settling on China in all directions and to be ready to tear the antique commonwealth to pieces between them. Within the empire itself revolutionary changes took place, the dowager empress having first deprived the emperor of all power and then enforced his abdication.
Meanwhile one important result came from the war. Li Hung Chang and the other progressive statesmen of the empire, who had long been convinced that the only hope of China lay in its being thrown open to Western science and art, found themselves able to carry out their plans, the conservative opposition having seriously broken down. The result of this was seen in a dozen directions. Railroads, long almost completely forbidden, gained free “right of way,” and promised in the near future to traverse the country far and wide. Steamers ploughed their way for a thousand miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang; engineers became busy exploiting the coal and iron mines of the Flowery Kingdom; great factories, equipped with the best modern machinery, sprang up in the foreign settlements; foreign books began to be translated and read; and the empress even went so far as to receive foreign ambassadors in public audience and on a footing of outward equality in the “forbidden city” of Peking, long the sacredly secluded center of an empire locked against the outer world.
The increase of European interference in China, with indications of a possible intention to dismember that ancient empire and divide its fragments among the land-hungry nations of the West, was viewed in China with dread and indignation, the feeling of hostility extending to the work of the missionaries, who were probably viewed by many as agents in the movement of invasion.