Today's China

Paper Summary:

This paper examines modern Chinese history in order to understand how the government has reached the stage where it is ready to consider moves towards democracy. The various stages examined are diplomatic and military innovations during the "Self-Strengthening Period" of 1861-95, political reform and revolution from 1898 to 1912, intellectual revolution from after World War I to about 1923, and finally, the struggle for supreme power between the Nationalists and the Communists since 1921, which led to the rise of Mao Tse-tung, the Cultural Revolution, and the People's Republic of China in 1949.

From the Paper:

"In order to effectively understand the current state of affairs in China regarding cultural values and the spread of democracy, one must begin in the past, especially between 1950 and 1990 when the cultural arena of China altered drastically from its ancient agrarian system to one of modernity and acceptance by most of the other nations in the world. With a recorded history of nearly four thousand years, Chinese civilization is one of the oldest and until modern times its development had been highly indigenous, due in part to the independent spirit of the Chinese people and China s isolation from the other great civilizations. However, with the beginning of the so-called "Age of Discovery," being the time in which China was visited by European explorers in the 16th century, the country began to shift from an ancient state into one of the most modern nations on earth. This event and a whole collection of others were nothing less than epochal for China and its people, for they broke her age-old isolationist policies and began the long-held contact with the West which though weak and faltering at first was to expand to such force in the 19th century as to create a head-on collision between China and the West. Moreover, when viewed in the context of China s domestic and cultural development, the arrival of the Europeans takes on added importance, for it coincided with the rise of the Manchus and the establishment of the alien Ch ing dynasty. These momentous foreign and domestic developments left behind far-reaching consequences which endowed the periods that followed, such as the Cultural Revolution, with characteristics greatly different from earlier times. Also, the influence of these other nations on China as to its culture, lifestyle and political sphere, are still in force today and have greatly altered the face of modern China."

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