GREAT BRTTAIN — FOREIGN POLICY IN INDIA; INDIA.
4. Modems Imperialism in the Far East —The Western Intrusion in Chica.—Of all the devel opments in modern imperialism that which will probably possess the greatest significance for the future of world history is the establishment of contact between western civilization and the Chinese Empire. The authentic history of China goes back to some 2.500 years a.c., but the dynasty which alone has any significance for the modern history of China dates from 1644, when, after a war of some 27 years, the Tatar Manchus from the north overthrew the native Ming dynasty and established the foreign domination which lasted until the resignation of the youthful emperor, Pu-yi, in 1912. In a geographic and administrative sense China is divided into southeastern China or China proper, and a number of outlying dependencies of great extent and widely varied degree of population. China proper is the only part of China that has any great historic significance and is the centre of the Chinese population and historic culture. It is about 1,500,000 square miles in area. possesses a population of thing over 300.000,000, and is divided into 18 provinces or administrative districts. ing China proper at the opening of the 19th century were the following more or less loosely attached dependencies, Korea, Manchuria, Surigaria. Turkestan, Tibet, Burma and Indo-China. Though Marco Polo had visited China in the 13th century and had been followed in the succeeding centuries by Catholic mis sionaries and by Portuguese, Dutch and British traders, China remained practically sealed against European contact, except for some strictly limited commercial relations with a few ports, especially Canton. The first notable in cursion of Europeans followed the deplorable Opium War of 184042, through which Great Britain, in the Treaty of Nanking, forced China to open four additional important Chinese ports to European trade. The foreign ingression was continued by the War of 1856-60, waged by the English and French against the Chinese and which terminated in the Treaty of Tientsin of 1860, opening six more Chinese ports to foreign trade and guaranteeing the position and safety of foreign traders and missionaries in China.
Between 1853 and 1864 Great Britain aided the Manchus in putting down a native patriotic insurrection — the Tai-Ping Rebellion — because she believed the dynastic party likely to be most favorable to the foreign incursion. Further progress was made following the Chino-Japan ese War of 1894-95, when the European powers abstracted from Japan most of her territorial gains. Germany followed the lead of Great Britain and France by seizing the port of Kiao-chau in the province of Shantung in 1898 as revenge for the murder of two German Catholic missionaries, whom the kaiser sud denly beheld as his °dear brothers in Christ,* in spite of his well-known anti-Catholic prej udices at home. Finally, by the joint European and American armed intervention of 1900 to suppress the Boxer revolt all barriers to west ern commerce and economic penetration were removed and China was put under the com mercial, and to a considerable extent the fiscal, tutelage of the western powers, being unable even to determine her own tariff schedules. At the same time that the western powers were forcing a commercial and financial entry into China they were also proceeding to encroach upon the Chinese dependencies and to wrest many of these from the empire. Japan took over the Liukiu Islands in 1874, Formosa in 1895, the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur in 1905, Korea in 1910, and made considerable progress soon afterward in the penetration of Manchuria. Russia, taking a portion of Chinese Turkestan in 1881, pushed southward from Siberia, taking over Amur in 1860, and outer Mongolia in 1913 after having lost her control of Manchuria and the Liaotung Peninsula through the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. The British assumed control of Tibet between 1904 and 1914, after having conquered Burma in 1885. France occupied eastern Indo-China be tween 1862 and 188.5. Finally, some of the most valuable Chinese ports, such as Hongkong, Port Arthur, Kiao-chau, Weihaiwei and Kwang chow \Van were handed over to foreign powers under military pressure.