Chapter 19

Daisy Alcaraz

Andrews

History

Chapter 19

In chapter 19 we take a good look at China. Starting off by looking at Hong Xiuquan who lived between 1814 - 1864. He was a chinese religious leader who sparked the Taiping Uprising. The Taiping Uprising was a massive chinese rebellion that devastates much of the country between 1850 and the 1864. It was based on the millenarian teaching of Hong. He had won millions to his unique form of christianity, where he stated he was Jesus’s younger brother. He stated he had been sent to earth to establish a “heavenly kingdom of great peace”. But peace was hard to achieve in china since they had been dealing with the opium wars from 1839 - 1858. It was a total of two wars fought by western powers and china. Which started after china tried to restrict the importation of foreign goods, especially opium. China lost both wars and was forced to make major concessions later known as the unequal treaties. Since the western influence had caused china great disappointment, the self strengthening movement developed. Which was china's program of internal reform in the 1860s - 1870s. Which was based on the rigorous application of confucian principles and limited borrowing form the west. But this was not the end of the fighting, in the 1900s there was a boxer rebellion which was the rising of chinese militia organizations in the 1900 in which large numbers of Europeans and chinese christians were killed. With all this inthe 1911 the collapse of china's imperial order, at the hands of organized revolutionaries but for the most part under the weight of the troubles that had overwhelmed the government for the previous half-century. Since they had gotten dominated by the Western powers but managed to retain their own government and keep independence they were then referred to as an Informal empire