Description
The idea of a “rising China” is often associated with familiar episodes like ‘Nixon goes to China’, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Four Modernizations’, or China’s seismic financial stabilisation measures during the 2008 Financial Crisis. For many Western observers prior to the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China remained a disordered backwater, plagued in the first half of the twentieth century by nationalism, imperialism, communism, warlordism, anti-foreign agitation, weak governance, and perpetual war. No one viewed China in this light more than observers in Britain. Particularly as Britain was one of the principal architects of China’s ‘century of humiliation’. But it was also in the early twentieth century that another, less popular, view of China began to take shape in Britain: of a country going through a period of painful transition in its inevitable return to world power.
Existing scholarship has made important in-roads into the intellectual history that underpins ideas of Asia in this period. Yet many of these accounts reinforce the more mainstream views of China as a backward country or as an arena for the intrigues of great powers. But for some in Britain – in just over twenty years – China was beginning to be taken seriously as a great power-in-waiting.
This paper seeks to explore the intellectual construction of British ideas of a rising China in the early twentieth century. Starting with the China Question of the 1890s and ending with the Washington Conference and the publishing of Bertrand Russell’s China Problem, this account examines the strategic, political, economic, and moral case for China’s return to great power status. To do this, it will rely on contemporary publications about China drawn from periodicals, travel writings, and lectures. It will also utilise correspondence and papers from important politicians, officials, journalists, and intellectuals particularly associated with this view. It is hoped that this paper will simultaneously enrich our understanding of early twentieth century British perceptions of China and help to historically ground later Western accounts of a rising China.
