How did Europeans gain entry into china?
The poster who talks about the english in China is totally ignorant, they were not, by far, the first europeans in China. The British occupied Hong Kong, China, in 1841. The Portuguese were given the territory of Macau, China, in 1557. Do the math, the portuguese beat the english by almost 300 years. Unlike Hong Kong, taken by force, Macau was a gift of the chinese emperor to the portuguese, because they cleared the pirate infested waters of the china sea and made sea trade between Europe and China a reality. The portuguese developed Macau into the biggest trade port in China, a part of the Portuguese Empire that included all of Africa, Brazil, most of India, all of Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Japan (the portuguese were the first europeans ever to reach Japan in 1543 and founded and developed the city of Nagasaki into the biggest trade port in Japan). Macau was a portuguese territory from 1557 to 1999, making it the longest and first permanent european presence in China.
How did China and Japan respond to Europeans in the 1800's?
China still refused to acknowledge the technological superiority of the Europeans while Japan found that it must learn from the West before it can compete successfully. In a word, China stayed conservative while Japan adapted. By the 1850s, China was losing concessions and signing "Treaties of Humiliation", while Japan was establishing itself as a regional power, seeking colonies in Korea and winning battles against Russia. Finally by 1912, China's imperial household collapsed while Japan's was gaining confidence for its imperial ambitions.
Why did China and Japan react as they did to the European's desire to trade with them?
-The rise of the West from the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries involved distant explorations and conquests resulting in a heightening and redefining of relationships among world societies. During the classical era, larger regional economies and culture zones had developed, as in the Chinese Middle Kingdom and the Mediterranean basin, but international exchanges were not of fundamental importance to the societies involved. During the postclassical period, contacts increased and were more significant. Missionary religions—Buddhism and Islam—and trade influenced important changes. The new world relationships after 1450 spelled a new period of world history. The Americas and other world areas were joined to the world network, while older regions had increased contacts. Trade became so significant that new relationships emerged among societies and prompted reconsideration of existing political and cultural traditions. The West's Commercial Outreach. Westerners, because of their superior military might, dominated international trade, but they did not displace all rivals. Asian shipping continued in Chinese and Japanese coastal waters, Muslim traders predominated along the East African littoral, and the Turks were active in the Eastern Mediterranean. Little inland territory was conquered in Africa or Asia; the Europeans sought secure harbors and built fortifications to protect their commerce and serve as contact places for inland traders. When effective indigenous states opposed such bases, Europeans gained protected trading enclaves within their cities. East Asian civilizations did not need European products; they concentrated on consumption or regional commerce. China was uninterested in international trading involvement and remained mainly outside the world economy until the end of the eighteenth century. China was powerful enough to keep Europeans in check
Depends what you mean by “European” and “China” but regardless there may have been some Europeans at the battle of Talas between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Tang Dynasty. But while that was in what was then China it is now in Kyrgyzstan.Other than that there were ethnic Europeans living in a multiracial culture in central Asia including East Turkestan which is now china’s most easterly province thousands of years ago although these people almost certainly never saw Europe.Defiantly there were Europeans from Russia in China after the invasion of the Mongols (but before Marco Polo) who were taken back to the mongol heartlands (including inner mongolia which is now a part of china).
Yes there are many Europeans who don't like Asians especially Chinese people. I don't think literally all Europeans do though.I was a bit shocked when I was at a party in Rotterdam (I look tan white, but my grandpa on my mom's side was Mexican and my grandma is Filipino; some people mistake me for being Turkish or something) and one guy my younger brother and I were talking to said, with a straight face, that "Asians are just out to fuck the system". In another incident, some Dutch women used the n-word when describing some African men who were cat calling them. I think both parties were in the wrong of course. I think part of it is nationalistic, but also part of it is that East Asian tourists are notoriously peculiar, rude, and very tourist-like when overseas. There is a little bit of truth to this. The Chinese government has now established a blacklist for Chinese Tourists Behaving Badly.One Chinese tourist wrote this on an ancient Egyptian temple, for exampleThis guy was the first person to land on the Blacklist (he got a two year Blacklist sentence): For more examples of Chinese tourists doing crazy things see Shanghaiist's top 10 most embarrassing Chinese tourists of 2015. Chinese tourists also travel in very large groups. I have been annoyed by Chinese tourists because of this at some points myself (see here) but I wouldn't ever treat them all rudely. Europeans have many different groups painted as with a target to be rude to, and some aren't based on race. France is notorious for being rude to, and having cultural misunderstandings with, Americans. I personally experienced this at a restaurant in Colmar for being American. On the other hand, Poland has a bit of a reputation for being rude to Germans.
The Silk Road trade routes were primarily used by European and Middle Eastern peoples. Africans never really ventured far out of Africa.Also, trade goods. Europeans produced higher quality steel than anyone else at the time, and high quality steel was incredibly valuable. Meanwhile, the majority of Africans were still wearing grasses and animal skins, using fire hardened wood and animal bone for weapons, and living in small tribal communities. They simply didn't have anything worth trading for.And by the time ocean trade routes to China were mapped, Africans were mostly a commodity to be traded, not people to be traded with. And the vast majority of Africa's mineral wealth was in the possession of European colonial powers.It's not very PC to say so, but the peoples of Europe and Asia were centuries ahead of Africans technologically and intellectually. The colonial powers saw Africans as primitive and inferior because, in comparison, they were. The idea of trading gunpowder with them would be like trading intercontinental missiles with people who haven't even mastered the bow yet.**This is not an attempt to condone or excuse the wrongs done during European colonialism. I do not believe that Africans and/or black people are in any way primitive or inferior. My comments pertain only to pre-colonial Africa, and are meant to emphasize the gulf in levels of advancement between African and European cultures and peoples at that time.
Why did China become a victim of imperialism by the Europeans?
China was the richest country in the world until the beginning of the 20th century. That's after the European countries had been looting, exploiting, and enslaving it for half a century. Yes, China was that rich. On the other hand, the European countries were going through the Industrial Revolution and was developing and expanding fast, they needed all the resources and wealth they could get to maintain that fast development and compete with each other. China, a country extremely rich and sub developed technologically at the same time, was an easy target. Check "Yuan Ming Yuan" in google. It was the famous "Garden of all Gardens", an imperial garden the size of a mid-sized European city. A garden where all types of sights and architecture styles in the world found its place. In 1860, the British and French army marched in, took all the precious diamonds, gold, antiques they could, raped all the imperial girls they ran into and set the garden on fire to cover up their act. It took 3,500 soldiers to set the palace on fire, 3 whole days to burn out all the treasures they couldn't take away. All this crime was praised and described in the west as an act of "protecting human rights" (Angry bare handed Chinese farmers managed to hold a dozen of western invaders prisoner and executed them before Beijing was overran). The British and French government forced the Chinese imperial government to pay 200 million pounds of silver for that invasion along. Today, the lost treasures of Yuan Ming Yuan lie in show cases of all the major Museums in the west, a scar in the heart of all Chinese. The ruins of Yuan Ming Yuan still lie to the north of Beijing, untouched as a national memory. This was just one of the dozens of incidents in one of the dozens of foreign invasions that took place during 1849-1949. Imagine the scale of the looting and killing that happened in China during that 100 years. It's why the western world is rich today, and why China chose not to . Now you understand why the European countries would invade China. Had not been the invasions, the western countries wouldn't have been able to modernize that fast. And you also know why China is still not a developed country today, and why Chinese government and people feel offended when the western medias shout "freedom", "democracy" and "human rights".
As for Japan, during the 16th century, Spain and Portugal were the first to set up connections with Japan, which during this period was undergoing a civil war. The Spanish and Portugese tried to meddle in Japan’s internal affairs and especially to force Catholizism on the Japanese (and to use it to control the country, as they had done in their previous colonies). The Dutch (and to a lesser extend, the English) were Protestants ans made it very clear that they were in Japan for trade only and not interested in taking over the country and that they respected the local authorities.Eventually the new Shogun had enough of the Spanish and Portugese interference (who used Japanese Daimyos who had converted to Catholicism to rebel against the Shogunate) and banned Christianity and kicked out the Spanish and Portugese. Many Japanese Catholics back then fled to the Philippines.