section_path: Western European and Russian intrusions into China
section_name: Western European and Russian intrusions into China
paragraph_text: Western European and Russian intrusions into China
  
  The 16th century brought many Jesuit missionaries to China, such as Matteo Ricci, who established missions where Western science was introduced, and where Europeans gathered knowledge of Chinese society, history, culture, and science. During the 18th century, merchants from Western Europe came to China in increasing numbers. However, merchants were confined to Guangzhou and the Portuguese colony of Macau, as they had been since the 16th century. European traders were increasingly irritated by what they saw as the relatively high customs duties they had to pay and by the attempts to curb the growing import trade in opium. By 1800, its importation was forbidden by the imperial government. However, the opium trade continued to boom.
  
  Early in the 19th century, serious internal weaknesses developed in the Qing dynasty which left China vulnerable to Western, Meiji period Japanese, and Russian imperialism. In 1839, China found itself fighting the First Opium War with Britain. China was defeated, and in 1842, signed the provisions of the Treaty of Nanking which were first of the unequal treaties signed during the Qing dynasty. Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain, and certain ports, including Shanghai and Guangzhou, were opened to British trade and residence. In 1856, the Second Opium War broke out. The Chinese were again defeated, and now forced to the terms of the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin. The treaty opened new ports to trade and allowed foreigners to travel in the interior. In addition, Christians gained the right to propagate their religion. The United States Treaty of Wanghia and Russia later obtained the same prerogatives in separate treaties.
  
  Toward the end of the 19th century, China appeared on the way to territorial dismemberment and economic vassalage—the fate of India's rulers that played out much earlier. Several provisions of these treaties caused long-standing bitterness and humiliation among the Chinese: extraterritoriality (meaning that in a dispute with a Chinese person, a Westerner had the right to be tried in a court under the laws of his own country), customs regulation, and the right to station foreign warships in Chinese waters, including its navigable rivers.
  
  Jane E. Elliott criticized the allegation that China refused to modernize or was unable to defeat Western armies as simplistic, noting that China embarked on a massive military modernization in the late 1800s after several defeats, buying weapons from Western countries and manufacturing their own at arsenals, such as the Hanyang Arsenal during the Boxer Rebellion. In addition, Elliott questioned the claim that Chinese society was traumatized by the Western victories, as many Chinese peasants (90% of the population at that time) living outside the concessions continued about their daily lives, uninterrupted and without any feeling of "humiliation".
  
  Historians have judged the Qing dynasty's vulnerability and weakness to foreign imperialism in the 19th century to be based mainly on its maritime naval weakness while it achieved military success against westerners on land, the historian Edward L. Dreyer said that "China’s nineteenth-century humiliations were strongly related to her weakness and failure at sea. At the start of the Opium War, China had no unified navy and no sense of how vulnerable she was to attack from the sea; British forces sailed and steamed wherever they wanted to go......In the Arrow War (1856-1860), the Chinese had no way to prevent the Anglo-French expedition of 1860 from sailing into the Gulf of Zhili and landing as near as possible to Beijing. Meanwhile, new but not exactly modern Chinese armies suppressed the midcentury rebellions, bluffed Russia into a peaceful settlement of disputed frontiers in Central Asia, and defeated the French forces on land in the Sino-French War (1884-1885). But the defeat of the fleet, and the resulting threat to steamship traffic to Taiwan, forced China to conclude peace on unfavorable terms."
  
  During the Sino-French War, Vietnamese forces defeated the French at the Battle of Cầu Giấy (Paper Bridge), Bắc Lệ ambush, Battle of Phu Lam Tao, Battle of Zhenhai, the Battle of Tamsui in the Keelung Campaign and in the last battle which ended the war, the Battle of Bang Bo (Zhennan Pass), which triggered the French Retreat from Lạng Sơn and resulted in the collapse of the French Jules Ferry government in the Tonkin Affair.
  
  The Qing dynasty forced Russia to hand over disputed territory in Ili in the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1881), in what was widely seen by the west as a diplomatic victory for the Qing. Russia acknowledged that Qing China potentially posed a serious military threat. Mass media in the west during this era portrayed China as a rising military power due to its modernization programs and as a major threat to the western world, invoking fears that China would successfully conquer western colonies like Australia.
  
  The British observer Demetrius Charles de Kavanagh Boulger suggested a British-Chinese alliance to check Russian expansion in Central Asia.
  
  During the Ili crisis when Qing China threatened to go to war against Russia over the Russian occupation of Ili, the British officer Charles George Gordon was sent to China by Britain to advise China on military options against Russia should a potential war break out between China and Russia.
  
  The Russians observed the Chinese building up their arsenal of modern weapons during the Ili crisis, the Chinese bought thousands of rifles from Germany. In 1880, massive amounts of military equipment and rifles were shipped via boats to China from Antwerp as China purchased torpedoes, artillery, and 260,260 modern rifles from Europe.
  
  The Russian military observer D. V. Putiatia visited China in 1888 and found that in Northeastern China (Manchuria) along the Chinese-Russian border, the Chinese soldiers were potentially able to become adept at "European tactics" under certain circumstances, and the Chinese soldiers were armed with modern weapons like Krupp artillery, Winchester carbines, and Mauser rifles.
  
  Compared to Russian controlled areas, more benefits were given to the Muslim Kirghiz on the Chinese controlled areas. Russian settlers fought against the Muslim nomadic Kirghiz, which led the Russians to believe that the Kirghiz would be a liability in any conflict against China. The Muslim Kirghiz were sure that in an upcoming war, that China would defeat Russia.
  
  Russian sinologists, the Russian media, threat of internal rebellion, the pariah status inflicted by the Congress of Berlin, the negative state of the Russian economy all led Russia to concede and negotiate with China in St Petersburg, and return most of Ili to China.
  
  The rise of Japan since the Meiji Restoration as an imperial power led to further subjugation of China. In a dispute over China's longstanding claim of suzerainty in Korea, war broke out between China and Japan, resulting in humiliating defeat for the Chinese. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), China was forced to recognize effective Japanese rule of Korea and Taiwan was ceded to Japan until its recovery in 1945 at the end of the WWII by the Republic of China.
  
  China's defeat at the hands of Japan was another trigger for future aggressive actions by Western powers. In 1897, Germany demanded and was given a set of exclusive mining and railroad rights in Shandong province. Russia obtained access to Dairen and Port Arthur and the right to build a railroad across Manchuria, thereby achieving complete domination over a large portion of northwestern China. The United Kingdom and France also received a number of concessions. At this time, much of China was divided up into "spheres of influence": Germany had influence in Jiaozhou (Kiaochow) Bay, Shandong, and the Yellow River valley; Russia had influence in the Liaodong Peninsula and Manchuria; the United Kingdom had influence in Weihaiwei and the Yangtze Valley; and France had influence in the Guangzhou Bay and the provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi.
  
  China continued to be divided up into these spheres until the United States, which had no sphere of influence, grew alarmed at the possibility of its businessmen being excluded from Chinese markets. In 1899, Secretary of State John Hay asked the major powers to agree to a policy of equal trading privileges. In 1900, several powers agreed to the U.S.-backed scheme, giving rise to the " Open Door " policy, denoting freedom of commercial access and non-annexation of Chinese territory. In any event, it was in the European powers' interest to have a weak but independent Chinese government. The privileges of the Europeans in China were guaranteed in the form of treaties with the Qing government. In the event that the Qing government totally collapsed, each power risked losing the privileges that it already had negotiated.
  
  The erosion of Chinese sovereignty and seizures of land from Chinese by foreigners contributed to a spectacular anti-foreign outbreak in June 1900, when the " Boxers " (properly the society of the "righteous and harmonious fists") attacked foreigners around Beijing. The Imperial Court was divided into anti-foreign and pro-foreign factions, with the pro-foreign faction led by Ronglu and Prince Qing hampering any military effort by the anti-foreign faction led by Prince Duan and Dong Fuxiang. The Qing Empress Dowager ordered all diplomatic ties to be cut off and all foreigners to leave the legations in Beijing to go to Tianjin. The foreigners refused to leave. Fueled by entirely false reports that the foreigners in the legations were massacred, the Eight-Nation Alliance decided to launch an expedition on Beijing to reach the legations but they underestimated the Qing military. The Qing and Boxers defeated the foreigners at the Seymour Expedition, forcing them to turn back at the Battle of Langfang. In response to the foreign attack on the Taku Forts the Qing responded by declaring war against the foreigners. the Qing forces and foreigners fought a fierce battle at the Battle of Tientsin before the foreigners could launch a second expedition. On their second try Gaselee Expedition, with a much larger force, the foreigners managed to reach Beijing and fight the Battle of Peking. British and French forces looted, plundered and burned the Old Summer Palace to the ground for the second time (the first time being in 1860, following the Second Opium War). German forces were particularly severe in exacting revenge for the killing of their ambassador due to the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who held anti-Asian sentiments, while Russia tightened its hold on Manchuria in the northeast until its crushing defeat by Japan in the war of 1904–1905. The Qing court evacuated to Xi'an and threatened to continue the war against foreigners, until the foreigners tempered their demands in the Boxer Protocol, promising that China would not have to give up any land and gave up the demands for the execution of Dong Fuxiang and Prince Duan.
  
  The correspondent Douglas Story observed Chinese troops in 1907 and praised their abilities and military skill.
  
  Extraterritorial jurisdiction was abandoned by the United Kingdom and the United States in 1943. Chiang Kai-shek forced the French to hand over all their concessions back to China control after World War II. Foreign political control over leased parts of China ended with the incorporation of Hong Kong and the small Portuguese territory of Macau into the People's Republic of China in 1997 and 1999 respectively.