Hundred Days' Reform in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895, not long after the First (1839–1842) and Second (1856–1860) Opium Wars; this blow came as a major shock to the Chinese, because Japan had been regarded as a tributary state, was much smaller than China, and was regarded as inferior. China also fought France in the Sino-French War from 1884 to 1885. Moreover, the defeat of China by Japan led to a scramble for "privileges" in China by other foreign powers, notably by the German Empire and Russia, further awakening the conservatives. Before the First Sino-Japanese War, China engaged in technological modernization only,
Foreign aid to China Foreign aid to China Foreign aid to the People's Republic of China since 1949 has taken the form of both bilateral and multilateral official development assistance and official aid to individual recipients. In 1978, China and Japan normalized their diplomatic relations. Deng Xiaoping had been to Japan to sign a treaty and to look at its development. As a result, China decided to borrow 220 million dollars in soft loans from Japan when the amount of foreign currency preparation was 167 million dollars. China poured that money into social infrastructures. In 2001 it received US$1.4 billion in foreign aid, or