How China ended Western domination
Chinese President Xi Jinping visited history museum in Beijing that surveyed the foreign abuses beginning with opium wars before moving to glories of “New China” and the “reform and opening up” post-Mao Zedong’s death, that created the world’s second- largest economy. He said: “In my view to realise the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history”.
Robert Bickers tells the story of how China became the powerful country it is today, and how China managed to keep its sovereignty and be one of the few countries not to succumb to Europe’s invasion, humiliation and looting and further exposes the corrupt, lurid modernity of pre-War Shanghai, and often tiny patches of “extra-territorial” land controlled by European powers, the entrepots of Hong Kong and Macao.
Robert Bicker’s, a professor at the University of Bristol, and the author of “The scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire”, has beautifully written the history of China’s 20th century reactions to the outside world, including the story of overcoming foreign domination and re-emerging as an economic power base.
He reveals how China’s connections with foreigners in the 20th century produced far more than just the moments of humiliation frequently.
China’s quest to overcome “western domination”, Bickers explains how the Chinese Nationalist government sought to earn foreign sympathy through culture and the International Exhibition of Chinese Art in London in 1935, and its global front in the war against Japan. The Nationalist government banned foreign films that it felt negatively portrayed China, prompting the head of Paramount Pictures to promise “nothing will be incorporated in any picture which we may produce in future which will in any way affect adversely the sensibilities of the people of your country and of its government.” According to Bickers each regime chronicled in the book sought to contort history to serve its purposes, and policing all alternative interpretations for the crime of “history nihilism.”
Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination by Robert Bickers, Allen Lane £30, 576 pages