Chinese scholarly works in Japan on the eve of Meiji restoration

The Opium War in China erupted in 1840 and culminated in signing of the Nanking Treaty. After 14 years, America induced Japan to sign the Convention of Kanagawa, which opened the country to foreign penetration. Thus, under the influence of external factors, China and Japan emerged from isolation, but found themselves under the yoke of unequal treaties, which limited their sovereign rights and provided Western powers with unilateral financial and legal benefits. In order to recover from the crisis, Japan started to move towards radical changes, though China increasingly turned into a semi-colony of foreign powers. However, China had played a decisive role before and during the initial period of the Meiji Restoration, introducing Japan to the work of its scholars who described foreign countries and wrote about scientific achievements of the latter. In the 1840s, knowledge of the wider world was important to China’s defense against Western intrusion, and a handful of Chinese scholar-officials who shared this view engaged in the serious study of foreign nations. A small but influential group of the Chinese embarked on the mission to expand China’s knowledge of the West; they did so in the belief that this was essential to China’s survival. The comprehensive accounts put together by Lin Zexu 林則徐 (1785-1850), Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794-1856), and Xu Jiyu 徐継審 (1795-1873), and shorter works by other authors suggest the importance of this new perspective. The historical role of the above mentioned representatives of social thought of 19th century China goes considerably beyond the period of their activity. Their positive influence on their contemporaries and on the social thought of subsequent generations, though studied insufficiently, is generally recognized. They were the first who showed interest in the outside world, scientific and technological achievements of the West being, at the same time, in an extremely unfavorable situation of Anglo-Chinese conflict. They became opponents to the policy of isolation. These, pioneering works influenced the whole generation of the nineteenth-century Chinese and Japanese intellectuals in defining the shapes of world politics and by introducing the basic, elementary information which helped China shape ideas about the manifold sources of Western power. Information given in this paper indicates attention to the works of Chinese scholars, which was noted in Japanese society on the eve of Meiji Restoration.