Periodization In China

Periodization–what the question is concerned principally with–has all too often been construed as an elusive manifestation of human desire for the structure in historical knowledge. Nevertheless, it is not only concerned with division of time into definitive periods, but more importantly with acknowledgement of historical continuity. Historical events are ostensibly asymmetrical and discontinuous in terms of their attributes and agents, yet it is possible to identify a common perspective of events within a specific chronological frame.
It would also be possible to conceive of an overriding continuity underlying all the concerned events. The onslaught of foreign aggression that originated from the Opium Wars gave impetus to the anti-imperialistic

However, there had been recent skepticism among Western scholars of this once-dominant view on Chinese modern history. The historian Philip Kuhn, in his work Origins of the Modern Chinese State, also dismissed it as “a larger discussion emerging within China” and attempted to trace the origins of the Chinese reform agenda from the crisis of the 1790s (popular rebellions on the frontier regions and natural calamities). Notwithstanding his well-grounded acknowledgement of the continuity that links the earlier reforms with the later modernization campaigns, there are reasons to believe that the Opium Wars represented an abrupt turning point in the Chinese reform

Preceding the First Opium War, the conventional scholarship of the Confucian classics was the source of the guidance in all spheres of life, not least in the Qing court. For instance, Wei too had anchored his constitutional thoughts on the Confucian classics, the Book of Odes. Yet when the state was menaced by the foreign colonialism, it became harder to appeal for the traditional Confucian values. Towards the end of the Qing dynasty, the traditional Confucian conservatism had altogether lost any relevance and became to be understood as the cause of Chinese backwardness. Frustrations at the continued foreign scramble for encroachments and the decisive defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War would further strengthen this anti-traditionalistic strand of thinking, inflaming the popular resentment for the Manchu’s imperial order (1911 Revolution) and precipitate the gradual evolution of Chinese modernization campaigns from the adoption of foreign technologies of warfare to the extensive emulation of foreign technologies, institutions and philosophies (May-fourth