Japanese Perspectives on China’s Early Modernization

The present broad survey has two principal objectives. First, it seeks to introduce as comprehensively as practicable the works of Japanese historians on the self-strengthening movement up to the end of 1971. Second, it is intended as a case study that illustrates the changing attitudes among Japanese scholars toward China since the middle of the nineteenth century. During the past two decades historians such as Knight Biggerstaff, Albert Feuerwerker, and John Rawlinson in the United States and Li Kuo-ch’i, Lü Shi-ch’iang, and Wang Frh-min in Tawian have produced valuable studies which deal with various aspects of the self-strengthening movement in late nineteenth-century China. In the same period, not fully known to their colleagues elsewhere, Japanese historians have also produced a considerable number of studies on the same subject. Many of these offer new perspectives and factual reconstructions that all students in the field need to consider. It was with the hope of drawing attention to and analyzing this body of historical literature that the present bibliographical survey was undertaken.