The cover of the book Chinas Hidden Century: 1796-1912 Photo:Screenshot from the website

 

Two Chinese experts published an article in the Beijing Daily on Sunday, in which they criticized the British-published book titled China's Hidden Century: 1796-1912, for what they say distorting the historical facts of China and singing praise for Western colonialism.

The book was jointly edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall, curator of the exhibition, and Julia Lovell, a professor of modern China studies at Birkbeck, University of London. The British Museum staged an exhibition with the same title of the book from May 18, 2023 to October 8, 2023.

Xia Chuntao and Cui Zhihai, experts from the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, pointed out that when talking about relations between China and Western powers in the 19th century, the book whitewashes colonial aggression and downplays wars of aggression from the standpoint of Western countries, and mistakenly equates colonization with modernization and globalization. 

To understand China and interpret what happened to the country in the 19th century in line with objective history, the experts called on the public to first have a correct view of history. One of the basic parts of Chinese history in the 19th century is that the nation was invaded by Western powers, which reduced China to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. Starting from the Opium War in 1840, in just 60 years, Western powers launched five large-scale wars of aggression against China.

Even though the invasion accelerated the disintegration of China's feudal economy and promoted the development of capitalism to a certain extent, the original intention of the wars waged by the Western powers was by no means to promote China's development and progress, the article in the Beijing Daily noted. 

When the editors of the book talk about the "positive" effect and "significance" of the Western invasion of China in the 19th century, they obviously ignore the various destructive effects of the invasion and the profound disasters brought to the Chinese people, and ignore that the entry of the great powers into China was certainly not to promote China's social progress, but to turn China into a market for its commodities and a source of raw materials - the exploitation of the colonies by the great powers, the Chinese experts pointed out.

It is an undeniable fact that after the invasion of Western powers, China's economy and society did not become richer, but poorer; China's position in the world did not rise, but greatly declined.

In effect, Western military aggression seriously harmed the Chinese people, grossly violated China's territorial sovereignty, and the huge war reparations burdened China's development at that time, while economic oppression made China's capitalist development even more difficult, the article pointed out. 

The confusion of this book's view of history has seriously affected the understanding of 19th-century China.

The editors need to be cautious about the so-called globalization perspective put forward by Western academics. This type of globalization is dominated by the West, and is essentially Westernized or capitalized, which still reflects "Western-centrism," the experts noted.

At the same time, the book obscures and dilutes the historical truth - China's national door was forcibly opened by the British with strong ships and cannons during the reign of the Daoguang Emperor (1820-1850) in the Qing Dynasty. In other words, China's involvement in the world was passive and forced. 

Through continuous exploration and struggle, and finally under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese people has striven from suffering to glory, and this constitutes the main line of China's historical development from the Opium War to the present, the Chinese experts concluded. 

Discussing the relations between China and the West in the 19th century in the preface, the editors of the book mentioned the various destruction, injuries, and adverse effects brought or inflicted on China by the European, US, and Japanese powers. Despite this, influenced by the modern view of history and the "shock - response" paradigm, there was little of this type of reflection in the actual exhibition, on the contrary, there was a large proportion of positive interpretations and elaboration of the aggression of the great powers.