How did China and Japan have different "destinies" in the twentieth century? Did they react differently to pressures from the West?
What will be an ideal response?
ANSWER:
Students should recognize that China and Japan shared a common heritage in many ways, but in the modern period they were on a "collision course." Students should discuss Chinese and Japanese rising populations as well as the social and economic changes facing each country. In China in 1908, the Empress Dowager Cixi died and the Qing dynasty collapsed. Sun Yat-sen took over the government, but his government was powerless in the face of local military strongmen called warlords. Sun Yat-sen resigned and a powerful warlord, Yuan Shikai, took over. By World War I, Japan's economy was growing rapidly. Japan also used the war as an opportunity to seize territory in China. In 1915 Japan presented China with the Twenty-One Demands, which would have made China a Japanese protectorate. The Chinese violently protested these Twenty-One Demands, and thirty years of fighting began between the two countries. The peace treaty at the end of the First World War allowed Japan to keep former German territory in China, triggering a student-led protest movement called the May Fourth Movement.
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