By the end of the nineteenth century, growing numbers of thoughtful Chinese recognized that their country was in crisis. Repeated European military interventions since the first Opium War in 1839 had humiliated the once proud Middle Kingdom, reducing it to a semicolonial dependent of various European powers. A decisive military defeat in a war with Japan in 1894–1895 represented a further humiliation at the hands of a small country long under the cultural influence of China. China also continued to face the enormous problem of widespread poverty among its peasant population, a dilemma reflected in repeated upheavals in the countryside. Both of these issues—foreign imperialism and peasant rebellion—found expression in the Boxer Uprising of 1898–1901. This upheaval demonstrated—once again—the ability of China’s vast peasant population to make its presence felt in the political life of the country as it had in the Taiping Uprising of the 1850s and ’60s. The Boxer Rebellion’s virulent anti-foreign and anti-Christian outlook disclosed the depth of feeling against imperialism even among rural dwellers. The outcome of that rebellion—foreign occupation of Beijing and large reparation payments from China’s government—revealed China’s continuing weakness relative to European and Japanese powers.

In this context, many plans for changing China emerged. Some of them were reformist and aimed at preserving the Qing dynasty regime; others were more revolutionary and sought to replace dynastic China with a new society and political system altogether. During a brief three-month period in 1898, known as the Hundred Days of Reform, and then again in the decade following the Boxer Uprising, some of these reform proposals began to be implemented, including the end of the traditional civil service examination system and creation of elected provincial assemblies. But more substantial change in China had to await the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the end of the monarchy in 1912, and the most dramatic changes occurred after the communists came to power in 1949. Nonetheless, the proposals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were significant, for they reveal both the mounting pressures for a new path and the obstacles that confronted those who advocated such changes.