Chinese Imperialism In The Early 20th Century

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The “west” is as old as time (Bonner 2004, p. 5). From pre-history to the modern era, the Chinese have a long tradition of using it to describe both their physical and spiritual diaspora: ”Just as the light of heaven moves towards the west, so does the human race hasten towards death” (Bonner 2004, p. 4). Its meaning is diverse- a compass point, the place of the setting sun, the place of death and the direction whence the European ‘conquistadores’ sailed (Bonner 2004, p. 5). However, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that the “West” was capitalized and politicized (Bonner 2004, p. 5), the new gentrification becoming aligned with the ‘politique’ of Protestant, capitalist, liberal democracy, the “East” having long devolved into its exotic …show more content…
47) with no country occupied apart from the Americas. However, the Industrial Revolution’s insatiable demand for raw materials (Mill 1998, p. 2) gave birth to ‘New Imperialism’, an actively bellicose and mentally racist practice governed by avaricious economics, aggressive religion and ruthless politics, which is blatantly depicted in Mill’s (1998, ps.1-3) concise treatise, ‘On Colonies and Colonization, 1848.’ According to Hopkins (2002, p.19): ‘The concept of the West is itself an invention that owes a great deal to interaction with the non-European world,” yet a combination of entitlement and ‘rassenlehre’ obliged Western imperialists to “civilize the heathen savages” (Broome 2010, p. 2), which would ultimately entail, in the majority of cases, disenfranchising the rightful owners, murdering the resistors, stealing the children, plundering the resources and exploiting the women (Broome 2010, ps.4, 29, 177). It was in this climate of ‘realpolitik’ (Catherine Dewhirst, 2014) that Australia, formerly New Holland, was …show more content…
Hobson (2005, p. 71, 94) considered new imperialism to have been corrupted “by its collusion with capitalism”, arguing that it was the by-product of ‘under consumption’, resulting from the lack of spending power of the industrial working class and the subsequent need to find new investments for ‘surplus capital’. Whatever the agenda, Asia, the South Pacific Basin and Africa were ripe for the picking and little time was wasted by the capitalist class-the bankers and financiers in particular, as well as the Rupert Murdochs of the day in whipping up popular sentiments of jingoism as self-serving dogma. Compelling economic motives had taken over from ‘power and glory’ as the driving force of imperialism, supported theoretically by the populist racial theory of the day, Polygenism, that suggested that Negroid and Asian cultures did not share the same lineage as Caucasians, but an alternate, inferior one and therefore would never improve or ultimately thrive (One Race or Several Species,
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