Self-Strengthening Movement
The Self-Strengthening Movement, also known as the Westernization[1] or Western Affairs Movement[2] (c. 1861–1895), was a period of radical institutional reforms initiated in China during the late Qing dynasty following the military disasters of the Opium Wars.
Native name
Ziqiang yundong
(simplified Chinese: 自强运动; traditional Chinese: 自強運動; pinyin: zìqiáng yùndòng)
1861–1895
Western Affairs Movement
(simplified Chinese: 洋务运动; traditional Chinese: 洋務運動; pinyin: yángwù yùndòng)
The British and French burning of the Old Summer Palace in 1860 as Taiping rebel armies marched north, forced the imperial court to acknowledge the crisis. Prince Gong was made regent, Grand Councilor, and head of the newly formed Zongli Yamen (a de facto foreign affairs ministry). Local Han Chinese officials such as Zeng Guofan established private westernized militias in prosecuting the war against the rebels. Zeng and his armies eventually defeated the rebels and prosecuted efforts to import Western military technology and to translate Western scientific knowledge. They established successful arsenals, schools, and munitions factories.
In the 1870s and 1880s, their successors used their positions as provincial officials to build shipping, telegraph lines, and railways. China made substantial progress toward modernizing its heavy industry and military, but the majority of the ruling elite still subscribed to a conservative Confucian worldview, and the "self-strengtheners" were by and large uninterested in social reform beyond the scope of economic and military modernization. The Self-Strengthening Movement succeeded in securing the revival of the dynasty from the brink of eradication, sustaining it for another half-century. The considerable successes of the movement came to an abrupt end with China's defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Another major modernization effort known as the late Qing reforms started in 1901 following the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform and the invasions of the Eight-Nation Alliance.