Taiping Rebellion, in which millions died either in conflict or
through mass starvation. But opposition to the emperor
was not institutionalized.
The structure of Japanese political institutions was
different. The shogunate had sidelined the emperor, but as
we have seen, the Tokugawa power was not absolute, and
domains such as that of the Satsumas maintained
independence, even the ability to conduct foreign trade on
their own behalf.
As with France, an important consequence of the British
Industrial Revolution for China and Japan was military
vulnerability. China was humbled by British sea power
during the First Opium War, between 1839 and 1842, and
the same threat became all too real for the Japanese as
U.S. warships, led by Commodore Matthew Perry, pulled
into Edo Bay in 1853. The reality that economic
backwardness created military backwardness was part of
the impetus behind Shimazu Nariakira’s plan to overthrow
the shogunate and put in motion the changes that eventually
led to the Meiji Restoration. The leaders of the Satsuma
domain realized that economic growth—perhaps even
Japanese survival—could be achieved only by institutional
reforms, but the shogun opposed this because his power
was tied to the existing set of institutions. To exact reforms,
the shogun had to be overthrown, and he was. The situation
was similar in China, but the different initial political
institutions made it much harder to overthrow the emperor,
something that happened only in 1911. Instead of reforming
institutions, the Chinese tried to match the British militarily
by importing modern weapons. The Japanese built their
own armaments industry.
As a consequence of these initial differences, each
country responded differently to the challenges of the
nineteenth century, and Japan and China diverged
dramatically in the face of the critical juncture created by the
Industrial Revolution. While Japanese institutions were
being transformed and the economy was embarking on a
path of rapid growth, in China forces pushing for
institutional change were not strong enough, and extractive
institutions persisted largely unabated until they would take
a turn for the worse with Mao’s communist revolution in
1949.