Chapter 19 - Empire in Collision

In today's reading, it is talking about the European Empires going in for the final kill of the Middle East and East Asia. The China's Century of Crisis began in 1793-1911, about an emperor Qianlong was the last great Manchu emperor. The 19th century marks the end of China's greatness agricultural and military decline, combines with administrative and economic collapse led to higher taxes and peasant unrest. The picture on the left of the first page on the reading caught my attention while reading this chapter. It made me wonder and I think it is talking about groups of the European, Middle East, and East Asia trying to come together to form a treaty and be fair with one another however, it is not working because the man with the knife just cut the pie in half. This French cartoon is called Carving Up the Pie of China. It is from the late 1890s, the Great Powers of the day starting from the left the woman is Great Britain's Queen Victoria, the man is Germany's Kaiser Wihelm, the next man is Russia's Tsar Nicholas II, and the female figure having her hand on the Russian guy represents France, and finally the guy at the far end right is the Meiji emperor of Japan. The Germany man is dividing China, while a Chinese figure behind them tries helplessly to yell, "STOP" for cutting his country in half. There are multiple conflicts between Europe, Middle East, and East Asia. The British Opium Wars was in 1839-1842 and 1856-1858, led to the Taiping Uprising, in which China lost 20 to 30 million people, gained an ever increasing deficit, and surrender to foreign occupation. Frederick Townsend Ward was one of the White/Europeans fighter for the Manchus against the Taiping rebels. In 1895, China lost in a war with Japan and lost control of Vietnam, Korea, and Taiwan, and in 1898-1901 the internal uprising called the Boxer Rebellion led to Western including USA powers controlling China. The 19th century was not a pleasant one for China not the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. In 1872-1881 the Chinese government sent Chinese Education Mission about 120 Chinese students to America to study Western subjects with the understanding that they would return to China to help to reform the government. The Ottoman Empire, "Sick Man of European" was still the central political fixture of a widespread Islamic world. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, which was to cut off Britain from India was beginning of a series of invasions into Ottoman territories that Muhammad Ali conquered Egypt in 1808 and established an empire lasting until 1952. Now shifting to the Modernization Japanese Style, the technologies gave Japan an advantage and opportunity to change their country to become a more rapid environment. While reading this section, I realized there were a lot art. Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts artworks, expressing the author's imaginative or technical skill. I think Strayer included the art in the reading to let the reader not just read and try to understand the reading, but also visualize the reading. Most people can understand the reading well with pictures, while others cannot so when the art is illustrated in the text they can see to make connection with the text. For me I am a visual learner so when I see pictures of the map or how it was like in the past I have a better connection because I can see people's emotions on their face or how difficult it was like living without technologies.