FROM WESTERNIZATION TO EASTERNIZATION

THE IDEA that the era of Westernization is coming to a close seems self-evident when viewed from a dynamic Asian city such as Shanghai or Singapore. It is not just that the evidence of growth and change is all around us. It is also that the Chinese, in particular, perceive the past as naturally cyclical. With a continuous history that extends across thousands of years, the Chinese are accustomed to the rise and fall of dynasties — with periods of prosperity and progress being followed by periods of chaos and regression. By contrast, the United States, whose history as a nation goes back only to the Declaration of Independence of 1776, has a more linear view: The history of the American republic has moved only one way, toward greater prosperity and global power. The notion of national decline — or even of cyclical rises and falls in power — seems much stranger and more alien to Americans than to the Chinese.

America's period as the dominant global power represents the extension of a period of Western dominance of global affairs that began in the late 1400s, with the beginning of Europe's imperial age. The voyages of discovery from Portugal and Spain that began in the 1480s opened up Asia and the Americas to European exploration and, in the process, transformed the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world.

European traders, colonists, and soldiers were able to reach Asia relatively swiftly by this time because of their technological lead in oceangoing ships. This was an area of human endeavor in which the Chinese had once led the world. In 1405, the Chinese admiral Zheng He led a fleet of nearly three hundred vessels and twenty-seven thousand sailors from Nanjing to Sri Lanka. In other voyages, Zheng He reached the Strait of Malacca, East Africa, and Java. The contrast between the size of the Chinese admiral's expeditions and the early voyages of Christopher Columbus is striking. When Columbus set sail from Cádiz in 1492, "he led just ninety men in three ships."

But China's emperors seem to have seen more threats than opportunities in the expansion of global trade. Some thirty years after Zheng He reached Sri Lanka, China's rulers banned oceanic exploration — probably on the grounds that it was a waste of resources. By contrast, Europe's warring kingdoms and empires competed to develop new and better ships and to expand their trading opportunities around the globe. Portugal's ability to explore first Africa and then Asia and the Americas was spurred by naval innovations sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator in the 1400s. These led Vasco da Gama to lay the foundations for the European imperial conquest of Asia, when he discovered the sea route from Europe to India in 1498.

The first European colonies in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, established by the Portuguese and then the Dutch, British, and French, were essentially trading posts. But the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century inspired technological advances and a drive for new markets that moved European imperialism in Asia into a new and more expansionist phase. Again Europe benefited from the fact that it had established a technological lead in a field in which Asia had once led the world. It was, famously, the Chinese who invented gunpowder, and the first guns seem to have appeared in China in the 1100s. It was in war-torn Europe, however, that firearms were developed most rapidly. As a result, when European and Asian armies clashed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Asians were easily outgunned.

The collision between the industrial and military might of the West and the ruling classes of Asia was a mismatch. Britain's East India Company was founded in 1600 and remained a largely commercial enterprise for its first 150 years. In 1756, however, when a local ruler expelled the company from its trading post in Calcutta, the company reacted by sending a naval force to retake the city. In 1757, East India Company forces defeated the nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the Battle of Plassey. Over the following century, the company used its military might to extend British rule across the Indian subcontinent, often in conjunction with local allies. It was not until 1858 that the British Raj was formally established in India, displacing indirect rule by the East India Company.

By the mid-nineteenth century, India had become the launch pad for an assault on the Chinese markets. Britain's desire to sell opium produced in India to Chinese consumers led to the notorious First Opium War of 1839–1842. When the Chinese authorities attempted to stop the opium trade in 1839 and expelled the British official delegated to supervise the commerce, there was an outcry in Britain at this violation of trade agreements. The British dispatched the Royal Navy to China. Its new all-iron steamers ensured an unequal fight. It was no accident that the anthem "Rule, Britannia," exulted that "Britannia rules the waves."

After Britain's destruction of the Chinese fleet, invading forces temporarily occupied Canton and Shanghai. In 1842, what the Chinese called the "unequal" Treaty of Nanjing was signed, forcing the Chinese to cede Hong Kong island to Britain in perpetuity (it was returned in 1997) and to open five "treaty ports" to European trade. In the 1850s, the Europeans returned to the offensive — in pursuit of further trade privileges. In one notorious incident, in i860, British and French armies burned the Chinese emperor's Summer Palace outside Beijing.

As the Anglo-French destruction of the Summer Palace illustrated, it was not only the British who demanded trading privileges at the point of a gun. By the end of the nineteenth century, the French, the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans had all been granted trading concessions in ports up and down the Chinese coast.

This pattern of the forcible opening of Asian markets by Western powers was replicated in Japan. In this case, it was American gunboat diplomacy that led the way. Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States and his fleet of black ships arrived in Japan in 1853, on a mission to compel Japan to open its ports to international trade. The Japanese were well aware of the military humiliations suffered by China. Rather than risk a comprehensive defeat, Japan signed a treaty in 1854, granting the main Western powers trading rights similar to those they already enjoyed in China.

In Japan's case, however, confrontation with the West and the internal...