Following the humiliation of the Opium Wars, China was thrown into complete disarray. The gigantic wooden fleets of the Chinese navy had fallen to under forty British vessels and a foreign force ten times smaller than its army. The former notions of sino-supremacy began to crumble: the Qing imperial government, the son of Heaven was vulnerable to foreign pressure.

New philosophies erupted to fill in the void left by sino-supremacy. Witnessing the weakness of the Qing dynasty that capitulated to the demands of the foreign invaders, scholars and grassroot nationalists alike began to search for a new global outlook for the survival of their nation. No longer was China the “Middle Kingdom”, the center of the universe, as its military and technological disadvantages became increasingly clear in contrast to the industrialized steam powered nations of the West. Throughout the search for a path to a reformed China, one philosophy that gained a great following was Lin Zexu’s idea of “using Western methods to defeat Westerners”. Somewhat similar to the concept of fighting fire with fire, this idea proposed for the adoption of Western techniques to Qing China’s repertoire. This notion can be seen as an adaption of many older Chinese adages, one of which states that if three men walk together, each can find a master in the others for some area of knowledge. Going by this model that encourages voracious learning by example, Lin identifies two main areas to model after: European weapons technology and European logistics. His ideas inspired later thinkers such as Wei Yuan, an official who later spearheaded the translation of foreign literature into China’s first encyclopedia of the world, and Feng Guifen, a scholar who delved in the “European studies” of mathematics, physics, chemistry and agriculture, notably remarking that Qing China was far behind the Europeans in matters regarding the divisions of class between the aristocracy and the people. Yet astute sociological observations such as those by Feng Guifen were rare. Although most of these liberal scholars advocated for the adoption of Western technologies, in general, it may be said that there was a reluctance to alter the fundamental cultural fabric of Qing China.

Meanwhile, the brunt of the reparations from the unequal treaties fell upon the largely agricultural populace of China. After the opium epidemic and a brutal military defeat, a series of famines exacerbated the discontent of the Chinese people as poverty and starvation descended. In the 1850s, a large number of popular uprisings sprung up all over China. Seeing an opportunity in the fragile state of the Qing court after the first Opium war, numerous ethnic minorities oppressed by both the Han Chinese and the Manchu Qing attempted to gain their own independence. From the Nian rebellion in north to the Miao and Muslim rebellions in the southwest, the era was reigned by complete upheaval. It was in this environment that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom arose under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan. Absorbing his own version of scripture from Christian missionaries, Hong proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus and gathered a force of 500,000 peasant believers against the Qing dynastic forces. The Qing army itself was spread thin and largely ineffective until foreign advisors intervened after the major trading port of Shanghai was threatened by a Taiping incursion. Although it ultimately ended in failure, the Taiping rebellion left an indelible mark in Chinese history as one of the bloodiest conflicts in the 19th century, with a death toll of 20 million, almost 30 times the total death toll of the American Civil War and 4 million more than the total casualties of World War I, wrought mostly through the onslaught of famine and disease in the aftermath of the battlefields.

The deciding factor of foreign advisors like British officer Charles Gordon with Western military knowledge and actual battle results in the Taiping Rebellion further stimulated the intellectual focus of scholars in the court. The Taiping doctrines themselves could be seen, in part, to be a catastrophe stemming from Western missionary influences as a corrupting factor, yet the formidable results of the European counsel on military victories was undeniable. Along with the existing literature from Lin Zexu’s generation advocating for imitation of foreigners, the threat of the Taiping rebellion gave birth to the Self-Strengthening movement; a call from the landed gentry for a supplementation of the Qing governing structure with Western technology.