The Rise of China

When Mao Zedong stood at the Gate of Heavenly Peace on October 1, 1949, and declared the founding of the People's Republic, he was closing a chapter that had opened with the Opium Wars a century earlier. Between 1839 and 1949, China had been carved up by foreign powers, shattered by civil war, occupied by Japan, and reduced from the center of its own civilizational world to a state that could not defend its borders or feed its people.

This matters for understanding everything that came after. The phrase "century of humiliation" is not just rhetoric. It is the psychological bedrock of modern Chinese nationalism, the lens through which the Communist Party justifies its rule and frames its ambitions. When Chinese officials today speak of "national rejuvenation," they are speaking to this wound. The Qing dynasty's collapse, the unequal treaties, the foreign concessions in Shanghai and Hong Kong, the Nanjing Massacre: these are not distant memories in Chinese political life. They are active, load-bearing narratives.

Mao's revolution promised to end all of it. China would stand up. No foreign power would dictate terms again. The question was what kind of country would replace the old one.