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1. Political Development of the Reform Movement The political reform movement that evolved from the Yangwu movement during the 1890s is primarily associated with the name Kang Youwei. In a memorandum from December 1888 (which, however, never reached the throne), the young scholar and examination candidate had demanded that the government change its methods in light of the impotence it had demonstrated in its war against France. On May 2, 1895, after the humiliating defeat of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, h…

The Comintern (CI), founded in Moscow in March 1919, conceived itself as the party of the world revolution. Its task was the "organization of revolutionary mass movements against capitalism" (Stalin, 1925). The parties associated with the Comintern were subject to Moscow's directives, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was officially associated with the CI since 1922. From the beginning of the 1920s through the 1940s, the Comintern had a direct influence on the Communist movement in China. Th…

Until the 1860s, Chinese did not know anything specific about Germany. It merely appeared on Chinese maps of the world from the 14th and 16th centuries and in geographical accounts of the first half of the 19th century. Chinese became interested in Prussia and the German Reich (state) established under its lead only in the wake of the Sino-Prussian Treaty in 1861, and especially after the military victory over France in 1870-71. At this early stage, the image of Germany was characterized by two factors: (1) Chinese esteem for German militar…

The first political associations striving from the removal of the Manchu Qing dynasty in the light of the powerlessness of the ossified regime in the face of the growing threat to national sovereignty from foreign powers formed as early as the mid-1880s. The Revive China Society ( Xing Zhong hui), founded by Sun Yatsen in Honolulu in November 1894 as a kind of secret society and which in early 1895 had established a branch in Hong Kong, demanded: (1) the expulsion of the Manchu, (2) the rebirth of China, and (3) the establishment of a democrat…