XI.The Tweetith Century研究生英语提高.docVIP

XI. 20世纪部分 1. Imperialism in Asia and the ‘Opening of China’ Europeans began their conquests in Asia in the early sixteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, Britain dominated most of south Asia (today’s India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) and Australasia (Australia and New Zealand). They had begun to expand into Southeast Asia, annexing much of Burma (now Myanmar) in 1853. This led them into competition with the French who landed troops in Annam (Vietnam) in 1858. Most of the East Indies had been claimed by the Dutch (the Dutch East Indies, today Indonesia) or the Spanish (the Philippines) for centuries. China and Japan had largely resisted Western penetration, except for toeholds such as Hong Kong, which the British leased in 1841. The new imperialism refreshed the European appetite for Asia. Between 1882 and 1884 the French subjugated the region of modern Vietnam, and their expedition continued until Cambodia (1887) and Laos (1893) were combined with Annam to form French Indo-China. This prompted the British to complete their annexation of Burma (1886) and to reach south for the Malay States (today Malaysia), which became a British-run federation in 1896. By the turn of the century, only Siam (Thailand) remained independent in the entire subcontinent, and Siamese freedom depended upon Anglo-French inability to compromise. Most of Southeast Asia had been under the loose suzerainty of the Manchu dynasty of China, and the European conquests of 1882–96 exposed the vulnerability of that regime. Japan’s easy military victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95—the result of a decade of rivalry over Korea, which Japan seized in 1894—underscored that lesson. The Treaty of Shimonoseki ended that war, with China granting independence to Korea and ceding the province of Kwantung (west of Korea) and the island of Formosa (Taiwan) to Japan. Europeans could not resist exploiting the infirmity of the Chinese Empire. Their initial intervention, however, was agai