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This essay explores China’s struggles against imperialism from the eighteenth century to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.
Renowned American historian Charles Beard in 1947 warned that a US policy of military interventionism in defence of economic interests would lead to ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’, a phrase that would be used over and over again by critics of US foreign policy, from the historian William Appleman Williams to the playwright and man of letters Gore Vidal. Imperialism would lead to this in China and much of the world.
There are three major organisational systems which have been used by imperialist powers in modern history. The first and best known is colonialism – the establishment of formal colonies; for example, the British in India and later Chinese Hong Kong, the French in Indochina, the Japanese in Korea and later Chinese Taiwan, and the US in...
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Selected Works
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Markowitz, N. (2020). China: Anti-imperialism from the Manchu Empire to the People’s Republic. In: Ness, I., Cope, Z. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_300-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_300-1
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