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“This lion has awoken”
Napoleon once said China was a sleeping lion, and “when she wakes she will shake the world”.
What Napoleon meant was that the lion may never wake. In fact, the lion has always been sleeping.
In 1840, around the time of the First Opium War, Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan tried to wake China with their “Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms.” But unintentionally, it pushed the hand of the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
Waking the sleeping lion needed more painful lessons.
The Japanese aggression in 1937 was a real wake-up call. Without a bitter decline, there was no glorious rise. But the cost of waking was enormous. China saw 35 million soldiers and civilians dead or wounded in the war, and lost 600 billion U.S. dollars in tangible assets, while the loss of intangible assets is beyond calculation. Amid the suffering, the people’s awareness and ability to organize was unprecedented.
In 1938, when the war seemed to be at its worst, historian Jiang Tingfu raised a question, “The fundamental question in the last 100 years of the Chinese people is: Can the Chinese people modernize and catch up with the West? Can the Chinese people learn to use science and machines? Can we abolish the concepts generated from our families and our homelands to form a modern nation-state? If the answer is yes, our future is bright; if not, we as a nation have no future.”
After more than three decades of failure, the Republic of China rendered itself unqualified to answer the question. The People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, fundamentally eradicated feudal and semi-feudal, colonial and semi-colonial attitudes and institutions, and overcame the state of disunity. When we look back at the past, we can see that without national consciousness forged in national survival, without the people’s organization formed during the resistance, without the troops forged in the war, victory would never have come so soon.
In the book “World Politics,” authors Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr say most countries were formed in war. China is no exception. The New China was founded after it defeated the invaders. Harvard Professor Joseph S. Nye said the sign of a major power is that it can win a war. It is the spirit of all the people united as one and together facing a national calamity that helped win the war and lift China to become a major power. The deciding factor was the Chinese people’s national awareness, unprecedented unity and bravery. This was the key to realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Before the New China was founded, Mao Zedong said China must have independence, must be liberated and Chinese affairs must be decided by the Chinese people, without the interference of imperialism. These words reflected the Chinese people’s wish for more than 100 years. As President Xi Jinping said in March 2014 at a meeting in Paris to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations with France, “Today, China, this sleeping lion, has woken.”
