In Europe at that time the question was being discussed over and over again, why Japan had so quickly succeeded in making herself a modern power, and why China was not succeeding in doing so; the Japanese were praised for their capacity and the Chinese blamed for their lassitude.  Both in Europe and in Chinese circles it was overlooked that there were fundamental differences in the social structures of the two countries.  The basis of the modern capitalist states of the West is the middle class.  Japan had for centuries had a middle class (the merchants) that had entered into a symbiosis with the feudal lords.  For the middle class the transition to modern capitalism, and for the feudal lords the way to Western imperialism, was easy.  In China there was only a weak middle class, vegetating under the dominance of the gentry; the middle class had still to gain the strength to liberate itself before it could become the support for a capitalistic state.  And the gentry were still strong enough to maintain their dominance and so to prevent a radical reconstruction; all they would agree to were a few reforms from which they might hope to secure an increase of power for their own ends.

In 1895 and in 1898 a scholar, K’ang Yo-wei, who was admitted into the presence of the emperor, submitted to him memoranda in which he called for radical reform.  K’ang was a scholar who belonged to the empiricist school of philosophy of the early Manchu period, the so-called Han school.  He was a man of strong and persuasive personality, and had such an influence on the emperor that in 1898 the emperor issued several edicts ordering the fundamental reorganization of education, law, trade, communications, and the army.  These laws were not at all bad in themselves; they would have paved the way for a liberalization of Chinese society.  But they aroused the utmost hatred in the conservative gentry and also in the moderate reformers among the gentry.  K’ang Yo-wei and his followers, to whom a number of well-known modern scholars belonged, had strong support in South China.  We have already mentioned that owing to the increased penetration of European goods and ideas, South China had become more progressive than the north; this had added to the tension already existing for other reasons between north and south.  In foreign policy the north was more favourable to Russia and radically opposed to Japan and Great Britain; the south was in favour of co-operation with Britain and Japan, in order to learn from those two states how reform could be carried through.  In the north the men of the south were suspected of being anti-Manchu and revolutionary in feeling.  This was to some extent true, though K’ang Yo-wei and his friends were as yet largely unconscious of it.