Self-Strengthening Movement

The Self-Strengthening Movement, also known as the Westernization or Western Affairs Movement (c. 1861–1895), was a period of reforms initiated during the late Qing dynasty following the military disasters of the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion.

The British and French burning of the Old Summer Palace in 1860 as Taiping rebel armies marched north, forced the imperial court to acknowledge the crisis. In 1861, Prince Gong and Grand Councilor Wen Xiang proposed establishing an office to direct foreign affairs. Prince Gong was made regent, Grand Councilor, and head of the newly formed Zongli Yamen (a de facto foreign affairs ministry). Local Han Chinese officials such as Zeng Guofan established private westernized militias in prosecuting the war against the rebels. Zeng and his armies eventually defeated the rebels and prosecuted efforts to import Western military technology and to translate Western scientific knowledge. They established successful arsenals, schools, and munitions factories.

In the 1870s and 1880s, their successors used their positions as provincial officials to build shipping, telegraph lines, and railways. China made substantial progress toward modernizing its heavy industry and military, but the majority of the ruling elite still subscribed to a conservative Confucian worldview, and the "self-strengtheners" were by and large uninterested in social reform beyond the scope of economic and military modernization. The Self-Strengthening Movement succeeded in securing the revival of the dynasty from the brink of eradication, sustaining it for another half-century. The considerable successes of the movement came to an abrupt end with China's defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Another major modernization effort known as the late Qing reforms started in 1901 following the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform and the invasions of the Eight-Nation Alliance.

The original use of the phrase "self-strengthening" is from the ancient Yijing, where it is written, "The superior man makes himself strong". The same phrase is encountered in use by the Southern Song dynasty in reference to dealing with the crisis of Jurchen invasion, and again by the Qianlong Emperor, writing that self-strengthening was requisite for warding off foreign aspirations.

As the eighteenth century drew to a close and the gradual decline of the Chinese bureaucracy became apparent, there was a rapid shift in the ideology of the Chinese Confucian Scholars towards the "School of Practical Learning" (jingshi) that argued for a practical approach to government and did not shy away from urging institutional reforms. These scholars came to co-opt ideas from the ancient Legalist philosophy such as fujiang, the focus on the wealth and power of the state.

The concern with the "self-strengthening" of China was expressed by Feng Guifen in a series of essays presented by him to Zeng Guofan in 1861. Feng obtained expertise in warfare commanding a volunteer corps in Qing government's campaign against the Taiping rebels. In 1860 he moved to Shanghai, where he was much impressed by Western military technology.

In his diaries, Zeng mentioned his self-strengthening rhetoric directed at technological modernization in an attempt to defend the nation's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Li Hongzhang uses the term in an 1864 letter whereby he identifies the Western strength as lying in technology and advocates learning to construct such machines, first military and subsequently – in a memorial the following year – civilian. Other terms used to refer to the movement are the Westernization Movement or Western Affairs Movement.