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Korean rulers, under whatever impulse they act, seem determined to create causes of international friction; petty causes, it is true, but these littles may make a mickle one fine day. Korea seems a very poor place to fight for. Its people are plunged in the most miserable poverty of any in the poverty-stricken East …. Japan, in spite of all her mistakes, stands for light and civilization; her institutions are enlightened; her laws, drawn up by European justice, are equal to the best we know, and they are justly administered; her punishments are humane; her scientific and sociological ideals are our own. China stands for darkness and savagery. Her science is ludicrous superstition, her law is barbarous, her punishments are awful, her politics are corruption, her ideals are isolation and stagnation. In 1894, the great Pullman Railway Strike paralyzed the economy of the Western half of the United States; the muckraking journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd published his expose of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company; and the United States remained in the throes of the Depression of 1893. In France, 1894 marked the beginning of the long, drawn-out Dreyfus affair, when anti-Semitism led to the court-martial and imprisonment on Devil's Island of an innocent Jewish officer. There were headlines concerning the assassinations of President Carnot of France and the Bulgarian nationalist, Stefan Stambulov. Tsar Alexander HI of Russia unexpectedly died, leaving the throne to his unprepared and panic-stricken twenty-six-year-old son, Nicholas II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONFLICT AND CONSENSUS While it is true that the Anglicization process produced its zealots, including one Chinese British subject who circulated a petition in 1900 volunteering Straits Chinese service against the Boxer Uprising in China, the outstanding feature of the Singapore and Penang Chinese communities from about 1890 to 1900 was the cooperation that existed between the English-educated local-born and the more conservative China-born immigrants. By the turn of the century, there were over 160,000 Chinese in the city of Singapore alone and the growth of the population together with the political debate in China and the modernizing impulse within the Straits Chinese British Association made Singapore a complex sociological melting pot and enabled the Chinese community to select its leadership from an increasingly wider range of viewpoints. The factionalism of the Chinese Revolution and occasional violence reached Singapore after 1908 and caused considerable polarization in Chinatown, but as a general rule, the first decade of this century was characterized by a spirit of cooperation for the public good. At the heart of the problem of selecting leaders from such a wide field were the old problems of status, education and material well-being. As the Lim–Song debate underscored, all sections of the Singapore Chinese body were acutely aware of the fact that their success abroad depended to a greater or lesser extent upon the degree to which they turned their backs on tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years of foreign imperialism in China produced many tales about the humiliation of the Chinese. There was the now notorious park in Shanghai's foreign sector that allegedly excluded both dogs and Orientals as well as the slightly less galling but even more basic expropriation of sovereign rights and national treasure by outside powers and their commercial representatives. It should not be surprising that some of the most widely told anecdotes about the major overseas Chinese capitalists relate instances when these Eastern businessmen bested their foreign rivals, forced acquiescence on a point of prestige, or otherwise gained respect for their business acumen. One such story has to do with an overseas Chinese millionaire known locally as Thio Thiau Siat. Near the end of the nineteenth century, when China's defeat at the hands of the Japanese had exposed the weakness of the Chinese modernization program, Thio was the dynasty's consular representative in Singapore. Having been ordered to return immediately to China for official consultation, Thio sent an agent to purchase a first-class steamship ticket. The German shipping company that he approached refused to issue the ticket on the grounds that non-Europeans were not permitted to travel in the superior accommodations. Even though Thio was a government official, the management refused to break the long-standing rule and allow a Chinese to purchase passage as a first-class passenger. The Chinese consul found it difficult to contain his displeasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]