Toward "One Enlightened and Progressive Civilization": Discourses of Expansion and Nineteenth-Century Chinese Missions Abroad

Recently, scholars attempting "China-centered" perspectives of the Qing dynasty's nineteenth-century effort at "self-strengthening" have asserted both a greater capacity for Confucianism to support modernization than previously supposed and a considerable amount of Chinese rather than Western agency in originating such efforts. This essay traces a distinct current in the writing of the self-strengtheners, which sees the marriage of Confucianism and Western technology as powerfully transformatory, leading not just to a revivified China, but also to a China that extended its commercial and cultural influence deep into the West.