The problem is lots of Chinese are ignorant, they don't have access to free information and they hardly venture into information in languages other than Chinese and may be English. Even in English, there are authentic academic research materials and there are bull$hit propaganda by different nations.
Chinese don't even know their history because they don't want to know anything beyond the earliest records that Chinese ancestors wrote and anything that was not written in Chinese. They should know what their ancestors recorded about their origin but they should also try to know what others say about their origin.
I am not saying China's history is not the oldest. I would rather say that China's history is older than what their own ancestors could assume and what is presently held by many of us. They don't even know they had a king, called by the Aryans as Dhautamulaka in Sanskrit as mentioned in the Mahabharata, in Southern Asia in the Gangetic valley.
On topic,
Chinese lost the wars because they had been stuck in backwardness, superstition and corruption. China was simply a stagnant society because for Chinese it was like the world starts in China and ends in China. As a result Chinese had no ambition for expansion or going beyond its territory because it was perceived that China had enough food to eat and enough means to secure it. China did have enough food sources but didn't have enough means to protect the sources.
When you don't have ambition, you are doomed. Anything that loses mobility and dynamism soon meets its end. China's fate had been written long ago.
Japan was even more backward in comparison with China. It was virtually a closed society. Even today, the North Koreans may have access to knowledge of outside world due to internet, Japan neither allowed any Japanese to go outside Japan nor did they allow any foreigner to come in.
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(You all are asked to read this post carefully)
At least for one moment I support the European colonization which led to the two world wars because those proved to be turning points in the history of mankind and particularly East Asia. They laid the foundation for the globalization of today's modern world. East Asia would have still remained in dark ages if it had not gone through the wars which actually opened the eyes of both Japan and China to the outside world. Wars opened the doors to modernity.
Japanese behaved with cruelty in China. But Chinese don't want to understand that Japanese had been living in a closed backward society for long. Japanese did not have the experiences in dealing with Chinese and other East Asians like those of the Europeans who had long been practicing and experimenting with colonialism in foreign lands. Japanese were idiots that they posed for camera while the Europeans used them as cannon fodders. But in reality Europeans committed worse crimes than what the Japanese are accused of. In other words, Japanese were not matured and smart enough.
Japanese were forced to commit crimes in China and in front of the camera by the Europeans. Now you will ask how were they forced? May be you don't know that...
Japan too was subjected to gunboat diplomacy just like China and forced to become a semi American colony just after the Opium Wars.
Many Chinese haven't heard the name of Kaigai Shinwa. It was the first Japanese knowledge book of the world outside Japan. It reflects how Japanese viewed the world and how they perceived the Chinese. The Opium Wars were epic wars of bloodshed and atrocity for the Japanese who first time heard about steam engine ships. For the Japanese, at that time, technology starts and ends with a bamboo.
But lets see what Kaigai Shinwa had to say about the Opium Wars. Lets see the preface.
In the preface, you will watch how the Japanese perceived the Chinese and how they perceived the foreign invaders. They saw Chinese as their own while cursed the foreigners as barbarians and demons. You can also see how they felt insecure fearing that the foreign invaders would now turn to Japan.
Ever since the early-17th century, Japans samurai leaders had enforced a strict policy known as sakoku, or closed country. Foreigners were not allowed in, nor were Japanese permitted to leave and then return. In practice, however, the closed-country policy was not watertight. It leaked in various waysand one of the most significant of these exceptions to strict seclusion was a window to the outside world established at the port city of Nagasaki in the southernmost island of Kyushu.
Tightly regulated trade was permitted at Nagasaki, restricted almost entirely to the Dutch and the Chinese. This is an engaging story in itself. What is important here is that this window allowed more than just trade goods to enter and leave Japan. It also opened the country to knowledge of the world beyond its borders, in the form of Chinese writings and Dutch books and reports.
Because of the seclusion policy, there were no Japanese observers in China to witness the Opium War firsthand. It was the Nagasaki window that brought Japan knowledge of this conflictand, with this, knowledge of the black ships. Until Commodore Perry made his first show of force in Edo Bay in 1853, the Japanese had never seen a steam powered warship.
They had read about them in connection with the war next door in the early 1840s, howeverand had even drawn their own pictures of them, as well as of the huge multi-cannon men-of-war that made the British navy so formidable.
It is indeed wonderful that a nation which had no knowledge of steam powered modern ships made the largest and strongest navy in the world within a century. Those who had their their machines limited to bamboos only can now be regarded the most high tech society. Only Japanese can do that.
Kaigai Shinwa also contains the map of the world, which the drawn for the first time in Japan.
A few illustrations from Kaigai Shinwa would help us to see how the Japanese depicted the foreign invaders in China.
) defend Japan atroicity with mouth but American defend Japan atrocity with military support. China's weakness was arrogant, we didn't know how to take advantage of other's weakness nor how to make alliance to defend our interest in the pass...and the outcome was so obvious, let other gang up against us.
