Japan modernized by borrowing Western techniques while preserving its cultural essentials, China did not

Evidence

When the West forced itself on China and Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, after a momentary infatuation with Kemalism, the prevailing elites opted for a reformist strategy. With the Meiji Restoration a dynamic group of reformers came to power in Japan, studied and borrowed Western techniques, practices, and institutions, and started the process of Japanese modernization. They did this in such a way, however, as to preserve the essentials of traditional Japanese culture, which in many respects contributed to modernization and which made it possible for Japan to invoke, reformulate, and build on the elements of that culture to arouse support for and justify its imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s. In China, on the other hand, the decaying Ch’ing dynasty was unable to adapt successfully to the impact of the West. … At the end of the 1940s the import from the Soviet Union won out over those from the West —nationalism, liberalism, democracy, Christianity—and China was defined as a socialist society. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘reformist vs rejectionist’ response typology Huntington is building throughout this chapter — and to modernization theory debates about why Meiji Japan succeeded where Qing China failed.
• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry — Japan preserving traditional culture as a modernization asset while China’s collapse led to adoption of a foreign ideology — is a dense, two-century-long causal argument resisting summary.