The Burden of “Concert of Great Powers” and the Remaking of Modern China

In the face of the decay of the post-Cold War unipolar international system , many scholars in the world attempt to rebuild the global “concert of great powers” by referring to the 19th century experience of “concert of great powers”. However, China’s historical experience of being the object of the “concert” of the colonial empires has not yet been fully studied. Since the first Opium War, many colonial empires obtained unilateral most-favored-nation treatment from China, which brought them mutual interest. Since the early 20th century, great powers developed new mechanisms of concert such as the conferences of ministers in Beijing, the “network of treaties” and the banking consortium. On the eve of World War I, even though internal conflicts in Europe intensified, the six major powers in China still acted in concert to shape the outcome of the 1911 Revolution. The outbreak of World War I brought about the decline of the pre-war concert mechanism. Japan, taking advantage of the World War I, stregnthened its power in China. After the First World War, the Versailles-Washington system partially rebuilt the mechanism of concert, but suffered from great internal structural contradictions. Great powers such as Britain, France, and the United States failed to act in concert to stop the Japanese invasion of China. However, the breakdown of the “concert of great powers” also made China a “weak link” in the global colonial order, which prepared the basic conditions for the Chinese revolution. Taking modern China’s experience of “concert of great powers” as a reference, how to avoid the repetition of the dark side of the old “concert of great powers” in history will be a topic that China needs to rethink in the post-unipolar era.