Japan was the first in Asia to modernize, and it exported that modern civilization to China through education, language, and revolutionary support.
Chinese students in Meiji Japan carried back political, scientific, and cultural concepts—many expressed in Japanese-coined terms that still form the core of modern Chinese vocabulary.
Sun Yat-sen, Wang Jingwei, and Chiang Kai-shek all relied on Japan as a revolutionary base.
Yet modern China failed to develop a true constitutional system, and its modernization remains incomplete.
The essay asks: when will China, the “poor student,” learn modern civilization from Japan again?

Japan was the country that succeeded in modernizing earlier than any other in Asia.
Since the Meiji era, Japan took advantage of the depth and richness of its own civilization cultivated over its long history, proactively introduced modern Western culture and civilization, and rapidly transformed itself into a modern industrialized nation.
Meanwhile, neighboring China (the Qing Empire), an ancient giant, belittled Western civilization due to its self-centered Sinocentric worldview, lagged far behind in modernization, and fell victim to Western powers to such an extent that even its independence and survival were in danger.
It was Japan that brought “modernity” to China and greatly assisted its modernization at a time when China faced national ruin.

The starting point was the First Sino-Japanese War.
Japan, long despised by the Chinese as the “small country of the Eastern barbarians,” utterly defeated the mighty Qing Empire in this one war, shocking the Qing court and its scholar-officials.
In order to survive, they had no choice but to discard their pride and learn from “the small country of Japan” to advance their own modernization.
Thus began the national policy of “shifa Riben”—learning from Japan.

The first step was sending talented young Chinese to study in Japan.
“Eastern Study,” as Chinese called studying in Japan, rapidly became a nationwide social trend, and the Meiji government and the Japanese people welcomed Qing students wholeheartedly and provided them with excellent learning environments.
In 1896 (Meiji 29), thirteen government-sponsored students sent by the Qing arrived in Japan, and from then on the number grew yearly, exceeding ten thousand by 1906 when including both government-sponsored and privately funded students.
By the 1910s, the total reached several tens of thousands.

Chinese students of that era studied the full range of modern civilization and culture that Japan had adopted and developed from the West, and Japan served as their window to Western-origin modern civilization.
In 1907, among the forty-five Chinese students enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University, records show eighteen in law, ten in agriculture, three in the humanities, two in science, and one each in engineering and medicine.
They learned new knowledge in politics, history, law, literature, natural sciences, commerce, and the arts and brought it back to China.
This triggered revolutionary change across a wide range of fields in China.
China’s modernization was advanced by this group of students who had studied in Japan.

Within this, a highly interesting cultural phenomenon occurred.
After the Meiji era, Japanese people absorbed all aspects of modern civilization from the West—humanities, natural sciences, political systems, and social institutions.
They learned the words expressing “modern concepts” from English, German, and French, and assigned existing Chinese characters to them, creating a huge number of new Japanese terms.
Words such as “civilization,” “culture,” “politics,” “economy,” “society,” “science,” and “technology” were all coined by Japanese in the Meiji era.

Chinese students studying modern civilization in Meiji Japan learned these newly created terms and took them directly back to China.
These Japanese terms were subsequently used in China and became part of modern Chinese vocabulary.
For example, the terms “people” and “republic” in the name “People’s Republic of China” were Meiji-era coinages, and in “Central Politburo of the Communist Party of China,” everything except the word “China” originates from Japanese coinages.

Meiji Japan was not only an exporter of modern civilization to China but also the overseas base of China’s modern revolution.
Sun Yat-sen, the “father of the modern revolution,” founded the revolutionary organization Tongmenghui in Tokyo, the imperial capital, and leading figures such as Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek were all students who had studied in Japan.

After the revolution succeeded, the Republic of China—China’s first republic—was founded, and a bicameral parliament was established.
In 1916, among the 439 members of the Republic’s upper and lower houses, 181 were former students in Japan, and all four speakers of the houses had studied in Japan.

However, although Japan was an excellent teacher of China’s modernization, China was never a good student.
Although China should have introduced modern civilization from the Meiji era onward, it ultimately failed in its own modernization and remains largely unchanged even today.
To take only the political system as an example, Japan established Asia’s first modern constitution in 1889 (Meiji 22) and began walking the path of constitutional government, while China did not adopt its first constitution (the Constitution of the Republic of China) until 1947.
And in today’s China, the “constitution” is nothing more than decoration, while the reality remains an unchanged “imperial Middle Kingdom” ruled by the emperor.

When will this poor student ever feel inclined to learn modern civilization from Japan once again?