Looking back at the development of Japan, China and Korea in the 19th century we can see that they were all opened up by capitalism by force. Capitalism did not emerge from within, but it was “imported” from the outside. Unlike many European countries, where a revolutionary bourgeois class was able to cast aside the fetters of feudalism, there were no such bourgeois revolutions carried out by the local bourgeoisie.

Yet while these three countries were opened by foreign capitalists during the same period in the 19th century, they followed three different paths.