To deal with internal and external pressures after the Taiping rebellion, People in China were divided into two factions that have different school od thought on how to deal with the problems:
- Those who believe that China should stick to the Confucianism value that they held for a long time
- Those who believed that china should handle the problems by adopting the values from western nations.
Eventually, those who believed that China should opened itself to western nations gained more dominance in the country. China started to opened up trading relationship and acquire the development in technology that introduced by the western nations.