Self-Strengthening Movement
In the 1870s and 1880s, their successors used their positions as provincial officials to build shipping, telegraph, and railways. China made substantial progress toward modernizing its heavy industry and military but the majority of the ruling elite still subscribed to a conservative Confucian worldview, and the "self-strengtheners" were by and large uninterested in social reform beyond the scope of economic and military modernization. The Self-Strengthening Movement succeeded in securing the revival of the dynasty from the brink of eradication, sustaining it for another half-century. The considerable successes of the movement came to an abrupt end with China's defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895.