What advantages, if any, does China obtain by the relaxing of her exclusiveness?

Judged from our standpoint, it must be assumed at once that they are manifold.

First and foremost is the expansion of her ideas concerning the world. That which the discovery of America was to Europe will the widening of her narrow horizon become to China. Think for a moment what the voyage of Columbus into the great unknown revealed to the peoples of Europe so recently—not yet four centuries ago: it proved that the earth is a sphere; that on its other side the sun, moon, and stars give their light in the same proportion as where we dwell; that rain, wind, dews, and clouds belong also to the further hemisphere, where rivers and mountains, forests and lakes, greater than they had ever seen are to be found! And the inhabitants—what of them? The Spaniards discovered people simple enough to worship them, coming, as it seemed, on winged canoes over the big water from the sunrise. We have read our Prescott, and know what the invaders proved to the natives of New Spain; and Sebastian Cabot, Jean Cartier, and others tell us of a different race—men of the forests and prairies, who had neither city nor wealth of any kind; nomad hunters and warriors, living like Bedouin Arabs, and equally independent and proud.