The foreigners take advantage of our shortcomings to export their own products. . . . Our government offices have foreign personnel, our factories have foreign artisans, our schools have foreign teachers. The European influence is everywhere. . . . Wherein lies our spirit? In resisting foreign insults and cherishing our same kind. Wherein lies our lifeline? In uniting our resolve and sharpening our skills. . . . With these we can win out against the foreigners, with these we can survive in the international struggle.
—Construction Workers’ Guild stele inscription, early twentieth century1
For China the half century that followed the Convention of Beijing in 1860 was not on the whole a happy one. The Qing eventually suppressed a series of major rebellions, but only at the cost of relinquishing overall control of the military to provincial leaders and their local armies. Although those leaders did not immediately turn their new military power against the central government, the consequence of this delegation of military leadership was a permanent dilution of centralized political authority. At the same time, Chinese people became increasingly interested in political participation; by 1911 these developments were to spell the end of the imperial system. In the meantime the foreign presence, partly the cause and partly the beneficiary of internal political weakness, became ever more pervasive. Foreign trade expanded enormously, while Christian missionaries fanned out all over the country. Both challenged traditional economic and sociocultural patterns. This was also the era of gunboat diplomacy, when the powers routinely threatened war if China refused to toe the line. Even though China had not become a formal colony like India or the Dutch East Indies, its independence seemed to have become a dead letter.
But China was collectively determined not to let appearance become reality. Foreign wars brought earlier reform proposals into sharp focus; the effect was galvanizing. If it were now required to conduct international relations according to specific rules of law, China would discover and make use of those rules to its own advantage. If it were necessary to match force with force, it would buy or build the necessary technology as fast as possible, using as much foreign assistance as was compatible with retention of overall control.
From 1860 the quest for self-determination took on renewed energy at every level of Chinese society. Although not every strategy worked, disputes about the best way to proceed often hampered progress, and things got considerably worse before they got better, China had struck a new path. The chief characteristic of this period was not so much relentless hostility to foreigners as it was the creative use of foreigners, whether in the form of the adaptation of their ideas, tools, and techniques to secure Chinese wealth and power (fuqiang) or the tactic of playing foreigners against one another to prevent their uniting against China (yi yi zhi yi). In these ways China pursued with great tenacity the recovery of international standing and respect and of the self-esteem that had been devastated by those same foreigners.
This chapter covers the period from the 1860 Convention of Beijing, a turning point in China’s relationship with Western nations, down to the outbreak of World War One in Europe in 1914. The chapter ends in 1914 because the war marked a shift in Chinese relations with and views of the Western world. Three factors—the political rise of Japan, the war’s exceptional brutality, and the peace settlement, which China considered blatantly unfair—disillusioned Chinese who had once been enthusiastic about emulating the West. This fueled a creative effort by Chinese intellectuals to rethink Chinese civilization and China’s place in the world, but we reserve this discussion for the next chapter because these events form part of a complex continuum that lasted well beyond 1914.
The treaties of 1858–1860 changed China’s relationship to the Western powers, and later to Japan, considerably more than those that had followed the First Opium War, which proved to be something of a false start. Among the most important long-term consequences, direct and indirect, of the later treaties, were the spread of foreign settlements and concessions to many of China’s major cities on the coast and along inland waterways; the elimination of prohibitions—in practice routinely disregarded—on Chinese emigration; virtual carte blanche for Christian missionaries in China; an enormous expansion in opium smoking, and in domestic production of opium poppies, a shift that both reduced food production and more generally damaged Chinese society; the launching of industrialization, beginning in the military sphere; and the inexorable transformation of education.
After 1860 the Qing adopted a conciliatory policy toward the foreign powers, taking the view that their own most pressing objective was to recover control of the empire from the various sets of rebels: the Taiping in south and central China, the Nian in the north, the Miao ethnic minorities in Guizhou province, and the Muslims in Yunnan and in the northwest. Large portions of China were virtually in a state of civil war. Although the foreign threat was alarming, it had to take second place to the restoration of internal peace. By the 1880s the Qing had achieved this goal. The aggressively antiforeign Xianfeng Emperor was succeeded in 1861 by his five-year-old son, whose mother, the imperial concubine Cixi (1835–1908), acted as regent together with another empress, whom she soon displaced. Cixi controlled the succession in such a way that, for the next forty-eight years, until her death in 1908, she effectively held paramount power as the empress dowager. A skillful politician, for the first half of her rule Cixi strove to achieve a balance between the reforming impulse of progressive provincial leaders, whose military success against the Taiping gave them considerable clout as well as a keen interest in foreign technology, and the largely antiforeign successors to the literati groups whose pressure had helped precipitate the first war with the Western powers. Later on, however, this quest for compromise succumbed to a reactionary conservatism that she apparently regarded as her best hope for political survival.
In foreign affairs during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, China suffered a number of setbacks. Russia assumed control over part of Qing Central Asia, Britain’s interest in expanding outward from its colonial bases in India and Nepal threatened Qing control over Tibet, France began moving into the area of modern Vietnam, and Japan began to infiltrate the Liuqiu Islands, Taiwan, and Korea. In 1884 China lost a war with France; this defeat was followed within little more than a decade by another, this time at the hands of Japan, which imposed the crippling Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895). This second defeat enormously heightened Chinese apprehensions, dispelling forever the notion that Japan was in effect merely a junior constellation in China’s civilizational orbit. As the result of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, foreign investment snowballed to such an extent that detractors had some justification in claiming that China was half mortgaged to the powers. Many Chinese feared that their country would cease altogether to have an independent existence and would be “carved up like a melon” by the foreign powers, who openly discussed such a prospect in their treaty port newspapers.
In 1900 the empress dowager threw her support to the violently antiforeign Boxer Uprising, perceiving in its popular energy a last possible chance to save Qing power and the Chinese nation. The events of 1900 aroused widespread popular feeling, not only against the foreigners but also against the Qing’s ineptitude in dealing with them. No one doubted any longer that major change was in the air. Patriotism remained a given, even a driving force, but its predominant focus became resistance to the ruling house. In their own defense, the Qing introduced sweeping institutional, educational, and military reforms during the first decade of the century. They also began to introduce representative assemblies and a constitution as in Meiji Japan, which many regarded with new respect since China’s defeat. But the reforms were too little, too late, and ironically they strengthened the very opponents they were intended to mollify.
The Qing empire finally fell in 1911, succeeded by a republic still firmly in the grip of overseas interests. It took some considerable time and several wars and revolutions for China to recover its former strength and achieve a position of parity with the powers. But in retrospect we can see that the writing was on the wall for foreign imperialism in China by no later than the turn of the century, even if the ink was still barely visible. The seeds of self-determination had been planted several decades earlier.
In the world of the nineteenth century China was in many ways unique. It was not a colony; the Qing government continued in power. But after 1860 it was dotted with foreign enclaves that had a significant impact on its social, political, economic, and cultural life. Although Chinese sovereignty was thus still more or less intact, the treaties made significant inroads by permitting foreign residence in China under the protection of extraterritoriality, according to which foreigners could live, conduct business, and own property in designated areas immune from Qing jurisdiction.
In the last few years of the century Japan and the Western powers greedily competed to establish spheres of influence in China. Britain claimed the middle and lower Yangzi down to Shanghai; France claimed parts of the southwest adjacent to its Indochinese colonies; Germany claimed parts of east China; Japan claimed southern Manchuria, Taiwan, and Korea, and occupied the latter two from 1895 to 1945; Russia claimed northern Manchuria. During this period the foreign powers forced China effectively to concede sovereignty in their spheres of influence by granting them leaseholds together with railroad, mining, and timber rights. Germany took a lease on parts of Shandong province for ninety-nine years; Russia took the Liaodong peninsula in southern Manchuria, including two key harbors, Port Arthur and Dalian, for twenty-five years; France took the port of Guangzhouwan, opposite Hainan Island, for ninety-nine years; and Britain took the Shandong port of Weihaiwei for however long Russia kept Port Arthur and the New Territories of Hong Kong, on the Chinese mainland beyond Kowloon, for ninety-nine years, until 1997.
As the result of this “scramble for concessions,” there were nearly one hundred ports in China open to foreign trade but not necessarily residence. Some had been opened by treaty agreement; others China had opened voluntarily. Different treaty ports had different arrangements. In some, “concession” areas were leased by the Chinese government to foreign governments, whose consuls, as the chief resident officials, could sublease property within the concession to individual foreigners. Such was the case in Tianjin, Hankou, and Canton, for example. In other cities, notably Shanghai, the foreign settlements whose early days were described in the last chapter were not leased but were simply designated by treaty as areas for foreign residence and trade. In such areas Chinese theoretically were barred from owning land, but in practice many did so, sometimes through a foreign intermediary.2
Chinese Communist rhetoric later lambasted the treaty ports in general and the foreign concessions and settlements in particular as blights on the national landscape, in which imperialists conspired to obstruct China’s advance to modernity. But recent reevaluations suggest that the rhetoric has disguised at least some of the reality. Shanghai, first the focal point of the Western presence and later, repeatedly, the fountainhead of revolutionary activism, demonstrates that the foreign enclaves also made positive contributions to some of China’s key transformations.
Over the course of time considerable numbers of Chinese came to live in the foreign settlements: war refugees, would-be compradors, and scions of upper-class families. They sought the protection of foreign policing, the relative security provided by the exclusion of the Chinese military, and employment. Initially many worked for the burgeoning foreign enterprises, helping them negotiate their way into the Chinese market. International commerce expanded enormously, as did joint ownership by Chinese and foreign entrepreneurs and management by Chinese compradors of foreign-owned firms that wished to infiltrate the Chinese domestic market. Both played a significant role in introducing a whole range of new business methods into China. At the same time, a new urban middle class of Chinese entrepreneurs, merchants, and tradespeople, many of whom soon set up their own businesses, also flourished. This new bourgeoisie came into its own in the first decades of the twentieth century, stepping into the vacuum left by the weakness of the state and the retraction of foreign economic interests as the result of World War One. The influence of the new merchant elite was considerable, even though developing nationalism cast an unfavorable light on their close relationship with foreigners. At the same time, however, the creation of such civic bodies as chambers of commerce, able to interpose themselves between ordinary citizens and the state, created an intermediate sphere of public life that was neither state-controlled nor completely private in its orientation.
Some educated Chinese who sought nontraditional work in the foreign-run sectors still bore the imprint of the traditional upper-class sense of responsibility for the fate of the nation. Many gravitated in large numbers toward the new publishing and newspaper industries, whose foreign operators were relieved by extraterritoriality of the fear of retaliation should they express critical views about current events, as they often did. One such foreign-owned publication, based in Shanghai, was the Chinese-language newspaper Shenbao, founded in 1872, which showed how it was possible to report news and to influence public opinion—for example, on the issue of conservative obstruction of railroad development. Drawing inspiration from these kinds of publications, Chinese intellectuals began operating their own newspapers and periodicals in huge numbers.
Initially circulated among Chinese in the settlements, the new publications soon spread far beyond. They included information about foreign ideologies, such as Marxism and republicanism, as well as news reporting. The wide-scale dissemination of information and opinions that neither emanated from the government nor was subject to its control proved profoundly subversive of the old order.
Among the most active of those who sought to popularize new ideas in this way was the great reform leader Liang Qichao (1873–1929). A product of the traditional educational system, Liang founded a number of periodicals dedicated to studying China’s problems and proposing reforms in education, the arts, literature, and the political structure. In time his views shifted, leading him to promote a Chinese constitution and even a parliament. As we shall see, his ideas helped lay the foundations for the May Fourth Movement of the 1910s and 1920s and for the later movements for democracy.
By the end of the century railroads, telegraphs, and the rise of a popular press all helped disseminate information about the widening foreign presence into the interior of China. Other sources of information included troops from the new armies, visiting home or demobilized into the community at large, as well as workers in the budding new industrial complex. Particularly after 1895, when foreigners could establish their own industrial enterprises and factories in the treaty ports, a stream of factory workers flowed steadily back and forth between big cities, such as Shanghai, and their home villages in the surrounding countryside, taking with them word of life among the foreigners. With information traveling in all these different ways, then, by the turn of the century Chinese virtually everywhere had some degree of knowledge about the foreigners and their impact on China.
Moreover, foreign goods reached people even in the remotest areas, as the renowned intellectual Kang Youwei (1858–1927) pointed out in 1895:
In addition to the fifty-three million ounces of silver we spend on foreign cottons, we buy such items of ordinary use as heavy silk, satins, woolens, fine silks, gauze, and felt; umbrellas, lamps, paint, suitcases and satchels; chinaware, toothbrushes, tooth-powder, soap and lamp oil. Among comestibles we buy coffee, Philippine and Havana cigars, cigarettes and rolling paper, snuff, and liquor; ham, dried meats, cake, candy, and salt; and medicines—liquid, pills, powders—as well as dried and fresh fruit. We also buy coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, and other materials; wooden utensils, clocks, watches, sundials, thermometers, barometers, electric lamps, plumbing accessories, mirrors, photographic plates, and other amusing or ingenious gadgets. As more households get them, more people want them, so that they have reached as far as Xinjiang and Tibet.3
Yet foreign trade remained only a small proportion of China’s overall economy, with a turnover that never exceeded 10 percent of gross domestic product, and the modern sector of industry remained relatively limited well into the twentieth century.
Attitudes toward the presence of foreigners, foreign goods, and foreign values varied widely. This is hardly surprising when we recall that the population of China was approaching half a billion. It was extremely diverse. We must bear in mind issues of local and regional difference, of firsthand or merely derivative knowledge, of different perspectives based on gender and social class, and, finally, of possibly biased representation. For “the people” did not always speak for themselves, and we are sometimes forced to rely on others for reports and interpretation of popular actions. Many such interpreters had axes to grind. Missionaries seeking to bring religious enlightenment, for example, might assert that “the Chinese people are backward”; local gentry fighting to retain their traditional position in society might claim that “the Chinese people will resist this change,” while progressive reformers might declare that “the peasants are extremely enthusiastic about investing in modern enterprises in their locality.” All these characterizations may have been accurate in a limited sense, but most often they tell at best only part of the story. It may well be that there were so many points of view that each opposing group could readily find one to support its own perspective.
For Chinese in Shanghai and other treaty ports, the discrimination practiced by the various imperialist powers against them was particularly galling. Until World War One, for instance, foreign-controlled racecourses banned Chinese except if they paid an entrance fee on race days. There is some debate about whether an infamous notice at a public park barring “dogs and Chinese” ever actually existed, but attitudes were such that it might as well have. Restrictions of this kind did not in general extend to nonwhite colonial subjects of the Europeans—for example, Indians and Africans. Some of these had originally been brought to patrol the British-run International Settlement and the French Concession, where Sikh and Senegalese guards and policemen were commonplace. Their presence added to the city’s cosmopolitan flavor, but it also stiffened the resolve of many Chinese to hold firm in the face of foreign imperialism so as not to suffer the same fate as had India and other European colonies. One way in which it still remained possible to display firmness was in the realm of diplomacy.
In 1861 the Qing created a new office of foreign affairs, the Zongli Yamen (Office for the General Management of Affairs Concerning the Various Countries). A subdivision of the Grand Council, the principal agency of state, it was manned by from three to eleven senior officials who simultaneously retained their other positions, such as provincial governor. For much of its life it was headed by Prince Gong (1833–1898), uncle to the first of the several baby emperors for whom the empress dowager acted as regent. His experience negotiating the 1860 peace settlement with the British and French had favorably transformed his once-hostile attitude toward the foreigners. Prince Gong’s basic policy was to deal as peaceably as possible with the powers and to concentrate on reviving China’s strength by learning from the foreign example. The empress dowager sought to prevent his becoming too powerful and eventually dismissed him altogether. In any event, the Zongli Yamen did not have sole jurisdiction over matters affecting the coast, and its decisions were subject to her approval.
The Zongli Yamen endeavored to invoke international law to protect China, and it sponsored the dispatch of embassies to Europe and the Americas to investigate overseas political systems and social conditions and to speak up for overseas Chinese. By the 1870s it had identified several advantages in official representation overseas. First, stationing diplomats abroad would make it possible for China to deal directly with foreign governments instead of with foreign ministers resident in Beijing. The intransigence of some foreign diplomats posted to China made the option of circumventing the quirks of individual personalities particularly appealing. Second, diplomats could gather intelligence on foreign countries, which in the case of nearby locations could help reinforce China’s defenses and could glean technological information for use in its industrialization projects. Third, an overseas diplomatic presence would better enable China to assess the international situation and possibly to gain support from one foreign power against another in times of crisis. The hope of playing the powers off against one another was a persistent thread of foreign policy. Fourth, protection of overseas Chinese communities would discourage disaffection and, on the contrary, promote support for the Qing government. With luck the better-off overseas Chinese would even offer their services and some of their wealth to the home country if it made some effort to take care of their interests. Besides, the need to protect Chinese workers overseas was urgent. The absence of consular representation was one cause of Chinese impotence in the face of the ill-treatment of Chinese “coolies” around the world. That impotence tarnished China’s international image.
In the 1870s and 1880s China concluded numerous treaties allowing Chinese diplomatic representation in foreign countries. These treaties, much less discussed by historians than the notorious treaties forced on China by the bellicose Western powers and Japan, were the result of Chinese activism in the protection of its interests. They were not “unequal,” although China experienced considerable difficulty in implementing them. These difficulties arose partly as the result of Qing ineptitude but more important because the Western powers and Japan knew very well China could not back up its demands with effective military power. Hence the powers were at best extremely lackadaisical about compliance. At worst they simply ignored treaty provisions, often to the great disadvantage of Chinese resident overseas.
Large-scale diplomatic expansion was hampered by a chronic shortage of funds and, at least at first, a lack of sufficient qualified personnel. Therefore some early foreign missions—in Honolulu and Singapore, for instance—were partly financed by funding raised among Chinese locally. Chinese ambassadors sometimes represented their country’s interests in more than one country. The ambassador to Britain, for instance, also was accredited to France and Italy, and the envoy to the United States had responsibility for Spain as well. Apart from the financial issue, some officials urged caution in diplomacy because they feared that too rapid an outreach would appear aggressive to the Western powers and might prompt a hostile response.
China also began employing foreign nationals to represent its interests overseas, in a new pattern of Qing employment of foreigners, to which the appointment of Britons to head the Imperial Maritime Customs Service also belonged. In 1867 the Zongli Yamen sent an investigative mission to the United States under the former American minister to China, Anson Burlingame. Among other things, the Burlingame mission led to a treaty, concluded with the United States in 1868, which sanctioned Chinese immigration to America. But within a decade the Chinese immigration issue had become a hot topic in U.S. politics, and under subsequent treaties China agreed to try to stem the flow of emigrants bound for the United States.
Violent hostility to local Chinese communities periodically flared in the United States. Anti-Chinese riots erupted in Los Angeles in 1871 and in Denver, Colorado, in 1880. The worst episode broke out in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, when twenty-eight Chinese were killed, fifteen injured, and damage was done to thousands of dollars’ worth of property. By then the United States had passed, in 1882, the first of a series of stringent Exclusion Acts aimed at halting further Chinese immigration and broadly limiting the rights of Chinese already in the United States.
The American government was reluctant to make any amends for the Rock Springs massacre. But when the governor-general of the Guangdong region threatened that Americans in China might suffer reprisals at the hands of an aroused populace, the United States agreed to pay compensation for the damaged property, although not for the lost lives. It was no triumph born of gunboat diplomacy, but it was a minor victory for China. Chinese diplomatic activism also blocked the dispatch to China of a U.S. ambassador who, as a congressman, had frequently called for ending Chinese immigration.
Chinese diplomacy won other important successes. In the 1870s China sent two investigative commissions, one to Cuba, where since the abolition of slavery the sugar industry depended on Chinese labor, and the other to Peru, where Chinese worked in such industries as guano. As a result, the coolie trade as such was abolished in 1874, and agreement was reached—although by no means always honored either in letter or in spirit—for the better treatment of Chinese in those places. The treatment of Chinese in Cuba also affected Chinese relations with Spain, whose government depended on the taxes on the profits of the sugar industry.
In Japan an 1871 diplomatic treaty gave Chinese, like other foreign nationals, the right to extraterritoriality and provided for the installation of consuls in several Japanese cities in addition to the ambassador in Tokyo. Chinese consuls also gained the right to a special cemetery for Chinese who died in Japan and to a hospital for Chinese. For some time Chinese diplomats were still able to form friendly personal relationships with Japanese intellectuals, despite the growing political differences between their nations.
Networking among diplomats also enabled Qing officials to gain a better sense of where overseas representation might be most needed. In the 1890s, for instance, the Chinese ambassador to Chile passed on information he had learned from the Chilean consul to British Columbia. Chinese immigration, he had heard, was already running into the tens of thousands; it would be desirable to establish a consulate there to take care of their interests. In the last decades of the century China appointed consuls in a number of places where there was a strong Chinese presence, including Singapore, Penang, Rangoon, and several cities in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, as well as in Hong Kong.
Negotiations over a Chinese consulate in Hong Kong dragged on for two decades. The British feared that the presence of a Chinese official in Hong Kong, the vast majority of whose population was Chinese, would undermine their own authority. They also took it for granted that the main function of such an office would be espionage of one kind or another. But Chinese negotiators were at pains to point out that it was untenable to deny the Chinese the right to establish a consulate, given the presence of Japanese and other diplomats in the colony. A Chinese consulate eventually opened in Hong Kong in 1891.
The diplomat Xue Fucheng (1838–1894) expressed the attitude of many of his forward-thinking colleagues when he was serving as ambassador to Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy, noting in his diary:
We should sign contracts with Brazil and Mexico for Chinese laborers and to establish consulates there for their protection. In the contract we must clearly demand fair treatment for our people even after their work is finished, so that they will not be subjected to the humiliation of mistreatment and deportation, which the American authorities have recently imposed upon our people [under the 1882 Exclusion Act and its successors]. Under the protection of our consulates our people will not be threatened by the natives and will be able to purchase land, build houses, and raise families there. After several generations, their descendants may even invest in China on account of their heritage. In all likelihood we will be building a new China outside of Chinese territory so that our people may prosper in years to come. This move will strengthen our nation, feed our people, reduce our national deficit, increase our productivity, and change our national image. Therefore it is essential to implement such a policy as soon as possible.4
For their part, the overseas Chinese communities tended to support anything that would strengthen and revitalize China. They understood only too well that they could hardly expect any protection of their own rights and interests if China was too weak to protect itself at home. At the same time, rising sentiments against Chinese immigrants in many different parts of the world, the outgrowth of racism, nascent nationalism, and trade protectionism helped consolidate Chinese expatriates as a group and orient them homeward.
The hope that the overseas Chinese would prove to be a source of funding was soon realized. By as early as the 1880s annual remittances from abroad amounted to as much as twenty million dollars, perhaps half of which flowed to the Canton area, from which a majority of emigrants hailed. Actual remittances were only part of the story. Trade funneled to China as the result of connections with the overseas community was estimated at several million dollars annually. This benefit flowed in particular to Canton and Hong Kong. Although the latter remained under British rule, the livelihood of a majority of its population depended on international trade.
Moreover, overseas communities, some of which became quite wealthy, could often be counted on to send funds in time of crisis because it was an effective way of demonstrating their continued loyalty to the home country. In the Sino-French War of 1884–1885, for instance, American Chinese alone sent more than a half million dollars. Before the decade was out, they contributed tens of thousands in additional relief money, as the central government proved increasingly unable to deal with regional crises. Many such crises were the consequence of natural disasters, such as floods or famine, but not a few others resulted from the periodic outbreaks of violence prompted by hostility toward foreign missionaries.
Christian missionaries had never stopped coming to China despite the prohibitions against them. Frustrated by the constraints under which they were compelled to operate, many became militant supporters of opening China by force and aggressively protecting the Church by means of gunboat diplomacy. The treaties of 1858–1860 were the answer to their prayers.
Many Chinese continued to regard Christianity with great suspicion. For more than a century Christianity had been banned as heterodox, a characterization full of subversive connotations that Taiping adoption of Christian belief—unacceptably reworked as far as the Westerners were concerned—seemed to confirm. Suddenly, by treaty, Christianity officially lost its heterodox label, and at the same time, it all at once gained considerable social and political power.
Upper-class Chinese were hostile to missionaries because they both challenged Confucian values and assumed certain social welfare functions that traditionally lay in the gentry’s bailiwick. The missionaries established themselves in Chinese communities, building churches, orphanages, medical clinics, and schools. The Chinese elite suspected too that left to its own devices, Christianity would fatally undermine their prestige by challenging their claims to moral and cultural predominance.
As a consequence of upper-class objections, the majority of Christian converts after 1860 came from the least privileged levels of society; many were women. Like the Taiping rebels and other dissenters from the established order, such people had little to lose and potentially much to gain from aligning themselves with the representatives of an alternative source of power. The opportunity to improve one’s lot in this life, rather than one’s chances in the next, was thus in many cases one of the most important factors in the decision to adopt Christianity.
Missionary intervention in matters involving their converts was common, and in case of dissatisfaction at the local level they rarely hesitated to complain to their consuls. That meant the Zongli Yamen would be notified, and the whole thing might end with a foreign gunboat sailing upriver to register a threatening presence or an indemnity for which the funds would have to be raised locally. For a local magistrate, therefore, whatever the merits of a complaint against a Christian convert, and however tempting support for local anti-Christian elements might be, it might not be worth the trouble of deciding against converts because they had such powerful backing. The resulting sense of untouchability allowed converts to behave with great arrogance, although of course not all took advantage. Still, because of the risk of missionary interference, a disgruntled non-Christian generally thought twice before bringing suit against a convert.
At the same time, the dilemma that a disturbance involving foreigners posed to local officials offered an opening to anti-Qing agitators. In other words, an incident of violence or hostility that seemed on the surface to be directed against foreigners sometimes was motivated not so much by antiforeignism pure and simple as by a desire to cause problems for local authorities or for the Qing itself.
While the benefits of missionary backing often clinched the decision to convert, they also brought down the resentment of the rest of the community on converts and their religion. What was more, converts were exempt, on grounds of religion, from making required donations to the expenses of local festivals, and by definition they were also ineligible to contribute to reparations arising from local anti-Christian activity. This financial burden had to be borne by their non-Christian neighbors. For the many who lived at subsistence level, this represented a significant additional expense.
The distinct class element—although not so much the gender element—in missionary conversions in China contributed to the ability of Christianity’s opponents to discredit it and had an adverse impact on the overall standing of the foreign religion in China. It seemed at times to appeal primarily to riffraff and those incapable of rational thinking. But there were plenty of other grounds for objection. Some Chinese, like their seventeenth-century predecessors, feared that the mission endeavor represented the subversive vanguard of wholesale foreign invasion; they were perhaps not altogether off the mark. Many suspected that missionaries were sexual perverts or sorcerers, or both, lumping Christianity together with other heterodox religions often the target of similar accusations. Why did Christian men and women worship together if not for purposes of debauchery? Why did missionaries take in unwanted children if not for pedophilia, witchcraft, or worse? What magic was in their pretended medicine? Who knew what their true intentions were when they claimed to be saving the bodies or souls of Chinese children?
These suspicions gave rise to a virulently anti-Christian literature that worked on Chinese emotions to create an atmosphere of at least latent fear of and antagonism toward foreign missionaries. Curiously, some of the claims made against the missionaries in China bore a striking resemblance to those raised against Chinese immigrants in the United States, where allegedly nefarious carryings-on in Chinatowns were a constant theme in anti-immigrant polemics. Rumor created an atmosphere of suspicion, in which the chance posting of a hostile placard or some fleeting misunderstanding might quickly lead to an explosion.
Many of the most furious acts of resistance took place against the background of specific events in the broader international context. This timing suggests that they were directed against missionaries as representatives of foreign imperialism rather than against them in their capacity as God’s envoys. For example, waves of violence against foreign missionaries followed China’s defeat in 1885 by France.
The Chinese state also found ways to resist foreign imperialism; their approach was less immediately violent but directly concerned the use of force. From the 1860s the state launched a series of programs to modernize its military forces both in terms of organization and training and in terms of technology.
Well before the First Opium War, certain statesmen had identified military modernization as of key importance. But the state had made little attempt to implement their proposals because before the conflict with the British most of the enemies that the Qing had fought were technically inferior to them, so that there had been little incentive to devote much attention or funding to military industrial reform. In this respect the situation in China was different from that in Europe, where competition between states of roughly equal power gave continual impetus to the quest for military advantage.
The foreign technology that brought about China’s defeat in the First Opium War made a huge impression in China. Steam propulsion, by then well established in the West, was previously unknown in China, as were the paddle-wheel boats that came so distressingly close in to Chinese harbors. Explosive shells that used slow-burning fuses, and hence made it possible to time explosions, had been in use in the West for a few decades but only now became known in China. The percussion cap, which had already revolutionized warfare in Britain and North America by making it possible to keep powder dry even in damp conditions, was also introduced into China soon after the war.
As we saw in the last chapter, Chinese began almost at once to experiment, with some success, with techniques for building Western-style warships, guns, gunpowder, and explosives. Although it was possible to buy foreign ships and weapons, the long-range goal was autonomy. So in addition to purchasing whatever they could, leading statesmen began calling for the establishment of government shipyards and arsenals to produce Western-style vessels and weapons, and they recommended using technicians from France and America (both hostile to Britain) to teach Chinese how to make and use them to greatest effect. In the late 1840s these calls came to nothing, as did French proposals, intended to give France the edge over Britain in China, that Chinese learn to manufacture ordnance in France. For at that time the lack of coordinated central control, together with the absence of any immediate military threat, derailed any concerted attempt speedily to update military matériel and revitalize the army.
Qing mid-century defeats by the Taiping, Nian, and other rebels brought new urgency to the earlier proposals for modernizing the armed forces. Attempts to adopt foreign technology and to provide the necessary education began to take place on a national level, with state backing. From shortly after the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion in 1851, local defense forces began ordering fresh supplies of artillery. Proposals to build local arsenals led to the establishment, in 1853, of a Gun Bureau in Hunan that became an important source of ordnance, as well as a number of other small arsenals and at least one shipyard where guns and ammunition and ships were produced. Throughout the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted until 1864, provincial leaders established a network of small-scale institutions of this kind to supply their beleaguered armies. At the same time, they steadily placed orders for foreign weaponry from the treaty ports and in some cases borrowed money from foreign merchants for the purpose. As we saw in the last chapter, foreign arms dealers of course sold to all comers, including the Taiping and other anti-Qing rebels, who themselves also became skilled weapons casters.
After the conclusion of the Convention of Beijing in 1860, the Qing could much more readily obtain Westerners’ military assistance because of the cessation of hostilities between them. The state, determined to upgrade its ability to produce and use military hardware, began to sponsor arsenals staffed by foreign experts and technical education to match.
The program of improving the military proceeded on the principle that however much foreign aid was needed in drilling and training, China should not at any cost become militarily dependent on foreigners. It should rigorously guard against such a possibility. This was simply an extension of the long-hallowed principle about maintaining centralized control of the military. The new regional armies created to conquer the Taiping already marked a departure from that rule, but so far they showed no intention of threatening imperial security, instead helping preserve the Qing. Abandoning military authority to voracious foreigners was altogether another matter; it was neither necessary nor something to take a chance on.
Apart from the desire not to surrender military control, accepting foreign military aid was a delicate matter because the Qing was determined not to become unduly indebted to any single foreign power. For example, in 1860 the desperate Qing finally accepted a Russian offer, made two years earlier, to supply them with rifles, artillery, and instructors, but they still rejected the idea that the Russians might send boats to help attack the Taiping capital at Nanjing. Nonetheless, the idea of using Western gunboats was appealing, all the more so after the Taiping had captured some coastal areas. Britain and France competed to win China’s order, which was eventually placed in London for seven steamers and one storeship.
This particular attempt at international cooperation is worth examining because it clearly demonstrated that the Qing, in concert with the newly powerful provincial commanders, fully intended to and actually would abide by their most cherished principles despite their political fragility. Briefly, what happened was as follows. The British head of the Qing Customs Service, Horatio Lay, helped conduct negotiations and locate a British captain and seamen to man the flotilla. But when Lay’s appointee, Captain Sherard Osborn, reached China, he insisted that the arrangements gave him overall command of the ships and that he was answerable only to the emperor (a child). Lay had probably assumed the Qing would concur in whatever they could get. But the Qing authorities had never had any intention of giving up ultimate authority and ordered him to serve under Chinese officers, in keeping with the principle of retaining control of the military and in order not to appear ready to back down. After protracted negotiations, the Lay-Osborn flotilla project was abandoned and its two namesakes were paid off and sent away. The ships themselves were converted into merchantmen under British control, in an agreement intended to allay parallel Qing and American fears that their opponents in their respective civil wars might somehow get hold of the flotilla.
Notwithstanding this particular disaster, China remained ready to use foreign troops, the best-known example of which was the Chinese mercenary force known as the Ever Victorious Army. This army of a few thousand men was effectively under Chinese control, although its officers and commanders—the most famous of whom was “Chinese” Gordon, later to die at Khartoum—came from a variety of foreign countries. As a result of the Ever Victorious Army’s superior training and its state-of-the-art Western weaponry, it played a significant part in the defeat of the Taiping, both because it distracted rebel troops from defending their capital at Nanjing and because its use of artillery was so effective that it converted the formerly cautious Li Hongzhang, the man who was to play a leading role in Chinese politics and international affairs from the late 1860s until his death in 1901, to active enthusiasm for foreign firepower and its technology, about which Li became extremely knowledgeable. Among other things, under Li’s auspices China became such a good client of Krupp, the German weapons manufacturer, that Alfred Krupp hung a picture of Li above his bed.
Li Hongzhang and the leading statesmen of the self-strengthening movement were interested in building a military industrial complex that before long would enable China to reduce or even abjure altogether its reliance on foreign aid. In the new workshops and arsenals, they planned to produce China’s own steamships, ammunition, and ordnance. They installed capital equipment purchased from abroad and, at considerable expense, hired foreign technicians to train Chinese workers. Of course state arsenals for the production of weapons were hardly new in China, nor was it unheard of to tap foreign military expertise. What really was new was the introduction of machinery, a direct import from the Industrial Revolution of the West.
The largest and most famous of these new institutions was the Jiangnan Arsenal, substantially funded by customs revenues levied on foreign trade, a tactic, incidentally, that helped the central government regain some of the power earlier ceded to provincial leaders. The arsenal was established in Shanghai in 1865. In addition to steamships, it machine-produced the most recent models of magazine rifles; black, brown, and smokeless powder; cartridges; breech-loading rapid-fire guns; giant coastal defense artillery; large-caliber artillery shells; and electrically detonated naval mines.5 These products, particularly the steamships and coastal defense weapons, left little doubt that the new weapons were intended to be used against outsiders as well as against rebels.
Soon there were almost twenty new arsenals and shipyards across the country. Most were in treaty port areas, which gave them ready access to imported supplies and foreign advisers. The level of sophistication improved rapidly. China not only caught up but also kept abreast of the extraordinarily rapid development in military technology simultaneously taking place in the West. It established research facilities. Within thirty-five years the Chinese arsenals were producing up-to-date arms and ammunition of generally high standard. By 1895, the year of the Chinese defeat by the Japanese, Jiangnan alone had produced almost six hundred heavy machines; some fifty-two thousand small arms and around twenty-seven million pieces of ammunition; almost three hundred guns of one kind or another with almost half a million pieces of ammunition; more than six hundred mines; sixteen vessels, including wooden-hulled and armor-plated propeller ships, a steel-armored vessel, and one ironclad; and several tons of powder.6
Besides equipping its military to compete with foreign armies, China needed to train its troops in the new methods. One early episode of foreign training gave rise in 1862 to the new Beijing Field Force, which was intended to defend the capital. It was drilled by five hundred bannermen who had themselves been trained by British officers in the new treaty port of Tianjin. By the late 1860s it had grown to about twenty thousand men, but not all were so well trained. Another program was initiated in 1864 under Gordon’s supervision. It had some success in training Chinese troops in the use of foreign weapons but petered out nine years later, in part because of opium addiction among the troops. A number of other, mostly short-lived military training programs were launched as the Qing tried, in a somewhat piecemeal fashion, to streamline and update their army.
The progress of the new training programs was greatly impeded by the ambivalence of official attitudes. One fundamental problem was that many existing army officers both lacked the modern training needed to make the new weaponry truly effective and strongly resented any attempt either to instruct or to replace them. As a result, training programs might teach the use of Western weapons purchased for the purpose without going the next step and permitting systematic drilling and training. Such attitudes and the lingering fear even among progressives that too much military authority, in any form, was a dangerous thing in the hands of foreigners handicapped the foreign military training project. So the new hardware was not always able to be used to best effect.
In any event, available funding was sufficient to permit the armies only in a few important locations, such as the capital area, to acquire and learn to use the newest weaponry. It might be necessary, for example, for drilling to take place with spears instead of guns, which obviously reduced effectiveness. Moreover, it was simply not possible to coordinate the rearming of the expanding armies. At century’s end it sometimes happened that not even all the troops in a single battalion necessarily had the same weapons. Nor was it feasible to complete systematic training before the next foreign onslaughts brought serious damage to the fleet and some of the best-armed and best-trained troops. To hasten the process of military modernization, the self-strengtheners continued to purchase foreign weapons in considerable quantities, but they had continually to make strategic decisions about where to concentrate their best efforts.
Observers have traditionally dismissed the military industrialization represented by the arsenals as a failure because first France and then Japan roundly defeated China in the 1880s and 1890s, in the first practical tests of China military reforms. These defeats considerably set back China’s progress toward acquiring a new army and navy. But as we have seen, these defeats did not necessarily prove that the programs of military self-strengthening had failed to make impressive advances. Attentive Westerners found that the Chinese arsenals showed an alarming capacity to produce and adapt to the changed requirements of military conflict.
The revolutionary implications of the introduction of machine production into China reached far beyond military use, as many reformers clearly recognized:
. . . what we have is machinery-producing machinery; no matter what type of machinery it can be reproduced step by step following the [right] method; then, it can be employed to make that type of product. There are no limits to what can be produced; all things can be mastered. At present we are unable to do everything at once; it is most important that we still produce iron ordnance to meet our military needs . . . foreign machinery can produce machinery for plowing, weaving, printing, ceramics, and tile making, which will benefit the daily needs of the people; originally it was not just for munitions. . . . I predict that in several decades there certainly will be wealthy Chinese farmers and great traders who will imitate foreign machine manufacturing for their own profit.7
The arsenals brought into China a far-reaching infrastructure, both conceptual and mechanical, that formed the basis on which it would later be able to create its own industrial base. The tools and techniques of military industrialization were applicable in almost every other area of the economy: in the mines, which used steam-powered pumps and modern extractive methods to supply the needs of military industrialization; in the steel refineries attached to the arsenals for making artillery; and in the all-important agricultural sector. It was in the arsenals too that the production of electrical equipment and the industrial processing of chemicals—both essential ingredients of industrial modernization—first took place. In addition, the military projects’ use of such new techniques as mass production and the use of interchangeable components, as well as the creation of a new organizational mentality, helped create a framework for later industrial development.
By the last decades of the century a wide range of industrial projects had sprung up: steamships for travel on the network of inland waterways and along the coast, coal mines, railroads, telegraphs, textile manufacturing, and the minting of currency. Most used Western machinery and methods. Reformers also proposed to revolutionize agriculture by introducing Western methods, including the use of machinery, and chemical fertilizer in place of night soil. In short, once industrialization, spearheaded by modernization in the military sphere, began, it knew no bounds. The goal was modernity and independence; the means was using the foreigners’ methods to break free of dependence on the foreigners.
But the path of industrialization did not run at all smoothly. Certain types of enterprise encountered particularly strong opposition. Although antiforeign sentiment often played a part in this type of resistance, the reasons were more generally social, economic, and cultural. Some Chinese opponents of mechanization feared the social repercussions of new industrial enterprises, as had Europeans earlier in the century. They expressed concern that machines would put too many people out of work and create too great a disparity between rich and poor.
Some objected to railroads, mines, and telegraphs on the ground that they would upset the geomantic balance by too much digging and destroying of the land. A few early lines were even torn up in protest by local inhabitants. Reformers drew attention to the fact that telegraph wires and railroad tracks required only laying on flat surfaces and tried to placate opponents of the new machine-operated mines by explaining that they were simply narrower and deeper than those to which Chinese were accustomed. But hostility remained. When, for example, the cosmopolitan diplomat Zeng Jize (1839–1890) took a small steamship home to Changsha from Nanjing in order to attend a family funeral, a number of influential people raised an enormous outcry that lasted several years.
The first Chinese ambassador to London, Guo Songtao (1818–1891), a man often vilified for his support of modernization projects, sought to address some of these concerns when he wrote in 1877 to Li Hongzhang about the building of railroads:
Since my arrival here a few months ago, I have actually seen the convenience of having these trains, which can make a round trip of three to four hundred li [approximately 100 to 130 miles] in half a day. The local gentry here also advise us to build railways, saying that marked the beginning of the foundation of British power, though originally they too had been suspicious of these railways and tried to stop their construction, fearing that they would be detrimental to the people’s livelihood. For example, thirty thousand horses were formerly used to maintain communication between the port of Southampton and London. However, with the opening of the railway, over sixty or seventy thousand horses are now used. This has happened because the convenience of the railway has led to a daily increase in trade, and since the railway only follows a [single] route, people from a distance of several dozen li or less, who come to take the train, must first travel by horse and get there, and do so in increasing numbers. . . .8
Some of the reluctance about railroads, in particular, was more directly related to the foreign threat. It stemmed from a fear that railroads would simply make it easy for the foreigners to infiltrate the whole of China. But this objection was largely overruled once the Qing discovered during the 1900 Boxer Uprising that railroads enabled them quickly to transport their own troops wherever needed and that if necessary, they could impede pursuit by tearing up the lines (a notion the Boxers also grasped). But just as the Chinese authorities realized that they could turn the foreigners’ railroads and weapons to their own advantage against the foreigners, so the Boxers and other anti-Qing elements realized that they could use them against the Qing itself.
The main targets of the antiforeign Boxer movement of 1899–1900 were Chinese Christians and the missionaries who backed them. Missionary objections to the harassment of their converts only heightened Boxer resentment of the imperialist presence. Drawing their inspiration from arcane rituals that included spirit possession, the Boxers believed they were impervious to Western firepower, and like the Taiping before them, they espoused an egalitarian ideology that convinced large numbers of people to join the movement.
They began by committing acts of vandalism, theft, extortion, kidnapping, and arson, sometimes injuring or even killing their primarily Christian victims. The beleaguered Qing, in despair about empire and nation, could not decide whether to crush them (which some preliminary skirmishes proved to be by no means a foregone conclusion) or to take a gamble on legitimizing them as representatives of the people’s will, in a last-ditch hope of getting rid of the foreigners. In the end they adopted the latter option. The emboldened Boxers eventually assembled a large force with which they marched on Beijing, with imperial backing, attacking missionaries and Chinese Christians as they went. Several hundred Westerners and thousands of Chinese Christians lost their lives, and property damage was considerable. In the capital the Boxers killed the German ambassador and laid siege to the foreign legations. From June till August Boxer armies and their supporters effectively blocked a multination expeditionary force trying to reach Beijing from coming to the rescue.
The failure of key military leaders to back the throne in supporting the Boxers drove the empress dowager to evacuate the capital and brought about the end of the uprising. The ensuing Boxer Protocol imposed stringent penalties on China, including indemnities of legendary proportions; a two-year ban on arms imports and permission for the foreign legations to install armed protection against further attack; execution and other punishments for highly placed Boxer supporters; and the erection of memorials in China to the Westerners killed in the uprisings. The sextant and other astronomical instruments made by European missionaries more than two hundred years before were removed from the Beijing Observatory to the palace of Sans Souci in Potsdam, Germany.
A vivid sense remained among foreigners and Chinese alike that it could always happen again. Against that fear, missionaries began very gradually to initiate a spirit more of cooperation than condescension, as the inkling dawned that ultimately they would turn their entire operations, religious, educational, and medical, over to Chinese control. Moreover, although Westerners scoffed in public at China’s “primitive” efforts at military modernization, some privately acknowledged that the combined imperial and Boxer forces had almost proved more than a match for the international rescue expedition, in terms of both tactics and technology, as one captain in the German forces noted: “If we had known beforehand that our small force would have to fight with all modern weaponry, it would have been greatly imprudent to start off as we did.”9 The surprising discovery that military defeat of Chinese troops was not a foregone conclusion demonstrated the unexpected extent to which China had brought its military forces much more nearly into line with those of its foreign enemies than had been anticipated by the foreigners, who generally underestimated China and its capacity to shift gears. They found that the attention to technology and training in the military was paralleled by an intense focus on every aspect of the educational curriculum.
Chinese leaders were well aware that creating new institutions and importing or copying foreign technology would serve little purpose without the transformation of education. They also knew that Japan had already been sending young men overseas to learn about foreign industry and foreign machines in order to launch its own military industry, and they were anxious not to lag behind. Hitherto the curriculum for the civil service examinations had been based on classical texts (with a smattering of questions on issues of current policy). A new curriculum would have to incorporate knowledge of technology, so that the next generations of leaders would be better informed about the new institutions the reformers hoped to build nationwide and would be less dependent on foreign aid.
Hiring foreign experts to give technical training in the arsenals was only the first step. It was also necessary to translate from foreign languages a much wider range of texts into Chinese than missionaries had already translated. Although these earlier efforts had helped provide both new information and convey new points of view and new ways of looking at things, it was not enough. Not least, a vital first step was establishing uniform terminology for the newly introduced sciences and technology, in itself no mean feat.
After 1860 the Qing established a number of translation bureaus where Chinese and Westerners worked together. One such bureau was attached to the Jiangnan Arsenal, where there was a desperate need for translations of technical works. Its rate of production was remarkable. By 1870 it had put out translations of almost 150 foreign technical works. Chinese were avid to read them; more than 130,000 volumes, many of which certainly passed through the hands of numbers of different readers, were sold during this period. In addition, the translations served as textbooks for Chinese technical workers at the arsenal and in other modern enterprises.
In time, translation work expanded well beyond the officially sponsored bureaus and well beyond pure technical works. Among the best-known translators was Yan Fu (1853–1921), a graduate of the new Fuzhou shipyard who had studied in England for several years. Yan’s translations of several English works on science and sociology, including Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinist Study of Sociology, were extraordinarily influential, as we shall see in the next chapter. Other translation projects involved putting a work through more than one language on its way into Chinese—for example, from the original German or Russian into Japanese and thence into Chinese. The net effect, at any rate, was that knowledge of the West became far more widespread; it was no longer the limited prerogative of a privileged few.
At the same time that the translation projects were getting under way, the Qing established new schools offering a nontraditional curriculum that included, in particular, the study of Western languages. This move suggested a new awareness that knowledge of the West was coming to be of strategic significance. At the College of Foreign Languages (Tongwen Guan) attached to the Zongli Yamen in the capital, for example, French, English, Russian, and German were offered; branch schools later opened in Shanghai and Canton. These institutions were intended to provide young men, at first primarily Manchus, with language training and some degree of more general education about Western countries, so that they could prepare for newly created careers as diplomats, interpreters, or engineers. As early as 1866 three Tongwen Guan graduates accompanied Robert Hart, the British director of the Qing Imperial Maritime Customs Service, on an informal mission to Europe.
By the 1870s the Tongwen Guan had expanded its enrollment to include more Chinese students and began, against conservative objections, to offer instruction not just in foreign languages but also in international law, political economy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, and astronomy. Other government schools offered study on such topics as technology, warfare, language, shipbuilding, mining, and telegraphy, as well as agriculture, newly identified as a suitable target for modernization.
The broadest-ranging of traditional educations had always included study of the scientific and other practical knowledge of the ancients, so that in a sense these new-style schools did not mark a radical departure. But they were a far cry from the many academies that focused only on classical texts and were geared to the civil service examinations. For this reason, some traditional families declined to send their sons to the new schools. Even those students who did attend had to accept on faith that the new knowledge would lead to a good career in some nontraditional area. Some evidently had misgivings; they were found practicing essays for the civil service examinations instead of studying the mathematics and English they were paid a stipend to learn. But the very existence of the new schools helped, notwithstanding, to ensure that the new knowledge itself, and a general awareness of its importance, began to filter out into educated society more generally.
The new schools naturally aroused opposition. Conservatives, as was to be expected, deplored the innovations because they thought the absorption of traditional moral values was the essence of a classical training and believed that what was good enough for the ancestors should be good enough for present and future generations. Such claims disregarded the reality that in the past Chinese intellectuals had often shown tremendous interest in foreign practical knowledge and that the indigenous tradition they so treasured had over the centuries been hugely enriched by input from the outside, if not always under the same pressure for national survival.
Beyond the government schools and training programs, Chinese could acquire a new-style education at missionary schools. Although Catholics and Protestants shared the common goal of inculcating Christian values, their approach varied. Catholic schools offered instruction in Chinese, primarily on subjects geared to the promotion of Christianity; they did not offer foreign languages or the study of science. They also set up schools for their converts’ children; by the end of the century in the Jiangnan region surrounding Shanghai alone, more than sixteen thousand boys and girls were enrolled in Catholic-run elementary schools, while the total number of Catholics in China amounted to some seven hundred thousand people, including a few hundred Chinese priests. In adopting the values of another culture, however, the candidates for the priesthood, often social outcasts seeking to improve their lot in life, further alienated local communities by their willingness to give up such staples of Chinese life as ancestor worship and by their sanctimonious renunciation of opium.
Protestant schools were altogether different. Many Protestant missionaries were professionally trained teachers and included Chinese men and women. They operated numerous elementary and middle schools and several colleges, at which enrollment rose nearly tenfold between 1877 and 1906, from six thousand to almost sixty thousand students. Instruction was in English, and many secular subjects (including medicine) were offered in addition to religious instruction. By treaty the missionaries had gained the right to establish hospitals in China, and many such institutions had medical schools attached. By the turn of the century these had turned out more than three hundred Chinese doctors and had almost as many still in training. The hospitals also employed numerous Chinese on their staffs.
After the Boxer Uprising of 1900 Chinese enrollment in mission schools and colleges increased sharply, but at the same time the Qing government began to take more determined initiatives in education as one way of responding to the newly overt nationalism.At government schools, for instance, missionary teachers no longer taught, and their textbooks were removed from the curriculum. In 1905 the abolition of the seven-centuries-old civil service examinations around which most academic programs had revolved laid open the path to a more practical, generally more Western-oriented curriculum. Chinese schools thus became far more competitive with missionary schools, where student activists backed with strikes their calls to make coursework serve patriotic goals and to eliminate required religious observance. More generally, critics often accused mission schools of cutting students off from their own culture by failing to offer proper Chinese instruction.
Many Chinese who enrolled in missionary schools never had much interest in becoming Christians. They were primarily interested in learning English so that they could more readily find employment in the treaty ports; business profits were much more appealing than religious enlightenment. More than one school in 1880s Shanghai noted that their English-language curriculum was their greatest attraction in the eyes of many of their Chinese students; the student body changed almost completely about every eighteen months because as soon as students learned enough English to work with foreigners, they left. The schools contributed in this way to the expansion of the new urban bourgeoisie, but their impact on the numbers of Christians were less striking. In 1900 there were still only about one hundred thousand Chinese Protestants.
Missionaries were well aware of their students’ priorities, but they hoped that education in one of their schools would at least incline young Chinese favorably toward foreigners and their cultural values. As a foreign-language newspaper put it, “A boy educated at the missions’ school is not in after life likely to be a rabid antiforeign, antichristian zealot. His better education should raise him somewhat in intellectual status above his neighbors, and this gives him an influence which ought to be on the right side.”10 But the demands of patriotism frequently overshadowed the influence of a Westernized Christian education.
In addition to operating schools for boys, missionaries ran schools for Chinese girls, a radical innovation in a society where very few females were educated outside the home. The first missionary school for girls in China was established in the treaty port of Ningbo in 1844, although in the interior women rarely had access to education until much later. Many tried to train their Chinese students to behave like Europeans, as one young woman noted in the early twentieth century: “All the lessons were given in English . . . it was not long before I could speak a little English. I was dressed and my hair was arranged now in European fashion. . . . With my English clothes, a hat which was the first I ever had on my head, the skirts which I now wore instead of trousers, I felt very much ‘in the role.’ . . . I learned how to drink tea as the English take it, with sugar and milk; how to eat bread and butter and toast; how to use a knife and fork instead of chopsticks, and how to take exercise.”11 The first private Chinese school for girls was established in 1897; the first government girls’ school not until 1906.
Traditionally religions such as Buddhism and Daoism had held considerable attraction for Chinese women because of the chance they offered for a better position than they were likely to find within the hierarchical confines of Confucian society. Missionary educators tried to woo women away from other religious beliefs with the promise that Christianity alone could offer them equality with men on the spiritual plane. But for many, Christianity offered the possibility of a bonus rather than an alternative in spiritual terms, and they did not necessarily abandon other beliefs to become exclusively Christian.
For young women, attendance at a mission school offered all kinds of benefits in addition to acquiring an education. It gave them a measure of independence from the stifling atmosphere of the family unit, and with it a new identity. It enabled them to make friends with their peers in ways that might not otherwise have been open to them. Some certainly found solace in religion that they found nowhere else, for the missionaries were skillful at playing on the vulnerability of the many young Chinese women who were unaccustomed to anyone’s paying them much attention. But Chinese women did not necessarily find Christianity as such particularly appealing.
Although some men did not care enough about their daughters to object to their attendance at a mission school, others complained bitterly, as one American missionary woman describes in a letter written in 1895 from rural Guangdong province: “The people were hostile, i.e., the men—for they said so many of the women and girls were ‘believing Jesus’ already, that if they allowed us to go on, soon the whole place would be filled with disobedient wives and daughters refusing to worship the idols when told. Therefore they came nights and stoned the house and commanded us to be turned out.”12
Following the example of their teachers, a majority of whom were women, many mission-educated Chinese women expected to work outside the home, and many decided to remain single in order to follow a vocation as a doctor, a teacher, or even a missionary. Some became the financial mainstays of their families. Many were also active in the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century, for example, saving up to buy a few shares of railroad stock during the Rights Recovery Movement, an effort to push back foreign economic advances by raising money locally to buy back tracks already mortgaged to eager foreign financiers. In the patriotic spirit of the times, they found that while their schooling enabled them to do something for their country, it also made it necessary for them to demonstrate their loyalty to their non-Christian fellows. In other words, having once broken free from the constraints of family and tradition by attending missionary schools, many young women also managed to assert their independence from missionary influence.
The new trend toward acquiring knowledge of and about the powers, with a view to learning how most effectively to compete with them, lent a new prestige to foreign travel. There was nothing like firsthand experience. As we have seen, Chinese emigration around the world, both voluntary and involuntary, began to escalate in the 1840s, spurred on by Chinese merchants’ need for overseas outposts and by the intensifying coolie trade. But now in addition to the emigration of laborers, educated Chinese began to travel overseas, as students and diplomats or simply to observe the wealth and power of the Western nations and Japan for themselves. Such knowledge became a cultural commodity, most valuable in the form of eyewitness accounts, but still valued when derived more at second hand. Among some intellectuals, foreign knowledge began to compete for prestige with old-fashioned Confucian erudition even before the abolition of the examination system.
Overseas study had begun shortly after the First Opium War. In 1847, for instance, Yung Wing (Rong Hong, 1828–1912), a young Macanese who had received some education from local missionaries, spent three years in a seminary in the United States and then attended Yale College, becoming in 1854 its first Chinese graduate. After considerable debate the state decided to sponsor study in the United States. From 1872 batches of students, often the sons of men who worked in the new arsenals and shipyards, traveled under the auspices of the Chinese Educational Mission to Hartford, Connecticut, where they remained for several years. They lived with families in different towns in the Connecticut Valley, attending local high schools and playing baseball, as well as regularly studying classical Chinese texts. Back in China some commentators expressed the fear that the students were becoming too Americanized. But the main reason the mission came to an end in 1881 was American hostility to Chinese people. When the Annapolis Naval College and West Point Military Academy both refused to admit Chinese students, notwithstanding treaty provisions to the contrary, China called an end to the project and withdrew its students from the United States altogether.
Given these kinds of difficulties, many young Chinese went elsewhere to pursue their studies. In the 1880s some began to go to France and Britain. Most, including translator Yan Fu, were graduates of the Fuzhou shipyard’s school, more mature and less impressionable than the young boys sent to America and better equipped to study the new scientific and technological subjects.
Even more than Europe or the United States, Chinese students preferred to pursue their education in Japan, which offered proximity and a sense of shared civilization. The preference for Japan was also to some extent a question of Asian pride. Japan had had some success in fending off the imperialists, and the Chinese felt a certain solidarity with the Japanese against the Western powers, at least until Japan defeated China in 1895. Young Chinese intellectuals hoped to use Japan as a shortcut to Western knowledge because its modernization was more advanced than China’s. They also believed that anything the Japanese could do, they would soon be able to do better.
The exodus of Chinese students to Japan began in the 1870s; by 1905 as many as nine thousand were there, women as well as men. Initially most were officially sponsored, but increasingly many went privately to Japan to further their studies. It was not only the formal education that attracted them. Many were exposed to a much broader range of new ideas while in exile, since a number of Western works had already been translated into Japanese but not yet into Chinese. Moreover, in Japan Chinese students enjoyed much greater freedom of thought and expression about the Qing regime and the Chinese tradition than they would have had at home. In Japan, for instance, the future revolutionary leader Sun Yatsen formed his first anti-Qing alliances, while the intellectual and reformer Liang Qichao, in exile in Japan after 1898, was at liberty to inspire many of his fellow countrymen and women with an intense sense of nationalism.
On the whole Japan welcomed the Chinese students. From Japan’s point of view, becoming an educational center for Chinese was part of a long-term project to expand Japanese interests in China. They hoped to forge links with the students, perhaps future leaders, by stressing a special relationship based on their common Asian culture. But by the turn of the century Japanese often made little secret of their personal disdain for Chinese students, with whom they had relatively little intimate contact. Hence many Chinese students, rather than become enamored of Japan, often came away disenchanted and strongly anti-Japanese. These sentiments formed part of the core of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism, as we shall see in the next chapter.
The generation that came to maturity around the turn of the century bridged the gap between those who received only a traditional Chinese-style classical education and those raised after the 1905 abolition of the examination system, whose education focused more on modern, technical subjects, foreign languages, and studies of the West. Many of this bridging generation were polymaths versed in both types of knowledge, like Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940) the radical and influential president of Beijing University in the 1910s, of whom a colleague later noted: “Before the age of twenty-nine [Cai] was totally versed in the old learning, at thirty he started to study science, at thirty-two he studied Japanese, at thirty-seven he started his study of German, taking his first trip to study philosophy and fine arts in Germany at the age of forty-one . . . at the age of forty-seven he traveled to France to study French.”13
With the course of time, however, the balance of Chinese students’ interest inclined more toward the new education and less and less toward the traditional curriculum.
The shift in education was accompanied by a shift in attitude toward both opium and footbinding. Chinese patriots identified opium addiction among men and footbinding among women as major sources of foreign denigration of their country. As Kang Youwei observed, “. . . all countries have international relations so that if one commits the slightest error the others ridicule and look down on it. Ours is definitely not a time of seclusion. Now China is narrow and crowded, has opium addicts and streets lined with beggars. Foreigners laugh at us for these things, and criticize us for being barbarians. There is nothing which makes us objects of ridicule so much as footbinding.”14
Ridding the country of both opium and footbinding became a high priority among Chinese tormented by national weakness. At the same time, many foreign missionaries parted company from their more commercially minded fellow countrymen by expressing their moral opposition to the opium trade. Although arguably opium had helped make possible their own presence in China, it both sat ill with their Christian mission and hindered their conversion efforts because of addicts’ unreliability.
The eradication of opium in China involved banning both its importation from overseas and the prohibition of domestic cultivation, for more opium now grew in China than was imported by the British. This posed a considerable challenge, given the complex networks of vested interests both within China and around the world and the by then massive numbers of addicts. But in 1906 an imperial edict forbade both consumption of the drug and its cultivation. The widespread determination to eliminate opium that was evident in China succeeded in favorably influencing international opinion. In Britain a changed political climate led to the gradual, if in some quarters reluctant, reduction of British opium exports to China.
Because of the difficulty of obtaining opium, many smokers soon began to switch to tobacco. The opium ban gave a tremendous boost to foreign tobacco companies seeking to make inroads into the China market, such as the British-American Tobacco Company, whose enormous success in persuading Chinese people to smoke cigarettes dated from this period. Still, opium trafficking continued to be big business, and addiction remained widespread.
At the same time that they were turning their attention to the opium problem, both Chinese patriots and Western missionaries dedicated considerable energy to campaigning against footbinding. Manchu women had been forbidden to bind their feet from the time of the conquest in the seventeenth century, and some of the scattering of male Chinese who advocated greater freedom for women in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries had written against footbinding. But toward the end of the nineteenth century a majority of Chinese women of all classes still wrapped their feet tightly from childhood, in conformity with long-standing ideals of beauty. Footbinding caused the bones to malform, the feet to grow only a few inches altogether, and allowed women only to hobble around.
Apart from the issue of China’s international image, many nationalist-minded Chinese concluded, first, that women with bound feet were a wasted resource and, second, that the crippling of Chinese women symbolized the condition of China itself. From there it was easy to imagine China the hapless victim of foreign rapists. The metaphors of a crippled nation and of violation emerged all the more starkly after the Boxer Uprising. Troops of the international force sent to relieve the siege of the Beijing legations were accused of large-scale rape. Thousands of women committed suicide, and it was easy to draw the implication, both literal and metaphorical, that they—and China—might have been saved if their feet had not been bound.
The antifootbinding movement was launched with the help of foreign missionaries, who continued to support the growing opposition to footbinding vigorously because they thought it cruel and un-Christian. They strongly discouraged it in convert families and refused to admit women with bound feet to their boarding schools. But missionary support for the movement was a mixed blessing because while it helped provide inspiration and organization, it also laid supporters open to the insidious charge of succumbing to alien influence.
The antifootbinding movement had gained momentum by the turn of the century. Tiny feet simply lost their chic and their erotic attraction. The daughters of intellectuals were the first to stop binding their feet. The government jumped on the bandwagon and came out against footbinding in 1902. Some women underwent the agony of unbinding their feet, either as a political protest or simply to be able to run in times of turmoil. By the 1920s one Chinese scholar observed that whereas in the past young women with natural feet had been unmarriageable, now those with bound feet were the unmarriageable ones. This observation was, however, truer in urban than in rural areas, where change in all aspects of life was much slower to take effect.
Progressive Chinese were particularly anxious that China not be represented abroad by women with bound feet. In 1903, when some women with bound feet were sent from Japanese-occupied Taiwan to an international exhibition in Osaka, a public outcry ensued on the mainland. Similar outrage greeted the display of women with bound feet at the world’s fair in St. Louis in the following year. Chinese students in America sent written protests to Beijing, while the Chinese press fulminated against this public humiliation: “Who is so shameless as to exhibit those ugly things in a place to which a thousand nations on earth pay their attention.”15 As China struggled to stand up for itself against the world’s contempt, women with bound feet were inappropriate representatives of the nation.
EARLY POPULAR ACTION
AGAINST FOREIGNERS
Just as educated Chinese were becoming increasingly vocal in their resistance to the foreign powers, so ordinary men and women consistently displayed a readiness to take a stand on behalf of their country. The legacy of successful popular resistance to superior foreign power bequeathed by the 1841 stand against the British at Sanyuanli, even though the reality was rather less than the glorious triumph it became in later mythology, at least fostered a sense of possibilities. Although many instances of popular action undoubtedly were organized by members of the elite or the new bourgeoisie, ordinary Chinese participated in them with considerable vigor. Such was the case just over ten years after Sanyuanli, when Chinese in Xiamen (Amoy) rioted in protest after a British coolie merchant had attempted to retrieve his Chinese broker from the local police station. The broker had been in custody after his attempts to entrap young workers had prompted members of the community to set upon him.
Individuals sometimes acted against foreigners. In Hong Kong in 1867 a Chinese baker poisoned with arsenic the bread he supplied to European households, including the governor’s mansion. Several hundred Europeans fell ill; in the aftermath indiscriminate arrests by the British acknowledged their vulnerability as a minority colonial authority. From the 1860s collective resistance in the form of labor unrest was fairly common in enterprises such as the Jiangnan Arsenal, where at least in the early days management might well be in the hands of foreigners. Such outbreaks suggested that Chinese workers had from the outset some sense both of their bargaining power and of the not necessarily benign effects of foreign influence.
One of the first major instances of mass action against foreigners took place in Hong Kong in 1884. Chinese dockworkers refused to service French ships freshly returned from destroying the newly constructed Chinese fleet that had been anchored at Fuzhou. Officials and gentry in Canton, in league with secret society members opposed to the Qing, exhorted patriotic Chinese to resist the French with all means available. They offered rewards, titles, and forgiveness of past offenses to anyone who would seize French munitions or murder a French commander. In addition, conscious that some Chinese had secretly been supplying the French with food and even working for them as spies, the Canton officials displayed placards that threatened death to traitors and dire punishment to their families. Their efforts hit home both because the families of many Hong Kong workers still lived in the Canton area, threatened with French attack, and because the warships interfered with trade and hence the people’s livelihood. Hong Kong workers struck again in 1888 and 1895 against regulations imposed by the colonial authorities, who found themselves effectively powerless to overcome this type of concerted action.
A second major outbreak against foreigners took place in 1905, when deteriorating American treatment of Chinese immigrants prompted an anti-American boycott in China. The Exclusion Acts of 1882–1894 prohibited Chinese workers from entering the United States, including Hawaii and the Philippines after these fell under American control in 1898 and 1900 respectively. The treaty that had led to this legislation was due for renewal, but the Qing government bowed to popular pressure at home and refused to renew it. To support the government’s stand, merchants and others called for a total boycott of American goods.
Dockworkers in Canton and workers and merchants in Wuhan, Nanjing, Tianjin, Xiamen, Hong Kong, and Shanghai all joined in the boycott, which lasted three months. Chinese students in the United States sent home funds to support the boycott. All kinds of people unexpectedly found themselves its targets; a Chinese dentist in Hong Kong, for instance, lost many patients because of his American education. But others who had direct business interests with Americans were often reluctant to jeopardize their economic well-being for patriotism’s sake and declined to participate.
The boycott’s geographic spread, its duration, and the evident strength of underlying feeling against the Americans took many people by surprise. In response to U.S. protests, Qing authorities posted announcements opposing the boycott, but they hung them upside down to indicate their lack of enthusiasm. The withdrawal of Chinese business from American companies gave a welcome, although often only short-lived, boost to their Chinese competitors. Moreover, the clear links to the Chinese community in America confirmed the vision of the early diplomats: that, in the overseas communities, China possessed a formidable national asset. Although the boycott eventually came to an end, it had made its point.
The third major antiforeign boycott was directed against Japan. Early in 1908 Chinese gunboats had seized a Japanese freighter, the Tatsu Maru, off Macao because it was smuggling weapons and ammunition into Canton. The vessel was taken to Canton, and the Japanese flag replaced by a Chinese one. Reaction was strong on both sides. The Japanese at once demanded an apology, an indemnity, the release of the freighter, the purchase of the cargo, and the punishment of the responsible officials. But influential Cantonese bombarded the Chinese Foreign Ministry with exhortations to stand firm. When the Qing caved in to the threat of Japanese gunboats, mass meetings held in Canton soon decided to stage a boycott against Japanese goods. With widespread support, the boycott spread to numerous cities where Japanese merchants were in business, including Canton itself, Hong Kong, and the overseas communities of Singapore, Manila, Honolulu, and Sydney, Australia. The boycott resulted in a considerable reduction of Japanese imports into China during its nine months. Even in British Hong Kong, where the colonial authorities severely punished leading boycotters, Japanese imports dropped by almost 24 percent over the preceding year, and anti-Japanese riots broke out.
Repeatedly humiliated by military defeat, compelled to operate internationally on Western terms, mockingly dismissed by the more powerful nations as both hopelessly corrupt and pathetically unable to pull itself out of its overwhelming inertia, China viewed the West with increasing ambivalence between the conclusion of the treaties of 1858–1860 and the outbreak of World War One in Europe. Chinese men and women ran the gamut from collective self-pity to envy of the wealth and power of the West. Yet among the large-scale mortifications were a number of less spectacular but significant triumphs: at the government level, for instance, the diplomatic successes and at the level of ordinary Chinese people, successful acts of resistance to the foreign powers.
As Chinese intellectuals began to learn about the West, there was almost always a specific focus to their studies. To be sure, they wanted to find out about the West in a general sense. But for some, part of the purpose of learning about the West was also to chart China’s course into the future. They believed that the path to modernity did not carry an infinite range of possibilities but rather that they already had some sense of what “modern China” would look like. It would somehow resemble the West in Chinese guise. In this respect they differed from their counterparts in India, many of whom found objectionable any version of modernity derived from their British colonial overlords.
Some found Western values of power and domination unappealing. The prospect that a modernized China might well lose some of its peculiarly Chinese characteristics and come to resemble its oppressors too closely lay at the root of widespread Chinese attempts to draw a distinction between Western learning and Chinese values. At the same time as they wanted to learn from the West in order to imitate (and eventually to surpass) its might, in the early twentieth century even those intellectuals who avidly supported reform drew back from wholesale Westernization.
This point of view, especially widespread after 1895, gave rise to a famous formulation: “Chinese learning for the essence; Western learning for the practical knowledge”—in Chinese, zhong xue wei ti, xi xue wei yong, popularly known as ti-yong. This formulation represented a clear rejection of such Western belief systems as Christianity, in favor of a traditional Chinese worldview, at the same time as it acknowledged how beneficial foreign science and technology might be for China. Some version of ti-yong was raised virtually without exception whenever Chinese perceived that the precarious balance between autonomy and dependence that characterized much of this period had been thrown off kilter. The question was then, and has remained ever since, whether it was possible to separate Western ideologies from Western practical knowledge and methodologies.