In the first decade of the nineteenth century a confederation of pirates plagued the waters off China’s southeastern coast. At their height they numbered at least fifty thousand men and women, with some two thousand junks, organized into two fleets, based in the port of Jiangping (Giang Binh) on the Vietnamese border. Their daring was legendary. In 1805, for instance, they blockaded the Portuguese island enclave of Macao for several weeks, reducing the panicked occupants to a few days’ food supply. Three years later they held hostage three large Siamese junks on a tribute mission and drove five American ships to take refuge within range of Macao’s artillery defenses. They capped it all by capturing the brig of the visiting Portuguese colonial governor of Timor, and to add insult to injury, the pirates towed the vessel ignominiously past Macao city, trailing its flag in the water.
Solving the piracy problem was in the interest of both the Manchu Qing rulers of China (1644–1911) and the various foreign traders whose merchantmen were vulnerable to pirate attack. The Qing insisted that it was their prerogative alone to patrol the Chinese coast, but they were unable to clear the seaways. So, in line with numerous predecessors, who over the centuries had called on foreign fighting forces and military technology, the Qing enlisted the aid of armed Portuguese and British ships in the area. But their occasional joint expeditions were not terribly successful and led to mutual recriminations. The Europeans accused the Chinese of being in league with the pirates, while the Chinese blamed the Europeans because their deep-draft boats could not sail in shallow coastal waters, thus usually allowing the pirates to slip away.
The pirates themselves—fishermen, peddlers, grass cutters, shopkeepers, rice dealers, sailors, and others from the lowest echelons of Chinese society—were just as willing to make use of the foreigners and their skills as were the Qing authorities. After pirate leader Zhang Bao’s vessel fled from a broadside of twenty-four-pound shot administered by a British ship, for instance, he is said to have examined the size of the cannonball with astonished respect. Only a few months later, his ship boasted its own twenty-four-pounder. And pirates often spared the lives of foreigners they captured so as to co-opt their expertise in gunnery, medicine, or just literacy.
Two significant points emerge from these facts. First, it is obvious that at the dawn of the nineteenth century China’s involvement with the wider world was already routine. Second, and as a corollary, clearly few Chinese, whether government officials or common folk, cared whether the skills and technology they needed had a foreign origin. In other words, the traditional isolationism, hostility to innovation, and xenophobic sentiment often sweepingly attributed to all Chinese, seem to have played little part in their calculations.
Unfortunately, however, even by the early 1800s this kind of misdiagnosis was fast becoming a habit among a majority of the Europeans arriving on China’s shores. Whatever these observers may have seen with their own eyes, their opinions of China and Chinese civilization were affected rather more by their own prejudices. These prejudices themselves were primarily influenced by the context in which they formed: by the Enlightenment, by industrialization, and by the new passion for political liberty evidenced by the American and French revolutions, among other things. Their judgments still profoundly influence our understanding of China today.
China shares responsibility for the formation of these notions. For one thing, there has been a wide chasm between propaganda and reality. Lofty public utterances emanating from the Chinese side led many observers to draw the conclusion that China regarded its own civilization as vastly superior to all other contenders. But the reality is that this rhetoric disguised considerable flexibility and open-mindedness. When we examine Chinese acts rather than Chinese words, it becomes evident that since earliest times China has displayed no greater cultural chauvinism than most other societies.
Old habits die hard. Much of what we once thought we knew about China now seems little more than a set of stereotypes, yet the promotion of this “knowledge” to the level of certainty has been extremely influential. Thus apparently well-informed people commonly, but inaccurately, still refer to the diverse and dynamic vastness of China as monolithic and perennially isolated from the rest of the world. These misconceptions, largely reflections of the views of the colonial Western powers, have even become a part of Chinese self-perception, for the extraordinary success of the West in undermining the Chinese sense of national identity and self-confidence led many Chinese to accept as accurate Western descriptions of China, particularly its relations with the rest of the world.
This book springs from the conviction that we must lay to rest some long-cherished myths, including the assumption that the Western nations “opened up” a hitherto “closed” China. Above all, it argues that time out of mind, China—Chinese emperors, Chinese governments, and Chinese people across the social spectrum—has been energetically and enthusiastically engaged with the outside world, permitting, encouraging, and seeking the circulation of foreign goods and ideas. At the same time, however, those in authority have been consistently reluctant to allow free rein to any kind of foreign ideology, for fear of losing political and moral control over that portion of the population for whom the foreign ideology might come to prevail over Chinese values and traditions.
The book is thus primarily about how China has taken the measure of the world and about the goods and ideas that have flowed into and out of China during the past several centuries. Readers should not, however, be misled into thinking that the book’s focus on foreign influences is intended to suggest that all of China’s development, especially in the modern era, has been externally driven. To the contrary, the contention of this book is that much of China’s historical experience has involved the complicated interplay of, on the one hand, indigenous developments and, on the other, foreign imports and influences of all kinds.
The book opens with a broad overview of China’s early contacts with other civilizations, from around 200 B.C., when surviving records enable us to begin to reconstruct the countless connections that existed, down to the advent of Europeans to East Asia in the sixteenth century. The principal theme of Chapter One is China’s active participation in a complex network of international exchange that stretched from Syria in the west to Japan in the east and from Korea in the north to Indonesia in the south and, by the sixteenth century, included Europe and the New World. Among the most influential features of this traffic was the spread of Buddhism from India to China; from China it spread across East Asia, particularly to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, taking with it elements of Confucianism and other cultural, intellectual, political, commercial, and artistic aspects of Chinese civilization.
Chapters Two and Three are primarily devoted to China’s first sustained interaction with Europe and European culture, in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. These initial encounters between Europe and China in the early modern age took place largely through the medium of Jesuit missionaries. Chapter Two focuses on China and Catholicism from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century and demonstrates that China’s reluctance to embrace Christianity stemmed from a variety of causes. First, traditional Chinese religious eclecticism was ultimately irreconcilable with Christian requirements of exclusivity. Second, in a context in which religion either directly served the state or was specifically subversive, many Chinese suspected that the foreign religion might turn out to represent the advance guard of a foreign invasion. Third, set against the highly charged political atmosphere of the mid-seventeenth-century dynastic transition from Ming to Qing, Jesuit service at the new Qing court appeared to some Chinese like collaboration with the enemy and cost them vital support, especially among the elite. Finally, bitter disputes within the European Church establishment bore some responsibility for Jesuit missionaries’ inability fully to achieve their goals in China.
Chapter Three, focused mainly on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, refutes the still-tenacious belief that China at that time was implacably hostile to foreign trade and to imported ideas in any form, a notion symbolized by the memorable assertion that “we have no need for [English] manufactures,” made in 1793 by the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795). The chapter describes Jesuits’ wide-ranging secular activities at the courts of Qianlong and his grandfather Kangxi (r. 1662–1722), among which was the construction by the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) of the sextant and other astronomical instruments that can still be seen today at the Observatory near the center of Beijing. Imperial enthusiasm for European and other imports—a preoccupation that mirrored the eighteenth-century European craze for chinoiserie—was intense and spearheaded a widespread passion for things European among the elite in China. Chapter Three also discusses the connections of the substantial inter-Asian trade to the growing Chinese settlements abroad, primarily in Southeast Asia, and this trade’s proliferating links to European nations through their colonial activities in Asia.
Chapters Four and Five cover the “long nineteenth century,” from the death of Qianlong in 1799 to the outbreak of World War One in Europe in 1914. During this period China suffered the imposition of a series of “unequal treaties” that gave the Western powers wide-ranging special rights in China. In retrospect historians have castigated the powers for imposing these treaties, but at the time these did not at first seem particularly onerous, even to China, because their provisions closely resembled arrangements made a few years earlier between China and its neighbors in Central Asia. Before long, however, China found that the cumulative effect of the treaties was to ride roughshod over Chinese sovereignty in all spheres, in an attempt to force China to become more “modern” or, put otherwise, to become more like the West. These treaties fundamentally affected the view of Europe, America, and later Japan held by Chinese men and women. Other international agreements China concluded during the nineteenth century, however, sought with some success to protect the by now huge number of Chinese migrants around the world, thus giving the lie to an oft-repeated view of a China that was debilitated at home and apathetic toward its diaspora.
By the late nineteenth century many educated Chinese had become deeply disillusioned with their culture, because neither Confucianism nor anything else within the Chinese tradition seemed adequate to meet the challenge of Western and Japanese imperialism. They came to feel both awed by these countries’ wealth and power, which they strongly desired to emulate and eventually match, and profoundly resentful. The potent fear, that the foreigners would carve China up “like a melon,” until it ceased to exist as an independent entity, together with increasing despair over the ineptitude of China’s Manchu rulers, encouraged the growth of nationalist sentiment whose ultimate goal was a return to autonomy. In short, China hoped selectively to adopt Western ways so as to overcome the West and preserve its own civilization.
Chapters Six and Seven cover the period from 1914 to 1997. The year 1914 marked the culmination of a shift in emphasis among the serried ranks of those threatening China. The slow buildup of hostilities among the European powers in the first years of the twentieth century diverted their attention just at the same time that newly modernized Meiji Japan had shown, by its defeat of first China (in 1895) and then Russia (in 1905), that it had become a significant force meriting both respect and fear. With the outbreak of World War One, the European powers altogether yielded pride of place in China to Japan, which from then on became China’s principal imperialist foe, arranging pretexts to encroach on Chinese territory and periodically launching limited military attacks. In 1937 Japan invaded China, compelling the Nationalist (Guomindang) government to retreat far inland and establish a temporary wartime capital in Chongqing, Sichuan province. At the same time, the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kaishek, passionately desired to eliminate the threat posed to their authority by the Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921.
War with Japan merged into World War Two, in which China’s resistance against Japan played a vital part in the Allied victory. The end of that war in 1945 was followed almost at once by a bitter civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists that in turn culminated in the departure of the Nationalists for Taiwan and the establishment by the Chinese Communist Party of the People’s Republic in 1949, marked by Mao Zedong’s ringing assertion that China would “never again be an insulted nation.” Over the next few decades, against the shifting politics of the Cold War era, much of China’s domestic and international agenda concerned its determination to slough off forever the economic and cultural residue of the century of domination by the Western powers and Japan.
The book ends in 1997, the year in which China resumed control over Hong Kong, an island off the south China coast under British colonial rule since 1842. The reversion of Hong Kong raised anew the question of once-independent Tibet, under Chinese control for most of the past 250 years, and of the island of Taiwan, lost in 1895 to the Qing empire that had annexed it in 1683, then a Japanese colony until 1945, and since then neither part of China nor independent.
Twentieth-century China has displayed a complicated mixture of fascination and ambivalence about foreign cultures. Politically China has often adopted a contradictory stance involving, on the one hand, the outward expression of enormous hostility to foreigners, especially the United States, and, on the other, a willingness to engage. But Americans, in particular, long rejected any engagement with China because of extraordinarily strong anti-Communist sentiment stoked by the “loss” of China, Guomindang lobbying, and the politics of the Vietnam War era.
A few definitions are necessary. In referring to “China,” one appears to be papering over immense regional differences, as well as considerable change over time in what constituted “China.” At its simplest, for instance, the impact of foreign imperialism in China was much different in coastal areas, where by the late nineteenth century foreigners had become commonplace, from its impact far inland, where foreigners often were still a rarity, although the advent of newspapers and telegraphs went some considerable way toward changing that situation. Similarly, in the late eighteenth century the boundaries of the empire, also constituting what is today regarded as properly part of the nation, ranged as far west as the Pamir Mountains bordering Kashmir and Afghanistan and as far north as the Amur River on the Russian frontier, whereas in the later nineteenth century the boundaries of the empire contracted from their eighteenth-century extent. At other times, for instance, under the Song (960–1276), “China” included neither the area now known as Manchuria nor the regions beyond the western terminus of the Great Wall in Gansu province. But to hedge every reference to “China” with qualification and clarification would be altogether too cumbersome, so readers must simply bear these spatial and temporal variations in mind.
The same is true of the term “the West.” From the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, this expression denotes Europe and Europeans, in a shifting configuration that began with the arrival of Portuguese and Spaniards, who established their Asian colonial bases, and ended with the domination of England and the Netherlands, although other Europeans were also present in Asia during this period. After the 1780s “the West” includes Americans, although on the whole they played a secondary role in Chinese history and consciousness down to the end of the nineteenth century. From then on, for a number of reasons, the United States took over the leading position among the nations of “the West,” and Europeans generally took second place.
This book is not intended for specialists in Chinese history, European imperialism, or world history, although it may have something to offer some or all of them. Rather, it is addressed to the general reader wishing to learn more about China’s engagement with the world in historical perspective and to those for whom the old saw, about China’s perennial preference for isolation and its antagonism to outsiders, just does not ring true. Although it is impossible to overcome deeply held stereotypes with a single work, it is the author’s hope that this book will go far toward undermining inaccurate conceptions about the history of China’s relations with the outside world, particularly but not exclusively Europe and the United States.
China has a long history and, until the last two hundred years, has been accustomed to exert authority over foreigners wishing to interact with it, at either the official or the individual level, as well as over those who live within its boundaries. This does not mean that China has been inimical to knowledge and ideas that come from abroad, merely that it has preferred to exercise caution in allowing the free circulation of notions potentially subversive to the ability to operate on its own terms. The ongoing quest to strike a balance between the absorption of foreign influences and the retention of autonomy and a distinctive national identity in many ways represents a more sophisticated continuation of past struggles, even though the playing fields of global power have leveled out considerably in the last part of the twentieth century.