part0017

HISTORIANS of the Qing empire use the word “imperialism” in at least two very different senses. Those on the political left, whether Chinese, Japanese, or Western, tend to employ the term in the sense defined by Lenin as “the highest stage of capitalism.” In this essentially economic definition, capitalism—as the most efficient mode of production, exploitation, and surplus accumulation developed to that time—presented a critical problem for metropolitan countries such as Great Britain in which capitalist production was most advanced: find an external outlet for investment of this surplus capital or else face strangulation and collapse of the domestic economy itself. In societies such as China that became the targets of this surplus capital investment, the profits it generated were repatriated to the metropolitan economy. The result was a drain of the target society’s own capital and a consequent inability to finance catch-up industrialization of its own. In the Nationalist and Communist revolutions of the 1920s and 1930s, the degree to which imperialism, understood in this way, had been realized in China would prove to be a point of vigorous dispute and a key determinant of revolutionary strategy. But imperialism in this Leninist sense also had a very broad time frame: it was applicable to the analysis of China’s history at any moment following its contact with the capitalist West, and, for some scholars, remains applicable even today. 1

A very different definition of “imperialism” has been employed by non-Marxist diplomatic historians. This definition is more political and military than economic and focuses on the worldwide competitive scramble for territorial colonization by the Western Great Powers (and eventually Japan). Scholars using this notion of imperialism see it as a system of diplomatic communication, informed by its participants’ continual search for a balance of power among themselves. “Imperialism” in this definition is also much more historicist: it is usually seen as beginning in the late nineteenth century and coming to an end in the suicidal conflagration of nationalism that was the First World War. 2

In a classic study of the imperialist era (so-defined) in East Asia, Akira Iriye observed that it was characterized in the West by a new and pervasive sense of cultural malaise, of sudden insecurity. Witnessing with shock Japan’s easy victory over the Qing empire drove home among Western opinion-makers in and out of government a sense of great opportunity. The newly revealed “sick man of Asia” (analogous to the tottering Ottoman empire, characterized at the time as the “sick man of Europe”) was the place where Western nations had to make their mark. Arguing in 1900 that the United States ought not to be left out of this competition, the historian Brooks Adams wrote that “Eastern Asia is the prize for which all the energetic nations of the globe are grasping . . . Our geographical position, our wealth, and our energy preeminently fit us to enter upon the development of Eastern Asia and to reduce it to part of our own economic system.” 3

But there was also a new sense of fear and anxiety, epitomized in the trope of the “Yellow Peril” that rapidly gained currency in the Western press. Japan’s rising strength was challenging, but, ironically, the lesson of the Sino-Japanese War seemed to be that China was potentially even more menacing. If Meiji Japan, with its relatively meager resource base, could become so powerful so quickly after adopting a program of forced-draft Westernization, how terrifying would the infinitely wealthier and more populous China be once it got its house in order as Japan had done? Under these conditions it was incumbent on Western nations to act aggressively toward the Qing empire while the opportunity still existed, not only for their own advantage but also as a defensive strategy to forestall China’s rise.

Another new element in Western expansionism of this era, as noted by Iriye, was its strikingly particularist nature. The social Darwinist world-view that now pitted the white “race” against the yellow also rendered obsolete the confident view of European nations that they were acting cooperatively, as collective agents of a triumphant Western civilization. With this ideal itself in some doubt, the goal of national policies became instead to advance national interests competitively, in a struggle for existence with other Western nations. Ironically and somewhat counter-intuitively, then, the unprecedentedly ferocious onslaught of Western predation toward the Qing in the final half decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth was the result not of Western self-confidence but rather of its opposite.

At the very moment of its unleashing, critics of this new aggression arose within the West itself. One of the most skeptical, the maverick British scholar J. A. Hobson, wrote in 1902 in proto-Leninist terms that

the controlling and directing agent of the whole process . . . is the pressure of financial and industrial motives, operated for the direct, short-range, material interests of small, able, and well-organized groups in a nation. These groups secure the active cooperation of statesmen and of political cliques who wield the power of “parties” . . . by appealing to the conservative instincts of members of the possessing classes, whose vested interest and class dominance are best preserved by diverting the currents of political energy from domestic on to foreign politics. The acquiescence, even the active and enthusiastic support, of the body of a nation in a course of policy fatal to its own true interests is secured . . . chiefly by playing upon the primitive instincts of the race. 4

Assuming the historicist definition advanced by Iriye, we can date the age of imperialism in East Asia rather precisely from April 1895, with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki that formally ended the Sino-Japanese War. As one might expect, the agreement was very tough on the Qing—though it certainly would have been tougher had not Japan’s chief negotiator, Itō Hirobumi, been embarrassed by an assassination attempt on his respected Qing counterpart, Li Hongzhang, by a radical Japanese nationalist. By declaring Korea an independent nation, no longer a tributary of the Qing, the treaty in effect rendered Korea a Japanese protectorate, and it was formally annexed some fifteen years later. The agreement also ceded to Japan the long-coveted island of Taiwan. A coalition of Qing officials and local elites on the island promptly declared a Taiwan Republic, only to be suppressed by Japanese troops within a few months. Taiwan would remain a Japanese possession until the end of the Second World War. The treaty also granted Japan an indemnity from the Qing of 200,000,000 silver taels. But ultimately more significant than any of this were two further provisions responsible for upsetting the delicate balance of power which, in retrospect, was all that had preserved the Qing’s integrity since the collapse of the “cooperative policy” a quarter-century earlier.

First, the Treaty of Shimonoseki explicitly granted Japan the right to set up industrial factories within the Qing domain. Foreign factories had been illegal in China up to this point, and few had been built. But this concession to Japan opened the floodgates to foreign industrial investment and economic imperialism. Western nations, already enjoying most-favored-nation status, immediately received the same right to open factories in China that Japan received, and most did so almost immediately. The foreign population in treaty ports beyond Shanghai mushroomed; in Hankou, for example, it rose from about a hundred during the early 1890s to nearly three thousand (1,495 Europeans and 1,502 Japanese) some twenty-five years later. 5 As native entrepreneurs adroitly followed foreign models and established their own factories in the treaty ports and beyond, this quarter century saw what can only be described as an industrial revolution. Prior to the Treaty of Shimonoseki, China was by no means an industrialized country, but by the close of the First World War it most certainly was.

Second, the treaty ceded to Japan the Liaodong peninsula of southern Manchuria, including the ports of Dairen and Port Arthur, where much of the fighting in the war’s last phase had taken place. Korea, of course, had never been a Qing possession; and Japan could plausibly argue that the Qing claim even to Taiwan was less than indisputable. But Manchuria was the very homeland of the Qing ruling house. Thus, the cession of Liaodong totally upset the unspoken principle of balance-of-power diplomacy that the Qing empire itself was off limits to colonization and that the Qing’s basic territorial sovereignty was to be respected. This provision of the 1895 treaty fundamentally undermined the equal-opportunity principle of Great Power expansionism in East Asia and in effect spelled the need for an entirely new international system.

The Qing empire’s dismemberment began with the so-called Triple Intervention on April 23, immediately after the terms of Shimonoseki were announced. Russia greatly feared the advantage that the cession of Liaodong would offer Japan, should it decide to make inroads into Siberia. Joined by France and Germany, Russia threatened military action if the cession was not revoked. After a few weeks of negotiations, Japan opted to withdraw its troops from Dairen and Port Arthur and retrocede the peninsula in exchange for as additional 50,000,000 taels of indemnity. Russia had claimed to be acting in the Qing’s interests, and many Chinese saw it that way, at least for a short while.

As thanks for its good agencies against Japan, Germany immediately demanded the cession of the bay of Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) on the southern shore of China’s Shandong peninsula, which Germany had coveted as a naval base since its first arrival in the region in 1860. For a time the Qing was able to resist this demand, but in early November 1897, when two German missionaries were hacked to death by an anti-foreign crowd in western Shandong, Kaiser Wilhelm II used this incident as pretext to seize Jiaozhou by force. Shortly thereafter a ninety-nine-year lease of the bay to Germany was negotiated. German colonists quickly built up the adjacent territory into the modern city of Qingdao and in 1903 founded the famous Tsingtao Brewery (arguably the most unambiguously positive product of Western imperialism in China!). The “scramble for concessions” was on.

In early 1898 Russia demanded and received a similar lease of Port Arthur and Dairen—which it had so recently “saved” for the Qing—in order to counter the possible advance of its putative ally, Germany. From this base Russia began the effective colonization of the entire Liaodong peninsula. To counter Russia, Great Britain obtained the lease of Weihai (Weihaiwei), the naval port at the eastern tip of the Shandong peninsula, once the base of the Beiyang Navy and a site of its defeat during the Sino-Japanese War. The term of the lease was for the same length of time that the Russians occupied Port Arthur, which it directly confronted across the Yellow Sea. While they were at it, Britain forced the lease of the New Territories, a peninsular area of the Canton delta that abutted Kowloon, which was just across Victoria Bay from Hong Kong Island. The immanent expiration of this ninety-nine-year lease is what prompted the British retrocession of Kowloon and Hong Kong to China in 1997. Not to be outdone, the French leased Kwangchow Bay (Guangzhouwan), a small inlet on the Leizhou peninsula facing the island of Hainan.

The United States was too preoccupied with a revolutionary movement in its newly acquired colony of the Philippines to stake a claim on the Chinese mainland. Instead, Secretary of State John Hay issued the Open Door notes in 1899 and 1900, which rather lamely pledged to protect the Qing empire’s territorial sovereignty. More concretely, however, the notes also proclaimed that within the “spheres of influence” of the foreign powers, nationals of other foreign powers would not be financially discriminated against and “vested interests” of other powers would be protected. The American declaration was not signed on to by any of the other powers, but neither was it openly contested. 6

Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, an elaborate round of secret diplomacy and gentlemen’s agreements had established that—well beyond the rather small bits of coastal territory explicitly ceded or leased to foreign nations—large sectors of the Qing empire were divided among the powers as their respective zones of economic hegemony. Manchuria was tacitly Russian, Shandong and parts of adjacent north China were German, the Yangzi valley was British, Fujian (across the strait from Japanese Taiwan) was Japanese, and southeast China (near to Indochina) was French. Within these spheres, the appropriate power was understood to have first priority at mineral exploitation, railroad construction, and other economic development activities, and the Qing was pledged not to “alienate” or cede parts of that jurisdiction to any other foreign power. Qing territorial sovereignty, despite the claims of the Open Door notes, was transparently a myth.

The manifest threat posed by imperialism had the effect of greatly catalyzing several trends already under way among the Qing population. Words such as “imperialism” (diguozhuyi ) itself, and the more graphic “carving the melon” (guafen )—reflecting the growing fear of the actual physical partition of the empire or, worse, the final extinction of China as a political entity—became common parlance. The fin de siècle saw the rise of mass politicization—the widespread belief that the individual could substantially affect the quality of his or her life by some form of direct personal involvement in the political process. If it had been true that for most Qing subjects the best practice was (to paraphrase Confucius) “respect the officials, but keep them at a distance,” this was no longer widely believed. 7

This era also saw the first stirrings of a genuine Chinese nationalism. 8 This spirit was in the air as early as the end of the first Opium War, with the celebration of the heroic militiamen of Sanyuanli and the emergence of political anti-Manchuism—the sentiment that Manchu rule was undesirable not merely because of Manchu cultural inferiority but because it prevented the Chinese from effectively defending themselves against the West. If this was not precisely nationalism, neither was it mere culturalism or anti-foreignism. It is not too great a stretch to label this Chinese “patriotism”—self-sacrificing defense of the patria. What would transform patriotism into true nationalism would be the emergence of the idea of the “nation” in the Western sense—an object of personal identification and loyalty that was competitive with loyalties to family, kin group, and locality. This understanding and sentiment was beginning to emerge in the last years of the nineteenth century and would become widespread in the decade to follow.

Qing subjects—now more justly conceivable as “Chinese”—were newly stirred to radical political action in this half-decade following the Treaty of Shimonoseki, action that may be seen as of three types. The first was a top-down modernist reformism. The second was a bottom-up nativist, popular reaction. And third was revolution.

Let us begin with revolution. This era saw the first stirrings of a violent movement to do away with the entire system of imperial rule, which had been the prevailing mode of governance in the two millennia since the Qin empire was proclaimed in 221 B.C . Something called a “republic” (gongheguo ) was suggested to take its place, though even among its partisans there was little clarity about what this entailed. In March of 1895 the Society to Revive China (Xingzhong hui ), led by the Western-trained physician Sun Yat-sen (Sun Wen), launched a quixotic and easily crushed republican revolution at Guangzhou. In 1900 a more potentially threatening plot on the part of the Independence Army (Zili jun ), a somewhat broader coalition of radical students and sectarians led by the Hunanese Tang Caichang, was discovered and aborted before it could launch its revolution in Hankou. Though they, of course, would be the wave of the future, in these years republican revolutionary sentiments affected only a minute segment of the Qing population. The more significant forms of political action during this period were radical reformism and nativist reaction.

The movement for radical reform in the last years of the nineteenth century coalesced around a firebrand Cantonese scholar by the name of Kang Youwei (1858–1927). Born in a well-to-do landlord-literati family in the Guangdong commercial town of Foshan and grandson of a famous scholar and academy headmaster of the conservative Cheng-Zhu (Songxue) school, Kang received an impeccable classical education and progressed steadily through the orthodox examination route to win his jinshi degree in 1895. But he was also extremely sensitive to the Qing’s political crises and, having visited British Hong Kong in his youth, was also deeply impressed with what he saw as Western orderliness and efficiency. His thought and his many publications thus blended Neo-Confucian and radical imported ideas. Kang was clearly a self-promoter of no little arrogance, but he was also a man of indisputable brilliance and originality. 9 As early as the mid-1880s he began to publish his vision of a utopian world community. He wrote as well on classical philology, on practical administrative reform, and on the need to liberate Chinese women to strengthen the national cause. In his later years he also sought to establish Confucianism as a true religion of personal salvation, offering an image of himself as China’s Martin Luther.

One key element in Kang’s thought, set forth in his early publication An Exposé of the Forged Classics (Xinxue weijing kao, 1891), was his acceptance of the “new text” (jinwen ) rather than the more commonly accepted “old text” (guwen ) version of the classical canon, and his preference for the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu ) over the conventionally accepted Zuo Commentary. These choices led Kang to see Confucius as the actual author rather than a redactor and transmitter of the classics and as a flexible and practical-minded political thinker responsive to the changing conditions of his day. In his Confucius as a Reformer (Kongzi gaizhi kao, 1897), Kang insisted that the slavish preservation of ancestral precedent long associated with Confucian statecraft was actually a gross perversion of the sage’s true intent. He thus discovered a classical and thoroughly indigenous legitimation for the most radical Westernizing reform.

Somewhat later in his career, Kang Youwei also developed ideas on local administration that show, despite his appearance as a radical Westernizer, how comfortably he could fit into the long-term development of Qing discourse on statecraft. Kang adopted the notion, from the fengjian tradition of Gu Yanwu, that governance of the county by indigenous local elites, based on faith in their pursuit of enlightened self-interest, was preferable to governance imposed by bureaucratic outsiders. He accepted as well Feng Guifen’s modification of this idea, advanced in the 1860s, that elected subofficials one step below the inherited magistrates could serve as a check on the magistrates’ potential for self-aggrandizement. To the statecraft ideal of local autonomy, however, Kang added the specific ideal of “self-government,” which he got from Western political theory via Japan. Thus, Kang’s model of county governance included, along with Gu’s inherited magistrates and Feng’s elected subofficials, elected representative assemblies to mobilize and give voice to a new type of local individual, the “citizen” (gongmin or guomin ).

Behind this subtle modification of received ideas about statecraft lay a more dramatic transformation of political goals: from social control and social harmony to social mobilization. As Kang envisioned it, self-governance by local communities was the most effective way to release the energies of the entire population and make China strong enough to compete in a predatory international environment. Local government would now be dedicated not merely to keeping the peace and collecting taxes but to rallying the citizenry for economic development, educational advancement, and national defense. It was the key, Kang thought, to a thoroughly revitalized Chinese nation. 10

Kang was no less innovative in the styles of political action he introduced. While he was in Beijing to sit for the metropolitan examination in April 1895, word broke of the humiliating provisions of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Kang responded by organizing more than 1,200 of his fellow candidates, from eighteen different provinces, to sign an unprecedented (and illegal) collective message of protest to the throne, the so-called Ten Thousand Word Memorial. Shortly thereafter he founded the Study Society for [National] Strengthening (Qiang xuehui )—the model for many other such study societies in the late Qing—which echoed scholarly associations of the late Ming but added new, Western-derived content. 11 Kang’s society had branches in Beijing and Shanghai, and its chief secretary was Kang’s pupil, the brilliant young Cantonese publicist Liang Qichao (1873–1929). Liang himself would become the pioneering political journalist of the late Qing and early republican era, his many short-lived newspapers designed above all to transform late imperial subjects into what one of these papers referred to in its title as the New Citizen (Xin gongmin ). 12

But the place where the radical reform movement really took off was neither Beijing, Shanghai, nor Guangzhou but the provincial backwater of Hunan. 13 The Yuelu Academy and similar private institutions in Changsha—which had produced several generations of militant, activist, yet culturally conservative scholar-gentry, including Zeng Guofan and the other anti-Taiping heroes of the Hunan Army—still simmered by century’s end and still yielded conflicting radicalisms. This environment produced both rabidly nativist rioters in the early 1890s and equally impassioned reformers sympathetic to Western-influenced change, epitomized by two close friends from northeast Hunan’s Liuyang county. One was Tang Caichang, leader of the doomed Independence Army uprising at Hankou in 1900, and the other was Tan Sitong (1865–1898), a brilliant young Confucian scholar who gradually merged his classical learning with elements of Buddhism, Christianity, and Western scientism to produce a new philosophy that he called Benevolence (Renxue ). During the late 1880s and early 1890s Tan had seen service throughout central China as a military advisor, systematically paying his respects at the graves of assorted heroes of the past. By 1896 he, along with Tang, was back in Changsha, part of a group of young reformers clustered around the Academy for Critical Examination of the Classics (Jiaojing Shuyuan).

A fortuitous constellation of reform-minded regional officials helped turn Hunan province into an experimental laboratory for many Western-inspired innovations. The self-strengthener Zhang Zhidong was ensconced as governor-general of Hubei and Hunan. Chen Baozhen (1831–1900) came in as Hunan governor in 1895, spearheading such reformist projects as new mining enterprises, a new police system, and paved streets and street lighting in Changsha. (Tan Sitong’s own father, notably less sympathetic to reform, was currently serving as governor of Hubei.) But the really radical element in Hunan’s provincial administration lay at the next level down, with a group of young men Chen brought in as his subordinates. Chief among these was the Cantonese Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a somewhat older associate of Kang Youwei who had served in diplomatic posts in Europe and Japan and had published a laudatory account of the Meiji Westernization projects. 14 Huang came to Hunan initially as provincial salt intendant and was promoted in July 1897 to provincial judge. Among his first acts in this post was to found the School of Current Events (Shiwu xuetang) at Changsha and to bring in his 24-year-old fellow-Cantonese Liang Qichao as its chief lecturer.

Using the school as their institutional base, Liang, Tan, and Tang began a frenetic campaign of reformist propaganda in Changsha. They founded and edited the province’s first newspaper, the Hunan Studies News (Xiangxue xinbao ), to propagandize their reformist vision among the province’s elite. They overhauled the local civil service examination curriculum, requiring study of translated Western works such as Robert MacKenzie’s The Nineteenth Century: A History. Spurred on by the humiliating German seizure of Jiaozhou in November and the Qing’s timid response, and following the model of Kang Youwei’s Study Society for National Strengthening, Tan Sitong founded the Southern Study Society (Nan xuehui), an activist lobby that eventually claimed as members over 1,200 literati from Hunan and throughout south China.

The content of the young reformers’ agenda turned progressively more radical. Tan Sitong argued that the core element of Chinese society, the patrilineal family system, demanded immediate overhaul if the country was to survive. The Southern Study Society bylaws stipulated that all members, regardless of age or degree-holding status, be treated as equals. The Hunan Studies News called for “people’s rights” and parliamentary government. Tan argued, indeed, that the idea of popular sovereignty was actually of Chinese, not foreign, origin and was an integral part of the Confucian legacy, stemming from the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Gongyang Commentary, which only his Hunanese fellow-provincials had correctly understood.

And, between the lines, anti-Manchu sentiments were increasingly discernable. Liang Qichao arranged the republication at Changsha of the incendiary eyewitness account of atrocities attending the Qing conquest, Wang Xiuchu’s Record of Ten Days at Yangzhou. Writings of the overtly racist seventeenth-century Hunanese philosopher Wang Fuzhi, whose rehabilitation had been cautiously pioneered by fellow-provincial Zeng Guofan in the 1860s, appeared in an expanded edition in Tan and Tang’s native Liuyang county in 1897. Whereas Guo Songtao (who had died in 1891 and whom Tan and Tang honored as their inspiration) had emphasized Wang Fuzhi’s reformist ideas and downplayed his nativist ones, the younger men gave equal weight to both. Merging Wang’s racial ideas with those of social Darwinism (the struggle for survival via natural selection among racial-national groups), Tan emerged with a powerful “scientific” anti-Manchu ideology. Gradually, the reformers called for Hunan’s “complete local self-governance” and secession from the Qing domain. Liang Qichao equated the province with the progressive Tokugawa domains of Satsuma and Chōshu, whose autonomous actions, he argued, had precipitated the nationwide Meiji restoration, but Tan seems more closely to have envisioned an independent Hunanese nation that would emerge from the ashes of the empire.

Conservative elements within the provincial elite greeted these developments with growing horror, the more so since Western ideas in the hands of suspect Cantonese like Huang and Liang brought to mind the devastations visited on Hunan by the Taiping less than fifty years earlier. Even the head of Changsha’s venerable Yuelu Academy, an early champion of the reforms, urged provincial authorities to intervene. In early summer, Governor-general Zhang Zhidong ordered the new Hunan newspapers muzzled and the School of Current Events renamed and reorganized as a technical school. Governor Chen Baozhen was dismissed and replaced by his more conservative lieutenant governor. And, one by one, the young reformers themselves left Hunan, heading for the new target of opportunity: Beijing.

Beginning in January 1898, expressly permitted by order of the Guangxu emperor (an increasingly independent-minded young adult by this time), Kang Youwei had been peppering the court with memorials offering his proposals for reform. On June 16 the emperor for the first time received Kang in person and on the same day appointed him secretary of the Zongli Yamen, with wide authority to initiate reforms in all aspects of government. Over the next few months he was joined at Beijing by Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, and other young zealots, and together they drafted a series of far-reaching reform decrees issued in the emperor’s name. These included establishing an imperial university at Beijing and Western-curriculum schools at the local level throughout the empire and shifting the contents of the civil service examinations from classical study to current events.

The central and field administrations were streamlined, with several sinecure posts and three governorships (Hubei, Guangdong, and Yunnan) abolished. Processes were begun to replace the Six Boards with Western-style cabinet ministries and to revise the judicial system and establish an independent judiciary. The yanlu (pathways of words) were opened to encourage reform suggestions from private citizens, which would be immediately forwarded to the court. The central government would take charge of railroad and industrial projects begun by regional administrations and greatly expand them. In the future, anyone aspiring to high office would be required to first undertake a tour of foreign countries to observe their state of development.

Over the summer of 1898 many in the court, and even moderate reformers such as Li Hongzhang and his protégé Yuan Shikai, became increasingly alarmed at what Kang and his followers were up to and rallied around the Empress Dowager Cixi. On September 21 the grand dame suddenly returned to Beijing from her retreat at the Summer Palace, declared herself once again regent, and effectively placed her 28-year-old son, the emperor, under house arrest on an island in the Imperial Park west of the Imperial Palace. Over the next several days the leading reformers were successively purged. Kang Youwei fled to Hong Kong and Liang Qichao to Japan, but Tan Sitong and five others were publicly executed.

The Hundred Days Reforms of 1898 were over, and on September 26 Cixi revoked nearly all their provisions. Reform-minded literati throughout the empire, however, even many who had doubts about Kang Youwei himself, were demoralized by the conservative coup. It seemed that reform from above might no longer be possible after all, and, with the evident failure of the Guangxu emperor to hold the reform program together, sentiments that Manchu rule itself was the major problem spread more widely. Tan Sitong’s friend Tang Caichang organized his ill-fated Wuhan putsch of 1900, and even Sun Yat-sen’s republican revolutionary propaganda began to look less incomprehensible than before.

Revolution and radical reform were for the most part responses of elites to foreign imperialism in the final years of the nineteenth century. A third response, more populist in its origins, was a violent anti-foreignism that culminated in the 1900 movement of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (Yihe quan ), known to Westerners more simply as the Boxers. The spawning ground of these nativists was in northwestern Shandong, in the hinterland of the Grand Canal city of Linqing, also the birthplace of earlier rebellions in the northern White Lotus tradition, including those of Wang Lun in the 1870s and the Eight Trigrams in 1813. This was an ecologically fragile region of small cultivators with little concentration of landownership. Its poverty had been exacerbated by the administration’s abandonment of the use of the Grand Canal for grain tribute transport in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Though cotton cultivation had helped slow the region’s decline for a while, foreign competition in cotton goods had diminished this resource by the 1880s and 1890s. Major flooding of the Yellow River in 1898 and drought in 1900 added acute short-term immiseration to a baseline of poverty and discontent.

But more incendiary than the smoldering economic crisis in rural areas was the proselytizing of foreign missionaries, especially German Catholics of the Society of the Divine Word. Active in Shandong since the early 1880s, the society rapidly became more aggressive in the years following the German seizure of Jiaozhou in 1897 during the “scramble for concessions.” Nearly a thousand small, localized “incidents” of conflict with foreigners were reported in Shandong in the years that followed, and gradually a loosely organized movement of Spirit Boxers emerged out of this, eventually spilling beyond Shandong into other parts of north China. These groups targeted foreign artifacts such as railroad and telegraph lines, and they violently attacked both foreigners and Chinese Christian converts. By the time the Boxer movement had been suppressed, some 231 foreigners and several thousand Chinese converts had been killed.

The Boxer uprising was extremely localized and complex, and its subsequent political use has been powerful and conflicted. 15 Scholars differ over the relationship of the Boxer movement with the White Lotus sectarian tradition, and over whether at the outset it had been Mingrestorationist and anti-Manchu, as well as anti-foreign. 16 What is incontestable is that the Boxer movement represented a remarkable instance of the Qing court doing what it had done best for nearly three centuries: co-opting existing popular movements, organizations, and leadership for its own purposes. Following her coup of September 1898, Empress Dowager Cixi had not only rescinded most of the reformers’ legislation but had moved the court much more to an aggressively anti-foreign stance, placing saber-rattling conservatives such as princes Duan and Zhuang, Grand Councilor Ronglu, and Grand Secretary Gangyi in positions of the highest authority. Her ire at foreigners was further stoked by the threatening response of the Western diplomatic community in Beijing to rumors that Cixi intended to depose the Guangxu emperor in favor of Prince Duan’s more tractable son. As the Boxer movement became increasingly violent during the early months of 1900, she issued repeated decrees that regional officials tolerate rather than suppress them. Zhili Governor-General Yulu complied, but Shandong Governor Yuan Shikai emphatically did not. The center of Boxer activities thus migrated from Shandong to Zhili.

Beijing became increasingly anarchic. Foreign diplomats in the legation quarter, southeast of the Forbidden City near the Front Gate, called in military support from naval vessels at Tianjin. Telegraph lines connecting the city with the rest of the empire were cut. Boxers and their Qing military supporters burned the British summer legation in the Western Hills on June 10, murdered the Japanese mission’s chancellor the next day, and on June 20 killed the German ambassador. Throughout the summer the legation quarter was under siege, with some Qing troops defending it and others attacking it. The Zongli Yamen twice sent in emergency food supplies.

The court itself was in chaos. Five high officials who counseled a crackdown on the Boxers, including the presidents of the boards of War and Revenue, were arrested and executed. On June 21, when more foreign troops landed near Tianjin to relieve the siege, the Cixi court declared war on all foreign nations, ordering all provincial officials to support the Boxers and expel the foreigners. Leading governors and governors-general, however, including the rehabilitated Li Hongzhang at Guangzhou, his protégé Yuan Shikai in Shandong, Liu Kunyi at Nanjing, and Zhang Zhidong at Wuhan, announced their collective refusal to comply. In effect, much of China had seceded from the Qing court’s authority.

In midsummer a cobbled-together Allied Expeditionary Force took Tianjin and marched toward Beijing. The army of over 18,000 included British soldiers, Russians, French, Americans, Austrians, Italians, and—by far the largest contingent—some 8,000 Japanese. The expeditionary force took the capital with ease (Fig. 17 ). The court fled, as it had done in 1860, but this time to Xi’an, near the ancient site where the Qin founded China’s first empire. In exile, Cixi begged Li Hongzhang to come north to lead the peace negotiations, in cooperation with Ronglu, who had earlier foreseen the folly of the court’s action and worked surreptitiously to protect the besieged foreign diplomats. On September 11, 1901, after prolonged deliberations, the Boxer Protocol was signed between “China” and eleven “Great Powers.” 17 It required the execution or suicide of Prince Zhuang and several lesser officials and the posthumous rehabilitation of those officials who had been executed in the past for opposing the Boxers. Monuments were to be erected in honor of the murdered foreign diplomats, and missions of apology dispatched to their home countries.

The Boxer Protocol was a disaster not only for the Qing empire but for its various twentieth-century successor regimes. Particularly devastating was the combined indemnity of 450 million silver taels awarded to the various foreign signatories. Since the Qing treasuries contained nothing like this amount, the sum was ordered to be payable over forty years at 4 percent annual interest. The total payment came to over 668 million taels. As security for this huge debt, virtually the entire revenue structure of the empire other than the land tax—the salt administration, the domestic customs administration, and the Imperial Maritime Customs—was placed in receivership under foreign control. The enduring financial burden of this indemnity would prove a debilitating legacy for a country embarking on catch-up industrialization and infrastructural development in the decades leading up to the Second World War. 1 8

In addition to this, the protocol stipulated that troops of foreign nations would remain stationed throughout north China for the future protection of their nationals there. In practice, most foreign powers fairly rapidly withdrew all but a token force, but Japan did not; these troops would still be on the ground in north China, legally, when Imperial Japan began its wholesale invasion of the country in 1937. Following the Boxer Protocol, the national sovereignty of the Great Qing empire was a myth that almost no one any longer believed .

Much historiography on late nineteenth-century China divides Qing political actors into Westernizing progressives and chauvinist reactionaries. While ideologies frequently informed the political behavior of the time, we should keep in mind, however, that in the late Qing empire, as in other times and places, personal self-interest and careerism—along with politics on a local level that was largely impervious to broader ideological conflicts—played an important role in determining the direction of historical change.

From the 1860s on, a force of growing importance was a political style known self-consciously as “pure discussion” (qingyi ). 19 Echoing a neo-Daoist practice of the early imperial era known as “pure conversation” (qingtan ), in which like-minded elites—ostensibly “purified” of material attachments and concerns—sat around and speculated about the nature of the cosmos, practitioners of late Qing pure discussion claimed to be able to distance themselves from mundane politics and articulate an unencumbered policy of the transcendent “public” interest. Literati identifying with this movement communicated opinions among themselves in letters, poetry, and other discrete forms, occasionally “leaking” to the population at large a memorial whose policy recommendations they favored. Growing ultimately out of the conspiracy theory of the Opium War, these activists adhered to a generally fundamentalist Confucian opposition to any institutional change, including industrialization, and to a hard-line militancy on relations with the West and Japan. Most of the pure-discussion men were in fact outsiders to actual policymaking processes and had little understanding of the real strength of their foreign adversaries. They invoked or manipulated idealist positions in an effort to become insiders with real decisionmaking power.

The center of this movement, as with similar ones earlier in the century, was in the Hanlin Academy, the holding pool for the most brilliant jinshi scholars awaiting official appointments. The Hanlin became home to the so-called Pure Stream Party (Qingliu pai ), a literati faction functionally similar to those of the late Ming such as the Donglin and the Fushe. Though outsiders, Pure Stream affiliates became expert at politically intimidating their chosen targets. Among their first successful campaigns were hounding the anti-Taiping hero Zeng Guofan out of political life for his conciliatory handling of negotiations following the Tianjin “massacre” of 1870 and publicly humiliating Zeng’s Hunan Army colleague Guo Songtao for accepting an ambassadorial post to England in the 1860s. 20 As reactionary as their political positions may seem, however, the political style of the Pure Stream Party was remarkably progressive in its claim to articulate a new kind of public opinion. No less reformist a figure than Liang Qichao seemed to recognize this when he appropriated their motto for the title of one of his many short-lived political newspapers, the Qingyi bao, following the 1898 debacle. 21

The routine target of the Pure Stream was a faction that became known as the Foreign Affairs Party (Yangwu pai ). These men were the consummate insiders—high-ranking officials in the provinces, in most cases old anti-Taiping leaders and their protégés, men like Zeng, Guo, Zuo Zongtang, Li Hongzhang, Sheng Xuanhuai, and Yuan Shikai. These leaders were accustomed to dealing with the West on a daily basis, as well as with domestic socioeconomic problems, and they very likely had a more secure idea of the magnitude of the crisis the empire was facing. They tended to advocate diplomacy in foreign relations and imitation of the West in developing domestic military and industrial technology. They cannot be seen simply as visionary progressives, devoid of personal or factional self-interest, however. As with later nationalist elites elsewhere in the colonial world, they promoted their supposed mastery of vital foreign techniques as essential qualifications for the powerful offices they held. And they were hardly averse to financial profit from industrial patronage. Li Hongzhang died a multimillionaire. Moreover, these so-called progressives were also rivals of one another. Personal animosities and regional-factional interests led them to undercut the reformist projects of their competitors as often as they supported them.

In the middle of all this factionalism was the Qing court. Comprising princes of the imperial clan, Chinese official advisors, the Grand Council, and other interests, the late-nineteenth-century court was itself deeply divided into what may be described as the emperor’s party and the empress dowager’s party. Most of the time Cixi, a consummate political infighter, managed to stay on top by balancing and astutely playing off against one another not just the Pure Stream and Foreign Affairs factions but the factions within each of these factions—the classic imperial strategy of divide and rule.

The fluidity of the late Qing political scene, as well as its personal and careerist elements, helps explain the otherwise anomalous ideological shifts of key participants. There is perhaps no better example than the strange odyssey of Zhang Zhidong. Born in the hinterland of Beijing to a hereditary family of lesser officials, Zhang received an impeccable classical education and passed the jinshi examination at the age of twenty-six. For the next fifteen years he held various lower-level commissions from the court, in the performance of which he refined his personal scholarship while frequently blowing the whistle on abuses of the examination’s integrity in various provinces. An affiliate of the Pure Stream Party, Zhang gained admission to the Hanlin Academy in 1880. Typical of his self-promotion during this period was a memorial he submitted in 1879 regarding a dispute over a waterworks project in central Hubei. The powerful local interests on either side had over the years brought onto their camp an ever more exalted range of official patrons lobbying for the particular outcome they sought. In his censorial capacity, Zhang Zhidong intervened, self-righteously denouncing the factional interests of both parties and trumpeting his own proposed solution to the conflict as uniquely nonpartisan and objective. 22

A year later, Zhang again stepped uninvited into a political debate when he demanded the immediate execution of Board of War vice-president Chonghou for negotiating a treaty with Russia that was, in Zhang’s view, demeaning to Qing honor. This last piece of saber-rattling gained Zhang his long-sought attention from the throne and helped secure his appointment in 1884 as governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi. One of his first acts in this post was to send government troops into Vietnam, precipitating the ultimately disastrous Sino-French War of 1884–1885. At this point, Zhang rescued his career by reversing course, suddenly becoming a patron of self-strengthening industrialization. The reactionary and chauvinist pure-discussion monger had become a progressive Westernizer. But his approach to reformism remained deeply proprietary: when Zhang was transferred to a new post at Wuhan in 1889, he put the ironworks project he first drew up for Guangdong in his back pocket and took it along with him.

At Wuhan, Zhang presented himself as a pioneer of educational reform, founding a number of new-style academies and Westernized schools to produce a generation of cosmopolitan young technocrats. After the debacle of the Sino-Japanese War, he at first patronized the reform activities of Tan Sitong, Tang Caichang, and Liang Qichao in Hunan, before recoiling from their manifest radicalism (which incidentally undermined his own vanguard status in the reform movement) and moving to assert tighter ideological control over the renegade province. In 1898, at the very peak of Kang Youwei’s aborted Hundred Days Reforms, he published his own manifesto, Exhortation to Study (Quanxue pian ), which calculatedly played to the interests of both the emperor’s party and the empress dowager’s party at court and shored up his own position as reformist guru. In 1900 he arrested and executed the reformer-turned-revolutionary Tang but at the same time courted Western approval by publicly distancing himself from the pro-Boxer position of the Cixi court. In the first years of the twentieth century, Zhang would vigorously suppress nationalist activism for “rights recovery” in Hunan (in a sense the direct heir of the pure-discussion activism of his youth) on the grounds that it undermined rightful government authority—his own. 23 The onetime outsider was now the consummate government insider.

While the genuine patriotism of each of Zhang’s rapidly evolving political stances is undeniable, in each case his vision of the Qing’s (or China’s) best interests was directly in line with promotion of his own political career. Ideology was surely important, but it was hardly everything. Men such as Zhang Zhidong must be seen in the context of their world. Measuring them against the simple yardstick of “China’s response to the West” goes only so far in helping us understand their motives, accomplishments, and shortcomings.

Another particularly revealing way to understand the politics of the Qing empire’s final half century is to concentrate on the localities, and on the struggle for power at the county level between appointed agents of the central bureaucracy (the magistrate) and indigenous local magnates—the problem we have already seen discussed theoretically by Gu Yanwu, Feng Guifen, and Kang Youwei. In at least one key region of the empire—the lower Yangzi—activist local elites increasingly, over the Qing’s final half century, won the struggle in practice, through a multistage process. 24

The first stage was reconstruction following the Taiping rebellion. Like many other parts of the empire, but more severely than most, the province of Zhejiang had been laid waste by the Taiping campaigns. Hydraulic works, city walls, government offices, and other infrastructural elements had been destroyed; fields had gone fallow and the population was dislocated; the values and moral fabric of local society had unraveled. As elites of the region reassembled at the county level in the 1860s, they found themselves in possession of a gentry-led apparatus of bureaus designed originally to raise subscriptions for financing local militia defense, and saddled with an enfeebled local officialdom that nevertheless encouraged gentry initiative in confronting the tasks of reconstruction. The elites determined to act collegially in what they identified as the communal or “public” interest—a sector distinguished from both the governmental and the private sectors—to finance and manage relief efforts, the repair of irrigation systems, land reclamation, construction of defense works and schools, and so on. In areas near Shanghai and other treaty ports, the reconstruction agenda came gradually to include public sewer systems, street lighting, medical facilities, and other foreign innovations.

After reconstruction, the second stage of the process was translocal networking. The key moment here was the founding of the first lasting Chinese-language newspaper, Shenbao, at Shanghai in 1872. Though established and owned by an Englishman, Ernest Major, Shenbao was staffed and read almost exclusively by Chinese, mostly by activist elites of Jiangnan, the Yangzi valley, and the coast. Though professedly apolitical on issues of national policy—at least at the outset—Shenbao was in fact deeply political in representing the interests of the reformist class who comprised its readership and in urging them to undertake projects in the public sphere. Much of its coverage was focused on reconstruction and other initiatives undertaken in various localities. By reading the newspaper on a regular basis, elite collectivities within particular counties learned who was doing the same sorts of things in other localities, and this led to mutual emulation and experimentation. Though they continued to act locally, these reformists began to think globally. 25

A third stage was reached when activist local elites began for the first time to target projects outside their own community. The critical turning point was probably the great drought-induced north China famine of 1876–1878, in which likely more than ten million people died and millions more were driven from their farms. Systematically exhorted by local officials and Shenbao to realize that Qing subjects were all in this together, elites from throughout central and southern China, working through their local subscription bureaus, mobilized financial resources for a massive relief project far from home. For the first time, local elites began to act on the belief that the problems of north China were the problems of all Chinese. 26

The final nineteenth-century phase of this process came when elite activism began to take on an overtly politicized dimension, spurred by interest in foreign relations and growing nationalist sentiments. In both the Sino-French War of 1884–1885 and the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, local elites throughout China, encouraged by editorials and war reportage in Shenbao, found themselves shocked by the Qing empire’s humiliating losses in wars they had imagined as easy victories. Collectively, these Chinese gentry, who had so impressively demonstrated their ability to get things done locally and nationally, began to wonder whether they couldn’t do a better job of conducting international affairs than the pitiful (alien) court that ruled their country. Events in the first decade of the twentieth century would finally turn these local elites into a constituency for republican revolution, but by the end of the nineteenth century the die was already cast. For activist local elites throughout much of the empire, the imperial regime was not so much a hated tyrant as an impediment to getting things done right.