The Celestial Court had come to understand the military inferiority of China but not yet the appropriate method for dealing with it. At first, it applied the traditional methods of barbarian management. Defeat was not unknown in the course of China’s long history. China’s rulers had dealt with it by applying the five baits described in the previous chapter. They saw the common characteristic of these invaders as being their desire to partake of Chinese culture; they wished to settle on Chinese soil and partake of its civilization. They could therefore gradually be tamed by some of the psychological methods illustrated by Prince Qiying and, in time, become part of Chinese life.

  But the European invaders had no such aspiration nor limited goals. Deeming themselves more advanced societies, their goal was to exploit China for economic gain, not to join its way of life. Their demands were therefore limited only by their resources and their greed. Personal relationships could not be decisive, because the chiefs of the invaders were not neighbors but lived thousands of miles away, where they were governed by motivations obtuse to the subtleness and indirection of the Qiying type of strategy.

  Within the space of a decade, the Middle Kingdom had gone from preeminence to being an object of contending colonial forces. Poised between two eras and two different conceptions of international relations, China strove for a new identity, and above all, to reconcile the values that marked its greatness with the technology and commerce on which it would have to base its security.

  CHAPTER 3

  From Preeminence to Decline

  AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY PROGRESSED, China experienced almost every imaginable shock to its historic image of itself. Before the Opium War, it conceived of diplomacy and international trade mainly as forms of recognition of China’s preeminence. Now, even as it entered a period of domestic turmoil, it faced three foreign challenges, any one of which could be enough to overturn a dynasty. These threats came from every direction and in heretofore barely conceivable incarnations.

  From across the oceans in the West came the European nations. They raised not so much the challenge of territorial defense as of irreconcilable conceptions of world order. For the most part, the Western powers limited themselves to extracting economic concessions on the Chinese coast and demanding rights to free trade and missionary activity. Paradoxically this was threatening because the Europeans did not view it as a conquest at all. They were not seeking to replace the existing dynasty—they simply imposed an entirely new world order essentially incompatible with the Chinese one.

  From the north and west, an expansionist and militarily dominant Russia sought to pry loose China’s vast hinterland. Russia’s cooperation could be purchased temporarily, but it recognized no boundaries between its own domains and the Chinese outer dominions. And unlike previous conquerors, Russia did not become part of the Chinese culture; the territories it penetrated were permanently lost to the empire.

  Still, neither the Western powers nor Russia had any ambition to displace the Qing and claim the Mandate of Heaven; ultimately they reached the conclusion that they had much to lose from the Qing’s fall. Japan, by contrast, had no vested interest in the survival of China’s ancient institutions or the Sinocentric world order. From the east it set out not only to occupy significant portions of Chinese territory, but to supplant Beijing as the center of a new East Asian international order.

  The ensuing catastrophes are viewed with considerable dismay in contemporary China, as part of an infamous “century of humiliation” that ended only by the reunification of the country under an assertively nationalist form of Communism. At the same time, the era of China’s hobbling stands in many ways as a testimony to its remarkable abilities to surmount strains that might break other societies.

  While foreign armies were marching across China and extorting humiliating terms, the Celestial Court never stopped asserting its claim to central authority and managed to implement it over most of China’s territory. The invaders were treated as other invaders had been in previous centuries, as a nuisance, an unwelcome interruption of the eternal rhythm of Chinese life. The court in Beijing could act in this manner because the foreign depredations were mostly on the periphery of China and because the invaders had come for commerce; as such it was in the interest of the invaders that the vast central regions, including most of the population, remain quiescent. The government in Beijing thereby achieved a margin of maneuver. All the exactions had to be negotiated with the imperial court, which was therefore in a position to play off the invaders against one another.

  Chinese statesmen played their weak hand with considerable skill and forestalled what could have been an even worse catastrophe. From the point of view of the balance of power, the objective configuration of forces would have suggested the impossibility of China’s survival as a unitary, continent-sized state. But with the traditional vision of Chinese preeminence under often violent challenge and the country lashed by waves of colonial depredation and domestic upheaval, China eventually overcame its travails by its own efforts. Through a painful and often humiliating process, China’s statesmen in the end preserved the moral and territorial claims of their disintegrating world order.

  Perhaps most remarkably, they did so using almost entirely traditional methods. A segment of the Qing ruling class wrote eloquent memorials in the classical style about the challenges posed by the West, Russia, and a rising Japan, and the resulting need for China to practice “self-strengthening” and improve its own technological capabilities. But China’s Confucian elite and its generally conservative populace remained deeply ambivalent about such advice. Many perceived the importation of foreign-language texts and Western technology as endangering China’s cultural essence and social order. After sometimes bruising battles, the prevailing faction decided that to modernize along Western lines was to cease to be Chinese, and that nothing could justify abandoning this unique heritage. So China faced the era of imperial expansion without the benefit of a modern military apparatus on any national scale, and with only piecemeal adaptations to foreign financial and political innovations.

  To weather the storm, China relied not on technology or military power but instead on two deeply traditional resources: the analytical abilities of its diplomats, and the endurance and cultural confidence of its people. It developed ingenious strategies for playing off the new barbarians against one another. Officials charged with managing China’s foreign relations offered concessions in various cities—but they deliberately invited multiple sets of foreigners to share in the spoils, so that they could “use barbarians against barbarians” and avoid dominance by any one power. They eventually insisted on scrupulous adherence to the “unequal treaties” with the West and to foreign principles of international law, not because Chinese officials believed them to be valid, but because such conduct provided a means to circumscribe foreign ambitions. Faced with two potentially overwhelming contenders for dominance in northeast China, and possessing almost no force with which to repulse them, China’s diplomats set Russia and Japan against each other, mitigating to some degree the scope and permanence of the encroachments by each of them.

  In light of the contrast between China’s military near impotence and its expansively articulated vision of its world role, the rearguard defense to maintain an independent Chinese government was a remarkable achievement. No victory celebration attended this accomplishment; it was an incomplete, decades-long endeavor marked by numerous reversals and internal opponents, outlasting and occasionally ruining its proponents. This struggle came at considerable cost to the Chinese people—whose patience and endurance served, for neither the first nor the last time, as the ultimate line of defense. But it preserved the ideal of China as a continental reality in charge of its own destiny. With great discipline and self-confidence, it kept the door open for the later era of Chinese resurgence.

  Wei Yuan’s Blueprint: “Using Barbarians Against Barbarians,” Learning Their Techniques

  In navigating the treacherous passage of assaults by the Western European nations with their superior technology and the new ambitions of both Russia and Japan, China was well served by its cultural cohesion and the extraordinary skill of its diplomats—all the more remarkable in the face of the general obtuseness of the imperial court. By the middle of the nineteenth century, only a few members of the Chinese elite had begun to understand that China no longer lived in a system marked by its predominance and that China had to learn the grammar of a system of competing power blocs.

  One such official was Wei Yuan (1794–1856), a midranking Confucian mandarin and associate of Lin Zexu, the Guangzhou governor whose crackdown on the opium trade had triggered British intervention and eventually forced him into exile. While loyal to the Qing Dynasty, Wei Yuan was deeply concerned about its complacency. He wrote a pioneering study of foreign geography using materials collected and translated from foreign traders and missionaries. Its purpose was to encourage China to set its sights beyond the tributary countries on its immediate borders.

  Wei Yuan’s 1842 “Plans for a Maritime Defense,” in essence a study of China’s failures in the Opium War, proposed to apply the lessons of European balance-of-power diplomacy to China’s contemporary problems. Recognizing China’s material weakness vis-à-vis the foreign powers—a premise that his contemporaries generally did not accept—Wei Yuan proposed methods by which China might gain a margin for maneuver. Wei Yuan proposed a multipronged strategy:

  There are two methods of attacking the barbarians, namely, to stimulate countries unfriendly to the barbarians to make an attack on them, and to learn the superior skills of the barbarians in order to control them. There are two methods of making peace with the barbarians, namely, to let the various trading nations conduct their trade so as to maintain peace with the barbarians, and to support the first treaty of the Opium War so as to maintain international trade.1

  It was a demonstration of the analytical skill of Chinese diplomacy that, faced with a superior foe and potentially escalating demands, it understood that holding fast to even a humiliating treaty set a limit to further exactions.

  In the meantime, Wei Yuan reviewed the countries that, based on European principles of equilibrium, could conceivably put pressure on Britain. Citing ancient precedents in which the Han, Tang, and early Qing Dynasties had managed the ambitions of aggressive tribes, Wei Yuan surveyed the globe, reviewing the “enemy countries of which the British barbarians are afraid.” Writing as if the slogan “let barbarians fight barbarians” were self-implementing, Wei Yuan pointed to “Russia, France, and America” in the West, and “the Gurkhas [of Nepal], Burma, Siam [Thailand], and Annam [northern Vietnam]” in the East as conceivable candidates. Wei Yuan imagined a two-pronged Russian and Gurkha attack on Britain’s most distant and poorly defended interests, its Indian empire. Stimulating long-running French and American animosities toward Britain, causing them to attack Britain by sea, was another weapon in Wei Yuan’s analysis.

  It was a highly original solution hampered only by the fact that the Chinese government had not the slightest idea how to implement it. It had only limited knowledge of the potential allied countries in question and no representation in any of their capitals. Wei Yuan came to understand China’s limits. In an age of global politics, he asserted, the issue was not that “the outer barbarians cannot be used”; rather, “we need personnel who are capable of making arrangements with them” and who knew “their locations [and] their interrelations of friendship or enmity.”2

  Having failed to stop the British advance, Wei Yuan continued, Beijing needed to weaken London’s relative position in the world and in China. He came up with another original idea: to invite other barbarians into China and to set up a contest between their greed and Britain’s, so that China could emerge as the balancer in effect over the division of its own substance. Wei Yuan continued:

  Today the British barbarians not only have occupied Hong-kong and accumulated a great deal of wealth as well as a proud face among the other barbarians, but also have opened the ports and cut down the various charges so as to grant favor to other barbarians. Rather than let the British barbarians be good to them in order to enlarge their following, would it not be better for us ourselves to be good to them, in order to get them under control like fingers on the arm?3

  In other words, China should offer concessions to all rapacious nations rather than let Britain exact them and benefit itself by offering to share the spoils with other countries. The mechanism for achieving this objective was the Most Favored Nation principle—that any privilege granted one power should be automatically extended to all others.4

  Time is not neutral. The benefit of Wei Yuan’s subtle maneuvers would have to be measured by China’s ability to arm itself using “the superior techniques of the barbarians.” China, Wei Yuan advised, should “bring Western craftsmen to Canton” from France or the United States “to take charge of building ships and making arms.” Wei Yuan summed up the new strategy with the proposition that “before the peace settlement, it behooves us to use barbarians against barbarians. After the settlement, it is proper for us to learn their superior techniques in order to control them.”5

  Though initially dismissive of calls for technological modernization, the Celestial Court did adopt the strategy of adhering to the letter of the Opium War treaties in order to establish a ceiling on Western demands. It would, a leading official later wrote, “act according to the treaties and not allow the foreigners to go even slightly beyond them”; thus Chinese officials should “be sincere and amicable but quietly try to keep them in line.”6

  The Erosion of Authority: Domestic Upheavals and the Challenge of Foreign Encroachments

  The Western treaty powers, of course, had no intention of being kept in line—and in the aftermath of the Qiying-Pottinger negotiations, a new gap in expectations began to appear. For the Chinese court, the treaties were a temporary concession to barbarian force, to be followed to the degree necessary but never voluntarily broadened. For the West, the treaties were the beginning of a long-term process by which China would be steadily drawn into Western norms of political and economic exchange. But what the West conceived of as a process of enlightenment was seen by some in China as a philosophical assault.

  This is why the Chinese refused to submit to foreign demands to broaden the treaties to include free trade throughout China and permanent diplomatic representation in the Chinese capital. Beijing understood—despite its extremely limited knowledge about the West—that the combination of the foreigners’ superior force, unfettered foreign activity within China, and multiple Western missions in Beijing would seriously undermine the assumptions of the Chinese world order. Once China became a “normal” state, it would lose its historic unique moral authority; it would simply be another weak country beset by invaders. In this context, seemingly minor disputes over diplomatic and economic prerogatives turned into a major clash.

  All of this took place against a backdrop of massive Chinese domestic upheaval, masked to a large degree by the imperturbable self-confidence projected by Chinese officials charged with managing contacts with foreigners—a trait unchanged in the modern period. Macartney had already remarked in 1793 on the uneasy accommodation between the Qing’s Manchu ruling class, Han Chinese bureaucratic elite, and mostly Han general population. “Scarcely a year now passes,” he noted, “without an insurrection in some of the provinces.”7

  The dynasty’s Mandate of Heaven having been put into question, domestic opponents escalated the scope of their defiance. Their challenges were both religious and ethnic, providing the basis for conflicts of encompassing brutality. The far western reaches of the empire witnessed Muslim rebellions and the declaration of short-lived separatist khanates, suppressed only at a major financial and human cost. In central China, an uprising known as the Nian Rebellion drew considerable support from Han Chinese laboring classes and, beginning in 1851, conducted a nearly two-decades-long insurgency.

  The most serious challenge came from the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), mounted by a Chinese Christian sect in the south. Missionaries had existed for centuries, though severely circumscribed. They began to enter the country in larger numbers after the Opium War. Led by a charismatic Chinese mystic claiming to be Jesus’s younger brother and an associate asserting telepathic powers, the Taiping Rebellion aimed to replace the Qing with a new “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace” ruled by its leaders’ bizarre interpretation of imported missionary texts. Taiping forces succeeded in wresting control of Nanjing and much of south and central China from the Qing, ruling in the mode of a nascent dynasty. Though little known in Western historiography, the conflict between the Taiping and the Qing ranks as one of history’s most devastating conflicts, with casualties estimated in the tens of millions. While no official figures exist, it is estimated that during the Taiping, Muslim, and Nian upheavals China’s population declined from roughly 410 million in 1850 to roughly 350 million in 1873.8

  The Treaty of Nanjing and its French and American counterparts came up for renegotiation in the 1850s, while China was torn by these civil conflicts. The treaty powers insisted that their diplomats be permitted to reside year-round in the Chinese capital, signifying that they were not tributary envoys but the representatives of equal sovereign states. The Chinese deployed their wide array of delaying tactics with the added incentive that given the fate of preceding negotiators, no Qing official could possibly have wanted to concede the point of permanent diplomatic representation.

  In 1856, an intrusive Chinese inspection of a British-registered Chinese ship, the Arrow, and the alleged desecration of its British flag, provided a pretext for the renewal of hostilities. As in the 1840 conflict, the casus belli was not entirely heroic (the ship’s registration, it was later discovered, had technically lapsed); but both sides understood that they were playing for higher stakes. With China’s defenses still in an inchoate state of development, British forces seized Guangzhou and the Dagu Forts in northern China, from which they could easily march on Beijing.