During the negotiations that followed, the gap in perceptions was as wide as ever. The British pressed on with missionary conviction, presenting their negotiating positions as a public service that would at last bring China up to speed with the modern world. Thus London’s assistant negotiator Horatio Lay summed up the prevailing Western view: “[D]iplomatic representation will be for your good as well as ours, as you will surely see. The medicine may be unpleasant but the aftereffects will be grand.”9

  Qing authorities were not nearly so enthusiastic. They acceded to the treaty terms only after a flurry of anguished internal communications between the imperial court and its negotiator and another British threat to march on Beijing.10

  The centerpiece of the resulting 1858 Treaty of Tianjin was the concession that London had sought in vain for over six decades—the right to a permanent embassy in Beijing. The treaty further permitted foreign travel on the Yangtze River, opened additional “treaty ports” to Western trade, and protected Chinese Christian converts and Western proselytizing in China (a prospect particularly difficult for the Qing given the Taiping Rebellion). The French and Americans concluded their own treaties on similar terms under their Most Favored Nation clauses.

  The treaty powers now applied their attention to establishing resident embassies in a clearly unwelcoming capital. In May 1859, Britain’s new envoy, Frederick Bruce, arrived in China to exchange ratifications of the treaty that would grant him the right to take up residence in Beijing. Finding the main river route to the capital blocked with chains and spikes, he ordered a contingent of British marines to clear the obstacles. But Chinese forces shocked Bruce’s party by opening fire from the newly fortified Dagu Forts. The ensuing battle resulted in 519 British troops killed and 456 wounded.11

  It was the first Chinese victory in battle against modern Western forces, and shattered, at least temporarily, the image of Chinese military impotence. Yet it could only stall the British ambassador’s advance temporarily. Palmerston dispatched Lord Elgin to lead a joint British and French march on Beijing, with orders to occupy the capital and “bring the Emperor to reason.” As retaliation for the “Dagu Repulse” and a symbolic show of Western power, Elgin ordered the burning of the Emperor’s Summer Palace, destroying invaluable art treasures in the process—an act still resented in China a century and a half later.

  China’s seventy-year campaign of resistance against Western norms of interstate relations had now reached undeniable crisis. Efforts at diplomatic delay had run their course; force had been met with superior force. Barbarian claims of sovereign equality, once dismissed in Beijing as risible, shaded into ominous demonstrations of military dominance. Foreign armies occupied China’s capital and enforced the Western interpretation of political equality and ambassadorial privileges.

  At this point, another claimant to China’s patrimony stepped into the fray. By 1860, the Russians had been represented in Beijing for over 150 years—with an ecclesiastical mission, they were the only European country permitted to establish a residence. Russia’s interests had in some ways trailed those of the other European powers; it had gained all the benefits extended to the treaty powers without joining the British in the periodic exercises of force. On the other hand, Moscow’s overall objective went much further than religious proselytizing or commerce along the coast. It perceived in the Qing’s decline an opportunity to dismember the Chinese Empire and reattach its “outer dominions” to Russia. It set its sights in particular on the lightly administered and ambiguously demarcated expanses of Manchuria (the Manchu heartland in northeast China), Mongolia (the then quasi-autonomous tribal steppe at China’s north), and Xinjiang (the expanse of mountains and deserts in the far west, then populated mostly by Muslim peoples). To that end, Russia had moved gradually and deliberately to expand its presence along these inland frontiers, poaching the loyalties of local princes through offers of rank and material benefit, underscored by a menacing cavalry.12

  At the moment of China’s maximum peril Moscow surfaced as a colonial power, offering to mediate in the 1860 conflict—which was, in fact, a way of threatening to intervene. Artful—others might argue duplicitous—diplomacy was underpinned by the implicit threat of force. Count Nikolai Ignatieff, the Czar’s brilliant and devious young plenipotentiary in Beijing, managed to convince the Chinese court that only Russia could secure the evacuation of the Western occupying powers from the Chinese capital, and to convince the Western powers that only Russia could secure Chinese compliance with the treaties. Having facilitated the Anglo-French march on Beijing with detailed maps and intelligence, Ignatieff turned and convinced the occupying forces that with the approaching winter the Beihe, the river route in and out of Beijing, would freeze, leaving them surrounded by hostile Chinese mobs.13

  For these services Moscow exacted a staggering territorial price: a broad swath of territory in so-called Outer Manchuria along the Pacific coast, including the port city now called Vladivostok.14 In a stroke, Russia had gained a major new naval base, a foothold in the Sea of Japan, and 350,000 square miles of territory once considered Chinese.

  Ignatieff also negotiated a provision opening Urga (now Ulan Bator) in Mongolia and the far western city of Kashgar to Russian trade and consulates. To compound the humiliation, Elgin secured for Britain an expansion of its Hong Kong colony into the adjacent territory of Kowloon. China had enlisted Russia to forestall what it believed to be a further assault by the treaty powers dominating China’s capital and its coast; but in an era of Chinese weakness, “using barbarians against barbarians” was not without its costs.

  Managing Decline

  China had not survived for four thousand years as a unique civilization and for two millennia as a united state by remaining passive to near-rampant foreign intrusions. For all that period, conquerors had been obliged either to adopt Chinese culture or to be gradually engulfed by their subjects, who masked their practicality by patience. Another such period of trial was at hand.

  In the aftermath of the 1860 conflict, the Emperor and the court faction that had urged resistance to the British mission fled the capital. Prince Gong, the Emperor’s half brother, assumed the role of de facto head of government. Having negotiated the conclusion of hostilities, Prince Gong summed up, in a memorial to the Emperor in 1861, the appalling strategic choices:

  Now the Nian rebellion is ablaze in the north and the Taiping in the south, our military supplies are exhausted and our troops are worn out. The barbarians take advantage of our weak position and try to control us. If we do not restrain our rage but continue the hostilities, we are liable to sudden catastrophe. On the other hand, if we overlook the way they have harmed us and do not make any preparations against them, then we shall be bequeathing a source of grief to our sons and grandsons.15

  It was the classic dilemma of the defeated: can a society maintain its cohesion while seeming to adapt to the conqueror—and how to build up the capacity to reverse the unfavorable balance of forces? Prince Gong invoked an ancient Chinese saying: “Resort to peace and friendship when temporarily obliged to do so; use war and defense as your actual policy.”16

  Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao. The Gong memorial demonstrated great geopolitical acumen in its assessment of the kind of threat represented by the various invaders. Despite the imminent and actual threat from Britain, the Gong memorial put Britain last in the order of the long-range danger to the cohesion of the Chinese state and Russia first:

  Both the Taiping and Nian are gaining victories and constitute an organic disease. Russia, with her territory adjoining ours, aiming to nibble away our territory like a silk worm, may be considered a threat at our bosom. As to England, her purpose is to trade but she acts violently, without regard for human decency. If she is not kept within limits, we shall not be able to stand on our feet. Hence she may be compared to an affliction of our limbs. Therefore we should suppress the Taiping and Nian first, get the Russians under control next, and attend to the British last.17

  To accomplish his long-range aims toward the foreign powers, Prince Gong proposed the establishment of a new government office—an embryonic foreign ministry—to manage affairs with the Western powers and analyze foreign newspapers for information on developments beyond China’s borders. He hopefully predicted that this would be a temporary necessity, to be abolished “[a]s soon as the military campaigns are concluded and the affairs of the various countries are simplified.”18 This new department was not listed in the official record of metropolitan and state offices until 1890. Its officials tended to be seconded from other, more important departments as a kind of temporary assignment. They were rotated frequently. Though some of its cities were occupied by foreign forces, China treated foreign policy as a temporary expedient rather than a permanent feature of China’s future.19 The new ministry’s full name was the Zongli Geguo Shiwu Yamen (“Office for the General Management of the Affairs of All Nations”), an ambiguous phrasing open to the interpretation that China was not engaging in diplomacy with foreign peoples at all, but rather ordering their affairs as part of its universal em pire.20

  The implementation of Prince Gong’s policy fell into the hands of Li Hongzhang, a top-ranking mandarin who had risen to prominence commanding forces in the Qing campaigns against the Taiping Rebellion. Ambitious, urbane, impassive in the face of humiliation, supremely well versed in China’s classical tradition but uncommonly attuned to its peril, Li served for nearly four decades as China’s face to the outside world. He cast himself as the intermediary between the foreign powers’ insistent demands for territorial and economic concessions and the Chinese court’s expansive claims of political superiority. By definition his policies could never meet with either side’s complete approbation. Within China in particular Li left a controversial legacy, especially among those urging a more confrontational course. Yet his efforts—rendered infinitely more complex by the belligerence of the traditionalist faction of the Chinese court, which periodically insisted on meeting the foreign powers in battle with minimal preparation—demonstrate a remarkable ability to navigate between, and usually mitigate, late-Qing China’s severely unattractive alternatives.

  Li made his reputation in crisis, emerging as an expert in military affairs and “barbarian management” during China’s midcentury rebellions. In 1862 Li was sent to administer the wealthy eastern province of Jiangsu, where he found its main cities besieged by Taiping rebels but secured by Western-led armies determined to defend their new commercial privileges. Applying the maxims of the Gong memorandum, Li allied himself with—and established himself as the ultimate authority over—the Western forces in order to destroy their common foe. During what was effectively a joint Chinese-Western counterinsurgency campaign, Li forged a working relationship with Charles “Chinese” Gordon, the famous British adventurer later killed by the Mahdi in the siege of Khartoum in the Sudan. (Li and Gordon eventually fell out when Li ordered the execution of captured rebel leaders to whom Gordon had promised clemency.) With the Taiping threat quelled in 1864, Li was promoted to a series of increasingly prominent positions, emerging as China’s de facto foreign minister and the chief negotiator in its frequent foreign crises.21

  The representative of a society under siege by vastly more powerful countries and significantly different cultures has two choices. He can attempt to close the cultural gap, adopt the manners of the militarily stronger and thereby reduce the pressures resulting from the temptation to discriminate against the culturally strange. Or he can insist on the validity of his own culture by flaunting its special characteristics and gain respect for the strength of its convictions.

  In the nineteenth century Japanese leaders took the first course, aided by the fact that when they encountered the West their country was already well on the way to industrialization and had demonstrated its social cohesion. Li, representing a country wracked by rebellion for whose defeat he needed foreign help, did not have that option. Nor would he have shed his Confucian provenance, whatever the benefits of such a course.

  An account of Li Hongzhang’s travels within China serves as a grim record of China’s turmoil: within one fairly representative two-year period in 1869–71, he was catapulted between southwest China, where French representatives had raised a protest over anti-Christian riots; to the north, where a new set of riots had broken out; back to the far southwest, where a minority tribe on the Vietnamese border was in revolt; then to the northwest to address a major Muslim rebellion; from there to the port of Tianjin in the northeast, where a massacre of Christians had drawn French warships and a threat of military intervention; and finally to the southeast, where a new crisis was brewing on the island of Taiwan (then known in the West as Formosa).22

  Li cut a distinctive figure on a diplomatic stage dominated by Western-defined codes of conduct. He wore the flowing robes of a Confucian mandarin and proudly sported ancient designations of rank, such as the “Double-Eyed Peacock Feather” and the “Yellow Jacket,” that his Western counterparts could only observe with bewilderment. His head was shaved—in the Qing style—except for a long braided ponytail, and covered by an oblong official’s cap. He spoke epigrammatically in a language that only a handful of foreigners understood. He carried himself with such otherworldly serenity that one British contemporary compared him, with a mixture of awe and incomprehension, to a visitor from another planet. China’s travails and concessions, his demeanor seemed to suggest, were but temporary obstacles on the route to the ultimate triumph of Chinese civilization. His mentor, Zeng Guofan, a top-ranking Confucian scholar and veteran commander of the Taiping campaigns, had advised Li in 1862 how to use the basic Confucian value of self-restraint as a diplomatic tool: “In your association with foreigners, your manner and deportment should not be too lofty, and you should have a slightly vague, casual appearance. Let their insults, deceitfulness, and contempt for everything appear to be understood by you and yet seem not understood, for you should look somewhat stupid.”23

  Like every other Chinese high official of his era, Li believed in the superiority of China’s moral values and the justness of its traditional imperial prerogatives. Where he differed was less in his assessment of China’s superiority than in his diagnosis that it lacked, for the time being, a material or military basis. Having studied Western weaponry during the Taiping conflict and sought out information on foreign economic trends, he realized that China was falling dangerously out of phase with the rest of the world. As he warned the Emperor in a bluntly worded 1872 policy memorial: “To live today and still say ‘reject the barbarians’ and ‘drive them out of our territory’ is certainly superficial and absurd talk. . . . They are daily producing their weapons to strive with us for supremacy and victory, pitting their superior techniques against our inadequacies.”24

  Li had reached a conclusion similar to Wei Yuan’s—though by now the problem of reform was exponentially more urgent than in Wei Yuan’s time. Thus Li warned:

  The present situation is one in which, externally, it is necessary for us to be harmonious with the barbarians, and internally, it is necessary for us to reform our institutions. If we remain conservative, without making any change, the nation will be daily reduced and weakened. . . . Now all the foreign countries are having one reform after another, and progressing every day like the ascending of steam. Only China continues to preserve her traditional institutions so cautiously that even though she be ruined and extinguished, the conservatives will not regret it.25

  During a series of landmark Chinese policy debates in the 1860s, Li and his bureaucratic allies outlined a course of action they named “self-strengthening.” In one 1863 memorandum, Li took as his starting point (and as a means of softening the blow for his imperial readership) that “[e]verything in China’s civil and military system is far superior to that in the West. Only in firearms is it absolutely impossible to catch up with them.”26 But in light of its recent catastrophes, Li counseled, China’s elite could no longer afford to look down on foreign innovations, “sneer[ing] at the sharp weapons of foreign countries as things produced by strange techniques and tricky craft, which they consider it unnecessary to learn.”27 What China needed was firearms, steamships, and heavy machinery, as well as the knowledge and the techniques to produce them.

  In order to enhance Chinese capacity to study foreign texts and blueprints and converse with foreign experts, young Chinese needed to be trained in foreign languages (an undertaking heretofore dismissed as unnecessary, since all foreigners presumably aspired to become Chinese). Li argued that China should open schools in its major cities—including its capital, which it had fought so long to safeguard from foreign influence—to teach foreign languages and engineering techniques. Li framed the project as a challenge: “Are Chinese wisdom and intelligence inferior to those of Westerners? If we have really mastered the Western languages and, in turn, teach one another, then all their clever techniques of steamships and firearms can be gradually and thoroughly learned.”28

  Prince Gong struck a similar note in an 1866 proposal urging that the Emperor support the study of Western scientific innovations: