A History of China (63 page)

The British had now achieved most of their objectives. They received the island of Hong Kong; four additional ports for trade as well as permission to have consuls and to bring their families to the ports; compensation for the opium Lin Zexu had destroyed; and payment for the losses they had incurred during the so-called Opium Wars. They compelled the Qing to abolish the Cohong and to permit them to trade with any and all merchants in China. Tariffs, they emphasized, ought to be standard and not capriciously imposed. They added that the Qing court would need to address Britain as an equal in any correspondence, a major deviation from traditional Chinese foreign policy. A provision in the supplementary 1843 Treaty of the Bogue proved to have far-reaching consequences. It extracted a most-favored-nation clause from China, which guaranteed that any privileges granted to any other power would automatically accrue to Britain. This clause was aimed at deflecting a traditional Chinese tactic of “using barbarians to regulate barbarians” – that is, favoring one group with commercial and diplomatic privileges and denying them to others, creating a rift among them. The treaty scarcely mentioned the reputed cause of the conflict. In fact, “Opium Wars” is a misnomer. The basic struggle revolved around two conceptions of trade and foreign relations. Opium was important but was much more of a symptom of the underlying issues.

Shortly thereafter, the other Western powers negotiated similar treaties but with additional privileges. In 1844, the USA, which had started to trade with China in the 1780s and now had considerable commercial interests in the so-called Middle Kingdom, pressed for and received permission in its treaty to set up hospitals and churches for its Protestant missionaries, who began to arrive in China in steadily increasing numbers. The treaty with the USA and a subsequent treaty with France enshrined the concept of extraterritoriality – that is, foreigners accused of crimes in China would be tried in their own countries’ courts. China was, in this way, compelled to relinquish sovereignty over its own territory.

The opium trade, the misidentified cause of the conflict, persisted. British smugglers accelerated the pace of trafficking. Unable to cope with the opium blight, the Qing legalized the drug in treaties signed with France and Britain after conflicts in 1856 and 1860. Only at the beginning of the twentieth ­century did the Qing reinstate the prohibition on the drug and initiate serious attempts to stamp out the trade. By then, most production had shifted to China, facilitating efforts of consumers to purchase it. Judging from the reports of both Chinese and foreign observers, opium was readily available in the first half of the twentieth century. Emily Hahn (1905–1997), the intrepid journalist who traveled throughout Asia and Africa from the 1920s on, wrote a harrowing account for
The New Yorker
magazine of her initial experience with and then addiction to opium in the 1930s and of the German physician who helped her to overcome her addiction. Most addicted Chinese either resisted or did not have such assistance. Repeated depictions of opium dens in movies and trashy novels offer clues about the scope of the problem in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China mounted a campaign to eradicate opium production and to “cure” addicts through punitive measures. The government claimed victory, but China remains a conduit for and consumer of drugs produced in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.

Westerners did not anticipate the Opium Wars’ consequences. They perceived that free trade and the elimination of monopolies would open up a market of more than four hundred million Chinese consumers. This dream was really a delusion because the vast majority of Chinese could not afford to pay for Western goods. Moreover, the Opium Wars had generated animosity toward the British and indeed all foreigners. Recognizing this hostility and being themselves ambivalent about the implementation of the humiliating ­provisions of the Treaty of Nanjing, Qing officials stalled in implementing some of their treaty obligations. Canton, a particularly antiforeign center, remained closed to the British, and the four other ports did not generate the ­volume of trade that the British assumed they would. The British began to believe that they needed an ambassador in Beijing to reflect their views and to adjudicate disputes with local officials. Such support in dealing with the highest levels of government would be of assistance in preventing officials in Canton and the other ports to act as what the British merchants perceived to be stumbling blocks. Once the barriers were removed, the British would reputedly be able to tap into the huge Chinese consumer base.

However, despite the number of treaties in the post-Opium Wars period, Western merchants and governments were disappointed with the relative paucity of economic activity. Merchants wanted their governments to elicit concessions from the Qing and to compel it to abide by its treaty obligations. Tensions were high throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. In 1856, Qing authorities gave British hard-liners the pretext they sought in order to undertake a harsher policy. Officials in Canton boarded the
Arrow
, a ship allegedly flying the British flag, and arrested several Chinese whom they accused of piracy. The men were eventually released, but local officials neither apologized for the false arrests nor offered assurances that they would refrain from boarding other British ships. War erupted, but the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in India diverted the British for a time. In 1858, the French, one of whose missionaries had been killed, collaborated with the British; the combined forces attacked and occupied Canton and then their ships attacked north China, compelling Chinese officials to sign the Treaty of Tianjin. However, the Qing court repudiated its officials’ actions and rejected the treaty. In 1860, the war resumed, and the Franco–British army marched into Beijing, razing the emperor’s Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) en route. This show of force prompted the court to relent and accept the Treaty of Tianjin as well as conventions newly negotiated in Beijing. The most significant provisions were the opening of eleven additional ports, authority for missionaries to buy buildings throughout China, permission to enter the interior, Qing payment of an indemnity, granting of Kowloon to the British, and the stationing of ambassadors in Beijing. At the same time, in 1858, Russia forced the Qing to sign the Treaty of Aigun, giving the tsarist court the left bank of the Amur River. Two years later Russia was also granted land east of the Ussuri River.

China’s reactions to these losses and to the infringement on its sovereignty were not uniform. Different groups of Chinese people responded differently to this extraordinary challenge posed to their system of values and government. Other invaders had reached an accommodation with China, leading to a merging of Chinese and foreign practices and institutions in governance, the military, an underlying philosophy, and the economy. Engagement with the Western countries, as well as with Russia and Japan, would not turn out to be so easy. Some Chinese institutions would be overturned or transformed. However, even without a contretemps with the West, China might still have, as some historians have argued, undergone changes through the rising tide of commercialism and industrialization. The Western challenge probably ­accelerated the pace of transformation, but it is important to keep in mind that nineteenth- and twentieth-century China’s policies were not merely a response to the British, the French, the Americans, the Russians, and the Japanese. Such domestic developments as the rapid increase in population, the growing corruption and ineffectiveness of government, and the heightened antagonism between the Manchus and the Chinese and between the state and its Muslim population frequently shaped Qing policies.

In addition, many Westerners exploited China, but, perhaps as important, they disparaged its culture, its values, its government, and its institutions. Past invaders had been impressed with Chinese civilization. Although they may have set up a harsh and repressive rule, they did not depict the Chinese as backward and did not attempt to alter Chinese customs and values. However, Westerners denigrated the practice of bound feet, Chinese traditional medicine, Chinese standards of sanitation and health, and Chinese philosophies and religions. They criticized the educational system, which enshrined the seemingly rote civil-service examinations, because it did not prepare the Chinese with the tools (science, engineering, etc.) to progress. These analyses and critiques dealt a severe blow to Chinese cultural pride. A civilization with at least a four-thousand-year history of glorious accomplishments was now being ridiculed and its institutions and morality described as incompatible with the modern world. Yet these criticisms would develop gradually throughout the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, China had to cope with defeats in the Opium Wars and the wars of 1856 and 1860. Many educated Chinese did not initially understand the dimension of the new Western threat. Several simply assumed that adoption of Western weapons, without other changes in the economy, organization, methods of work, and mores, would be sufficient to protect China and to ­compel the foreigners to relinquish their favored position in China. As China faced loss after loss in the mid to late nineteenth century, more sophisticated analyses and solutions would be proffered. However, before Qing officials devised more serious proposals for dealing with the foreigners, they faced major domestic disturbances and insurrections.

By the mid nineteenth century, China was no longer among the great powers. Defeated by Britain in the Opium Wars of 1839–1842, it also faced serious internal disturbances. At least four major rebellions had afflicted the dynasty by the early 1860s. The population had increased dramatically to over four hundred million people, creating great strains on agriculture and the available food supply. A bad harvest or a natural disaster could be catastrophic, leading to starvation and possibly famine. China’s relatively rudimentary workshops and factories could not compete with many of the Western countries and their industrial revolutions. For example, the Qing did not have the arsenals and dockyards to produce advanced weaponry and ships. Without such sophisticated armaments, the dynasty was vulnerable in foreign conflicts. The decline of the Qing Banner forces, once one of the world’s most powerful armies, exacerbated the court’s difficulties. Corruption, inadequate weapons and supplies, demoralized soldiers, and lack of modern strategy and tactics had eroded the Banner forces’ skills and competencies. It was no accident therefore that Russia encroached on China’s northern territories and that Britain had a base in Hong Kong and had detached the Himalayan kingdoms from China. France had substantial interests in mainland Southeast Asia and southwest China. Later, Japan and Germany would make additional inroads on Chinese soil. Social relations had been disrupted. Overpopulation and poverty afflicted China, leading to migrations to towns or cities and even to foreign emigration. Overseas communities developed in Southeast Asia, as Chinese saw and seized possibilities for economic opportunities in neighboring lands. A few Chinese ventured to South America, especially to Peru to work in the mines.

Some Chinese migrated to the USA because of employment opportunities. They originally arrived during the California gold rush in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Later they labored on the Transcontinental Railroad. American workers began to resent Chinese competition, and anti-Chinese sentiments increased rapidly. The Chinese deflected some of this criticism by shifting employment to starting laundries and restaurants. Yet they still attracted hostility, especially after the declining economy that followed the US Civil War. After considerable lobbying by their opponents, the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first of several anti-immigrant laws directed at east Asians. The Act stipulated, among other clauses, that neither skilled nor unskilled Chinese workers would be admitted into the USA for the next ten years.

How did China reach such an impasse? Specialists on Chinese history have offered numerous, sometimes conflicting, answers to this question, although a few interpretations can be reconciled. One view is that the imperial system and the Confucian scholar-officials imposed restrictions on the activities and power of the merchant and entrepreneurial classes, blocking the development of industrialism and capitalism. Another is that the large population undercut the need for machinery, as there was sufficient labor to undertake farming. Moreover, China had to use land for food crops instead of nonfood crops that required machinery for processing. Technological development was limited by the imperative of feeding the ever-increasing population. Still another, and the most recent, explanation is based on the fact that the industrializing European nations, especially Britain, possessed coal and other natural resources for industrialization and garnered substantial profits from their colonies in the New World to supplement the capital available for investment. Thus, they underwent an industrial revolution earlier than China and could capitalize on their advanced military and industrial technology to impose a colonial system on the Chinese. A combination of all these factors perhaps helps to explain China’s descent into chaos by the mid to late nineteenth century.

Pamela Crossley,
The Manchus
(Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2002).

David Hawkes, trans.,
Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel in Five Volumes
(Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1973–1986).

Philip Kuhn,
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of
1768
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

Ichisada Miyazaki,
China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

Jonathan Spence,
Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi
(New York: Vintage, 1988).