A History of China (67 page)

Li Hongzhang’s career embodied the reformers’ ideals. Although he devoted much of his life to foreign policy, he also fostered military and economic ­modernization. Adopting a policy of so-called government supervision and ­merchant operation, he supported continuous industrial development. Naturally, he initially lobbied for industries that would make China more powerful, including armaments and coal mining. Yet he also supported the textile industry and a shipping company. He helped elicit subsidies for these firms, engineered monopolies and reduced tariffs for the most favored firms, and even played an active role in supervising some of them. In 1872, the state helped to found the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, which within a few years fostered the establishment of the Kaiping coal mines, the Shanghai cotton mills, and the Imperial Telegraph Administration. Nepotism, corruption, a dearth of technical skills and capital, conservative opposition, a hostile bureaucracy, and tax evasion hobbled these enterprises, yet they made some progress. By the 1880s, some private enterprises had developed without government supervision. Yet the pace of such change was nowhere near as fast as it had been in Britain, France, and other industrialized countries.

These undertakings were made, in the words of a biography of Yan Fu, “in search of wealth and power.”
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A more powerful China would be able to stave off the West and protect its indigenous culture. Some Western-educated leaders, influenced by a conception of the social Darwinism to which they were exposed in their studies abroad, believed that only the strongest civilizations could survive. Thus, they advocated military and industrial modernization, especially a strong navy, but not necessarily Western economic or political institutions. Nonetheless, the external influences, via education, journals, and books, created a climate in which the Self-Strengthening Movement had some successes.

Even this reform movement, which could not be labeled revolutionary, faced opposition, particularly at court. A contingent at court was adamant in its unwillingness to adopt any Western ways. Historians have often, fairly or unfairly, chosen the empress dowager Ci Xi (1835–1908) as the personification of such opposition. Ci Xi was principally interested in securing and retaining power and aligned herself with conservative forces by default. A concubine of Emperor Xianfeng (1831–1861), she gave birth to a son, which elevated her status at court. Through adroit manipulation, she ensured that her young son became the emperor in 1862. He was a sickly and weak boy, and was ­dominated by his mother, who became the true power behind the throne. A complex but decisive woman (unlike the stereotype of a typical female in traditional China), she has generally received a bad press in China. Chinese sources often portray her as unscrupulous and vindictive in her rise to power and accuse her of ­serious crimes, perhaps even murder. They also revile her policies and depict her as a major stumbling block to the reforms needed for modernization.

Figure 10.1
Empress dowager Ci Xi. © Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy

The most damning critique of Ci Xi involved her diversion of funds meant for naval modernization to rebuild the Summer Palace, which the Franco–British troops had destroyed in the second Opium War against China in 1860. As an ironic and oft-cited response to her critics, she built an immovable marble boat on the Summer Palace lake (which has endured as a major tourist attraction). Some historians believe, rightly or wrongly, that the lack of a fully modern navy later left China vulnerable in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895. Literate and shrewd, Ci Xi’s adeptness at court politics and her ruthlessness in dealing with opponents also generated severe criticism. For example, after her son’s death in 1874, she maneuvered to have her young nephew placed on the throne, which offered her additional opportunities to dominate the court. She occasionally cooperated or allied herself with reformers and Chinese officials, including Li Hongzhang, and was not averse to reform, but her main preoccupations were siding with favorites and obtaining bribes from transactions to which she ­consented. One deficiency was lack of knowledge of Western technology and tradition, which caused her to be suspicious of the West. In turn, this attitude contributed to an image of her as a conservative opposed to reform. In any event, Ci Xi alone could not derail modernization.

Indeed, many at court and in the population at large looked askance at both the Westerners who arrived in China as well as the changes wrought by the Western presence. Traditionalists at court opposed the industrialization and modernization that gradually crept in to China, concerned that such developments would undermine their Confucian-based society. At the same time, ordinary Chinese were appalled by the intrusion of the Westerners, with their unusual dress, values, and interests, and by the appearance of new types of frightening weapons and technology. Eventually, they also objected to the evidence of industrialization in the country. They bided their time to act.

Simultaneously, the native economy was facing challenges. Continued population growth placed a burden on the arable land, and the poor and unfortunate were compelled to farm marginal land. Periodic droughts and natural catastrophes resulted in hunger and starvation, leading to social unrest, which, on occasion, bubbled up into attacks on foreigners and foreign technological innovations. Economic distress sometimes prompted leaders of dissidents to blame foreigners for parlous conditions. It is true that foreigners and foreign goods had, to a certain extent, affected the Chinese agrarian economy. As China was drawn into the global economy, it faced stiff competition in areas where it had been supreme. British textiles and Ceylonese and American tobacco cut into China’s share in the world market for these commodities and even began to supersede local production. However, international competition and colonial relations with foreigners did not, by themselves, generate the increasing pauperization of the population. Social and economic inequality contributed at least as much, if not more, to peasant poverty. Many peasants fell into increasingly greater debt, despite (for example) attempts by women to use their skills at weaving to earn a wage in order to shore up their household’s survival. Poor peasants and poor urban dwellers, who were frustrated by their economic instability, blamed foreigners for their problems.

Several notorious incidents created considerable tension between the Chinese and Westerners. In 1870, a French consul in Tianjin, enraged by Chinese officials’ support for anti-Catholic stories about nuns kidnapping and either harming or murdering Chinese orphans, stormed into a magistrate’s office, fired his revolver, and inadvertently killed an innocent observer of the scene. In turn, a crowd of Chinese killed the consul and the nuns and then destroyed the nunnery. The French government demanded that the court punish those responsible for the so-called Tianjin Massacre, and the Qing authorities complied by executing over a dozen men, some of whom may have been innocent. Later a British consul named Augustus Margary (1846–1875) was killed in southwest China. Although the Qing court had absolutely no connection to the murder, the British demanded and received, via the Chefoo Convention, compensation in the forms of a substantial payment, the opening of four additional ports to trade, and an embassy dispatched to apologize to Queen Victoria.

There were other less reported incidents until the Boxer rebellion in 1900 (discussed below), which involved Western missionaries. Both Catholic and Protestant clerics, representing a variety of Christian sects and orders from many Western countries, had arrived in China even before the first Opium War, but the British victory resulted in an onrush of missionaries. Most arrived with a sincere desire to convert the Chinese to what they perceived to be a truer religion and to introduce other elements of Western culture to China. Some, however, adopted condescending attitudes toward Chinese culture while also enjoying appurtenances (such as amahs, servants, and a luxurious lifestyle) that they could have not dreamed about in their native lands. Such denigration of Chinese culture elicited harsh reactions from the Confucian elite, who were genuinely distressed by the perceived attack on their traditional culture. They were also concerned about the missionaries’ challenge to the elite’s status in Chinese society. Thus, some in the elite gave credence to outlandish rumors such as that mentioned above concerning the supposed kidnapping and brutal treatment of Chinese children in nunneries and churches.

Although the missionaries’ ultimate goal was to convert the Chinese to Christianity, they contributed significantly to Chinese society in other ways. They started the first modern periodicals, founded schools with a Western ­curriculum, established schools and colleges for girls, introduced modern medicine (via clinics and hospitals), and translated classical Chinese texts into Western languages. In short, they exposed the Chinese to Western ideas, technology, and culture, not simply Christianity. Their schools taught secular ­subjects as well as the Bible and various Chinese texts. Together with secular organizations, they encouraged and sponsored capable students to study in the West. They also produced dictionaries and language texts to facilitate study of the Chinese language. A small minority traveled into the hinterlands and offered the first Western-language descriptions of rural conditions among non-Chinese ethnic groups. Marshall Broomhall and Isaac Mason, for example, provided valuable reports about the Islamic peoples in China, a subject barely known in the West.

All of these were worthy contributions, but Chinese conservatives often associated missionaries with the exploitation of China and with promoting the advent of Western-style industrialization in China – a heinous crime in their eyes. The missionaries’ most resented activity was their attempt to provide special benefits for Chinese converts to Christianity. They secured both legal and extralegal privileges for Chinese Christians, and many Chinese came to resent both the Chinese Christians and the missionaries.

The missionaries themselves had a very different experience from that of the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries who came to China. Because the Jesuits had dealt with the elite, they had had a favorable impression of Chinese culture and society; at the time, the Qing had been at its height, and had therefore impressed the foreign clerics. The Jesuits and the Confucian scholar-officials had shared a love of learning and a support for proper behavior. Even the Qing emperors were comfortable with the Jesuits, and vice versa.

Conversely, the nineteenth-century missionaries, mostly Protestants, met with ordinary people and only a small group within the elite. They encountered less sophisticated and sometimes illiterate Chinese. Perhaps as important, they failed to recognize the stresses and hardships the Chinese faced as a result of the turbulence in the country. Several thousand years of Chinese civilization had been challenged. Confucian values and Chinese attitudes toward foreigners and foreign states were all brought into question. Some Chinese feared that China could not survive in the new, more threatening world. Protestant sects and missionaries traveled into China’s interior and sought influence over ordinary people and were perceived as a great threat. Christianity appeared to represent turbulence both in the cities and in the countryside. The Chinese abhorred chaos, and they associated Christianity with the Taiping rebels and the Western encroachment on China. Thus, they distanced themselves from the missionaries, who made relatively few converts and wound up dealing with Chinese whom they perceived to be uneducated and unsavory. The missionaries’ characterizations of the Chinese were inaccurate, but they shaped the condescending attitudes of some missionaries toward the Chinese.

By the mid 1870s, China was under considerable pressure. Although it had suppressed the major domestic insurrections and turmoil, it confronted a growing population, peasants suffering from landlord exploitation, stiff taxes, and repeated natural disasters exacerbated by poor maintenance of environmental safeguards. Some peasants, despondent due to their inability to sustain themselves, turned to banditry; others became heavily indebted to landlords or usurers; and still others migrated to cities or towns, where they either found jobs in the newly developing enterprises or barely eked out an existence. Westerners intensified the pressure on China as they encroached upon its territory, with each country seeking influence on specific provinces or regions. The British, French, and Russians had already staked their claims. Britain detached Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal from alleged Chinese jurisdiction and sought influence or domination in China proper; France successfully challenged Chinese claims to modern Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as southwestern China; and Russia annexed lands all across China’s northern frontiers. Other powers would soon join in the attempt to capitalize upon China’s weakness.