Restless Empire (6 page)

O
F ALL THE
E
UROPEAN STATES
, China’s first regular foreign relations were with Russia. Indeed, it can be argued that China’s first foreign relations—in anything approaching the Western sense—with any country were with that other expanding empire moving into East Asia from the north. Already by the early Qing period, hunters and traders claiming some form of allegiance to the Russian Tsar had appeared on China’s frontiers. Kangxi was engaged in the massive attempt to control all of eastern Central Asia that his grandson Qianlong would complete. He knew enough about the West and worried enough about Russian power to decide to pacify this new group of barbarians in ways different from those used before.

In 1689, against the advice of many of his counselors, Kangxi entered into the Treaty of Nerchinsk, China’s first-ever treaty in any way similar to European treaties between states. In doing so, not only did he recognize a foreign monarch, the Tsar, who was not in an express tribute relationship to himself, but he agreed—at least in principle—to a border demarcation line between the two states along the Amur river. The greatest of the Qing emperors was a practical man: It was crucial that Russia remain neutral while he moved to crush the western Mongols, the Zunghars. In ways similar to today’s Shanghai Group—the twenty-first-century Sino-Russian collaboration against Central Asian Muslim “terrorists”—Kangxi and his successors wanted to see Russia get enough, in terms of trade and territory, so that it would be willing to stand aside while the Qing colonized the land from Kashgar to Ulaanbaatar. It turned out to be a remarkably successful grand bargain from the perspective of both empires, though the Zunghars, slaughtered to almost the last man, woman, and child by the 1750s, would have disagreed.

From the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, China and Russia—the two great imperial projects of north and east Asia—managed not only to avoid war but to cooperate, at least to a limited extent. In 1727, they signed the Kiakhta Treaty, which reaffirmed and
regularized the stipulations of the earlier agreement: Beijing would accept two hundred Russian merchants into the capital every third year, while also allowing for a flourishing border trade (which by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century turned increasingly private). The economic importance of this trade was not negligible, especially for Russia. By the end of eighteenth century, ten percent of its foreign trade came and went across the border with China. All the way up to the late nineteenth century, the trade advantage was with the Chinese: The Russians sold fur (sable, tiger, and wolf were highly valued in China), and the Chinese exported manufactured goods: silk and porcelain, later cotton and furniture. The Tsar’s general Alexander Suvorov rode against Napoleon under banners made from Chinese silk.
⁴

While the Qing, at home, tried to pass its relations with the Russians off as tribute, it was clearly very different from the exchanges China had with any other country. Often in diplomacy, a little bit of make-believe can go a long way: The first Chinese “diplomatic” relations were remarkably stable because both sides read into them what they wanted to see. The Tsar’s advisers believed that the Chinese would, over time, ally themselves with the Russians to the detriment of other European powers. The Qing nobles knew that keeping the Russians off their back would allow them to proceed with their colonization of China’s Central Asian domains. And although the Chinese side benefited more from the trade, the Russians got products that they valued. The expanding trade did not lead to the kinds of political problems that we shall see later in the case of the Guangzhou trade with the West. Likewise, the Orthodox priests who served in Beijing were there for the small Russian community, not to proselytize among the Chinese. Like the Jesuits a century earlier, they were cultural interpreters, not collectors of souls. As a result, relations between the two empires remained remarkably nonconfrontational, until the Qing in the mid-nineteenth century—already wounded by its internal wars and its wars against Britain—became a tempting victim for a new round of Russian imperialism.

C
HINA HAD BEEN A TRADING EMPIRE
for a very long time by 1800, although—given its size—it was only natural that most of the trade took place inside its borders or with its immediate neighbors. Distances were vast and communications slow and cumbersome, but land and water transport compared favorably with that in the West. While the state controlled and regulated all forms of trade and provided supplies to the population in cases of emergencies or natural disasters, various forms of private or semiprivate trade were spreading throughout the empire, aided by tax incentives, or rather tax neglect. The Court’s attitude to the merchant trade was snobbish, and so it neglected to impose comprehensive commercial taxation. As markets expanded in almost all parts of the country, so did private banking institutions and sophisticated brokerage practices.

Even in the field of foreign trade, in the early nineteenth century the Qing were ceding control to private interests. Part of the reason why China’s hold on its region had been manifested through physical tribute was that this practice allowed rulers to show their magnificence through the display of foreign luxury goods. The emperors publicly proclaimed that China was entirely self-sufficient, but they loved having their portraits painted wearing furs from Siberia or holding a musical instrument from Southeast Asia.

In reality the Qing from the mid-eighteenth century gradually opened up for an extensive foreign trade, roughly divided into three zones. The first was based on the tribute relationships: Commerce in Thailand, for instance, grew along the routes originally developed for bringing presents to the emperor by sea through the Guangdong ports. After the Qing in the 1720s rescinded the prohibition on Chinese engaging in seaborne foreign trade, most of the shipping engaged was from Guangdong and Fujian, or from Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. By the early nineteenth century, the whole concept of tribute was mixed in with trade in a very pragmatic manner. The Thai kings, who attempted to run a monopoly on foreign trade, benefited from
selling Chinese imports such as silk, tea, and copper. Chinese merchants prospered by reselling imported Thai dried goods and rice.

The two other zones of trade involved dealing with European powers. The Kiakhta system opened up and regulated trade with Russia along a border that from the late seventeenth century stayed remarkably stable. The third zone was more troubled: By the mid-eighteenth century the emperor tried to organize the seaborne trade by European merchants in a flexible system that borrowed elements of both the Russian trade and that with tributary states. The Canton system, as this routine was called, was based on setting up the port of Guangzhou (Canton) as the only harbor open to trade with Western ships. The foreigners, of whom most belonged to the British East India Company (EIC), could only come during the October to March trading season, get a Chinese permit when passing through Portuguese-held Macao, and then anchor at Huangpu just south of Guangzhou city. There they could establish contact with licensed Chinese merchants. On the Chinese side, the trade was organized by a superintendent of maritime customs for Guangdong province, appointed directly by the emperor. He licensed local merchants and collected duties and fees from them before each foreign ship was allowed to leave: The Chinese merchants, in other words, were responsible for the conduct of each ship with which they were trading.

By the late eighteenth century, the Guangzhou trade had begun to grow significantly, fueled to a great extent by the increasing British fondness for Chinese tea. As the EIC colonized India for Britain, a British-organized Asian trade began to integrate parts of South China with the emerging world market: Products from South Asia, such as cotton, were imported through Guangzhou, while British ships brought tea, porcelain, and silk back to Europe. The Chinese merchants and middlemen involved grew rich, and, more importantly, were able to set up their own trade links, which extended from the Pearl river delta upland, along the coast, and into the great rivers, as well as to parts of Southeast Asia where they had links already. As the modern world came
into being, some Chinese were already finding their place in it. And the Qing, in spite of their mercantilist approach to foreign trade, found the taxes and duties earned through the Guangzhou system far too enticing to crack down on it, as long as the empire’s sovereignty was not threatened.

As he lay dying, Qianlong lamented his failure to find the kind of balanced foreign relations he had sought since his early days in power. He had inherited a system in which rituals and institutions were well laid out, and which was reasonably well equipped to deal with China’s mid-eighteenth-century world. But by the end of his reign, the old emperor saw that the world was changing, and in dealing with these changes Qianlong and his successors were drawn in two different directions. One was to take refuge in the established practices of the Qing when handling outsiders; another was to open up for new forms of interaction. On practical trade China chose change, though a change that was intended to be slow and measured. On diplomacy it moved back and forth between, at times, finding new forms within the ideological framework set and, at others, upholding supremacy, arrogance, and intransigence of the sort well-known to past and present imperial enterprises elsewhere.

B
Y THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
, China was running out of time to make changes in its approach to the world. In 1793, just at the outset of the wars that would engulf Europe over the next twenty years, the British government had sent its first formal representative to China to ask for trade and diplomatic relations. George Macartney was an Irishman who had been ennobled by the British after serving in the Caribbean and India (he was later governor in South Africa), and he and his adjutants were admitted to the imperial summer residence in Rehe on the assumption that they were there to present tribute on the occasion of the emperor’s eightieth birthday. Qianlong and his advisers were curious about the newcomers and allowed them
to circumvent regular Court ritual and be admitted to an audience with the emperor himself. But the mission misfired badly when Lord Macartney tried to impress the Court by showing off his astronomical instruments—impudent, thought the Chinese. It turned toward disaster when the British tried to obtain further concessions on ritual, including an unprecedented second meeting with the emperor himself. This was all before the delegation had got to the point of presenting their proposals to the Chinese. When Maccartney asked Qing officials for a general reduction in trade restrictions as well as a permanent British presence both in Beijing and at a depot along the coast, Qianlong’s patience had run out. The group was returned home empty-handed.

The Macartney mission was a portent of things to come. In 1816, when the Napoleonic Wars were over, the British envoys returned. A new embassy headed by Lord Amherst in 1816 was even more of a fiasco than the previous one, but led to some concern among the advisers of the Jiaqing emperor about Britain’s intentions in South China. They worried about unfettered commerce involving foreigners spreading from the coast to the interior. They also worried about foreign missionaries coming to China in increasing numbers. By the time of the Jiaqing emperor’s death in 1820, they had become concerned about possible British attacks along the coast. One reason for the immediate concern with security was that the British-American War of 1812 had spilled over to Chinese waters with the British boarding US vessels off the Chinese coast. The emperor observed that “when two small countries have petty quarrels overseas, the Celestial Empire is not concerned with them.” But if they brought their wars to China, “then not only shall we destroy their warships, but we shall also suspend their trade.”
⁵

In spite of increased concerns about the links between foreign trade and foreign power in the early nineteenth century, China wanted to keep some form of trading system in place. It was simply too profitable to give up on. In 1818 the Jiaqing emperor had decreed that “to the barbarians who obey our regulations, we offer kindness; to those who
violate our regulations, we demonstrate our power. . . . We should not venture to start a war. [But] nor should we show cowardice which will encourage them to act lawlessly.”
⁶
Those who advised his successor, Daoguang, followed the same strategy. But while commerce increased in the 1820s and 1830s, the Chinese state did not develop a foreign service to deal with the new circumstances, and the old institutions, the
Huitong siyiguan
or Common Residence for Tributary Envoys, superintended by a Board of Rites senior secretary, and the
Lifanyuan
or Court of Colonial Affairs, a special agency under the Grand Council, were not up to the task. As the Court most needed it, access to accurate intelligence on foreign powers became worse, if anything, because of the constant factional struggles during the Daoguang reign. At the same time, taking a tough line on all things foreign became a way of gaining influence with a narrow-minded emperor, especially since many advisers were increasingly concerned with certain products the foreigners were importing into China.

Opium was a primary concern to Daoguang and his advisers. Different forms of narcotic drugs had been consumed in China, as elsewhere, from time immemorial, and from the early Ming period opium, mainly arriving from Southeast Asia as trade or tribute, had become the drug of choice for much of the elite as a calmative or a painkiller. As use of the drug grew in the early nineteenth century—probably resulting from a combination of availability, fashion, and affluence—the authorities became increasingly concerned with its effects. Officials charged that drug users became lazy and effeminate and claimed that the spread of opium was a threat to the well-being of the state. The Jiaqing emperor complained in 1813 that “before only city rascals had opium and smoked it in private. But today, attendants, guards and officials, they all take it. This is truly sickening.”
⁷