Restless Empire (8 page)

T
HE REAL THREAT TO THE ESTABLISHED ORDER
, however, was not to come from missionary chapels, but from new and militant forms of religion born within China itself. Among the jetsam of the
great turning of the tide in South China was a young man called Hong Xiuquan. Hong was born in 1814 in a village north of Guangzhou, nowadays close to the perimeter of the city’s gleaming new international airport. But even in the early 1800s, Hong’s birthplace was in touch with the outer world: It was emigrant country, with a population divided between Cantonese speakers and Hakkas, and already linked to international trade through the great port that it bordered.

Hong was a bright young man, the pride of his clan. He was sent to the city to sit for the first-degree Qing civil service examination in 1836, bringing with him his family’s hopes for social betterment. Hong failed his exam and, the next year, went back and failed again. Returning to his village, heartbroken, Hong became ill, and, in between fits of what we would probably call psychotic depression, he read a set of tracts he had received from an American Protestant missionary in Guangzhou, a potted version of Christianity emphasizing God’s call to man and religion as a moral endeavor. Over the next five years Hong reinvented himself to his Hakka neighbors as a religious guide, at least in his own eyes. In his village, he was mostly seen as an embarrassment to his clan. In 1843, with the local area in disarray after China’s defeat in the Opium War, Hong Xiuquan announced that he was the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He set out on a long march to Guangxi to win adherents for his heavenly father. Like so many founders of millenarian sects over the past two thousand years, Hong was an unbalanced man in unbalanced times; he and his gospel attracted the poor, the dispossessed, and the fearful, and made of them a formidable army that any earthly power would have found hard to put down.

Qing authorities tried to arrest Hong several times, but were driven away by his adherents. By 1850, he had turned the tables on those who persecuted him and his followers. Having mobilized 20,000 men and women as soldiers of God, he began laying siege to cities in south central China. The following year he announced the formation of a Christian state in China that he called Taiping Tianguo, the Heavenly Kingdom
of Great Peace. Its twin goals were to drive the Manchus from power and establish Hong Xiuquan and his elder brother Jesus as the sources of all authority. The result was a thirteen-year war that killed at least twenty million people and laid waste to large parts of south, central, and eastern China.

Hong’s message was based on a revisionist version of the Bible in which he himself played a primary role. The Manchus were devils who had to be driven away or killed. The Chinese had to reorganize their society based on their own traditions understood in light of Hong’s Bible. The Taiping rebels believed that great peace would be established when the Heavenly Kingdom joined its foreign brethren overseas to form a universal Christian state. This was a message that won them many adherents in troubled times, not so much because of its religious content as because of its promise to set wrongs right. But the social aspect of their preaching also alienated most local elites, who by the late 1850s began to join the Qing to defeat the Heavenly Kingdom.

For most Westerners in China, Hong was a troublemaker as well as a blasphemer.
¹³
His Taiping movement prevented the expansion of trade that foreigners had been looking forward to, and most foreign countries and companies were happy to assist the imperial armies against him, at least for a good fee. In east China, the Qing were much aided by a mercenary army led, first, by the American Frederick Townsend Ward and then by the British Charles Gordon (who later lost his head to the Mahdi’s army in Sudan). For the European governments—and for Britain especially—a weak Qing empire tied into international trade through accepted treaties was much preferable to a ferocious and fervent cult, albeit one underpinned by the Christian Bible.

As Hong’s visions became more extreme and minor prophets of the Taiping began to fight among themselves, local elites in central China were finally able to mobilize enough support to destroy the movement in 1864. Other rebel groups that had risen in the wake of the Qing rout by Britain were also gradually defeated in the 1860s and early 1870s.
At tremendous cost to the empire, the Nian in east central China, Muslim rebels in Yunnan and Xinjiang, and local insurgents all over south China were gradually overpowered or forced into mountain areas or wildernesses, where some of them would survive to fight another day under other banners.

The people who had led these rebel movements had often been inspired by a mixture of Chinese and foreign ideas. They were “new” men, of a kind that the empire had not seen before. But if the rebels were a new breed, so were those who defeated them, men like the Hunanese general Zeng Guofan and his protégé, Li Hongzhang. First and foremost, they had battled the rebels not on behalf of the Qing but in order save their home provinces and thereby save China. They wanted to recreate China’s greatness by learning from the West, while keeping a Chinese state and society in line with their traditions.

T
HE EXTENSION OF
W
ESTERN-LED TRADE
into China in the early nineteenth century led to a clash between the Chinese and the British empire that seriously weakened the Qing state. While some Chinese benefited from this waning of central power, others suffered as vital services disappeared. But at the same time as the Qing’s troubles multiplied, a metamorphosis in economic and social relations within China was beginning. Carried out mostly from below, it originated from the strength and vitality of Chinese society coming out of the eighteenth century and the effects of the Western incursions in the nineteenth. These processes of change would have seemed far less painful if it had not been for the cataclysmic wars of the time. It was the wars and the misery that followed in their wake that split Chinese society open and made it more vulnerable to economic exploitation and social devastation.

In the first part of the nineteenth century, much of China’s foreign relations and a reasonable amount of China’s internal politics were ripe for change. In Europe and North America, a transformation in science
and technology had helped create mighty military forces, which—in terms of power—favored the West over all other societies. In the early decades of the century, the Europeans had spent almost a generation tearing their own continent apart in the wars that followed the French Revolution. When these wars were over, China and Japan were at the top of the list of countries the leading Western states wanted opened to trade. There is also little doubt that both in China and Japan some sections of society were very well equipped to link into the trading networks that Western companies were setting up in the Indian Ocean and in the western Pacific. In China—and especially in the south—there were small groups of people who knew much about the changes that were taking place elsewhere in Asia and who wanted to profit from them.

The fact that the Qing could overcome the Taiping and other rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century is of central significance for understanding China’s international affairs in the decades that followed. The Qing project showed that it had a good deal of life left. To many Chinese, the empire represented stability and certainty, even if they disliked the Manchus. The mix of “self-strengthening” (meaning mostly Westernization) and appeals to tradition and “Chineseness” that the Qing came up with after the defeat of the rebellions against them appealed to many, not least because several of the new initiatives were led by non-Manchu military heroes. And even in retreat the Qing were still more feared by the general population than rebels and foreigners combined; their immense brutality when threatened had been seen over and over again in China for more than 200 years.

D
URING THE PERIOD OF THE
Q
ING’S
maximum weakness in 1856, as Taiping troops were advancing north, the Western powers chose to continue their wars against China in order to force further trade concessions. When the Qing Court resisted, British and French troops landed at ports in the north and moved toward Beijing. Initially
beaten back, the attacks were reinforced in 1860. At the western edges of Beijing, in a place called Baliqiao (Eight Mile Bridge), the Qing’s Mongol cavalry made its last stand. It was destroyed by French artillery, which it confronted head-on. The Qing army may have lost 5,000 men, but there were considerable losses on the Western side too. Prisoners on both sides were killed, as were a large number of Chinese civilians who happened to get in the way of the Western advance.
¹⁴

After occupying Beijing, the British and French generals decided to burn Yuanmingyuan, the Gardens of Eternal Brightness that the Qianlong emperor had built at the height of the Qing empire. The hundreds of palace buildings—art pavilions, pagodas, temples, and libraries—burned for several days, while soldiers and officers tried to get away with as much plunder as they could. A French soldier wrote: “I was dumbfounded, stunned, bewildered by what I had seen, and suddenly Thousand and One Nights seem perfectly believable to me. I have walked for more than two days over more than 30 million worth of silks, jewels, porcelain, bronzes, sculptures, [and] treasures! I do not think we have seen anything like it since the sack of Rome by the barbarians.”
¹⁵

F
OR THREE GENERATIONS FOLLOWING
the Qing’s defeat by Britain in the war of 1839–1842, imperialism and incursions by other states defined the framework for China’s relations with the rest of the world. For some Chinese, the economic and social orders created by the overseas presence offered new opportunities for trade, travel, and social advancement. As we shall see, many of the networks—commercial and otherwise—that operated within the Western imperial structures were Chinese in origin and in operation. For the Confucian elite, however, the reach of foreign empires into East Asia was reason for despair. Westerners’ contempt for Chinese tradition and their attacks on the Chinese state were appalling and humiliating. While it took another hundred years or so—right up to the end of the twentieth century—for values, products, and forms of exchange created by the encounter with the West to penetrate rural China, the stage was set for a transformation in ideas and politics that the country had not seen since the Buddhist revolution of the sixth century and the Qing revolution of the seventeenth respectively. And the first act within the new drama was the confrontation between the Qing empire and its imperial opponents, now established within the heart of Chinese territory.

The outcome of the confrontation between China and foreign empires was in no way a given in the mid-nineteenth century. There is reason to believe that if it had not been for the internal challenges that the
empire faced, it could have held its own for a longer time against its foreign challengers. As it were, the great rebellions had reduced the Qing to its lowest point ever, and the foreign empires recognized its weakness. Many Westerners were predicting the immediate collapse of the Chinese state, either through internal rebellions or external pressures. The fate of the Ottoman empire was the parallel often used, meaning the gradual breaking away of smaller parts of the whole until some form of “core only” remained.

But in the 1870s and 1880s, the Qing made a remarkable comeback. It was almost as if the elites within the empire had taken a hard look at their culture and decided to come out in its defense. Their Self-strengthening Movement was based on the idea that Western form—in defense and science, especially—could be combined with Chinese essence, meaning Confucianism. China could use Western weapons and technology to defend itself, but without losing its soul: Chinese culture would remain the unwobbling pivot of the empire. It is hard to say whether self-strengthening saved China from new levels of imperialist onslaughts—it is as likely that Western satisfaction with aims already achieved caused its temporary satiety after the end of the great rebellions. But there is little doubt that the policies developed by Li Hongzhang and other reformers saved the Qing from its domestic enemies and gave it—for a while—a new lease on life. Some proud Manchus called the first part of this era the Tongzhi restoration, for the five-year-old boy who became emperor in 1861. They hoped he could be thought of in the same way that the Japanese did with their emperor Meiji, who oversaw the revolutionary epoch that bears his name.

But the Tongzhi emperor was no Meiji, or, if he was, he did not get much of a chance to show it, since he died at nineteen in 1875. The empire was never to be ruled by an adult emperor again; Tongzhi’s successor Guangxu was four years old when he took the throne, and his successor, the Xuangtong emperor—the last emperor, Puyi—was only two. The power behind the throne was increasingly Tongzhi’s mother,
the empress-dowager Cixi, a staunch conservative of no uncertain views. Like most of the imperial clan, Cixi detested Western influence—the more she knew about the West (and she came to know quite a bit) the less she liked it. Her, and the Court’s, preference was for minimizing the impact of foreign learning and methods. Cixi argued that adopting the ways of the West—even in self-defense—would mean surrendering the culture that constituted the very meaning and essence of China. And the result would be certain disaster.

The predicament of the Qing is best understood in light of what was happening elsewhere in Asia in the late nineteenth century. While often following routes and practices established by Asians, Westerners were becoming central to the region’s commerce and trade: Their companies and currencies gained predominance. In the Malay world (today’s Malaysia and Indonesia), Britain and the Netherlands were expanding their influence, while France was taking over Indochina and the United States was occupying the Philippines. And only a generation after the West had forced it to open its borders to trade and Western influence, Japan became an imperialist power in its own right.