Restless Empire (9 page)

Meanwhile, Britain remained the major foreign power in China. Its control of the key bases and depots for the developing trade—Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a large extent Shanghai—anchored its primacy. But while the British controlled the structure, the Chinese supplied the infrastructure—the depots for East Asian trade were all Chinese cities, run as much by Chinese networks as by British authorities.

While the West inserted itself into China, the Chinese themselves, as travelers and emigrants, began reaching out to the rest of the world. The late nineteenth century saw not just the great encounter between China and the West in terms of war, diplomacy, science, and trade. It was also the decades in which China went global, with a sharp increase in emigration and travel. Increasingly, the world was seen through Chinese eyes in a direct sense, with travelers, sojourners, and emigrants covering the globe, with no area excepted. This Chinese diaspora posed
new questions about what it meant to be Chinese, and about the distinctions between “Chinese” and “foreign.” Therefore, most of this chapter deals with various forms of fluidity and hybridity, and the creation of new networks, communities, and institutions that would moderate relations between people who defined themselves in various ways and for various purposes somewhere on the scale between Chinese and non-Chinese.

T
HE GREAT REBELLIONS AGAINST
Q
ING
rule in the 1850s and 1860s provided opportunities for Western powers to push for further concessions from the Chinese government. But even when the fortunes of the Qing seemed at their lowest, in the late 1850s, their princes were not willing to compromise their sovereignty further, at least not in formal terms. On the contrary, Beijing dragged its feet in implementing the 1842 agreement, which it had been forced to accept. And so, in 1857, the British again began military operations against China. Ostensibly they were retaliation against Chinese forces for having boarded a Hong Kong ship, the
Arrow
, but in reality they were used to extract more and more from a weakened Manchu government. By the end of the year, British forces under Lord Elgin, and French forces under Jean-Baptiste Gros seized Guangzhou against light resistance. The hapless Chinese governor, Ye Mingchen, was captured. Ye—who was to starve himself to death as a British captive in Calcutta two years later—somewhat unfairly became known to the Cantonese as “Six Nots”: not negotiate, not defend, and not fight; not die, not surrender, and not flee.

After the allied forces moved north from Guangzhou, the Court in Beijing panicked and sent envoys, who agreed to extend the rights of foreigners in China. These included the right to embassies in Beijing, unrestricted travel for foreigners all over the country, and the opening of the Yangzi river to foreign navigation. The Chinese negotiators also accepted that the country should pay vast reparations. But when the British envoys in 1859 insisted on a military presence in Beijing, the
Chinese equivocated and the war resumed. In part as a result of having mobilized against the Taiping, this time the Qing were better prepared, and the first British attempt at reaching the capital was repelled, with four gunboats destroyed. But in the summer of 1860 nearly 20,000 British and French forces landed in North China. Against stiff resistance from Qing troops—this time mostly Mongols and Manchus—European artillery won the day, and the foreign forces fought their way to Beijing. Once there, they plundered the city and—in a deliberate act of destruction—razed much of the imperial summer palace to the ground. The 1860 looting of the Chinese capital was the greatest act of plunder of the nineteenth century, yielding treasure that still has pride of place in many a Western art museum.

While Britain used its victories over the Qing to solidify its hold on trade with China, Russia was expanding into outer Manchuria and along the Pacific coast. In 1858, at the height of the Taiping crisis and while China was at war with Britain and France, Russia presented its demands to Beijing. It was able to force a border revision that transferred to its control territory the size of France and Italy combined. For the Qing the new Russian expansionism was at least as threatening as that of the British, because it was overland and could potentially encroach on China along the 4,000-mile border from Central Asia to Korea. Thus, when Moscow tried to build up Muslim separatist regimes in Xinjiang in the 1860s, the Qing fought back, putting together what was to be its last major military campaign, culminating in the 1878 destruction of the pro-independence groups and—for the time being—a sharply reduced Russian influence there.

In the south, the Qing were confronted with an expanding French empire, which was laying claim to China’s Indochinese tributaries. In 1874 France claimed a controlling influence in all of Vietnam, and—while the Qing was in no position to challenge it—local Chinese rebel movements operating in northern Vietnam soon came into conflict with the French. When Paris took formal possession of the whole country
in 1883, Qing forces entered from the north. There followed a somewhat confused war, in which French forces landed in Taiwan and on the Fujian coast, where they destroyed most of the newly built Chinese fleet. But given the tensions in European politics, France had to be careful not to be seen as challenging the position of other powers in China, first and foremost Britain. After having driven the Chinese forces out of Vietnam, the French commander attempted to enter Guangxi province, but a Qing counterattack in 1885 sent the invaders fleeing back to Hanoi. The defeat caused a major upheaval in French politics, forcing the resignation of prime minister Jules Ferry’s government, and even if the threat of further military action led Beijing to concede control of Indochina to the French, the Tonkin and Xinjiang campaigns told both Chinese and foreigners that even when weakened, the Qing could be a formidable opponent for any enemy.

I
T WAS IN
H
ONG
K
ONG
that the colonial experience in China was formed. Even though Shanghai from the late nineteenth century became more important both for trade and industry, it was in the great harbor at the mouth of the Pearl river that the pattern for hybrid Chinese-European societies would be set. The city served both as a depot and a refuge. It facilitated British trade all over southern China, while becoming, in terms of its population, a Chinese city, attracting immigrants from all over the country: refugees, dissidents, entrepreneurs, and fortune hunters. After having swallowed up a number of Chinese settlements across the bay in 1860, Hong Kong had a population of more than 120,000, of whom only 3,000 were non-Chinese.

Like all British colonial cities, Hong Kong was basically well-run, but somewhat shoddy at the edges, where corruption and exploitation thrived. It was a city founded on enormous paradoxes and hypocrisies. The foreign missionaries preached virtue to the Chinese while the foreign merchants kept them addicted to opium. The British preached law and order, though they had taken the territory by brute force. The
Chinese came to Hong Kong to take advantage of the opportunities offered them in a city that was not theirs and bore the indignities of being second-class residents in a strict racial hierarchy in order to escape a world that was crumbling around them elsewhere in China. Over time, they built their own organizations, as the Chinese diaspora did elsewhere, even though the Hong Kongers had never left their own country.

The great trading houses stood at the center of foreign commercial activity in Hong Kong. Many of these companies—Jardine, Matheson, Butterfield & Swire, Hutchison—came out of British trade in India after the dissolution of the East India Company in 1834, and established a presence in many treaty ports in China. Still, they were nowhere more influential than in Hong Kong, where they not only ran the economy (and in effect also the politics) but also were the very raison d’être for the colony. From the beginning, these trading houses were international organizations, led by English (or in the case of Jardine’s, Scots) businessmen but staffed by Chinese, Indians, Europeans, and Americans. By the late nineteenth century, they were the main mediators between Chinese and foreigners, not only in Hong Kong, but all over China, not least because of their increasing control of the Chinese banking system.

It was not just Hong Kong’s economic opportunities that drew Chinese from all over but also its educational ones. To begin with, most of these were linked to the potential for economic gain. As elsewhere within Chinese societies, private schools were funded by families and organizations, but increasingly in the 1850s and 1860s, non-Chinese missions and foreign-run educational societies set up schools, too. Beginning in the 1870s, Hong Kong got a government-sponsored primary education system, which gradually expanded its enrollment among the Chinese. While to begin with, all of these schools emphasized Chinese classics, Bible study, and some English, from the late nineteenth century on they also made room for science. A teacher training college was set
up in 1881, a medical school in 1887, and a university in 1910. For many Chinese parents, the relatively easy access to education in the colony became a massive argument in favor of entry into Hong Kong and contribution to its economy.

Hong Kong served as a convenient depot for British expansion in South China. But its economic role was—in the first hundred years of its existence—far inferior to that of the major foreign territorial concessions that were wrested from the Qing empire all over the country after the wars of the late nineteenth century. At the height of the system, just before World War I, there were forty-eight so-called treaty ports, where foreigners had the right to settle, conduct trade, and have extraterritoriality under their own consuls. In the main treaty ports, there were concessions or settlements that were almost entirely under foreign jurisdiction, with their own administrations usually answerable to a consul. This intricate system of exploitation produced micro-versions of informal empires within China. The concessions were almost entirely secured by blackmail: Most Western powers kept gunboats in Chinese waters and rarely hesitated to bombard Chinese cities if their conditions were not met. But some of the concessions became as important (and sometimes more so) for China and the Chinese as for their foreign inhabitants. And while unequal and oppressive in intent, they brought expanding concepts of Western law into China and helped globalize international law by attempting to regulate the multinational presence within the Qing empire.

There is a lot of nonsense about the role of the concessions that has been written both by Chinese and foreigners. Instead of a neat and tidy model created to subjugate China, the so-called treaty port system was an unwieldy, composite, and often unsuccessful response to events as they unfolded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the treaty ports and concessions played no role in furthering commerce. Some, such as the Italian concession in Tianjin, were set up for reasons of national pride by European powers that had almost no real connections with China; others were inhabited almost exclusively by Chinese, because foreign traders found it much more comfortable to live with their Chinese servants, lovers, and business companions outside the limits of Western jurisdiction. The ones that really mattered were the large concessions in Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, with the German- and Russian-leased areas of Qingdao and Harbin as special cases. The different zones in these cities, whether Chinese-controlled or foreign-controlled, did much to create modern China, economically, culturally, and politically. With their complex systems of governance and social interaction, they provided the spaces in which the hybridity and fluidity of contemporary Chinese society were born.

Shanghai’s three sections—“international,” French, and Chinese—provided the concession city par excellence, the place where much of Chinese modernity was created. Built around an already thriving port, new Shanghai became, by World War I, a city of 1.3 million people. While a few among the foreign population, which never counted more than 40,000 people in total, governed the International Settlement and the French concession, both parts were in reality Chinese cities, with around a third of all Shanghailanders in the former and a tenth in the latter. The trading significance of Shanghai had been obvious for centuries. It was located at the mouth of the Yangzi, on the central coast, and the main tea- and silk-producing areas were within easy reach. But from the late nineteenth century, what really distinguished the city was its role as the country’s prime industrial center. It received more than half of all foreign investment into the country and became the place where the Chinese economy began to integrate and amalgamate foreign technologies, products, and tastes.

The first fifty years of concession life were bounded by foreign domination, but with Chinese providing the manpower that connected trade routes, provided supplies, and, increasingly, manned factories. While the Qing were struggling to break into the international system of independent, recognized states, and desperately trying to play the countries
that harassed it off against each other, new kinds of societies emerged in some of the cities along China’s coast and on the great rivers. These were societies in which ideas and practices developed fast and gradually spread to the rest of China, on matters as diverse as street lighting and company stocks, waterpipes and religious creeds, shipyards and schooling. In business, foreigners and Chinese were linked together from the beginning. In daily life, interactions and observations gradually created much that was new for everyone.