Colonialism, China and the Chinese

Amidst Empires

Peter Monteath, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Peter Monteath, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Peter Monteath, Matthew P. Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138389403
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429753459
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This book explores the place of China and the Chinese during the age of imperialism. Focusing not only on the state but also on the vitality of Chinese culture and the Chinese diaspora, it examines the seeming contradictions of a period in which China came under immense pressure from imperial expansion while remaining a major political, cultural and demographic force in its own right. Where histories of China commonly highlight episodes of conflict and subjugation in China's relations with the West, the contributions to this volume explore the complex spaces where empires and their peoples did not merely collide but also became entangled.

1 Amidst empires

Colonialism, China and the Chinese

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick and Peter Monteath

Like other Asian states such as Japan, Siam and Burma, China’s political and economic sovereignty came under immense external pressure between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries as the land and sea empires of Europe competed for control of territories they considered suitable for settler, mercantile and plantation colonies. Yet in some respects, the attempt to subordinate China was different, given its own past as an Asian hegemon. Historically, China had been a formidable regional power, able to extend its control over the trade and transfer networks of Eastern Eurasia, the West Pacific Ocean and the East Indian Ocean, via both mercantile and tribute trade.¹ Unburdened by the fictive, formal equality that cloaked the machinations of the European state system, China’s hegemony under the Ming and Qing dynasties had been the structuring political and economic fact undergirding state relations in the region.² While the precise extent of this power waxed and waned, and was often contested by other regional powers such as Japan and Korea,³ Europe’s eventual subordination of the empire at the heart of the “Sinocentric world economy” during the nineteenth century was both unexpected and unprecedented.⁴

China’s difficulties with imperial encroachments lie at the heart of the historiography of the late Qing dynasty, and events during and after 1912 are often presented as a countervailing reaction to the political and economic challenges to Chinese sovereignty during the “century of humiliation.”⁵ Yet it pays to be careful when discussing the extent of China’s subordination to the West. Recent works such as Stephen Halsey’s Quest for Power have correctly highlighted that the picture of a moribund China in the last decades of the Qing dynasty has been too strongly drawn.⁶ As Kirk W. Larsen has recently commented, Qing China was, despite the predations of the Western powers and Japan, “a dynamic empire in many ways worthy of comparison with the strongest and largest empires of the West.” According to this view, the Qing Empire was “not merely a victim of the new strands of modern imperialism; it was also an imperialist power in its own right.” Quite rightly, Larsen argues that focusing on China’s capacity to absorb and withstand imperial pressure helps to explain why, “when nearly all Western empires experienced dramatic contraction in the twentieth century, the People’s Republic of China remains in control of most of the territory claimed by the Qing.”⁷

Despite its littoral territorial losses, China was never directly ruled by a Western imperial power, and the concept of “constrained sovereignty” more properly describes the position of China after the Opium Wars.⁸ Nevertheless, an overview of international “high politics” between the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion illustrates just how difficult the foreign policy environment was for the Qing dynasty, which struggled to overcome its dependence on Western governments for survival (notwithstanding the delicate balancing act of leading officials such as Li Hongzhang), even as these European powers increasingly undermined Chinese sovereignty. After the First Opium War and the humiliation of the Treaty of Nanjing at the hands of the British, the second half of the nineteenth century proved particularly dangerous for the new Xianfeng Emperor. Having already conceded numerous harbours as treaty ports and acceded to Britain’s occupation of Hong Kong, China found itself too sapped to offer meaningful resistance to the domestic threat posed by the Taiping revolutionaries. Notwithstanding the pro-British predilections of leading Taiping figures, and the private sympathy for the aims of the rebels expressed by Western diplomats, the European powers cautiously sided with the Emperor and positioned themselves as defenders of the imperial status quo. This support was based on the calculation that a weak Qing emperor was more likely to be amenable to the demand to open China’s markets than a revitalised Chinese government under the control of modernising revolutionaries.⁹

This broad, in principle, support for the Qing dynasty did not, however, stop the European powers from Janus-faced military action that further eroded the power of the Xiangfeng Emperor. On the flimsy pretext of the Arrow crisis of 1856, British hostilities against the Qing recommenced, with Britain’s representative in China, Lord Elgin, commenting that the crisis was such a shabby casus belli that he “hardly alluded to that wretched question of the Arrow, which is a scandal to us” in his ultimatum to the Chinese.¹⁰ This Second Opium War nonetheless had the desired effect of generating for the Western powers the even more crushing terms of the Treaty of Tianjin, whose demands on Chinese territorial sovereignty were so extreme as to lead to the resumption of hostilities. With Anglo-French pressure now bringing the Xianfeng Emperor to a breaking point, many Chinese (including the military leader of Taiping forces in Shanghai, Li Xiucheng) assumed that the British would now inevitably side with the Taipings to overthrow the beleaguered Qing dynasty once and for all.¹¹ This suspicion was shared by the other European powers, with the leader of the French forces in China, Jean-Baptiste Gros, complaining that “Lord Elgin pushed things a long way and would like to annihilate the ruling dynasty and perhaps go hand in hand with the rebels of Nanjing.”¹²

The Anglo-French campaign against the emperor culminated with the burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British troops in 1860. This deliberately calibrated, symbolic illustration of the military impotence of the Chinese was a calculated personal insult and a warning to the emperor not to overstep the limits to sovereign action, particularly in the fields of trade and foreign policy, being established by the powers.¹³ Yet the aim of the war and the occupation of Beijing was not the complete destruction of the Chinese monarchy, but rather to force China into further defeat-induced pliability and dependence. Far from constituting a policy of regime change, this action occurred in tandem with Western moves against the Taiping revolutionaries elsewhere. In fact, the destruction of the Summer Palace on Elgin’s orders on 18 October 1860 came directly after the defence of Shanghai against the Taiping army by Anglo-French troops. These troops had laid waste to the region surrounding Shanghai and had killed 3000 Taiping supporters in August 1860, all in an effort to deny the city to the revolutionaries and in the name of defending the sovereign rights of the emperor.¹⁴

In the wake of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Revolution, the very young Tongzhi Emperor, or rather his regents Yixin (Prince Gong) and his mother, the dowager empress Cixi, were confronted with the fact that there were increasing limits to the scope for sovereign action. Alongside this, China’s territorial integrity was coming increasingly under threat from European powers jostling to position themselves so as to gain if not outright dominance then at least a comparative advantage in Chinese trade. From a strong empire that saw itself as being surrounded by “barbarians” (yi) that would be overcome as a matter of course,¹⁵ the Qing court now found itself in a seemingly existential struggle with militarily stronger Europeans (now more often referred to less derisively as yang, xi or wai – oceanic, Western or foreign), who had their own militarily enforced concept of cultural superiority that placed the Chinese decidedly below themselves.¹⁶

The founding of the Zongli Yamen to act as a conduit between Chinese officialdom and the ascendant European powers on matters of foreign affairs was a sign that a return to Chinese hegemony was beyond reach for the foreseeable future. As the 1861 memorial from Yixin, Guiliang and Wenxiang, petitioning for the establishment of the Zongli Yamen, admitted, “the barbarians took advantage of our weakness and we have been drawn under their control.”¹⁷ The Zongli Yamen may have made relations between the empires more orderly, but it did little to curb the political, economic and territorial demands placed upon China by the powers, including an expansionist Japan. By the time of the accession of the Guangxu Emperor, Russian expansionism in Xinjiang and French control over Annam and Tonkin after the Sino-French War and the Tianjin Accord of 1884 had once again underlined the difficulties facing the defence of China’s territorial sovereignty in the borderlands of the empire.¹⁸ The prominent Chinese writer Wang Tao noted at the time that “out of all Asian land, the Europeans own half of it, and they still behave as if it is not enough. When one thinks of this, how can one not tremble?”¹⁹

Similarly, the territorial concessions gained by Japan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 saw other powers, including now Germany, looking to gain their own territorial holdings, with the Russians particularly alarmed at Japan’s entry into areas it had earmarked for its own expansion. For its part, Japan saw Russia’s railway imperialism in Manchuria (which had been reinvigorated under Foreign Minister Sergei Witte) as a clear danger in China’s north, which they saw as a natural outlet for their own expansionist endeavours.²⁰ Those responsible for China’s foreign affairs such as Li Hongzhang found themselves caught between requiring Russia’s weight in the region to curb Japanese expansionism (as per the “secret” treaty of 1896) and concern for the effects of Russian expansionism in Manchuria itself.²¹

Great power manoeuvring for territory along the Chinese coast became a complex process of balancing competing commercial and naval interests, with the primary concern being the extent to which any coastal acquisition would antagonise one of the other powers, rather than the effects such acquisitions would have on China. Germany’s Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz spoke for most of the powers when he declared in 1896 that China’s views could be safely overlooked, because it would be “a century” before China could successfully attack a European naval base on the Chinese coast.²² In finally settling on Jiaozhou, the Germans, for example, had already discounted harbours further south such as Xiamen and Zhoushan that were better connected to trade, not because of China’s expressed views on the matter, but rather because moving into the southern harbours would antagonise the British.²³ In the event, however, the zero sum game of the race for Chinese harbours meant that in avoiding upsetting British interests, the Germans antagonised the Russians, who felt that they had established rights of first anchorage in the harbour. Damagingly for the Chinese, once the Germans had occupied Jiaozhou (citing the Japanese precedent), a flood of counterclaims from the other powers for equal “territorial compensation” saw China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty ignored once again.²⁴

Arguably, these coastal developments are not the whole story, and the history of the effects of empire on China in this period is incomplete without reference to the unevenness with which European (and Japanese) imperial power projection was felt within China, and how this engendered new political formations. Beneath the seeming helplessness of the Qing government, increasingly anti-imperial subaltern elements of Chinese society were nonetheless making their presence felt through periodic violence against Europeans. It was after the murder of two German Catholic missionaries that Germany moved to seize Jiaozhou. Such sporadic and opportunistic attacks were, however, only a prelude to the broader anti-imperial violence of the Yihequan that came to the fore in the so-called “Boxer Rebellion.”

The representatives of the European powers in Beijing had tried without success to have the Zongli Yamen denounce the Boxers in early 1900; however, by the middle of the year, they had become a serious threat to all Europeans in China.²⁵ Even more alarmingly for the powers, having halted the mov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Amidst empires: Colonialism, China and the Chinese
• Part I Imperial exchanges
• PART II Diasporic entanglements
• PART III Modes of alterity
• Index