China Only Yesterday, 1850–1950

A Century of Change

Emily Hahn

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504016285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

A fascinating journey through 100 years of Chinese history, beginning with the historic Treaty of Nanking and ending with Mao Tse-tung's creation of the Chinese People's Republic, by the the acclaimed New Yorker correspondent who lived in China from 1935 to 1941 For centuries, China's code of behavior was incomprehensible to Westerners whom the Chinese viewed as irredeemable barbarians. Presenting historical events with an immediacy that makes you feel as if you were there, Hahn takes readers through isolationist China's difficult and often costly adaptations to the invasions of Western "foreign devils", —from the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which gave the West access to five 5 of China's eastern ports, to the British colonization of Hong Kong, the rise of the tea trade, the Opium Wars, the arrival of Christian missionaries, and the Boxer Rebellion. Hahn also illuminates the revolutionary movement led by Sun Yat-sen, the overthrow of the Ch'ing Dynasty, the escalating tensions between the Communist and Nationalist parties, and the Japanese invasion on the eve of World War II—which Hahn witnessed firsthand. The final chapters cover the civil war, which ended with Chairman Mao's formation of the People's Republic of China and Chiang Kai-shek's retreat to Taiwan. With an insider's knowledge of Chinese culture and the politics, Hahn delivers a sharply observant book that illuminates an unforgettable era in China's tumultuous past.

Chapter One

William Hickey was a very young man when he stopped off in China in 1769, coming home after his first voyage to India, but even then he was a good observer. The amiable chatterbox he became in his old age gave a vivid picture in his memoirs of the peculiar life he shared in Canton with his compatriots for those few weeks. To be sure, it wasn’t the true China that he saw. The “factory” district, i.e., the place of foreign factors, or traders, was a fringe of flat land squeezed in between the city wall and the river, and this site, with the row of long narrow buildings that nearly filled it, was the only mainland ground on which the Red Hairs were permitted to set foot. Now and then they went to some island for a picnic; the sailors from their ships, in fact, had to take shore leave on certain islands. But the city of Canton, and the ordinary land of China, must not be entered. The country’s rulers did not wish their people to be perverted by foreign devils. They trusted only a few merchants and a severely restricted number of domestic servants to have dealings with the dwellers in the factories. On one occasion the high-spirited Hickey broke the rules and went through a gate in the wall into the city. Children threw stones at him, and he was glad to get back to the East India Company territory where he lodged and had his meals with Company officers, ships’ captains, and supercargoes, as the business managers of imports and exports were called. The East India Company held the monopoly of foreign trade in China. Hickey made no mention of what must have been a strange sight to his inexperienced eyes—the great walls of the City of Rams, the teeming narrow streets, the gaily painted boards or silk banners that advertised a shop’s wares, and the pigtailed, shaven-pated men, clacking about the cobbled streets in clogs or moving softly in slippers.

He seems to have enjoyed his sojourn in the factory. He said that the Company people were hospitable and that he had luxurious spacious quarters. He saw their warehouses, and the studios where they kept workmen busy preparing the articles that were to be shipped back to Europe. The British and other Europeans bought tea from the Chinese, and silk, china, nankeen (a kind of cotton cloth), and sago. In return they sold woolen cloth and metal, pepper and other spices from the isles of the Indies, and light cotton cloth and opium—though the East India Company never dealt in this commodity—from India, making up the difference with silver bullion and coins, usually Spanish dollars. They seem to have been blasé about the Chinese rarities they shipped home and sold so profitably, judging from one of William Hickey’s anecdotes. He had made friends with a thirteen-year-old boy who was serving an apprenticeship in the factory.

“Bob Pott passed most of his time in our rooms, generally coming before I was up of a morning. He breakfasted with us, and if he took it into his head that McClintock was too long at a meal, or drank too much tea, he without the least ceremony overset the table. The first time he practiced this, I was very angry at such a quantity of handsome china being thus mischievously demolished, and expressed my displeasure thereat, which only excited the mirth of young pickle. ‘Why, zounds!’ said he, ‘you surely forget where you are. I never suffer the servants to have the trouble of removing a tea equipage, always throwing the whole apparatus out of window or down stairs. They easily procure another batch from the steward’s warehouse.’”

Hickey met and talked with only a very few Chinese—business acquaintances of his hosts—and decided that he liked none of the race. He took for gospel all he was told by the other foreigners, and naturally embraced their prejudices. He marveled at Chinese superstition, retailing several extraordinary anecdotes to illustrate their stupidity and ineptness. Though he was ill-informed and unfair in his judgment he was not high-handed in his attitude: like his friends he seems to have thought of these strange natives as unpleasant but not exactly inferior. The foreigners didn’t look down on the Chinese. After all, they were scarcely in a position to do so. The boot was on the other foot; Chinese did look down on Westerners, as they did on all non-Chinese except the Manchus who were their overlords—and no doubt some high scholar-officials dared to do even that, in their heart of hearts. In their estimation the Western traders were barbarians of low degree; they were traders, the lowest class of Chinese civilization, where mankind was divided into four main groups—scholars, then in descending quality farmers, workmen, and, last of all, merchants. That the Emperor and government made much profit from the taxes paid on barbarian trade had no softening effect whatever on their opinion of the barbarians. Of course the Chinese merchants who did the actual bartering were in favor of the traders, as far as they dared to show their feelings, but this was merely a question of like understanding like, and they were not the lawmakers.

China, Chinese thought, the Chinese code of behavior, were conservative to a degree that the West could scarcely comprehend, let alone appreciate. The officials who advised the Emperor realized that their tight system would be pushed off balance if they permitted Western ideas to infiltrate. These tiresome, noisy, ill-bred Europeans with their drunken sailors were not only offensive, but representative of the danger of the unknown. For years they had tried to get in, but the Chinese and Manchus still kept them mewed up in one bit of land outside Canton’s walls, over two thousand miles from Peking. And however badly they were treated they never went away altogether, which—though the Chinese and Manchus would never have admitted it—was a good thing, since a total disappearance of Westerners would have embarrassed the administration financially, and been the ruin of a great number of officials who collected “squeeze” from the trade. Fortunately those peculiar Westerners had such an overpowering lust for trade that they seemed capable of swallowing any amount of discouragement.

Of the Western nations who tried their hands at Far East trade, Britain was the acknowledged leader. By means of the East India Company it had held that position since 1715, the Company extending protective wings over the independent “country trade”—plying between India, the East Indies, and China—as well. Certainly the British were kingpins when Hickey was there. They held the biggest share of factory space, but there was little bad blood between nationalities on that account, for they were banded together by necessity and their many common grievances. The restraint under which they lived was notorious. According to the Eight Regulations imposed by the Chinese Viceroy (the Governor General of Kwangtung) and his colleagues, no foreign devil could stay in Canton the year round, or any time except the season, from September to March, when tea and raw silk were brought down to the coast for sale. For the rest of the year the merchants must withdraw to Macao, which the Portuguese occupied not quite independently of Chinese supervision. In many ways, it must be admitted, the withdrawal was a good thing for the foreign devil’s state of mind, for in the Canton factory he was practically in prison. He could not stray outside the factory limits, though on three days of the year, if properly chaperoned and in a party, he might visit one of the islands nearby. But even there he must not fraternize with the natives. Foreign devils could not keep arms, nor must their warships enter the Pearl River. Wives and families must not ever visit the factories. No women at all were permitted. While Hickey was there, all loading of foreign ships was suspended for a time because one of the captains was caught in the act of smuggling ashore “a smart little Madras girl” disguised as a boy. A Company man, on the subject of the best-known rule, observed to Hickey that the fact that no Europeans were ever allowed to pass the gates of the city was a circumstance “little to be regretted, because in fact there was nothing in Canton worth seeing.” This sounds like sour grapes, but he was voicing an honest opinion held by most people in the Company.

Though it is not strictly true, as the Chinese claim, that China always absorbs her conquerors, it is probably as accurate a statement as the other good old cliché, that history repeats itself. Both these slogans, like most of their kind, need qualifying. There is enough similarity between some of Cathay’s cycles to give the aid and comfort of such thoughts to Chinese when they are in the process of being conquered, and are unhappy about it. The truth lies rather in a concept of China and her conquerors, like two noble metals lying close to each other, being miscible, silver soaking into gold for a slight depth at the surface, and vice versa. Since the dark, misty period when there was—perhaps—a state in China called the Hsia Kingdom, down to the Ch’ing Dynasty, there were periods when the Flowery Kingdom was subjected to such experience, when a strange race came in and took over the power. Five of these periods were lengthy. The T’o-pa, who were a Turkish people, moved from the north in the fourth century A.D., and imposed barbarian rule until the middle of the sixth century, as the T’o-pa Wei Dynasty. In 907 the Tartar Ch’i-tan came—again from the north—and stayed (the Liao Dynasty) more than two hundred years, holding firmly to a large portion of the country, until they became civilized and weakened. When they were overrun by another lot of barbarians called the Ju-chen, forerunners of the Manchus, the Ch’i-tan could not defend themselves and went under. The Ju-chen (Chin Dynasty) also took eagerly to Chinese ways and adapted themselves to civilization, but for some reason they were not so debilitated as their predecessors, and put up a stout fight against Genghiz Khan when he led his Mongols against them. However, Genghiz had his way ultimately, and the Yuan Dynasty that he founded persisted until well into the fourteenth century. Doubtless the Chinese told themselves, all that time, that China always absorbs her conquerors, but in 1368 the rule of the Mongol was at last thrown off. The Ming Dynasty was Chinese, and it ruled—with considerable glory—until invaders showed up in the seventeenth century: the Tartars, called Manchus, who took over in 1644. They held on with tenacity. They were still in power when the Red Hair barbarians from the West, of whom some had already found foothold in Macao and Formosa, began arriving in force from the sea, clamoring for permission to trade in China without hindrance. By 1770 the Manchus, inevitably, were much Sinicized, and had taken on certain Chinese ideas, particularly that one of holding all barbarians well away for as long as possible. This Ch’ing Dynasty was no longer strong, but on the face of it the structure still looked sound enough; certainly the Emperor and his courtiers, both Manchu and Chinese, felt capable of living in the traditional way, aloof from strangers. For their class, time was standing still. They were not aware, or at least did not care, that the world was shrinking. They must have known of British incursions in India: though they disdained to show any concern of what barbarians might be doing to each other out there, the knowledge must have strengthened Imperial determination—if strengthening were needed—never to run the risk of similar invasions at home.

After two hundred years of Manchu rule the Emperor’s Chinese were apparently loyal to him, and satisfied with the way things were. Certainly those of high rank had reason to be. Within limits they had power—only a few of the highest posts were reserved strictly for Manchus—and they flourished. Nevertheless there were misgivings in the land, as there had been since the conquest. A Chinese Emperor was the Son of Heaven and ruled by Heavenly Mandate. When, or if, it became apparent that the Mandate had expired, the Emperor had to be replaced, by what the Western world would call rebellion. But what of a Manchu Emperor? Had he ever really held the Mandate, barbarian as he was by ancestry? There were Chinese who felt that he could not, and so should not be on the throne. Some of them believed firmly in a prophecy that was going the rounds, that he would be removed two hundred years after his dynasty mounted the throne: that time was approaching.

All the while the British, far away in a mysterious country of which Peking knew nothing and cared less, went on developing plans in which China figured largely. The West had taken kindly to tea-drinking, even when a high tax made it a costly pleasure. The more tea that was brought out of Canton, the more other people smuggled it into England, until in self-defense the legitimate importers persuaded the government to lower the tax and put the smugglers out of business. The smuggling did stop as a result of this action, and though for a while it went hard with the revenuers when they lost a large part of the tax income, consumption of tea promptly increased. In Canton thousands of chests were bought and loaded and sent back to England, and thousands of taels of silver (a tael is a Chinese ounce, then worth six shillings eightpence) went to pay the exporters of China—and the Chinese customs officials—and the dozens of hangers-on, each of whom had a cut—and, ultimately, the Emperor in Peking, who, with his officers, got the residue. There was so much tea buying that the Western merchants found themselves in need of silver and coins with which to pay. The situation lent fresh vigor to their chronic complaints of restraint of trade. If only they could get into the country and stimulate public desire for the things they could supply from Britain! Nobody in Canton needed British wool, but up north it could be bitterly cold; the inhabitants of Chihli and Shensi and Shantung would love woolen cloth, once they’d tried it out, and there were other products as well that the Western merchants were sure they could sell, if only they could get a chance. They could not believe that the Emperor really understood what they were after. They thought he was insulated by his courtiers, deceived as to the true nature of foreign hopes and desires. After all, China had not always been sealed off from the great world. The pertinacity of the British was due in part to their hope, too, that history might repeat itself.

The door had been slammed in their faces, over and over again, whenever they prized it open. But in the past, through side doors, other traders had got into the country, by way of the overland Silk Routes; what had been done once could be done again, surely? And there had been many missionaries. It was a foreign faith, Buddhism, that took such a firm hold of the Chinese that it survived in its adopted home long after its roots died off in India. Nestorian Christianity, modern Christianity, Islam, Judaism—they had all got in. There were Jesuits at Court until the Society was disbanded. The first British Embassy that reached Peking, in 1793, found its footsteps impeded the whole way by European Catholic missionaries. If those white men could get in, why not the merchants?

The traders never realized the full extent of Chinese contempt for them as traders. Intellectuals like the Jesuits did: they understood the mentality of their hosts, yet even Jesuit understanding was not proof, ultimately, against banishment. The traders persisted in assuming that all mankind cared, just as they themselves did, for profit pure and simple: they overrated the simplicity of the problem, and when the Embassy failed, in spite of all Macartney’s polish and intelligence, to get what they wanted, they were still unwilling to give up. Indeed, they could not give up. The investors at home kept pushing them, demanding that they expand: they were between a strong force and a blank wall. Something had to give. In the end, it was the wall that gave, pushed down by the Opium War.

This celebrated war was, from one point of view, the opening wedge to China’s modernization. It was also, of course, a blatantly immoral settlement of a problem that should never have been posed. There were other contributions to the war, apart from the opium trade—which in any case had, under cover, a great number of Chinese and Manchu connivers in the game, as well as foreigners. There was the awkward fact of Peking’s flat refusal ever to consider any foreign nation on an equal basis. According to Chinese tradition, China was the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom, The People. The Emperor was the Son of Heaven. Therefore, no envoy from any barbarian country must approach him, save as an inferior creature, on bended knee. Lord Macartney refused to perform the k’ou-t’ou, the ceremony of knocking the head on the ground in the presence of a superior person: he was pardoned this gross breach of manners because as a barbarian he didn’t know any better, but the incident did not help his cause—namely, the furtherance of trade relations between the two countries. In fairness it must be said that it probably didn’t harm it either—the project was doomed from the start. The gifts he had brought as a courtesy from the British King to China’s ruler were referred to in all exchanges by two terms. Macartney called them “presents.” The Chinese and Manchus called them “tribute.” Neither side would give in on this point, and though it seems a small one, it indicated the root of the matter.

Then there was the fathomless abyss that lay between Western and Oriental concepts of justice. Chinese notions of proper trial and punishment scandalized the foreigners. They were based on the security-group system, by which any man in a group, especially the leader, might be called upon to suffer for the crime of another member. Whenever a foreign sailor broke the law, the Chinese would demand someone, anyone, from the same ship or even the same fleet, to punish whether or not he happened to be guilty. The whole idea was so abhorrent to the Western mind that Canton’s foreigners did not take it quite seriously until fantasy merged with reality in the Lady Hughes affair of 1784. At that early date a gunner aboard a Company ship, the Lady Hughes, while firing a salute, accidentally sank a little boat and drowned two minor Chinese officials. The authorities demanded that the British hand over the gunner. As he was innocent of any wrong intent, the British refused. The Chinese promptly arrested another Englishman who had nothing whatever to do with the ship, and put a stop to all trade. At last, after the Chinese had promised to give the gunner a fair trial, the British did hand him over. Immediately, the Chinese put him to death by strangulation, and the horrified British never got over the shock. Then too, as was well known, the Chinese tortured their prisoners to obtain confessions. Appalled, yet fascinated, Europeans at home collected pictures of the different methods of Chinese torture. British justice was not always tempered with mercy in those days—very seldom, in fact—but even the hardest-hearted British magistrate felt that this was going too far. Many people in the West, when they thought of China, associated the word first of all with summary decapitations and torture.

The situation was made all the worse by a total absence of any proper means of communication. For one thing, no important Chinese official would let an Outer Barbarian hold audience with him: the merchants simply could not get at the people who mattered. Nor were they able to send letters, save on very infrequent occasions. At any rate, they didn’t often have the means to write in Chinese—Chinese scholars wouldn’t do it for them, and they themselves could neither write nor speak the country’s tongue. In such circumstances, intercourse could hardly be said to flourish, and one can understand why some of the simplest facts of China’s government should have remained unknown to the foreigners—as, for example, the arrangement of the Imperial Court, by which the Emperor, far from being the secluded, indifferent monarch the barbarians thought he must be, was a hard-working, knowledgeable man, fully informed of his country’s affairs. He was not being kept by his officials from the barbarians he didn’t want to see them. But he knew they were there.

Few foreigners could speak any Chinese at all, before the Opium War: the exceptions were some Catholic missionaries, whose legacy from bygone days of religious tolerance in Peking was a knowledge of Mandarin. What was needed in the south, of course, was someone who could speak Cantonese, and read and write Chinese characters. Westerners believed Chinese to be incredibly difficult, a language that could be acquired only by especially gifted people. (It is odd how that notion has persisted, despite much proof to the contrary, down to the present day.) Naturally no highly placed Chinese bothered to learn English, Latin, or French; they left the study of foreign languages to lowly clerks and Christian converts. In such circumstances, the already imperfect rapport between China and the West was sometimes almost imperceptible. When the first British Embassy was being formed—the one that set out from England in 1787, but never arrived in Peking—the administration was hard put to it even to find an interpreter. Finally they acquired the only European deemed capable of handling the post: he was a Frenchman named Galbert. The envoy, Colonel Cathcart, died on the way, so the project was abandoned and the other members of the party came back: Galbert too died during the return voyage. Five years later the Macartney Embassy was sent out. The business of finding a new interpreter was far more complicated and lengthy than the search for the ambassador himself. Lord Macartney’s friend Sir George Staunton went to France on purpose to acquire a new Galbert, but he failed to discover one. He asked around in other countries; he asked in Gothenburg, Copenhagen, and Lisbon, all in vain. Ultimately an Italian cardinal directed him to a mission in Naples, where he found a number of young Chinese converts studying for the priesthood, and managed to obtain the services of two of these youths, who could write not only their native language but Latin and Italian as well. Nevertheless, when the Embassy arrived in China Macartney depended heavily on the accomplishments of Staunton’s son, a twelve-year-old boy who, on the voyage out, had learned to write a number of characters. This child was called on, several times, to make fair copies of the party’s diplomatic papers, since no Chinese would put himself on record as aiding the barbarians in such a way—his calligraphy would be recognized, and himself punished for presumption amounting to blasphemy. The little Staunton boy was held in considerable awe by the rest of the party, as one might well suppose. Macartney was frankly amazed by his genius.

It was a capital offense for a Chinese to teach Chinese to a foreigner, and so the only Chinese language school was in Singapore. Nevertheless as the years went by, the shortage of linguists was somewhat relieved. Young Staunton himself helped to alleviate it when...