GATE TO CHINA EB

Michael Sheridan

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008356262
• eBook ISBN: 9780008356248
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: History

'Impressive … Fascinating' Sunday Times

'An authoritative history' Financial Times

'Gripping and richly researched' Rana Mitter

A superb new history of the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule.

The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule are told with unique insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures and documents from archives in China and the West.

The story sweeps the reader from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars of the 19th century to the age of globalisation and the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. It ends with the battle for democracy on the city's streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party.

How did it come to this? We learn from private papers that Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to handle China and put her trust in an adviser who was torn between duty and pride. The deal they made with Beijing did not last.

The Chinese side of this history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many new to the foreign reader, revealing how the party's iron will and negotiating tactics crushed its opponents. Yet the voices of Hong Kong people – eloquent, smart and bold – speak out here for ideals that refuse to die.

Sheridan's book tells how Hong Kong opened the way for the People's Republic as it reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raises fundamental questions about progress, identity and freedom. It is critical reading for all who study, trade or deal with China.

1

Merchants and Mandarins

Traders from the West appeared off the coasts of China in late antiquity. Early records from the Tang dynasty tell of a cosmopolitan throng in the city of Panyu, now known as Guangzhou, and in the West until the late twentieth century as Canton. In far-off Beijing, rulers took a lofty and often benevolent view of barbarians on the fringes of their domains. The notion developed that those excluded from the celestial realm must perforce have come to it to perform rituals of tribute and obeisance.

It is worth looking into this distant past. Many aspects of it resonate across more than a thousand years of war and revolution down to modern times. It also demonstrates that the arrival of foreigners in nineteenth-century China was neither as strange nor as unprecedented as is sometimes depicted by historians.

In the Tang dynasty, between AD 618 and 907, Guangzhou was the most prosperous of the country’s southern cities. It was a frontier town, set amid wilderness populated by savages and rife with plague. Around it, though, grew plentiful lychees, oranges, bananas and banyans. Within its triple walls lived 200,000 people. In the ninth century some 120,000 of them were foreign merchants, according to the Arab chronicler Abu Zayd al-Sirafi. He praised China for its rule by law and admired the simplicity of its state finances, which were based on a poll tax and on the ruler’s monopoly of salt and tea, whose properties, he explained, were an antidote for many ills. Abu Zayd marvelled at the Chinese genius for manufacturing. In all of God’s creation, he wrote, no people were more skilled at engraving and craftsmanship. They worked in ivory and metal, jade and stone, wood and precious minerals.

Not all was grace and refinement, however. Abu Zayd deplored the Chinese habit of wiping themselves after defecation instead of washing with water, while his fastidious nature recoiled at their failure to clean their hands and teeth before eating. As for the Chinese practice of having sex with their women during menstruation, their tolerance of organised prostitution and, indeed, their propensity for attractive boys provided for that purpose in the temple quarters; from these Abu Zayd averted his eyes in dismay.

Ninth-century Guangzhou throbbed with commerce. Marvellous sights awaited its visitors and its streets bustled with strangers speaking strange tongues. One account spoke of its port jammed with the argosies of Brahmans, Persians and Malays to a number beyond reckoning, laden with aromatics, drugs and precious items. They brought fragrant tropical woods and much-coveted medicines to swap for bolts of silk, crates of chinaware and slaves. China imported gum resins, sandalwood, aloeswood, camphor, patchouli, cloves, frankincense and myrrh. Chinese businessmen gave up the comforts of the north for the profits of the south, their revenues raising the governor to such high estate that he carried six yak tails and possessed majesty and dignity worthy of the son of Heaven. The administration was managed by eunuchs, one of whom was ‘a gorgeous rascal’, and graft was rife. As long as revenues flowed to the court, along with luxuries such as luminous pearls, kingfisher feathers and the occasional live rhino, the city was left to its own manners and customs.

There was a foreign quarter, where Arabs and Sinhalese mingled with ‘white barbarians’, Indian Buddhists (whose monasteries hid pools adorned with perfumed blue lotuses) and Shia Muslims from Khorasan, who had fled persecution and worshipped in their own mosque. All obeyed the summons of a drum to the great market at noon and dispersed to their own districts at the boom of the drum at sunset. The poet Chang Chi complained of ‘the babble of barbarian voices in the night markets’. While the foreign traders awaited favourable winds to set sail for home, they were ruled by a chosen worthy. They enjoyed some extraterritorial privileges, but few details of these, which would become contentious in later centuries, are known.

Southern China was not a land of calm content. Rebellions broke out, thieves roamed the streets, murders were common. The captain of a Malay vessel murdered the governor, Lu Yüan-jui, who had extorted money from him. In 758 a band of Arab and Persian pirates raided the city, looted its stores, burnt houses and drove out the governor before escaping to a lair on the southern island of Hainan. For half a century afterwards, many foreign ships chose to sail to Hanoi instead of Guangzhou.

Neither was the Tang period always a time of easy cosmopolitanism. Lu Chün, the governor of Guangzhou from 836, was scandalised to find foreigners and Chinese living unsegregated and even intermarrying. He put a stop to that and banned foreigners from buying houses. An imperial edict forced Turkic Uighur Muslims, who were resented as moneylenders, to wear their distinctive costumes at all times. In the taxonomy of Chinese prejudice, Persians were rich, Malays were dark-skinned and thus ugly, southeast Asians went naked and were immoral. Young poets ogled Iranian waitresses in wine-shops, literati admired harpists and dancers from Central Asia, but the ninth century was also ‘an age of suspicion and persecution of foreigners’.

Attitudes towards commerce and foreigners were ambiguous. Trade was sometimes blamed for rising prices and disorder. Some outsiders gained favour and could rise to office in the government; the new gentry class which emerged through the introduction of an examination system was more open-minded than the hereditary aristocracy. Some used their skills, poised between two worlds, to mediate contracts, duties and disputes among traders and their haughty, distrustful Chinese counterparts. The privileged interlocutor was a position established more than a thousand years before the European colonial powers set foot on the shores of Hong Kong and Macau.

Even in the ninth century, the Chinese state took a commanding role in business. Aristocratic attitudes to commerce were ambiguous and trade ‘was never free from political entanglements’. This was an age when the dynasty held monopolies on domestic goods such as salt, iron, currency and some basic commodities. Officials saw these as models for the control and taxation of luxuries pouring into Tang China from abroad. In the eighth century the emperor established a Commissioner for Commercial Argosies at Guangzhou, his duties being to buy up goods which the state wished to control and to organise their distribution. Foreigners were expected to offer some of their goods as gifts in tribute to the son of Heaven and to demonstrate submission to his universal power. The rest of their consignments had to be deposited in government warehouses and could only be sold in the markets under official supervision. It was a rash foreign trader who would dare to sell his wares directly to the public.

Then there was the vexed notion of exchange and barter. Commerce was hampered by regulations which could be imposed in the name of morals, revenue, sumptuary laws or national security. One edict of the eighth century banned the export or sale to foreigners of tapestries, damasks, fine silk, embroidery, yak tails, pearls, gold and iron. There was no fixed medium of exchange: Tang tombs have yielded up Byzantine gold coinage and Arab traders at Guangzhou were said to use gold Islamic dinars to settle accounts. From time to time officials decided that this or that foreign commodity might weaken, deprave or corrupt the Chinese consumer. Such regulations were capricious and often temporary, but they made it hard for merchants to fix prices or make contracts.

Finally, the Tang laws enshrined xenophobia. If a foreigner took a Chinese wife or concubine, a decree of AD 628 obliged him to remain in China: in no case might a Chinese woman accompany him home. If the foreign trader died in China his goods were sealed and confiscated by the state.

Like the Persian kings demanding soil and water from prostrate cities in classical Greece, the rulers of China expected symbolic acknowledgement of their supremacy from the tributary states around them. The emperors claimed that, far from threatening their august status, the arrival of foreigners not subject by birth to their graciousness tended to confirm it. This exalted attitude was to have consequences which reverberate down to modern times.

At the dawn of the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth century, China was still remote and mysterious to Europeans. Immured behind its barriers of desert and mountain, washed by the waters of seas yet to be charted, it was a realm made for medieval romancers. The accounts of early travellers, like Marco Polo, who went by land and returned by sea in the late thirteenth century, spoke of a Great Khan, of marvels and riches, of Tatar paladins and a summer palace called Xanadu, where wild beasts roamed amid woods and fountains. He told of a splendid port called Zaiton, ‘for all the ships that arrive from India laden with costly wares and precious stones of great price and big pearls … a marvel to behold’.

Many of the travellers’ tales were fantastical. They had little authentic news about wars and politics, and what they claimed to be insight into the economy of China was little more than a simple reaction to the taxes and tribute demanded of them. Their accounts depict the manners and customs of the Chinese as strange and sinful. These foreign storytellers were free to invent and exaggerate, safe in the knowledge that the Chinese court would never read their works and their readers were most unlikely to see China because it was so far away.

Yet China was not isolated. Caravans along the Silk Road had connected the Han dynasty with the Middle East during the empires of Rome and Parthia. Chinese trading ships plied the coasts of Asia and East Africa. Under the Tang emperors, who reigned from the seventh century to the tenth, the port of Guangzhou was one of the busiest entrepôts of the world. Western religions were known in China from the same period, as a stele in a museum at Xi’an from AD 781 inscribed in Syriac and Chinese attests. As the empire expanded, Persians and Arabs held military and administrative posts. Chinese cultural and political influence expanded to Korea and Japan. If China withdrew into seclusion while Europe flowered in the Renaissance, it was still seen from afar as a land of silks and spices, a refined civilisation pursuing arts, literature and music under an almighty ruler and his caste of mandarins. By most measures of the time, the Chinese economy was the biggest in the world.

The balance of power and fortune changed in the sixteenth century. The kings and queens of western Europe grew mighty and ambitious; it was the era of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, François I and Henri VI of France and Philip II of Spain. The Christian monarchies triumphed over the Ottoman Turks, who had carried the green banners of Islam to the heart of Europe. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent abandoned the siege of Vienna and in 1571 an alliance defeated the Turks at the sea battle of Lepanto. The tide had turned and the European nations began to look outwards. It was the start of four centuries of world domination by Europe in which China was eclipsed.

The growth of European power in Asia was not linear, and it was propelled by forces which no Chinese strategist of the time could have grasped. One key event was the collapse of Spanish power in continental Europe between 1640 and 1714 through foreign wars, inflation, bankruptcy and internal strife. ‘Here was a country which had climbed to the heights and sunk to the depths; which had achieved everything and lost everything; which had conquered the world only to be vanquished itself,’ wrote one historian of the Spanish Empire. Addicted to treasure from the Americas, prey to economic forces its devout monarchs did not understand, Spain still sent its galleons between Acapulco and Manila laden with silks and silver. But its part in the European adventure in Asia was at an end.

The second victim of economic change was the Venetian republic, which had grown rich on Mediterranean commerce and the overland trade with Cathay. Its decline was less steep than Spain’s. But it never recovered from the voyage of the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. Da Gama opened a sea route to the East and destroyed the centuries-old Venetian grip on trade through the Levant. Venice, said the French philosopher Montesquieu, was ‘thrown into a corner of the world’. Today Chinese tourists troop along the flagstones of the Rialto to Marco Polo’s house, past quays where argosies laden with the silks and spices of the east once moored, where moneychangers dealt in bills of lading from all the known world and a republican oligarchy built, in Shelley’s words, palaces ‘like fabrics of enchantment pil’d to heaven’. Venice has vanished as a world power.

Two enterprising maritime nations, England and Portugal, seized the opportunity they had long sought for an all-water trade route to the Indies. In 1557 the Portuguese opened a base in Macau with the wary consent of the Chinese authorities. Their British rivals, the East India Company, began to build an empire in India and turned their eyes to China. The French and the Dutch were not far behind. All the European powers fought one another from time to time, but even if China had possessed the political skill to divide and defeat them it was in no position to do so.

In 1600 the late Ming empire seemed to be at the peak of its splendour. The dynasty had ruled China since the fourteenth century. From his majestic capital in Beijing, the son of Heaven held sway over 120 million people, more than in all the nations of Europe. There was no empire like his on earth. Mughal India was breaking up. Spanish conquistadors and foreign diseases had laid waste the Aztec and Inca empires of Mexico and Peru. The Ottomans were in retreat. Russia was a geographical expression. Japan was in the last stages of civil war before a powerful shogun of the Tokugawa clan unified it and set up his capital at Edo, modern Tokyo. In China, the imperial government was hallowed by ritual and administered by officials chosen through rigorous examinations. The wealthy enjoyed the fruits of a rich cultural and economic life accompanied by a sense of peace and order. The late Ming period produced some of China’s finest painting and some of its greatest works of literature: The Peony Pavilion, a play by the dramatist Tang Xianzu, which featured a poetic scholar-official, The Journey to the West, a picaresque tale of a monk and a monkey on the road to India, and The Golden Lotus, an erotic reverie.

But just as the European powers grew confident and powerful, China fell into a crisis from which, some of its intellectuals argue, it has never truly recovered. Corruption, intrigue and decadence weakened the Ming dynasty; floods, famines and a brief ice age ruined farmers, trouble in the borderlands forced tax rises to fund the military; in despair the peasants and artisans upon whom Ming prosperity rested rose up in rebellion. Much later, some Marxists argued that Portuguese traders at Macau – that tiny foreign body in the great organism of China – were to blame because they bought up Chinese silk and traded it for silver, which was pouring out of the mines in Mexico and Peru; the resultant huge inflow of silver into China’s agrarian economy led to inflation, wild speculative excess and a boom-and-bust cycle which the Confucian scholar-administrators of the time were incapable of managing. In this telling, like the Spanish Habsburgs, the imperial house of China fell to forces of modernity it did not comprehend. The causes and effects of the worldwide silver crisis in the sixteenth century are still debated by economic historians, but it left a legacy of suspicion of foreign speculators among all subsequent rulers of China.

In 1644, after a long decline, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Invading tribal armies from the northeast conquered the country and installed a dynasty of Manchu warriors. The last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, murdered his consorts, then slunk away to hang himself from a tree near the Forbidden City in Beijing. Generations of literati mourned the fall of the Ming as a cultural apocalypse. Some of the nobility scorned the Manchus. Their strange language was foreign to the dominant Han Chinese and their customs were thought vulgar. From time to time rebellions broke out and, tellingly, resistance lingered longest in the south. But the new dynasty, known as the Qing, won loyalty by adopting not just Han Chinese values and rituals, but the existing ruling elite. This new regime was to rule for more than two and a half centuries.

It was during the height of Qing magnificence that King George III of England sent envoys to the court of the emperor Qianlong. (Chinese emperors took regnal names, thus Qianlong was born Aisin Gioro Hongji and adopted his new name, which means ‘Perfect Eminence’, on acceding to the throne in 1736.)

Throughout his long reign Qianlong vacillated between opening and closing the borders of the realm. Relations with barbarians were regulated by the Imperial Household, the Office of Border Affairs and the Ministry of Rituals, the better to prescribe the degree of their submission. Under the Ming, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci had been allowed to reside at the court in Beijing in 1601. The scholar-priests translated the principles of western mathematics, cartography and astronomy into Chinese and translated the works of Confucius into western languages. Jesuits were trusted by Qianlong’s grandfather, the emperor Kangxi, to draft the Latin text of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, regulating borders and commerce between China and Russia, in 1689. Trust, however, was a commodity in the shortest supply at court.

By the late eighteenth century, foreigners were pushing at the doors of the Qing empire in the south. To repel them, officials clung to ritual and rules, with decreasing conviction or effect. They dropped the pretence that the visitors had come to offer tribute and conceded that they might trade with the celestial empire at selected ports. At one of these, Guangzhou, local merchants set up a guild, known to foreigners as the Cohong, in 1720 to monopolise contacts with the traders and to control prices, fees and rakeoffs. The combination of bowing to the inevitable while seeking to manage the foreigners and to profit from them became enduring Chinese policy.

In 1760 an exasperated emperor ordered that all trade must be restricted to Guangzhou. The foreigners were permitted to reside there only in the trading season, which was governed by the monsoons and ran from October to March. Moreover, they could deal only with the Cohong and might communicate only with its members in the event of disputes. Imperial officials remained in aloof seclusion, did not condescend to meet the barbarians, and often disdained to examine their petitions. To a certain cast of mind this was meant to inspire awe and to many Chinese it appeared magnificent. In an age when the Western powers were growing in military, economic and diplomatic might it was extremely unwise.

During the long reign of Qianlong the Chinese empire appeared to foreigners to exist in a state of political and bureaucratic inertia. In fact, Chinese histories record that government by its philosopher-officials was more flexible and responsive than it has been given credit for. But the ambitions of the East India Company, the pressure of Dutch seaborne commerce, the residual power of Spain, the resolute Portuguese foothold at Macau and the first appearance of ships from the newly independent United States off the south China coast did not allow the guardians to recline and contemplate.

In 1792 the British government of King George III dispatched one of its ablest diplomats, Lord Macartney, on the voyage to China. Macartney was an Irish nobleman who had toured Europe, met Voltaire, served with distinction as envoy to Catherine the Great of Russia and completed a term as governor of Madras without scandal. His mission was to prise open the gates of the Qing empire and to become Britain’s first ambassador to the court at Beijing. The aim was to put trade on a sure footing and to compel China to enter the international state system then coming into existence. The Chinese throne had no intention of permitting any of these things to take place. The comedy of errors that ensued was recorded in Macartney’s own journal and the accounts of others in his suite, becoming a feast for cartoonists back at home.

Macartney was greeted with exquisite courtesy, which turned to alarm as the mandarins in attendance realised that their guest did not intend to perform the ‘kowtow’, the requirement to fall to his knees before the emperor and to prostrate himself nine times. Travelling by canal towards the capital, his lordship became aware that the banners adorning the fleet of junks proclaimed him to be an ambassador bearing tribute to the throne.

The emperor was at his pleasure dome at Chengde, known in those days as Jehol, pursuing affairs of state far from the heat and noise of Beijing. He would receive the emissaries there. Meanwhile the English party was conducted to Beijing and given palatial quarters while they awaited word from the court and negotiated over the precise form of obeisance that would take place. Macartney adopted a principle of reciprocity that would bedevil encounters between China and the West for ever after, maintaining that he would pay the same respect to the emperor as he would to his own monarch. The negotiations became fraught.

Meanwhile presents from George III, including crystal chandeliers, Derbyshire porcelain, a globe, clocks, a barometer and an orrery, a cloc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• List of Illustrations
• Dramatis Personae
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Names
• Introduction: Hong Kong, China
• 1 Merchants and Mandarins
• 2 Reform and Opening Up
• 3 A Long Farewell
• 4 The Iron Lady versus the Steel Factory
• 5 A Joint Declaration
• 6 The Eighties
• 7 The Change
• 8 Two Journeys
• 9 A Mandarin for All Seasons
• 10 Transitions
• 11 To Seek a Wider World
• 12 The Rivals
• 13 One Country, Two Cultures
• 14 Chaos under Heaven
• 15 Hunger Games
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Picture Section
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Publisher