On China (6 page)

For China’s classical sages, the world could never be conquered; wise rulers could hope only to harmonize with its trends. There was no New World to populate, no redemption awaiting mankind on distant shores. The promised land was China, and the Chinese were already there. The blessings of the Middle Kingdom’s culture might theoretically be extended, by China’s superior example, to the foreigners on the empire’s periphery. But there was no glory to be found in venturing across the seas to convert “heathens” to Chinese ways; the customs of the Celestial Dynasty were plainly beyond the attainment of the far barbarians.

This may be the deeper meaning of China’s abandonment of its naval tradition. Lecturing in the 1820s on his philosophy of history, the German philosopher Hegel described the Chinese tendency to see the huge Pacific Ocean to their east as a barren waste. He noted that China, by and large, did not venture to the seas and instead depended on its great landmass. The land imposed “an infinite multitude of dependencies,” whereas the sea propelled people “beyond these limited circles of thought and action”: “This stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land, is wanting to the splendid political edifices of Asiatic States, although they themselves border on the sea—as for example, China. For them the sea is only the limit, the ceasing of the land; they have no positive relations to it.” The West had set sail to spread its trade and values throughout the world. In this respect, Hegel argued, land-bound China—which in fact had once been the world’s greatest naval power—was “severed from the general historical development.”
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With these distinctive traditions and millennial habits of superiority, China entered the modern age a singular kind of empire: a state claiming universal relevance for its culture and institutions but making few efforts to proselytize; the wealthiest country in the world but one that was indifferent to foreign trade and technological innovation; a culture of cosmopolitanism overseen by a political elite oblivious to the onset of the Western age of exploration; and a political unit of unparalleled geographic extent that was unaware of the technological and historical currents that would soon threaten its existence.

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T THE CLOSE of the eighteenth century, China stood at the height of its imperial greatness. The Qing Dynasty, established in 1644 by Manchu tribes riding into China from the northeast, had turned China into a major military power. Fusing Manchu and Mongol military prowess with the cultural and governmental prowess of the Han Chinese, it embarked on a program of territorial expansion to the north and west, establishing a Chinese sphere of influence deep into Mongolia, Tibet, and modern-day Xinjiang. China stood predominant in Asia; it was at least the rival of any empire on earth.
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Yet the high point of the Qing Dynasty also turned into the turning point of its destiny. For China’s wealth and expanse attracted the attention of Western empires and trading companies operating far outside the bounds and conceptual apparatus of the traditional Chinese world order. For the first time in its history, China faced “barbarians” who no longer sought to displace the Chinese dynasty and claim the Mandate of Heaven for themselves; instead, they proposed to replace the Sinocentric system with an entirely new vision of world order—with free trade rather than tribute, resident embassies in the Chinese capital, and a system of diplomatic exchange that did not refer to non-Chinese heads of state as “honorable barbarians” pledging fealty to their Emperor in Beijing.

Unbeknownst to Chinese elites, these foreign societies had developed new industrial and scientific methods that, for the first time in centuries—or perhaps ever—surpassed China’s own. Steam power, railways, and new methods of manufacturing and capital formation enabled enormous advances in productivity in the West. Imbued with a conquering impulse that propelled them into China’s traditional sphere of dominance, the Western powers considered Chinese claims of universal overlordship over Europe and Asia risible. They were determined to impose on China their own standards of international conduct, by force if necessary. The resulting confrontation challenged the basic Chinese cosmology and left wounds still festering over a century later in an age of restored Chinese eminence.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, Chinese authorities had noted the increasing numbers of European traders on the southeast China coast. They saw little to differentiate the Europeans from other foreigners operating at the fringes of the empire, save perhaps their particularly glaring lack of Chinese cultural attainments. In the official Chinese view, these “West Sea barbarians” were classified as “tribute envoys” or “barbarian merchants.” On rare occasions, some were permitted to travel to Beijing, where—if admitted into the presence of the Emperor—they were expected to perform the ritual kowtow: the act of prostration, with the forehead touching the ground three times.

For foreign representatives the points of entry into China and routes to the capital were strictly circumscribed. Access to the Chinese market was limited to a tightly regulated seasonal trade at Guangzhou (then known as Canton). Each winter foreign merchants were required to sail home. They were not permitted to venture further into China. Regulations deliberately held them at bay. It was unlawful to teach the Chinese language to these barbarians or to sell them books on Chinese history or culture. Their communications were to take place through specially licensed local merchants.
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The notion of free trade, resident embassies, and sovereign equality—by this point, the minimum rights enjoyed by Europeans in almost every other corner of the world—were unheard of in China. One tacit exception had been made for Russia. Its rapid eastward expansion (the Czar’s domains now abutted Qing territories in Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria) placed it in a unique position to threaten China. The Qing Dynasty, in 1715, permitted Moscow to establish a Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing; it eventually took on the role of a de facto embassy, the only foreign mission of its kind in China for over a century.

The contacts extended to Western European traders, limited as they were, were seen by the Qing as a considerable indulgence. The Son of Heaven had, in the Chinese view, shown his benevolence by allowing them to partake in Chinese trade—particularly in tea, silk, lacquer-ware, and rhubarb, for which the West Sea barbarians had developed a voracious appetite. Europe was too far from the Middle Kingdom ever to become Sinicized along Korean or Vietnamese lines.

Initially, the Europeans accepted the role of supplicants in the Chinese tributary order, in which they were labeled as “barbarians” and their trade as “tribute.” But as the Western powers grew in wealth and conviction, this state of affairs grew untenable.

The assumptions of the Chinese world order were particularly offensive to Britain (the “red-haired barbarians” in some Chinese records). As the premier Western commercial and naval power, Britain bridled at its assigned role in the cosmology of the Middle Kingdom, whose army, the British noted, still primarily used bows and arrows and whose navy was practically nonexistent. British traders resented the increasing amount of “squeeze” extracted by the designated Chinese merchants at Guangzhou, through which Chinese regulations required that all Western trade be conducted. They sought access to the rest of the Chinese market beyond the southeast coast.

The first major British attempt to remedy the situation was the 1793–94 mission of Lord George Macartney to China. It was the most notable, best-conceived, and least “militaristic” European effort to alter the prevailing format of Sino-Western relations and to achieve free trade and diplomatic representation on equal terms. It failed completely.

The Macartney mission is instructive to examine in some detail. The diary of the envoy illustrates how the Chinese perception of its role operated in practice—and the gulf existing between Western and Chinese perceptions of diplomacy. Macartney was a distinguished public servant with years of international experience and a keen sense of “Oriental” diplomacy. He was a man of notable cultural achievements. He had served three years as envoy-extraordinary to the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, where he negotiated a treaty of amity and commerce. Upon his return, he published a well-received volume of observations on Russian history and culture. He had subsequently served as Governor of Madras. He was as well equipped as any of his contemporaries to inaugurate a new diplomacy across civilizations.

The aims of the Macartney mission to China would have seemed modest to any educated Briton of the time—especially compared with the recently established British dominion over the neighboring giant, India. Home Secretary Henry Dundas framed the Macartney instructions as an attempt to achieve “a free communication with a people, perhaps the most singular on the Globe.” Its principal aims were the establishment of reciprocal embassies in Beijing and London and commercial access to other ports along the Chinese coast. On the latter point, Dundas charged Macartney to draw attention to the “discouraging” and “arbitrary” system of regulations at Guangzhou that prevented British merchants from engaging in the “fair competition of the Market” (a concept with no direct counterpart in Confucian China). He was, Dundas stressed, to disclaim any territorial ambitions in China—an assurance bound to be considered as an insult by the recipient because it implied that Britain had the option to entertain such ambitions.
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The British government addressed the Chinese court on equal terms, which would have struck the British ruling group as affording a non-Western country an uncommon degree of dignity, while being treated in China as insubordinate insolence. Dundas instructed Macartney to take the “earliest opportunity” to impress upon the Chinese court that King George III saw Macartney’s mission as “an embassy to the most civilized as well as most ancient and populous Nation in the World in order to observe its celebrated institutions, and to communicate and receive the benefits which must result from an unreserved and friendly intercourse between that Country and his own.” Dundas instructed Macartney to comply with “all ceremonials of that Court, which may not commit the honour of your Sovereign, or lessen your own dignity, so as to endanger the success of your negotiation.” He should not, Dundas stressed, “let any trifling punctilio stand in the way of the important benefits which may be obtained” by success in his mission.
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To help further his aims, Macartney brought with him numerous examples of British scientific and industrial prowess. Macartney’s entourage included a surgeon, a physician, a mechanic, a metallurgist, a watchmaker, a mathematical instrument maker, and “Five German Musicians” who were to perform nightly. (These latter performances were one of the more successful aspects of the embassy.) His gifts to the Emperor included manufactures designed at least in part to show the fabulous benefits China might obtain by trading with Britain: artillery pieces, a chariot, diamond-studded wristwatches, British porcelain (copied, Qing officials noted approvingly, from the Chinese art form), and portraits of the King and Queen painted by Joshua Reynolds. Macartney even brought a deflated hot-air balloon and planned, without success, to have members of his mission fly it over Beijing by way of demonstration.

The Macartney mission accomplished none of its specific objectives; the gap in perceptions was simply too wide. Macartney had intended to demonstrate the benefits of industrialization, but the Emperor understood his gifts as tribute. The British envoy expected his Chinese hosts to recognize that they had been hopelessly left behind by the progress of technological civilization and to seek a special relationship with Britain to rectify their backwardness. In fact, the Chinese treated the British as an arrogant and uninformed barbarian tribe seeking special favor from the Son of Heaven. China remained wedded to its agrarian ways, with its burgeoning population making food production more urgent than ever, and its Confucian bureaucracy ignorant of the key elements of industrialization: steam power, credit and capital, private property, and public education.

The first discordant note came as Macartney and his entourage made their way to Jehol, the summer capital northeast of Beijing, traveling up the coast in Chinese yachts laden with generous gifts and delicacies but carrying Chinese signs proclaiming, “The English Ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China.” Macartney resolved, in keeping with Dundas’s instructions, to make “no complaint of it, reserving myself to notice it if a proper opportunity occurs.”
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As he approached Beijing, however, the chief mandarins charged with administering the mission opened a negotiation that put the gap in perceptions in sharper light. The issue was whether Macartney would kowtow to the Emperor or whether, as he insisted, he could follow the British custom of kneeling on one knee.

The Chinese side opened the discussions in a circuitous manner by remarking on, as Macartney recalled in his diary, “the different modes of dress that prevailed among different nations.” The mandarins concluded that Chinese clothes were, in the end, superior, since they allowed the wearer to perform with greater ease “the genuflexions and prostrations which were, they said, customary to be made by all persons whenever the Emperor appeared in public.” Would the British delegation not find it easier to free itself of its cumbersome knee-buckles and garters before approaching the Emperor’s august presence? Macartney countered by suggesting that the Emperor would likely appreciate if Macartney paid him “the same obeisance which I did to my own Sovereign.”
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The discussions over the “kowtow question” continued intermittently for several more weeks. The mandarins suggested that Macartney’s options were to kowtow or to return home empty-handed; Macartney resisted. Eventually it was agreed that Macartney could follow the European custom and kneel on one knee. It proved to be the only point Macartney won (at least as to actual conduct; the official Chinese report stated that Macartney, overwhelmed by the Emperor’s awesome majesty, had performed the kowtow after all).
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