The Contest of the Century (23 page)

Yet Li delights his students by taking potshots at the foreign teachers in his school, who sat in a circle behind him onstage when he was giving his lectures. He called on one of the teachers to stand up, an American named Shawn who was considerably overweight. “America is a ridiculous country,” he boomed. “Why do you people get so fat? Why do you eat so much?” The audience roared with laughter. “Are you offended, Shawn?” he asked. Shawn smiled gamely—a slice of humiliation is clearly part of the contract for teaching at Li’s schools. “I hate going to America,” Li later told me in his car, a black Buick sedan. “I mostly stay at home and watch TV. What is there to do apart from going to Sam’s Club? I find America boring.” As the car pulled up to the second school, the driver nearly knocked over one of the teachers by accident. “These foreign teachers, they are so lazy,” Li muttered. “They become language teachers because they are too lazy to do anything else. I always tell them this.”

NEVER FORGET OUR NATIONAL HUMILIATION

Blame it all, if you like, on Lord Elgin.

China and Greece have one powerful thing in common—a deeply held grievance over the cultural vandalism of the British Empire. In both cases, their resentment is focused on the Bruce family from Fife in Scotland, inheritors of the earldoms of Elgin and Kincardine, and colonial adventurers of the most notorious brand. For Greece, it is the seventh earl, Thomas Bruce, who dominates the family’s share of historical infamy. It was he who in 1801 removed the marble sculptures from the Parthenon that are still housed in the British Museum. For the last few decades, Greece has viewed Britain’s refusal to return the marbles as an
acute form of post-colonial condescension. For modern China, it is his son, the eighth earl, James Bruce, who has a central place in the gallery of foreign villains. It was this Lord Elgin who gave the order in 1860 to set fire to the Yuanming Yuan, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, a vast complex of Qing dynasty gardens and buildings to the northwest of Beijing which were known in English as the Summer Palace.

James Bruce has received much less attention than his father in the U.K. over the years. When Britons reflect on the history of empire, we focus heavily on India and to a lesser extent on East Africa, but we rarely discuss the episodes in China. At my school, we only learned about the Second Opium War, 1856–60, in which Elgin was a central figure, because of the way Lord Palmerston used it for domestic political gain in a general election. When Elgin sailed in 1856 on board the
Furious
, he almost did not make it to China: when they stopped on the way in India, the Sepoy Mutiny, one of the biggest uprisings against colonial rule, broke out, and the governor of Calcutta pleaded with him to use his seventeen hundred troops to help put down the uprising. They were delayed for several months. But their voyage to China culminated in an incident of imperial arrogance that still reverberates a century and a half later, even if it is largely forgotten at home.

Uncomfortable in the claustrophobic confines of the Forbidden City, which had been the focus of power under the Ming dynasty, the Qing dynasty rulers constructed a new compound to the northwest of Beijing on an area of eight hundred acres. Amid the palaces and pavilions, there were opera houses, fountains, waterways, and intricate gardens. The complex also boasted extensive hunting grounds and riding trails, which were among the favorite haunts of Xianfeng, who became the seventh Qing emperor in 1850. He was born at the Summer Palace, by which time it had already become the main seat of power.

Elgin had been dispatched to China after a dispute over a ship called the
Arrow
, which had been impounded by the Chinese authorities. The British used the incident as a pretext to push for greater opening of China to European trade. By September 1860, a British and French force was on the outskirts of Beijing and threatening to invade if Xianfeng did not grant their demands. Elgin sent a small team to conclude an agreement with Xianfeng’s envoys, which included a senior British official, Harry
Parkes; Elgin’s secretary, Henry Loch; a group of Sikh cavalry; and a journalist from
The Times
called Thomas Bowlby. Instead of reaching a deal, they were imprisoned and tortured. Parkes and Loch were later released, but fifteen of the twenty-six taken prisoner were killed, including Bowlby. According to one of the Sikh soldiers imprisoned with him, Bowlby’s dead body was eventually fed to dogs and pigs.

The British and French armies decided they needed to extract symbolic revenge. Elgin later said that he wanted to find a way to punish Xianfeng personally without hurting the residents of Beijing. His solution was to burn the Summer Palace. Xianfeng had already fled, and the compound was unguarded when the French and British troops arrived. At first, the soldiers went on a spree of frenzied looting and plundering, smashing porcelain vases and jade ornaments. After a day, the officers reasserted control over the troops and organized them to complete the main mission: to methodically destroy the elaborate Summer Palace complex.

Outraged at the death of its correspondent,
The Times
supported Elgin’s actions, but even at the time, at the height of empire, the Anglo-French force was denounced at home. Victor Hugo said that Elgin was worse than his father and famously warned that the incident would come back to haunt the British and French. The marquess of Bath described it as an act of “vandalism” that was comparable to the sacking of Rome or the burning of the Alexandria Library. On his way to China three years earlier, Elgin had written,
“We have often acted towards the Chinese in a manner which is very difficult to justify.” But although he later regretted burning the Summer Palace, he defended the decision on the grounds that it was necessary to set an example, so that other Europeans in China would remain safe. It had been a “painful duty,” said Elgin, who went on to become viceroy of India. Some of the soldiers he commanded realized the consequences. “The people are very civil, but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did to the palace,” Charles George Gordon, who was then a young army captain, later wrote. “You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them.… It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.”

China’s rulers tried to restore many of the buildings that had been
destroyed, even if a shortage of funds meant they had not quite completed the job by the time the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1898. Called I Ho Ch’uan in Chinese or Righteous Harmonious Fists, the Boxers—as they were known in English—were a secret society that called for the expulsion of “foreign devils.” The initial target was Chinese Christians, but some British missionaries were also killed. By 1900, the violence against foreigners was so intense that hundreds took refuge in the Legation Quarter in Beijing, where foreign diplomats resided. To relieve the siege, a twenty-thousand-strong army from eight countries made its way to Beijing—six European countries, Japan, and this time the U.S., which had troops in the region following the conquest of the Philippines. After they relieved the Legation Quarter, the foreign armies embarked on what one American marine called an “orgy” of looting, so extensive that the troops later held open-air markets to trade the gold, silver, and silks they had stolen. (Again, the actions of the foreign armies were denounced in their home countries, this time with Mark Twain to the fore.) Before they left Beijing, the armies decided they needed to perform one last act to rub in their victory. They looted, ransacked, and burned down the Summer Palace again.

In some ways, it is surprising that the Summer Palace has been turned into a symbol of the wonders of Han Chinese civilization. The Qing rulers were Manchus, who were considered by many of their Chinese subjects to be foreign barbarians, and the ravishing complex they built was full of overseas influences. A series of marble pavilions in the northeast of the complex, including one known as View of Distant Seas, were actually designed by Jesuit missionaries. The destruction continued for many decades after the foreign armies had left, this time at the hands of ordinary Chinese people, who quietly took away many of the remaining treasures. During the Cultural Revolution, the Summer Palace continued to be thoroughly ransacked. The Zhengjue Temple, one of the few buildings that remained intact, became a boiler factory. But in the late 1970s, as China started to breathe again after the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, historical interest in the Yuanming Yuan site picked up.

A petition was circulated in 1980 to get funds for its protection—120 years after the duke of Elgin’s fateful order. The Chinese historian Wu
Hung described the pavilions of the View of Distant Seas, by then crumbling and smashed columns, as China’s “national ruin.” A picture of the destroyed pavilions became a regular fixture in popular culture, reproduced on playing cards and cake tins. As interest in the stories of Elgin and the anti-Boxer armies spiked, the Summer Palace site gradually evolved into an emotional symbol of both cultural unity and patriotic outrage. So it was not a complete surprise that, when the G-7 imposed sanctions on China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Deng Xiaoping reached into this collective memory of anti-imperial anger to frame his response.
“I am familiar with the history of foreign aggression against China. When I heard the seven Western countries had at their summit decided to impose sanctions on China, my immediate association was to 1900, when the allied forces of the eight powers invaded China,” he said.

——

The stories that a country tells about itself say a lot about how it views the rest of the world. Tiananmen was a fundamental break in the way Communist China has decided to describe its own history. During the Mao years, China was the proud winner in a revolutionary struggle against imperialism and its internal class enemies. The Chinese people had stood up, as Mao declared in 1949. There was plenty of anti-foreigner sentiment—during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards burned down the British embassy—but China presented itself as victor, not one of history’s injured parties. After Tiananmen, however, Chinese history-writing started to reflect a very different self-image, a form of anti-Western nationalism that adopted the tone of an aggrieved victim. Jiang Zemin, who took over from the ousted Zhao Ziyang as party secretary-general after the massacre, announced that the education system “must prevent the rise of the worship of the West.” In a speech entitled “Patriotism and the Mission of the Chinese Intellectual,” he thundered that the U.S. and its allies were “trying to turn China into a vassal state dependent on the Western superpowers.” Deng, who continued to pull the strings behind the scenes, gave a speech to the PLA in which he blamed the protests on the way history had been taught to young people. “During the last ten years, our biggest mistake was made in the field of
education, primarily ideological and political education,” he said. The students had occupied Tiananmen Square and had called into question the very legitimacy of the Communist Party for one simple reason: they had not been taught how to be sufficiently patriotic.

The new patriotic education had a name: National Humiliation History.
Wuwang guochi
—or “Never forget our national humiliation”—had been a popular phrase in the 1920s, after Germany’s colonial possessions in China had been handed to Japan at the 1919 Versailles Conference. With their backs to the wall after 1989, the Communist authorities started to lean on the same emotional memory of national humiliation. The school curriculum began to emphasize the “Century of National Humiliation,” which started in 1840 with the First Opium War and ended with the Communist takeover in 1949. This time frame knits together the different invasions, unfair treaties, economic exploitation, and other indignities that a weakened China suffered at the hands of the Western powers. The destruction of the Summer Palace, first by Elgin, then by the anti-Boxer armies, became a central episode in the narrative.

The bullying, war crimes, and injustice were real, of course, the genuine story of a proud civilization humbled by foreigners who had become more powerful without anyone in China realizing it. Yet it is also a version of history that leaves out as much as it includes. Qing China (1644–1912) ruled a country twice the size of the one controlled by the Ming dynasty that preceded it (1368–1644). Long before British warships ever sailed up the Yangtze, China’s frontiers had been a constantly shifting map that contained their own stories of expansion and aggression. One of the foundational myths of modern Chinese identity is the benevolence of imperial rule, the belief that China expanded as a result of the superiority of its culture rather than the strength of its armed forces. Today’s official histories also have little to say about the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war in the 1850s which Elgin stumbled into, and which took as many as twenty million Chinese lives, making it one of the most brutal episodes in China’s or any country’s history. In the “national humiliation” canon, Qing China was neither an expansionary empire nor a dynasty whose writ was crumbling, but a victim of history—a defenseless and naïve innocent plundered by a warmongering West.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the First Opium War, a book entitled
The Indignation of National Humiliation
was published in 1990, the first in a series of new textbooks that aimed to provide the patriotic lessons Deng thought China’s youth needed. The 1998 text
Never Forget National Humiliation
set as its goal the rejuvenation of a Chinese nation that would “rise again to be an awesome and gracious great power like in the past that will stand lofty and firm in the Eastern part of the World.” Another school textbook implored its student readers: “In modern Chinese history since the Opium War, foreign powers have launched invasion after invasion, act after bloody act of coercive pillage, occupying Chinese sovereign territory, slaughtering the Chinese masses, looting China’s wealth, and stealing China’s cultural artefacts. All this stained China with blood and tears.” Jiang Zemin ordered that the curriculum start in kindergarten.