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I am currently about a 1/3rd of the way though this and so far it is excellent. It takes the Opium War and shows how that event has shaped the West's understanding of China, especially Imperial China, and China's conception of its own history and its relationship with the West. As for the war itself, So far, the book is taking a very careful and nuanced approach to the war, which I definitely appreciate. It is not Britain evil China good or an British apologist rag. It tries to really explain how things happened.
For example, it was during the period surrounding the Opium Wars that the West's opinion of China changed to a vast, homogenuous, insular and static despotic state. Basically, the sick man of the East. China's rejection of free-trade was deemed archaic and backward, its insistence on pomp and ritual affronted British honor because it put Britain in a subordinate position, its destruction of private property was also an affront to British honor, and because of all these things Britain was justified in imposing their will on the Chinese state through military force.
In short, the British wanted everything in China to be exactly as they liked. While the Qing state, not surprisngly, disagreed.
The problem with that conception of the Qing state is that it is quite untrue, and I think that conception of Imperial China, and possibly even China today has stuck with us.
Perhaps even British detractors would have changed their minds, if they had taken the trouble to look at a map, or study a little history. Far from a community turned in on itself, Qing China was a vast, multi-ethnic jigsaw of lands and peoples. British opinion- and policy-makers of the 1830s made the mistake of – or deliberately deceived themselves into – simplifying the territory they called China into a complacent unity: an obstinate duelling partner from whom satisfaction must be extracted. It was nothing of the sort. This was an empire that could not even agree upon a single word for itself – changing shape and name according to whichever dynastic house happened to have acquired it.
Before the nineteenth-century closing of the Western mind on China, a visitor touring the palaces of the Qing dynasty would have found it hard to fathom the self-identity of its ruling house.
The rest of this paragraph goes on to talk about various structures and buildings owned by the imperial family and its wide range of styles and influences, from Chinese, Manchu, European, to Tibetan, etc.
The story of the Qing is of a great colonial enterprise, in which a Manchurian conquest minority somehow kept in check for over two and a half centuries a great patchwork of other ethnic groups: Chinese, Mongolians, Tibetans.
In old age, Qianlong styled himself the ‘Old Man of the Ten Utter Victories’, generating some 1,500 poems and essays commemorating his wars, to be scratched (in the several languages incorporated into the Qing conquest – Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Arabi, Uighur) onto hundreds of monumental war memorials littered across the empire.
In 1670, therefore, the warlike Kangxi emperor had reinvented himself as a hearth-and-home Confucian, indoctrinating his millions of new subjects in the philosopher’s submissive virtues of obedience, loyalty, thrift and hard work.
When it came to governing the peoples of Inner Asia, Qing rulers reinvented themselves, in turn, as the descendants of Genghis Khan, as patrons of Tibetan Lamaism, as secretive earthly mediators with the Buddhist spirit guide of the dead – all in the interests of wielding spiritual (and therefore political) power over Tibet and Mongolia. Qianlong advertised himself not only as the Confucian Son of Heaven and the Khan of Khans, but also as the messianic ‘wheel-turning king’ (cakravartin) of Tibetan Buddhist scripture, whose virtuous conquests were rolling the world on towards salvation..
Does this really sound like an insular, homogeneous kingdom to anyone?
As for the famous Macartney Embassy:
But Qianlong wanted little to do with George III’s demands for free-trading rights in China and for a permanent British embassy in Beijing. ‘We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures’, Qianlong explained in his official response to the British king – a communication that has subsequently become shorthand for Qing China’s delusions of supremacy over the rest of the globe.14 China, Macartney concluded, was ‘an old crazy first rate man-of-war’ fated to be ‘dashed to pieces on the shore’.15 Macartney’s failure – disseminated soon after his return in the published diary of his travels, and in the peevish travel memoirs of his entourage – edged British public opinion on China closer towards the shorter-tempered nineteenth-century vision of an arrogant, ritual-obsessed empire that had to be blasted ‘with a couple of frigates’ into the modern, civilized world of free trade.16
Again, however, the Qing world would probably not have recognized itself in Britain’s caricature. Far from self-sufficient, Qing China was fully – vulnerably – dependent on international commerce to bring in the essentials of existence: rice, pepper, sugar, copper and wood from south-east Asia, Taiwan, Japan and Korea; and New World silver to pay its taxes, and therefore government and armies.17 Early nineteenth-century European travellers around China’s fringes reported the population’s eagerness for trade and for foreign goods – wool, opium, even Bible tracts. Neither did Chinese merchants wait passively for useful items to come their way from abroad. Instead, China’s booming population spilled across the seas in search of business and labouring opportunities (boatbuilding, sawmilling, mining, pawnbroking, hauling), mostly in south-east Asia, Ceylon or Africa; a handful (of barbers, scholars, Christian converts) straggled out as far as France, Italy, Portugal, Mexico. Only a state of emergency would persuade the authorities to shut down maritime trade. During the war to recover Taiwan from Ming loyalists in 1661, Kangxi shifted coastal populations twenty miles inland, to starve out the island; the ban was promptly rescinded in 1684, once the breakaway regime had been ousted. A 1740 Dutch massacre in Batavia of more than 10,000 Chinese residents did not offer sufficient cause to ban trade – and neither, for long, did the outbreak of the Opium War.
So if the British simply wanted to trade, Qianlong pointed out in his reply to George III, they already could do so, down at Canton – which many of them quite contentedly were doing.
It was true, nonetheless, that the Qing state was far more devoted to regulating the European than it was the Asian junk trade. And a discontented British minority concluded from the limits imposed on them a general principle of Qing xenophobia. More careful consideration of the matter would have revealed a political design behind the entire scheme. European sailors of the two centuries before Macartney’s arrival had not been on their best behaviour when approaching the Chinese coast. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to make a concerted effort to penetrate mainland China under the Ming dynasty, had barged undiplomatically up to Canton – building a fort, buying Chinese children, trading at will. The first British merchant to introduce himself memorably to the Chinese authorities was one Captain John Weddell who, in 1637, similarly forced his way up to Canton aspiring to ‘do all the spoils . . . [he] could unto the Chinois.’20
While deliberating on how to handle the Macartney embassy, the Qing court pondered accounts of the British absorption of India. ‘Among the western ocean states, England ranks foremost in strength’, Qianlong secretly communicated to his Grand Minister. ‘It is said that the English have robbed and exploited the merchant ships of the other western ocean states so that the foreigners along the western ocean are terrified of their brutality.’21 The British, the emperor observed, were ever-ready to take advantage of slack military discipline on the coast. The accuracy of Qianlong’s assessment of British ambitions in Asia would be borne out by the events of 1839–42 and beyond.
I think this paragraph is really interested. It gives clear evidence that the Qing court knew what Britain was doing in India, knew that they were subjugating it through force and robbing them of wealth. Their experience with other European merchants did not put them in a good light either, so is it any surprise that China regulated the trade? That they were far more regulated than the Asian trade (which was basically free-trade)? They were legitimately concerned about their security and were obviously keyed into what Britain was doing at the time and keyed into foreign affairs. Hardly the mark of a insular, arrogant and dismissive country. They wanted to regulate and keep tabs on the British for their own security based on their actions in the pacific and their relations with them as merchants and diplomats.
I think this next paragraph will explain why the Qianlong Emperor made that famous remark:
Qianlong’s lofty public denial of interest in ingenious foreign articles (belied by his French, Tibetan and Mongol residences, by his profusion of exquisite European ‘spheres, orreries, clocks and musical automatons’ that, Macartney noted, made the British gifts ‘shrink from the comparison’
is perhaps best understood as part of a careful strategy of imperialist control. The emperor was informing a potential rival of his determination to define and monitor his empire’s need for ideas and objects.23 His rhetoric suggests an insular overconfidence in his empire’s possessions and achievements. His contrasting actions – his collections of exotic artefacts and religions, his expansionist campaigns – reveal an aggressive interest in the outside world.
The Qing appetite for foreign languages, objects and ideas grew directly out of the preoccupation with security that nineteenth-century European accounts read as xenophobia. Emperors made excellent diplomatic use of their own cosmopolitanism: ‘when the rota of Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans come every year to the capital for audience,’ proclaimed the sexalingual Qianlong emperor, ‘I use their own languages and do not rely on an interpreter . . . to conquer them by kindness.’24 They used Manchu to correspond secretly with distant officers in the field, outside Chinese lines of communication. Well aware of the political uses of multilingualism, the Qing did its best to prevent non-resident Europeans from acquiring Chinese and Manchu, and therefore the means to communicate independently with the native population:
So, Qianlong was basically speaking tough, acting powerful and the like, but people easily accepted this at face-value, even though mounds of evidence spoke to the contrary, because it fit the new view of China, a view that would allow Britain to 'legitimately' make war on China.
n short, the British made an error of judgement in assessing their first, influential encounter with high Qing diplomacy in 1793, allowing the ceremonial facade of the tribute system to obscure the pragmatic reality of Qing foreign policy. According to the tributary ideal, no ruler of China ever needed to lift a finger against its neighbours as – mesmerized by the glitter of Confucian civilization – all would voluntarily prostrate themselves before the Son of Heaven. The great military enterprises of the Qing dynasty tell a different story: this was an ambitious conquest backed by all available technical or political means – Central Asian, Confucian, Tibetan, European – of securing the resulting empire. As a result, by the start of the nineteenth century, it becomes remarkably difficult to define what European observers so confidently called China. What we have instead is a cross-bred state, held together by coercive cosmopolitanism: by a sense of unbounded entitlement to rule and control, justified by the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, the Manchu Way, Tibetan spirituality and European firepower. The great Qing emperors tried to be all things to all their people: great conquerors, preaching the superiority of their ethnic heritage; learned Confucian poets, scholars, receivers of tributaries; Buddhist messiahs. While the foundation stones of the empire – the economy and the army – were prospering, success seems to have kept this multi-ethnic balancing act in place. But once these same things sank into decline at the close of the eighteenth century, the whole edifice of empire began to shake.
I know I said that the China also uses the Opium Wars to define its history and its relationship with the West, but I think I will wait on that since this post is getting mighty long and I am sure the book will talk about that in more detail later.
I just really found it fascinating that our whole conception of Imperial China changed because of this quite justifiable trade policy by the QIng. Suddenly, they were backwards, archaic and static instead of fascinating, sophisticated, etc (which is what we thought of China in the Enlightenment), and that negative view just kinda snowballed due to the Opium War, China's serious troubles in the 19th century, and its military weakness. And I think that conception of China, at least its Imperial history (or at the very least the Qing dynasty), has stuck with us today.
