On China (10 page)

In other words, China should offer concessions to all rapacious nations rather than let Britain exact them and benefit itself by offering to share the spoils with other countries. The mechanism for achieving this objective was the Most Favored Nation principle—that any privilege granted one power should be automatically extended to all others.
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Time is not neutral. The benefit of Wei Yuan’s subtle maneuvers would have to be measured by China’s ability to arm itself using “the superior techniques of the barbarians.” China, Wei Yuan advised, should “bring Western craftsmen to Canton” from France or the United States “to take charge of building ships and making arms.” Wei Yuan summed up the new strategy with the proposition that “before the peace settlement, it behooves us to use barbarians against barbarians. After the settlement, it is proper for us to learn their superior techniques in order to control them.”
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Though initially dismissive of calls for technological modernization, the Celestial Court did adopt the strategy of adhering to the letter of the Opium War treaties in order to establish a ceiling on Western demands. It would, a leading official later wrote, “act according to the treaties and not allow the foreigners to go even slightly beyond them”; thus Chinese officials should “be sincere and amicable but quietly try to keep them in line.”
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The Western treaty powers, of course, had no intention of being kept in line—and in the aftermath of the Qiying-Pottinger negotiations, a new gap in expectations began to appear. For the Chinese court, the treaties were a temporary concession to barbarian force, to be followed to the degree necessary but never voluntarily broadened. For the West, the treaties were the beginning of a long-term process by which China would be steadily drawn into Western norms of political and economic exchange. But what the West conceived of as a process of enlightenment was seen by some in China as a philosophical assault.

This is why the Chinese refused to submit to foreign demands to broaden the treaties to include free trade throughout China and permanent diplomatic representation in the Chinese capital. Beijing understood—despite its extremely limited knowledge about the West—that the combination of the foreigners’ superior force, unfettered foreign activity within China, and multiple Western missions in Beijing would seriously undermine the assumptions of the Chinese world order. Once China became a “normal” state, it would lose its historic unique moral authority; it would simply be another weak country beset by invaders. In this context, seemingly minor disputes over diplomatic and economic prerogatives turned into a major clash.

All of this took place against a backdrop of massive Chinese domestic upheaval, masked to a large degree by the imperturbable self-confidence projected by Chinese officials charged with managing contacts with foreigners—a trait unchanged in the modern period. Macartney had already remarked in 1793 on the uneasy accommodation between the Qing’s Manchu ruling class, Han Chinese bureaucratic elite, and mostly Han general population. “Scarcely a year now passes,” he noted, “without an insurrection in some of the provinces.”
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The dynasty’s Mandate of Heaven having been put into question, domestic opponents escalated the scope of their defiance. Their challenges were both religious and ethnic, providing the basis for conflicts of encompassing brutality. The far western reaches of the empire witnessed Muslim rebellions and the declaration of short-lived separatist khanates, suppressed only at a major financial and human cost. In central China, an uprising known as the Nian Rebellion drew considerable support from Han Chinese laboring classes and, beginning in 1851, conducted a nearly two-decades-long insurgency.

The most serious challenge came from the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), mounted by a Chinese Christian sect in the south. Missionaries had existed for centuries, though severely circumscribed. They began to enter the country in larger numbers after the Opium War. Led by a charismatic Chinese mystic claiming to be Jesus’s younger brother and an associate asserting telepathic powers, the Taiping Rebellion aimed to replace the Qing with a new “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace” ruled by its leaders’ bizarre interpretation of imported missionary texts. Taiping forces succeeded in wresting control of Nanjing and much of south and central China from the Qing, ruling in the mode of a nascent dynasty. Though little known in Western historiography, the conflict between the Taiping and the Qing ranks as one of history’s most devastating conflicts, with casualties estimated in the tens of millions. While no official figures exist, it is estimated that during the Taiping, Muslim, and Nian upheavals China’s population declined from roughly 410 million in 1850 to roughly 350 million in 1873.
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The Treaty of Nanjing and its French and American counterparts came up for renegotiation in the 1850s, while China was torn by these civil conflicts. The treaty powers insisted that their diplomats be permitted to reside year-round in the Chinese capital, signifying that they were not tributary envoys but the representatives of equal sovereign states. The Chinese deployed their wide array of delaying tactics with the added incentive that given the fate of preceding negotiators, no Qing official could possibly have wanted to concede the point of permanent diplomatic representation.

In 1856, an intrusive Chinese inspection of a British-registered Chinese ship, the
Arrow
, and the alleged desecration of its British flag, provided a pretext for the renewal of hostilities. As in the 1840 conflict, the casus belli was not entirely heroic (the ship’s registration, it was later discovered, had technically lapsed); but both sides understood that they were playing for higher stakes. With China’s defenses still in an inchoate state of development, British forces seized Guangzhou and the Dagu Forts in northern China, from which they could easily march on Beijing.

During the negotiations that followed, the gap in perceptions was as wide as ever. The British pressed on with missionary conviction, presenting their negotiating positions as a public service that would at last bring China up to speed with the modern world. Thus London’s assistant negotiator Horatio Lay summed up the prevailing Western view: “[D]iplomatic representation will be for your good as well as ours, as you will surely see. The medicine may be unpleasant but the aftereffects will be grand.”
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Qing authorities were not nearly so enthusiastic. They acceded to the treaty terms only after a flurry of anguished internal communications between the imperial court and its negotiator and another British threat to march on Beijing.
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The centerpiece of the resulting 1858 Treaty of Tianjin was the concession that London had sought in vain for over six decades—the right to a permanent embassy in Beijing. The treaty further permitted foreign travel on the Yangtze River, opened additional “treaty ports” to Western trade, and protected Chinese Christian converts and Western proselytizing in China (a prospect particularly difficult for the Qing given the Taiping Rebellion). The French and Americans concluded their own treaties on similar terms under their Most Favored Nation clauses.

The treaty powers now applied their attention to establishing resident embassies in a clearly unwelcoming capital. In May 1859, Britain’s new envoy, Frederick Bruce, arrived in China to exchange ratifications of the treaty that would grant him the right to take up residence in Beijing. Finding the main river route to the capital blocked with chains and spikes, he ordered a contingent of British marines to clear the obstacles. But Chinese forces shocked Bruce’s party by opening fire from the newly fortified Dagu Forts. The ensuing battle resulted in 519 British troops killed and 456 wounded.
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It was the first Chinese victory in battle against modern Western forces, and shattered, at least temporarily, the image of Chinese military impotence. Yet it could only stall the British ambassador’s advance temporarily. Palmerston dispatched Lord Elgin to lead a joint British and French march on Beijing, with orders to occupy the capital and “bring the Emperor to reason.” As retaliation for the “Dagu Repulse” and a symbolic show of Western power, Elgin ordered the burning of the Emperor’s Summer Palace, destroying invaluable art treasures in the process—an act still resented in China a century and a half later.

China’s seventy-year campaign of resistance against Western norms of interstate relations had now reached undeniable crisis. Efforts at diplomatic delay had run their course; force had been met with superior force. Barbarian claims of sovereign equality, once dismissed in Beijing as risible, shaded into ominous demonstrations of military dominance. Foreign armies occupied China’s capital and enforced the Western interpretation of political equality and ambassadorial privileges.

At this point, another claimant to China’s patrimony stepped into the fray. By 1860, the Russians had been represented in Beijing for over 150 years—with an ecclesiastical mission, they were the only European country permitted to establish a residence. Russia’s interests had in some ways trailed those of the other European powers; it had gained all the benefits extended to the treaty powers without joining the British in the periodic exercises of force. On the other hand, Moscow’s overall objective went much further than religious proselytizing or commerce along the coast. It perceived in the Qing’s decline an opportunity to dismember the Chinese Empire and reattach its “outer dominions” to Russia. It set its sights in particular on the lightly administered and ambiguously demarcated expanses of Manchuria (the Manchu heartland in northeast China), Mongolia (the then quasi-autonomous tribal steppe at China’s north), and Xinjiang (the expanse of mountains and deserts in the far west, then populated mostly by Muslim peoples). To that end, Russia had moved gradually and deliberately to expand its presence along these inland frontiers, poaching the loyalties of local princes through offers of rank and material benefit, underscored by a menacing cavalry.
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At the moment of China’s maximum peril Moscow surfaced as a colonial power, offering to mediate in the 1860 conflict—which was, in fact, a way of threatening to intervene. Artful—others might argue duplicitous—diplomacy was underpinned by the implicit threat of force. Count Nikolai Ignatieff, the Czar’s brilliant and devious young plenipotentiary in Beijing, managed to convince the Chinese court that only Russia could secure the evacuation of the Western occupying powers from the Chinese capital, and to convince the Western powers that only Russia could secure Chinese compliance with the treaties. Having facilitated the Anglo-French march on Beijing with detailed maps and intelligence, Ignatieff turned and convinced the occupying forces that with the approaching winter the Beihe, the river route in and out of Beijing, would freeze, leaving them surrounded by hostile Chinese mobs.
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For these services Moscow exacted a staggering territorial price: a broad swath of territory in so-called Outer Manchuria along the Pacific coast, including the port city now called Vladivostok.
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In a stroke, Russia had gained a major new naval base, a foothold in the Sea of Japan, and 350,000 square miles of territory once considered Chinese.

Ignatieff also negotiated a provision opening Urga (now Ulan Bator) in Mongolia and the far western city of Kashgar to Russian trade and consulates. To compound the humiliation, Elgin secured for Britain an expansion of its Hong Kong colony into the adjacent territory of Kowloon. China had enlisted Russia to forestall what it believed to be a further assault by the treaty powers dominating China’s capital and its coast; but in an era of Chinese weakness, “using barbarians against barbarians” was not without its costs.

China had not survived for four thousand years as a unique civilization and for two millennia as a united state by remaining passive to near-rampant foreign intrusions. For all that period, conquerors had been obliged either to adopt Chinese culture or to be gradually engulfed by their subjects, who masked their practicality by patience. Another such period of trial was at hand.

In the aftermath of the 1860 conflict, the Emperor and the court faction that had urged resistance to the British mission fled the capital. Prince Gong, the Emperor’s half brother, assumed the role of de facto head of government. Having negotiated the conclusion of hostilities, Prince Gong summed up, in a memorial to the Emperor in 1861, the appalling strategic choices:

It was the classic dilemma of the defeated: can a society maintain its cohesion while seeming to adapt to the conqueror—and how to build up the capacity to reverse the unfavorable balance of forces? Prince Gong invoked an ancient Chinese saying: “Resort to peace and friendship when temporarily obliged to do so; use war and defense as your actual policy.”
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Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao. The Gong memorial demonstrated great geopolitical acumen in its assessment of the kind of threat represented by the various invaders. Despite the imminent and actual threat from Britain, the Gong memorial put Britain last in the order of the long-range danger to the cohesion of the Chinese state and Russia first: