Now began the siege. The Brazilian commander wrote his Paraguayan counterpart, General Alen, to offer him a huge bribe (2.5 million gold pesos) and assurances of rank and command in the allied army if he delivered the fortress. Alen’s answer deserves to be recalled: “General,” he said, “I don’t have that kind of money to give you, but if you surrender your squadron, I’ll give you the Imperial Crown of Brazil.” So the allies kept shelling and shooting, and the fortress was reduced to rubble. Alen sent news of his losses and imminent collapse to the marshal-president, but Lopez ordered him to continue resistance. Alen tried, failed, abandoned hope, and shot himself in the head. It was the easiest way to go. Eventually Lopez allowed the garrison to abandon the camp: 2,500 skeletal survivors who had to surrender a few days later when surrounded by four times their number. Furious, Lopez had the wife of Alen’s successor arrested and put in chains. Who knows? Maybe she had urged her husband to quit. Lopez tortured and flogged her for a week, and when convinced that she could feel no more, had her shot.
In the end, ferocity and courage—the Paraguayan women fought as hard as the men—could not stand up to superior numbers and better materiel: white arms and muskets vs. rifled cannon and Gatling guns. Lopez led a small, scantily armed force of survivors into a swampy corner of the country. Ammunition was so scarce that executions, still free and easy, had to be done by steel. When the Paraguayans ran out of shells, they fired stones and broken glass. Lopez himself fought to the death—his death, that of his oldest son, and by this time that of the great majority of the Paraguayan male population—an overall loss (both sexes) of about 70 percent.41 “Muero con mi patria!” Almost every Paraguayan is said to know that cry by heart. But the key word is the preposition con: I die with my country.
To celebrate their victory, the Brazilians organized at Rio one of the most extravagant concerts in history: eighteen pianos, an orchestra of six hundred fifty musicians, an infantry battalion under arms, and two field guns.42
Paraguay was a small country, and the madness of its rulers was paid for by hundreds of thousands of dead and many decades of impoverishment. The next century would see bigger fools and villains and far more numerous victims.
21
Celestial Empire: Stasis and Retreat
Now England is paying homage.
My Ancestors’ merit and virtue must have reached their distant shores.
Though their tribute is commonplace, my heart approves sincerely.
Curios and the boasted ingenuity of their devices I prize not.
Though what they bring is meager, yet,
In my kindness to men from afar I make generous return,
Wanting to preserve my good health and power.
—Poem by the Qienlong emperor on the occasion of the Macartney embassy (1793)
Those sixteenth-century Europeans who sailed into the Indian Ocean and made their way to China met an unaccustomed shock of alien condescension. The Celestial Empire—the name tells everything—saw itself as the world’s premier political entity: first in size and population, first in age and experience, untouchable in its cultural achievement and sense of moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiority.
The Chinese lived, they thought, at the center of the universe. Around them, lesser breeds drew on their glow, reached out to them for light, gained stature by doing obeisance and offering tribute. The Chinese emperor was the “Son of Heaven,” unique, godlike representative of celestial power. Those few who entered his presence showed their awe by kowtowing—kneeling and touching their head nine times to the ground. Others kowtowed to anything emanating from him—a letter, a single handwritten ideograph. The paper he wrote on, the clothes he wore, everything he touched partook of his divine essence.* Those who represented the emperor and administered for him were chosen by competitive examination in Confucian letters and morals. These mandarin officials embodied the higher Chinese culture—its prestige, its wholeness and sublimity. Their self-esteem and haughtiness had ample room for expression and exercise on their inferiors, and were matched only by their “stunned submissiveness” and self-abasement to superiors.1 Nothing conveyed so well their rivalry in humility as the morning audience, when hundreds of courtiers gathered in the open from midnight on and stood about, in rain and cold and fair, to await the emperor’s arrival and perform their obeisance. They were not wasting time; their time was the emperor’s. No mandarin could afford to be late, and punctuality fell short: unpunctual earliness was proof of zeal.2
Such cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny made China a reluctant improver and a bad learner. Improvement would have challenged comfortable orthodoxies and entailed insubordination; the same for imported knowledge and ideas.3 In effect, what was there to learn? This rejection of the foreign was the more anxious for the very arrogance that justified it. That is the paradox of the superiority complex: it is intrinsically insecure and brittle. Those who cherish it need it and fear nothing so much as contradiction. (The French today so trumpet the superiority of their language that they tremble at the prospect of a borrowed word, especially if it comes from English.)* So Ming China—convinced of its ascendancy—quaked before the challenge of Western technology, which was there for the learning.
Ironically, those first Portuguese visitors and Catholic missionaries used the wonders of Western technology to charm their way into China. The mechanical clock was the key that unlocked the gates. This, we saw, was a European mega-invention of the late thirteenth century, crucial for its contribution to discipline and productivity, but also for its susceptibility of improvement and its role at the frontier of instrumentation and mechanical technique. The water clock is a dunce by comparison.
For China’s sixteenth-century officials, the mechanical clock came as a wonder machine that not only kept time but amused and entertained. Some clocks played music; others, automata, featured figurines that moved rhythmically at intervals. Clocks, then, were the sort of thing the emperor would want to see and enjoy, that had to be shown him if only to earn his favor, that a zealous courtier had to show him be fore someone else did. Not easy. This magical device had to be accompanied. Chinese instinct and practice dictated that foreigners be kept at a distance, confined to some peripheral point like Macao and rarely allowed to proceed to the center. The sixteenth-century clock, however, needed its attendant clockmaker.
No question that Chinese loved clocks and watches. They were less happy, though, with their European attendants. The problem here was the Chinese sense of the wholeness of culture, the link between things, people, and the divine. The Catholic priests who brought them these machines were salesmen of a special kind. They sought to convert the Chinese to the one true trinitarian God of the Roman Church, and the clocks served a twofold purpose: entry ticket and argument for Christian superiority. Those who could make these things, who possessed special astronomical and geographical knowledge into the bargain, were they not superior in the largest moral sense? Was not their faith truer, wiser?
The Jesuits came prepared to make this argument, stretching the while the rules and rites of the Church to fit the moment. (The Chinese ideographs for ancestor worship, for example, became the signifiers for the Christian mass.) European laymen followed suit. Here is Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, co-inventor of the calculus and philosopher:
What will these peoples say [the Persians, the Chinese], when they see this marvelous machine that you have made, which represents the true state of the heavens at any given time? I believe that they will recognize that the mind of man has something of the divine, and that this divinity communicates itself especially to Christians. The secret of the heavens, the greatness of the earth, and time measurement are the sort of thing I mean.4
On occasion, this argument carried. Catholic missionaries had some small success, although they had trouble persuading their open-minded “converts” to be good exclusivists (no other faith but the “true” faith) in the European tradition. But most Chinese saw these pret
ensions for what they were: an attack on Chinese claims to moral superiority, an assault on China’s self-esteem.
The response, then, had to be a repudiation or depreciation of Western science and technology.5 Here is the K’ang Hsi emperor, the most open-minded and curious of men in his pursuit of Western ways, the most zealous in teaching them: “…even though some of the Western methods are different from our own, and may even be an improvement, there is little about them that is new. The principles of mathematics all derive from the Book of Changes, and the Western methods are Chinese in origin….”6
LATE MING AND EARLY Q’ING CHINA, SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. The “willow palisade” surrounded the area of Chinese settlement in Liao-tung and cut it off from the rest of Manchuria.
So ran the heart-warming myth. So the Chinese, who would not give up clocks, who wanted clocks, trivialized them as toys, which for many they were; or as nonfunctional symbols of status, inaccessible to hoi polloi. Premodern imperial China did not think of time knowledge as a right. Time belonged to the authorities, who sounded (proclaimed) the hour, and a personal timepiece was a rare privilege. As a result, although the imperial court set up workshops to make clocks and got their Jesuit clockmakers to train some native talent, these Chinese makers never matched Western horologists—for want of the best teachers and lack of commercial competition and emulation. Imperial China never had a clockmaking trade like Europe’s.
The same sin of pride (or indifference) shaped China’s response to European armament. Here we have anything but a toy. Cannon and muskets were instruments of death, hence of power. The Chinese had every reason to desire these artifacts, for the seventeenth century saw the Ming dynasty fighting to survive and losing to Tartars from the north. In these decades of war, European inventions might have tilted the balance of power.
And yet the Chinese never learned to make modern guns. Worse yet, having known and used cannon as early as the thirteenth century, they had let knowledge and skill slip away. Their city walls and gates had emplacements for cannon, but no cannon. Who needed them? No enemy of China had them.* But China did have enemies, without and within. No European nation would have been deterred from armament by enemy weakness; when it came to death, Europeans maximized. European technology was also incremental: each gain led to further gain. The Chinese record of step-forward, step-back, signaled an entirely different process.†
So it was that in 1621, when the Portuguese in Macao offered four cannon to the emperor by way of gaining favor, they had to send four cannoneers along with them. In 1630, the Chinese hired a detachment of Portuguese musketeers and artillerymen to fight for them, but gave up on the idea before they could put it into action. Probably a wise decision, because mercenaries have been the death or usurpation of more than one regime.* But the Mings did use some Portuguese as teachers, and later on they got their Jesuit theologian-mechanicians to build them a foundry and cast cannon.
These Jesuit cannon seem to have been among the best China had. Some still found use in the nineteenth century, two hundred fifty years later. Most Chinese guns saw short service, however, being notoriously unreliable, more dangerous to the men who fired them than to the enemy. (We even hear of Chinese cannonballs made of dried mud, but these at least allowed the force of the explosion to exit by the mouth of the tube.) In general, Chinese authorities frowned on the use of firearms, perhaps because they doubted the loyalty of their subjects. In view of the inefficacy of these weapons, one wonders what they had to fear. Presumably the improvement that comes with use.7
All of this may seem irrational to a means-ends oriented person, but it was not quite that; the ends were different. Europeans saw the purpose of war as to kill the enemy and win; the Chinese, strong in space and numbers, thought otherwise. Here is Mu Fu-sheng (a pseudonym) on the imperial viewpoint:
…military defeat was the technical reason why Western knowledge should be acquired, but it was also the psychological reason why it should not be. Instinctively the Chinese preferred admitting military defeat, which could be reversed, to entering a psychological crisis; people could stand humiliation but not self-debasement…. The mandarins sensed the threat to Chinese civilization irrespective of the economic and political issues and they tried to resist this threat without regard to the economic and political dangers. In the past the Chinese had never had to give up their cultural pride: the foreign rulers always adopted the Chinese civilization. Hence there was nothing in their history to guide them through their modern crisis.8
Along with indifference to technology went resistance to European science. Christian clerics brought in not only clocks but knowledge (sometimes obsolete knowledge) and ideas. Some of this interested the court: in particular, astronomy and techniques of celestial observation were valuable to a ruler who claimed a monopoly of the calendar and used his mastery of time to control society as a whole. The Jesuits, moreover, trained gifted students who went on to do their own work: mathematicians who learned to use logarithms and trigonometry; astronomers who prepared new star tables.
Little of this got beyond Peking (Beijing), however, and soon the new learning ran into a nativist reaction that reached back to long-forgotten work of earlier periods. One leader of this return to the sources (Wen-Ting, 1635-1721) examined mathematical texts of the Song dynasty (tenth to thirteenth centuries) and proclaimed that the Jesuits had brought in little that was new. Later on, his manuscripts were published by his grandson under the title Pearls Recovered from the Red River.9 The title was more eloquent than intended: by this time much Chinese scientific “inquiry” took the form of raking alluvial sediment.
Meanwhile European science marched ahead, and successive churchmen brought to China ever better knowledge (though still well behind the frontier). Here, however, constraints thwarted their mission. They had laid so much stress on the link between scientific knowledge and religious truth that any revision of the former implied a repudiation of the latter. How, then, deal with Europe’s constantly changing science? In 1710, a Jesuit astronomer sought to use new planetary tables based on the Copernican system. His superior would not permit it, for fear of “giving the impression of a censure on what our predecessors had so much trouble to establish and occasioning new accusations against [the Christian] religion.”10
This intellectual xenophobia did not apply to all Chinese. A few far-sighted officials and at least one emperor understood that the empire had much to gain by learning these new ways. Yet the curse of foreignness remained. In a letter of November 1640, the Jesuit von Bell wrote: “The word hsi [Western] is very unpopular, and the Emperor in his edicts never uses any word than hsin [new]; in fact the former word in used only by those who want to belittle us.”11
The would-be modernizers were thwarted, moreover, not only by brittle insecurities but also by the intrigue of a palace milieu where innovations were judged by their consequences for the pecking order. No proposal that did not incite resistance; no novelty that did not frighten vested interests. At all levels, moreover, fear of reprimand (or worse) outweighed the prospect of reward. A good idea brought credit to one’s superior; a mistake invariably meant blame for subordinates. It was easier to tell superiors what they wanted to hear.12
This prudent aversion to change struck generations of visitors. Listen to the Jesuit missionary Louis Le Comte (1655-1728): “They [the Chinese] are more fond of the most defective piece of antiquity than of the most perfect of the modern, differing much in that from us [Europeans], who are in love with nothing but what is new.”13 George Staunton, Lord Macartney’s secretary, disheartened by Chinese indifference to suggestions for improvement of their canals, lamented that “In this country they think that everything is excellent and that proposals for improvement would be superfluous if not blameworthy.” And a half century later a Christian friar, Evariste Hue, engaged in the sisyphean task of missionizing, despairingly observed: “Any man of genius is paralyzed immediately by the thought that his efforts will win him punishment ra
ther than rewards.”14
(Imperial China is not alone here. The smothering of incentive and the cultivation of mendacity are a characteristic weakness of large bureaucracies, whether public or private [business corporations]. Nominal colleagues, supposedly pulling together, are in fact adversarial players. They compete within the organization, not in a free market of ideas but in a closed world of guile and maneuver. The advantage lies with those in higher places.)
The rejection of foreign technology was the more serious because China itself had long slipped into technological and scientific torpor, coasting along on previous gains and losing speed as talent yielded to gentility. After all, China was its own world. Why did it not produce its own scientific and industrial revolutions? A thousand years ago, the Chinese were well ahead of anyone else—and certainly of Europe. Some would argue that this superiority held for centuries thereafter. Why, then, did China “fail”?
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 40
