China’s Imperial Government had ruled by prestige which defeat by the barbarians gravely undermined. In the years following the First Opium War disasters multiplied, taxes were increased upon the peasantry, corruption in the governing mandarinate became systematic, respect for authority declined, power decentralized, banditry flourished, sovereignty rotted at the center. In 1850 all these decays and discontents coalesced in a great popular uprising known as the Taiping Rebellion which was to last 15 years and cost 20 million lives before it was over. Drawing strength from the oppressed, the Taipings succeeded in establishing a rival capital at Nanking. The recurring moment seemed at hand when the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn from a dynasty proven unworthy. But the foreigners, in order to ensure the privileges they had exacted by treaty, shored up the Government. With their aid Nanking was retaken to the accompanying massacre of 100,000 Taipings. China’s failed French Revolution was suppressed.
Preserved by foreign help, China’s Bourbons thereafter began to lean upon their encroachers. One form that dependence took was in the vital area of revenue. During the chaos of the revolution the British and the Americans had taken over the collection of customs dues on behalf of the Government, and as a result of greater efficiency and less graft, Peking enjoyed a larger income from this source than ever before. The system was extended by agreement to all Treaty Ports and put on a permanent footing with a foreign staff under a British Inspector General.
Many Chinese were coming to believe that their country, while remaining true to its own concepts, must arm itself with Western techniques if it was to cope with the Western threat. It must reform or perish. Western methods appeared as something that could be picked out of context and borrowed for limited use. Leaders of this “self-strengthening” movement managed to introduce Western training programs for the Army and Navy, arsenals for Western weapons and, against the bitter resistance of the conservatives, a college in Peking for the study of Western subjects to supplement the ritual learning of the classics which was the substance of Chinese education. As the first essential for a country largely dependent on wheelbarrows for land transport, they advocated railroads as well as telegraph lines, factories, machines, a postal system and above all a modern school system. But reactionary objection was strong, and lacking a mover of vigorous conviction like the current Emperor Meiji in Japan, the program of modernization had no engine and developed no power of its own. The Imperial circle, personified in the narrow mind and majestic presence of the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, was able to deflect the efforts of the reformers.
Her Government rested on a medieval-minded princely clique and on a mandarinate grown slack and inefficient. Energy for change was in the foreigner. Railroads were the channel of penetration for foreign capital and influence. The Government sold concessions for the railroads to the foreign powers, who scrambled for them. Foreign advisers were increasingly employed; missionaries proliferated, asserting by their presence China’s need for salvation; foreign cotton and other products were imported, causing the decline of cottage industry. China’s resentment increased in proportion to her dependence and expressed itself in “incidents,” each ending helplessly in another “unequal” treaty, another round of sovereignty sliced off, another toe of extrality*1 inserted, another Treaty Port door wedged open by a foreign foot. Foreigners developed China’s resources but sapped her will and capacity to use them.
Western imperialism reached its rampant age in the 1880s. The Manchu Empire, fighting bitterly but ineffectively, lost two tributaries to the West in 1885—Tonkin and Annam to France, and north Burma to Britain—plus ten more Treaty Ports to Britain in the same year. A third tributary was lost within the decade to another species of barbarian, near neighbors whom the Chinese customarily referred to as the “dwarf slaves” or “dwarf bandits.” In 1895 Japan suddenly stood up in new strength and, easily victorious in war with China, forced her to release Korea (under the euphemism of “independence”), as well as Formosa, the Pescadores, a large indemnity and—severest loss of all—the strategic Liaotung peninsula on the mainland. This was the door to Manchuria and the control point of the seaward approach to north China.
Startled at this rival apparition, the European powers, urged on by Russia who wanted no one else in Manchuria, hurriedly combined to make Japan disgorge Liaotung, and then separately rushed in to exact from a China still quivering in defeat various leaseholds, concessions and special privileges for themselves. Russia moved in where Japan had been pushed out and took leasehold of the tip of Liaotung where she built herself a naval base at Port Arthur and a commercial port and railway terminus at Dairen. Across from Port Arthur Britain took Weihai-wei on the Shantung peninsula, giving herself a naval base in the north. Germany acquired a naval base and railway terminus at Tsingtao on the underside of the Shantung peninsula facing the Yellow Sea, plus mining concessions. In the south Britain took Kowloon on the mainland opposite Hong Kong and France acquired her naval base at Kwangchow Bay on the coast adjoining Indochina and also the concession to build a railway leading from Indochina into Yunnan in south China.
Next they all quarreled over shares in the foreign loans through which China was to pay the Japanese indemnity. Loans were the favored form of penetration after railroads. Competition sharpened greed and the powers settled down to staking out “spheres of interest” where each secured a recognized prior right to develop resources and a foothold for future annexation should China ever be partitioned. As the predatory spirit sharpened, talk of the partition of China was increasingly heard, causing an agony of concern to the United States, caught between hunger and principle.
America in the flush of post-Civil War boom had joined in the exploitation of China without compromising her scruples against taking territory. In 1898 this combination of profit and principle was elevated to a doctrine of foreign policy by John Hay. Called the Open Door (though not by him), it managed to sound generous, high-minded and somehow protective of China while meaning, if anything at all, that the door for penetration should be opened equally to everybody.
American infiltration of China by this time was a two-pronged affair of business and the gospel. Agents of Standard Oil purveying kerosene for every household lamp in China may have found more receptive customers, but the missionaries were to leave a greater mark on relations between the two countries.
China’s vastness excited the missionary impulse; it appeared as the land of the future whose masses, when converted, offered promise of Christian and even English-speaking dominion of the world. Disregarding the social and ethical structure which the Chinese found suitable, the missionaries wanted them to change to one in which the individual was sacred and the democratic principle dominant, whether or not these concepts were relevant to China’s way of life. Inevitably the missionary, witnessing China’s agonies in the nineteenth century, took these as evidence that China could not rule herself and that her problems could only be solved by foreign help. Zealous and ubiquitous, American missionaries took “America Assists the East” as their mandate and made it the refrain of their reports to the congregations at home. As they were personally dependent on the home constituencies for financial support, they had to be convincing in arguing the cause to be worthwhile. Congregations all over the United States listened to the returned missionary with his lantern slides tell of the deserving qualities of the Chinese people and of the great reservoir of future Christians. Along with the public impression that America had saved China’s integrity by the doctrine of the Open Door, missionary propaganda helped to create the image of China as protégé, an image which carries an accompanying sense of obligation toward the object of one’s own beneficence.
For a brief hopeful hour in 1898 China grasped for modernity. Following the defeat by Japan, the shock of the despised neighbor’s transformation into a modern military power had revived the Chinese reform party which, with the support of the young Emperor Kuang Hsu, proposed a large program of modernization including development of
transport and industry, establishment of schools and newspapers, civil service reform and, most drastic of all, abolition of the old examination system based on calligraphy and the Confucian essays. The Emperor issued the necessary decrees, the old shell cracked and for a hundred days a new China struggled to be born. But the old clique controlled the strongest armed force. In a sweeping coup the Empress Dowager arrested the reform leaders, executed six of them, imprisoned her nephew in an island palace on a lake of the Forbidden City and reseated herself on his throne. A painted, brocaded despot amid her eunuchs, she presided over the final sinking years of the Manchu dynasty, lapped by approaching ruin.
Out of accumulated frustration and humiliation the great crisis of the Boxer Rebellion burst in 1899–1900. Xenophobia was the cry if not the entire cause. The instigators were a train of secret societies called “Harmonious Fists” (translated “Boxers” by foreign newsmen) led by fanatics who blamed all China’s ills on the foreigner and aroused the populace with incitements to massacre and promises of magic immunity to bullets. They were the Chinese equivalent of America’s Know-Nothings in the 1850s. Not a true rebellion, the movement was a wild and murderous extravaganza that flamed in the north and claimed to fight not against the Manchus but in the name of Empire and Dynasty. It rested in fact on support by the Government which saw in the Boxers both an opportunity to divert popular discontent upon a scapegoat and a last mad hope of sweeping out the foreigner altogether. In separate outbreaks through north China the Boxers murdered over 200 missionaries and their families plus 20,000 or more “secondary devils”—that is, Chinese converts—before converging upon Peking in a siege of the foreign Legations. Trembling with the gathered hate of 60 years, the court, though divided in counsel, declared war on the Western powers at last.
A foreign force made up of six national contingents fought its way through from the sea to rescue the besieged Legations. Afterwards in revenge for the Boxers’ attack, the rescuers burned and looted and killed in wanton punitive forays. “Every town, every village, every peasant’s hut in the path of the troops was first looted and then burned,” wrote an eyewitness, the veteran journalist, Thomas Millard. The path of the foreign contingents, he concluded, “will leave a taint in the moral atmosphere of the world for generations to come.” Inside Peking, according to the American Minister, foreign soldiers and civilians from general to private, from minister to attaché, from bishop to missionary, have “stolen, sacked, pillaged and generally disgraced themselves.” Terms imposed by the victors were harsh. Twelve powers signed the Protocol which pronounced China guilty of crimes “against civilization” and against the laws of nations. The Legation Quarter in the heart of Peking was yielded up to extrality under control of foreign garrisons. Importation of foreign arms was prohibited for two years and China’s forts from Peking to the coast were razed, with foreign troops given the right to keep the way to Peking open. A huge indemnity was levied with China’s customs revenue as security. Four Imperial officials were executed, others dismissed or permanently exiled.
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Foreign enterprise, however galling, dragged China into the twentieth century, developing her economy, awakening political consciousness and breaking down her seclusion. As the need to adapt to modernity became obvious, the desire to get rid of the Manchu incubus spread. The first secret society dedicated to the overthrow of the Manchus, the Hsing Chung Hui or “Revive China Society,” was organized in 1894 by a twenty-eight-year-old Western-educated Christian, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. A native of Canton, the area longest open to Western influences, he had received Western schooling in Honolulu and Western medical training in Hong Kong. His followers were part of the movement toward modernity that was surfacing in many forms—in daring students who cut off their queues, a symbol of submission to the Manchus, and in a literary renaissance that was breaking the rigid mold of the classics. Even the mandarinate, not all of whom were diehards, began to move and in 1904 established the first national public schools. In September 1905, by Imperial edict, the classical examination system in force since the first century B.C., the Great Wall of the country’s culture, was abolished. The Manchu court, willing to adopt a new facade in order to preserve the power of the throne, promised a constitution in five years and elected assemblies after a suitable period to allow for education of the people. Western subjects were introduced into the school curriculum and missionary schools expanded as sources of the new learning. Progressive Chinese, like the Japanese, were attracted to Western methods because they saw in them the means of meeting the Western challenge.
Japan’s startling success in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 gave impetus to the “self-strengtheners.” The Japanese example appeared as something to emulate. Students seeking a higher education in tune with modern times went to Tokyo. A powerful impulse to nationalism was given by the United States Exclusion Act of 1904. Brought on by heated agitation against cheap “coolie labor” imported to lay the transcontinental railroads, the act ordained specific and permanent exclusion of Chinese workers, but not other classes. Resentment in China burst into a boycott of American goods in 1905 which spread to 25 cities from Peking to Canton and merged with revolutionary sentiment against the Manchus. Now the enemies were combined; usurper and foreigner together would be swept away in a general overturn of all that bound China down. The boycott did not, however, extend to Western ideas; modern-minded Chinese continued to regard Westernization as the necessary vehicle of change.
The returned students from the United States and Europe, with their degrees in engineering or agriculture or political science, their Western clothes and eyeglasses and earnest look, formed a new class as distinct in spirit from the silk-gowned mandarin with the button of rank on his skullcap and long mustache hanging to his chest as they were in appearance.
America at this time, newly directed toward Asia by the recent acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines, was dazzled by the vision of the opportunities for her enterprise and outlets for her commerce in the Far East. China seemed the area of America’s future and took on vast importance. John Hay was credited with having said that whoever understands China holds the key to the world’s politics for the next five centuries. “Our future history,” declared President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, “will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe.” In 1908 he remitted America’s share of the Boxer indemnity, the unpaid portion to be allocated for the education of Chinese students in the United States. As a visible gesture this was an act of advertising genius which for long afterwards was to be cited by Americans and Chinese as the sign of a special relationship between their countries.
American dollar diplomacy, less altruistic, shared with other powers in the frenzied activity to force loans on China for construction of railroads at highly profitable interest rates. Wherever a Chinese looked, some part of his country’s body or sovereignty or essential services was in the hands of foreigners. Their steam vessels navigated her inland waterways under treaty rights. Their banks financed her industry and trade and controlled both the proceeds of her Maritime Customs and the interest payments on her foreign debts. They also provided a trusted place for the deposits of her wealthy citizens. Foreign courts administered extraterritorial law and foreign post offices distributed extraterritorial mail. In the foreign settlements of Shanghai a Chinese resident paid taxes but could not vote or enter certain of the public parks although he could be arrested by a foreign policeman.
In the Treaty Ports, many located in the interior on rivers, the foreign Customs Officer in uniform was a familiar presence and an extraterritorial area was set aside for foreign business and residence. In the Chinese section all was bustle, crowds, smells and the incessant din of voices calling, quarreling and laughing. Steamboats jostled junks and sampans at the wharves where boatmen yelled and passengers picked their way between bales of cargo. Streets were filled with outdoor vendors, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, sedan chairs
of the rich surrounded by bodyguards shouting for passage, coolies with twin loads bobbing from bamboo shoulder poles, thin dogs prowling underfoot for scraps and men squatting over open drains.
All this stopped at the canal crossed by a bridge. On the other side everything was suddenly quiet and clean, with neat streets lined by shade trees, a guard in a white uniform dozing in a chair and a little white gunboat with shiny brasswork anchored off the Bund. Outside the settlement a recreation ground usually called Victoria Park provided tennis courts, cricket field and clubs. In any club controlled by the British, as were most of them, no Chinese were admitted. Every afternoon the Concession’s elite rode out to the park in sedan chairs whose Chinese bearers wore the various uniforms of the consulates and mercantile companies—red facings on white for the British Consul, white on blue for Jardine Matheson’s, the great British trading company. In case of riots, bandits or other threats, a small landing party of blue jackets from the gunboats made a show of drill on the Bund. For foreigners in the “outports”—these isolated enclaves in the vast uncertain mass of China—life would have been precarious without the migratory visits of the little gunboats with their birds’ names—Snipe, Teal, Sandpiper, Woodcock.
Stilwell and the American Experience in China Page 5
