China

by John Keay

  Meanwhile new industries were established – cotton-spinning and weaving in and around Suzhou, Hangzhou and up-and-coming Shanghai became as important as silk production – and the population went on growing. The statistics remain controversial. A figure of around 300 million by the year 1800, about twice that of all Europe at the time, is generally accepted, though what rate of growth this represents is uncertain. More people meant more productivity but also a greater demand for cultivable land. Swamps were laboriously drained, lake-beds reclaimed and hilly forests cleared and terraced for cultivation, all at growing cost to the environment, both natural and human. For now heavy rains leached and eroded the deforested hillsides, so adding to the downstream problems of siltation and flooding, while reducing the water-retentive properties of the upstream terrain. Though the state was better equipped to meet the needs of disaster victims, the incidence of local droughts and floods increased. Accessible timber became scarce. In the south, as long since in the north, coal began to replace wood as fuel; beams of iron or steel were increasingly used in construction. But the new lands were never enough and the pool of wage-earners always too many. Seasonal migrations and the pull of the cities wrenched ever more from their village roots. ‘Most evidence seems to suggest that the empire’s rapidly expanding population was geographically mobile on a scale . . . unprecedented in Chinese history.’8

  Since most of the new territories in the far north and west (‘Xinjiang’ translates as ‘new territories’) were as yet reserved for military settlement, were closed to Han migration and were separately administered as a Manchu-Mongol preserve, the obvious regions for agricultural expansion were in the south and south-west. Here, in the great arc of rugged and often wooded or mountainous country that stretched from western Guangdong right round to Sichuan, both Han and non-Han settlement made substantial progress. But it was preceded by ruthless campaigns against the indigenous non-Han peoples that rumbled on throughout the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns. The tusi (‘native officer’) system of indirect control once favoured by the Ming was largely superseded by standard administrative units; and amnesties, land grants and subsidies were offered as incentives to settlement. But non-Han chiefs were removed from their territories, and their clansmen – Zhuang, Miao, Yao, Lolo, etc. – were expected to adopt Chinese names, grow queues and submit to registration for the purposes of taxation, labour service and military recruitment. Of those who refused, some migrated south to Laos and Vietnam; others retreated farther and higher into the hills.

  No longer much of a threat, it was the latter’s fate to furnish the Manchu Qing, and later the (overwhelmingly Han) People’s Republic of China, with the material for catalogued inventories of the empire’s exoticised ethnic minorities, each with its colourful and carefully coded costumes, its musical and choreographic traditions, its professional specialisations, and its supposedly casual grasp of morality, especially female chastity. In another late-eighteenth-century collection of colossal scroll paintings, this time of Qing tributaries, one entire series of scrolls was devoted to ‘Minorities from Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi’. Each of the seventy-eight featured peoples was represented by a male and female of the species engaged in some characteristic activity. ‘A commentary in both Chinese and Manchu was written above each pair, describing them, their religion, national dress, customs, local products, the taxes and tribute they paid and their relationship with the Qing court.’9 Thus in China’s empire, as in other colonial empires, marginalised minorities were already being portrayed in a context calculated to advertise the distinction and the all-embracing dominion of the ruling power. Replicated in print and paraded on the podium, such attitudes to China’s ‘human sub-species’ would be adopted by later regimes, whether chauvinistically Nationalist, patronisingly Maoist or tourism-minded market-socialist.

  Despite the size, stability and apparent prosperity of their empire, the Qing remained uneasy rulers. Elsewhere in the world of the late eighteenth century self-evident truths and inalienable rights were being loudly asserted. Across the Atlantic ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’ vied with Liberté, Égalité , Fraternité in uniting peoples and galvanising governments. Social contracts and the rights of man were eating into privilege; votes had begun to count. China, by contrast, was still what Macartney called ‘a tyranny’. To a Qing emperor, consultation was optional, representation suspect, and any talk of accountability treason. Imperial pronouncements savoured heavily of indoctrination, and given the moral authority of the emperor, that was indeed their purpose.

  Theoretically, and to a wide extent in practice, all subjects of the empire were still enrolled in a system of ‘mutual security’ that was actually more about shared liability and mutual surveillance. Known under its Song dynasty variant of baojia, it grouped households into decimal units of a thousand (bao-) and a hundred (-jia), the latter being composed of ten groupings of ten households, and each unit having its own headman. Chosen by rotation, the headman was responsible for the good order and prompt compliance of his unit, rarely for the expression of its grievances; it was not a desirable post. The penal code made the headman and his unit liable not only for the conduct of its constituents but also for any crimes committed by them. Ideally the baojia grouping cut across the bonds of kinship, clan or professional association, and instilled a sense of equal and responsible participation in the machinery of government. But while in practice it might cement existing bonds, it did little to stem the exodus of the landless, and it often atrophied for want of support. Admirable as had been the attempts of the ‘Three Emperors’ to address the needs of their realm and placate their various constituents – Manchu, Mongol and Chinese – neither they nor their subjects had any concept of popular legitimacy. Government still relied on the penal code and the force of arms; Heaven’s judgement was the ultimate sanction, and the dynastic cycle the only guarantee of change.

  The regime at the height of its power revealed something of its paranoia in the Qianlong emperor’s ‘Four Treasuries’ – the second of the Qing’s monumental compendia and the one which, containing all that had ever been written in the way of literature, history and philosophy, was too vast ever to be published. For despite the project’s avowed purpose of rescuing and preserving for posterity the entire corpus of Chinese scholarship, it soon transpired that the great work was also expected to ‘serve some of the functions of a literary inquisition’. Compilation meant discovering and assembling all relevant extant works, weeding out and destroying any that slighted the Jurchen-Jin/Manchu-Qing or contained other unwelcome material, and punishing the individuals responsible for harbouring them. ‘So thorough was this campaign that over 2000 works that we know were scheduled for destruction by Qianlong’s cultural advisers have never been rediscovered.’10 The project attracted a host of underemployed and potentially disaffected degree-holders; editorial standards were high, and the classics and histories were subjected to some much-needed forensic philology; the Qianlong emperor, an indefatigable collector, connoisseur and practitioner of all the arts, took a genuine delight in the work. But in his censorship, as in institutions like the baojia and massive Qing building projects like the Jesuit-designed Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan), this last of the great emperors could not but remind anti-Manchu scholars of the dictatorial extravagance and heavy-handed legalism of the first great emperor, the book-burning Qin Shihuangdi.

  INSULTS AND OPIUM

  Like most dynasties, that of the Qing would succumb to internal disturbance, not foreign assault; and like the Tang dynasty after the An Lushan revolt, the Qing would stage a recovery from the great rebellions and foreign encroachments of the mid-nineteenth century to linger on into the twentieth century. But the foreign presence remained, undermining imperial authority, discrediting the Confucian ideology on which it was based, and inciting a tumult of protest. All dynasties were doomed; the Qing would have fallen without foreign intervention; indeed, it lingered as long as it did only because of foreign intervention. But
not perhaps the empire. While indigenous causes would topple the dynasty, it was extraneous forces which would cripple the empire.

  When in the late 1830s, forty years after Macartney’s mission, the hostilities known as the Opium War broke out, European shipping had been trading on the China coast for more than three hundred years. For most of that time the Portuguese enclave of Macao had afforded the foreigners a sanctuary and an agreeable home on Chinese soil. The volume of trade had steadily increased; and over time the main foreign participants had changed, as had the commodities most in demand. Guangzhou, the port nearest to Macao and that to which the trade had been restricted since the mid-1700s, had grown into a major financial and intellectual centre. Foreign merchants, minus wives, were allowed to reside there only during the trading season and were restricted to Shamian Island, today a leafy river frontage beneath the flyovers but then a mudbank lined with ‘colonial’ buildings flying the flags of their respective nations.

  There was nothing inherently destabilising about these commercial contacts between West and East. Geographically and ideologically they were peripheral to a still-agrarian empire beset by the problems of managing an explosive population while distributing and taxing the fruits of its labour. Overseas imports were advantageous to the economy, especially in respect of liquidity (silver) and some raw materials (ores, spices, furs and latterly cotton). The trade provided the state with revenue and the emperor himself with a rich source of ready cash in the form of sweeteners remitted directly to Beijing by Guangzhou’s merchant groupings; and it was of course profitable for all those directly engaged in it, both Chinese and foreigners. As Macartney had stressed, neither they, their respective governments nor the emperor had anything to gain by disrupting intercourse. Disputes had arisen, mostly over unpaid debts and alcohol-fuelled affrays; everyone found much to complain of; but moneymaking good sense generally prevailed. Many nations were involved, including the Spanish in the early days and latterly the French and the Americans. But the Portuguese had enjoyed a near-monopoly for most of the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth the Dutch had been pre-eminent, and as of the early eighteenth it was the English who accounted for by far the most ships.

  Chartered in 1600 to compete for the Asia–Europe spice trade, the London (or English) East India Company, after being ousted from Indonesia’s Spice Islands by the Dutch, had found compensation in favourable trading conditions and substantial ‘factory’ bases on the coast of India. With its chartered monopoly of the ‘out-and-back’ trade between London and the East, the company imported from India to Britain mostly finished cotton fabrics, while both it and its servants, acting in a private capacity, competed for freight in the unmonopolised inter-port carrying trade of the East. From the company’s factory-cum-fort of Madras (Chennai) a group of these freelancing company employees led by the brothers Elihu and Thomas Yale (later of Connecticut) had dispatched the first company ship to Guangzhou in 1691. For hospitality at nearby Macao they trusted to the amicable relations that had subsisted between England and Portugal ever since Charles II’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza; and for trading rights at Guangzhou they depended on the Qing authorities not penalising them for earlier contacts with the Taiwan of Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga) and his son. Despite early misunderstandings, they were not disappointed. As of 1699 company ships sailed annually for the place they called ‘Canton’ (a word supposedly derived from ‘Guangdong’ but applied to that province’s capital of Guangzhou).

  A mere sideline in 1700, China soon proved a bonanza for the company. By 1770 the Guangzhou trade was the most important and lucrative in its considerable portfolio. This was thanks to massive dealing in a single and much-sought-after sedative – which was not opium but tea. The Englishman’s thirst for the beverage knew no bounds. ‘The 200,000 pounds sold [in London] by the Company in 1720 was up to a million pounds a year by the end of the decade . . . In 1760 it was just under three million and by 1770 nine million.’11 It would double and double again in the nineteenth century. Porcelain, once packed in tea to prevent breakages, was now carried largely as ‘kintledge’, or ballast to stabilise sailing ships too lightly laden just with dried leaf. Taxation levels of over 100 per cent on imports entering Britain did nothing to stem demand. British colonists were equally taken by the brew. Famously it was protests over the re-export from Britain of a commodity that, by the time it reached Boston, was more tax than tea which triggered the war that cost the British their North American territories.

  Although a Commutation Act of 1784 reduced the duty on British imports to 12.5 per cent, the taxes soon rose anew. By the 1830s tea was contributing nearly 10 per cent of the British government’s entire revenue receipts. Nor was this the full story; for the Commutation Act (so called because it ‘commuted’ most of the tax on tea into one on windows) had been prompted by the knowledge that similar quantities of tea were reaching Britain’s high streets untaxed. To circumvent both the company’s monopoly and the British exchequer’s demands, private adventurers and interlopers, many of them British, had taken to operating under flags of convenience provided by the rival East India companies of Ostend, Sweden, Denmark and Austria-Hungary. They too purchased in Guangzhou but shipped mainly to the Low Countries, from where the tea was smuggled across the North Sea. Nocturnal flurries and occasional firefights in Britain’s inshore waters in the eighteenth century nicely anticipated similar scenes in China’s inshore waters in the nineteenth century. The British attitude to tea and the Chinese attitude to opium would be radically different; tea enlivened society and was welcome, opium destroyed it and was banned. But in purely economic terms they posed a not dissimilar challenge.

  The tea, mostly black bohea not from Guangdong but from farther north, was purchased with silver. Barter would have been preferred by the company, but other British exports enjoyed little demand in China; wool-lens were generally unwelcome in steamy Guangdong, and as the emperor had told Macartney, China had as yet ‘not the slightest need of British manufactures’. The balance of trade throughout the eighteenth century was thus overwhelmingly in China’s favour. The Celestial Empire came to rely on this abundant source of silver, while British manufacturers and economists deplored the disregard of the national interest and what they called the ‘drain of specie’. Indian produce sometimes supplemented silver, notably raw cotton shipped direct from Bombay (Mumbai) to Guangzhou; so did a roundabout trade involving the shipment of Indian textiles to south-east Asian markets, then of south-east Asian spices and culinary exotica to China. It was in this three-way trade, conducted mainly by non-company adventurers and agencies, and involving the mercantile communities of the Malay and Indonesian ports, among whom Chinese emigrants were now prominent, that the potential of Indian-grown opium first became apparent.

  In China home-grown opium, mainly for medicinal use, had been consumed, as it had in Europe, for at least a thousand years. But smoking it – rather than infusing or eating it – for the greater ‘hit’ nowadays classed as ‘recreational’ seems to have originated in Taiwan in the seventeenth century. It may have been the result of novices experimenting in tobacco smoking, itself then a novelty. The habit spread to the mainland, where the Qing Yongzheng emperor made opium dens and opium dealing illegal but did not actually proscribe the drug. It also spread to south-east Asia, where Indian-grown opium was already circulating and from where both Chinese and Europeans began shipping some on to China from the 1720s.

  When in 1773 the East India Company assumed monopoly control over poppy-growing and opium production in Bengal, about a thousand chests (60,000 kilograms, 60 tons) a year were reaching China. This figure had quadrupled by 1796, the year of the Qianlong emperor’s abdication and from which date, on orders from the Guangzhou authorities, the company stopped exporting its opium to China; ignoring the Chinese ban would have meant risking an embargo of its tea purchases, which was unthinkable. Instead the company’s Indian opium crop was auctioned in Calcutta, purchased by private syndicates organised as �
��agency houses’, and then shipped by them to Guangzhou in still greater quantities. As prices fell, demand increased; so did the profits of shippers and dealers; and so did official concern in Beijing. The Jiaqing emperor (successor of the Qianlong emperor; r. 1796–1821) introduced heftier penalties for smokers. He also banned opium imports altogether, which meant that it was now the turn of Guangzhou’s Co-hong merchants to forgo any overt involvement in the trade. The consequences were much the same as with the company: dealing moved offshore and out of control. Singapore, acquired by the British in 1819 and developed as a free port, had attracted Chinese émigrés and a vast concourse of shipping; the opium trade there found the perfect entrepôt. From Singapore, vessels, not all British, carried the chests to Lintin island at the mouth of the Pearl River, to hulks moored in its vicinity and to fast clippers cruising up the coast. From headlands and inlets, smaller craft, well oared and armed, put out to meet them. They were usually expected, terms and timing having been prearranged at Guangzhou. The chests were trans-shipped, then landed.