That same year Japan went to war with China. The cause was Korea, which both countries sought to dominate. It was the first test of Japan’s modernity, and also, as Tokutomi Soh frankly put it, a golden opportunity for Japan to ‘build the foundation for national expansion in the Far East … to take her place alongside the other great expansionist powers in the world’.9 The brisk rout of Chinese naval and land forces not only resoundingly proved the sturdiness of Japan’s military and its industrial and infrastructural base. It also showed that, as Soh put it, ‘civilization is not a monopoly of the white man’.
Overtaxed Japanese peasants had already paid a huge price for Japan’s modernization along Western lines, a process inherently brutal for the weakest everywhere. It was now the turn of the Chinese. The ‘real birthday of New Japan’, the writer Lafcadio Hearn, then living in Japan, wrote, ‘began with the conquest of China’.10 Tokutomi Soh hailed a ‘new epoch in Japanese history’. White men had regarded the Japanese, Soh complained, as ‘close to monkeys’.11 Now
We are no longer ashamed to stand before the world as Japanese … Before we did not know ourselves, and the world did not yet know us. But now that we have tested our strength, we know ourselves and we are known by the world. Moreover, we know that we are known by the world.12
Closely following the practices of ‘civilized’ nations, Japan forced China to pay a huge indemnity, to open riverside towns deep in the hinterland as treaty ports, and to cede the island of Taiwan (then called Formosa). As part of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Japan even appropriated a bit of mainland China, the Liaotung Peninsula, before Russia, France and Germany prevailed upon the country to be less punitive and hand it back.
The return of the Liaotung Peninsula under Western pressure provoked more discontent among Japanese patriots (exacerbated when Russia forced the Qing emperor to lease Port Arthur (now Dalian) on the peninsula to the Russian navy, which caused a rift with Japan that led to the Russo-Japanese War in 1904). There was no question now of Japan remaining subordinate to Western powers on its own territories. The treaties were revoked, and in 1902, nearly half a century after the Ottoman Empire first tried to climb on to the international stage on the back of the greatest European power, the Japanese concluded an alliance with the British Empire.
Tokutomi Soh, already Japan’s most respected journalist, was on a ship en route to the Japanese military base at Port Arthur when he learnt of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Soh had long been convinced that Japan, a small country with few resources of its own for modernization, had to expand its territories, a ‘matter of the greatest urgency’, and for that she had to ‘develop a policy to motivate our people to embark upon great adventures abroad’ and ‘solve the problem of national expansion without delay’. Now – April 1895 – it seemed possible. The news put him in a buoyant mood.
It was the first time he had left Japan. In Port Arthur, he later recalled,
spring had just arrived. The great willows were budding; the flowers of North China were at the height of their fragrance. Fields stretched out before the eye; a spring breeze was blowing. As I travelled about and realized that this was our new territory, I felt a truly great thrill and satisfaction.13
Soh’s joys of new ownership died quickly as he received news of Japan being forced to give up the territory by Western countries. ‘Disdaining’, he later wrote, ‘to remain for another moment on land that had been retroceded to another power, I returned home on the first ship I could find.’
Soh took a handful of gravel back to Japan to remind him of the pain and humiliation he had suffered. It was clear that, as he lamented, ‘the most progressive, developed, civilized, and powerful nation in the Orient still cannot escape the scorn of the white people’. And, having been ‘baptized into the gospel of power’,14 as he wrote bitterly, Soh, the champion of individual rights and freedoms, would now become a loud advocate of Japan’s imperialist expansion in Asia, which, he hoped, would ‘break the worldwide monopoly and destroy the special rights of the white races, eliminate the special sphere of influence and the worldwide tyranny of the white races’.15
The return of Japan’s spoils of war under Western pressure was no consolation to many Chinese; the damage to their self-esteem had already been done. The question for them was whether it would spur any meaningful attempt at self-strengthening in China.
Shortly after China’s defeat in early 1895, Japanese troops stopped and searched a Chinese steamer in the North China Sea. Such infringements of China’s sovereignty had become routine then, but by one of the strange accidents of history there were among the many students on board a twenty-two-year-old called Liang Qichao and his mentor, Kang Youwei, then aged thirty-seven, both travelling to Beijing to sit the imperial examinations for China’s civil service.
Liang was to become China’s first iconic modern intellectual. His lucid and prolific writings, touching on all major concerns in his own time and anticipating many in the future, inspired several generations of thinkers including the much younger Mao Zedong. A restless intellectual seeker, Liang combined his Chinese classical learning with a great sensitivity to Western ideas and trends. And his life, and its many intellectual phases, manifested more profound dilemmas than many other Chinese thinkers, bolder but shallower than Liang, faced. It would be woven tightly through all major events and movements in China over the next three decades.
The exams selected the men of ‘virtue’ whom Confucian classics called upon to be responsible for the social order. Success in them was the passport to status and prestige in China. There were more men passing them than there were government jobs, but Liang and Kang could still look forward to membership of an elite culture, and good jobs in teaching or business if not necessarily high positions with the government. However, they had other things on their minds than personal advancement.
Hailing from scholar-gentry families near Canton (Guangzhou) in Guangdong, the Chinese province most exposed to Western aggression, they were both patriotically concerned about the fate of China, and seethed at its ignorance and helplessness in the face of the Western challenge. Early in the nineteenth century, Indian intellectuals had begun to receive – and transform – the ideas of Rousseau, Hume, Bentham, Kant and Hegel; by the middle of the century, they were following the fortunes of Mazzini and Garibaldi. But most Chinese in the nineteenth century did not know of the existence of Western countries, let alone of their internal revolutions.
China came into contact with the West only at the port of Canton, which, closely regulated and strictly commercial, was never likely to turn into the transmitter of Western knowledge that Deshima became for the Japanese. A large part of the problem was that for too long China had, Liang wrote in 1902, ‘looked on its country as the world’, and regarded the rest as barbarians.16 Liang himself first learnt about China’s lowly position in the world when in the spring of 1890 he came across books in Chinese on the West in Beijing.
In 1879, Kang Youwei had been similarly surprised while visiting Hong Kong. Awestruck by the British-run city’s efficiency and cleanliness, he realized that educated Chinese like himself ought not to look down upon foreigners as barbarians. Further reading in Western books convinced him that the Chinese status quo was unsustainable, and, after a brief flirtation with Buddhism, Kang resolved to rejuvenate the social ideals of Confucianism.
Liang was one of the bright young students Kang had gathered around himself in a Confucian temple in Canton to both prepare for the imperial examinations and to reinterpret the Confucian canon as a call to social and educational change. Kang had already spent a decade importuning the Qing court in Beijing with letters and memos about the urgency of reforms. Experiencing Japanese arrogance on board his ship to Beijing now hardened his conviction, and loosened his tongue. At the risk of lèse-majesté, Kang now told his fellow students that China had degenerated so much that it resembled Turkey, another once-confident and now-feeble country carefully maintained in its infirmity by exploitative foreigners.
This, if anything, was an optimistic diagnosis. The European ambassadors in Istanbul may have been intolerably interfering in Turkey’s domestic affairs, but they exercised none of the brute force that their counterparts in Beijing did. The Ottoman sultan never had to scurry into hiding to escape their wrath; Istanbul was not besieged, nor its grandest imperial palace burnt to the ground.
From the late 1830s (just as the Tanzimat reforms were being set in motion in Istanbul), to the Second World War, China was bullied and humiliated on a vast scale. And it was more shocking for the Chinese because they had lived with the illusion of power and self-sufficiency for much longer than the Ottomans. ‘Our country’s civilization’, Liang Qichao pointed out in 1902, ‘is the oldest in the world. Three thousand years ago, Europeans were living like beasts in the field, while our civilization, its characteristics pronounced, was already equivalent to theirs of the middle ages.’17
This wasn’t just some cultural defensiveness. China could trace its culture back 4,000 years, and political unity to the third century BC. If the Han and Tang dynasties had supervised the writing of China’s historical classics and its greatest poetry, the Song had built a network of roads and canals across China. China led the world in science and arts, and in the development of a sophisticated government bureaucracy selected through competitive examinations. Recruiting its bureaucrats from a provincial gentry that was schooled in Confucian classics, the Chinese imperial state relied less on coercion than on the loyalty of local elites across China.
As in Islamic countries, a literary culture and a morality derived from canonical texts gave Chinese civilization an extraordinary coherence, and made it the most influential cultural model for neighbours such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Western travellers, many of them Jesuit missionaries, brought back highly coloured descriptions of self-possessed, sophisticated and ethical followers of Confucius, turning such Enlightenment philosophers as Voltaire and Leibniz into ardent Sinophiles and nascent European consumers into connoisseurs of all things Chinese.
Contrary to the general picture of the decline of Asia and the rise of the West, the Chinese economy was buoyant in the eighteenth century, developing its own local variations and with trade links across South-east Asia. Silk, porcelain and tea from China continued to be in great demand in Europe (and in the American colonies) even though in 1760 the Chinese confined all Western traders to the port city of Canton. Tribute-paying neighbours as near as Burma, Nepal and Vietnam (and as far away as Java) upheld Beijing’s solipsistic view that the Chinese emperor, presiding over the central kingdom of the world, had the right to rule ‘all under heaven’. The Qing Empire, founded by nomadic warriors from north-east China, or Manchuria, in 1644, was still expanding its territory in the eighteenth century. The last great Manchu emperor, Qianlong, personally supervised the annexation of Xinjiang and parts of Mongolia, and the pacification of Tibet.
The Manchus were foreigners, but they hadn’t radically disrupted China’s traditional socio-political order, which, unparalleled anywhere in the world, had been perfected over centuries by several imperial dynasties using the teachings of the sixth-century BC sage Confucius. Far more long-lasting than Islam, Confucianism had underpinned Chinese government and society for two millennia; its values of ren, yi, xiao and zhong, imperfectly translated as ‘benevolence’, ‘propriety’, ‘filial piety’ and ‘loyalty’, prescribed the correct modes of behaviour and action in both private and political life.
As the Mongols had done before them with Muslim countries, the Manchus did not impose their ways upon the conquered population of Han Chinese. Rather, they tried to persuade the latter that they were not uncouth upstarts from the north. They upheld Confucianism as the source of social and personal values, with the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors presiding over a major reinterpretation of Confucian classics. Confucian ideas intermingled with and were often overlaid by other Chinese religious traditions. But they remained the basis for the imperial examinations that led so many Chinese to seek service with the state’s vast bureaucracy, and they had long contributed to China’s extraordinary political unity and ideological consensus.
China’s population expanded rapidly during Qianlong’s long reign, putting pressure on the land. Towards the end of his reign, a series of local rebellions and economic crises revealed that all was not well with the Qing Empire. Corruption among Manchu nobles had grown, and partly in response, revolts, often of a millenarian cast, erupted across north China. There were more such shocks to come in the nineteenth century, especially the Taiping rebellion, which was led by an eccentric sect fired by Christian millenarianism. But the panoply of omnipotence was carefully maintained throughout these crises: China remained the universe, with everyone else on its insignificant periphery. The illusion could not survive.
Even before the Opium War, Western powers had begun to nibble at the edges of the Qing Empire, annexing the territories that the Manchus had brought into the tributary system. Beginning in 1824, after many hard battles the British subdued Burma, and made it a province of their Indian empire in 1897. In 1862, while the Qing were busy fighting the Taiping rebels, France overran southern Vietnam; it invaded the north of the country in 1874, and then, in 1883, announced the old kingdom of Annam in central Vietnam to be its protectorate. The Chinese resisted, and in the war that ensued the French destroyed much of the Chinese navy.
As in the Ottoman Empire, military losses to Western powers made Chinese bureaucrats call for urgent ‘self-strengthening’. Contrary to the Western caricature of the ‘Confucian’ mentality that was not amenable to modernization, the Chinese were quick to learn the lesson from their defeats. Two years after witnessing the total defencelessness of Chinese coastal cities during the First Opium War, Lin Zexu, the former imperial commissioner at Canton, wrote a private letter to a friend underlining the need for adopting modern weapons technology. ‘Ships, guns, and a water force are absolutely indispensable. Even if the rebellious barbarians had fled and returned beyond the seas, these things would still have to be urgently planned for, in order to work out the permanent defence of our sea frontiers.’18
Another Chinese scholar-official, Li Hongzhang, who led one of the victorious Qing armies against the Taiping rebels, managed to persuade the conservative court to set up factories and dockyards for the production of modern weapons and ships, regulate relations with foreign powers, open legations in the capitals of Europe, America and Japan, and send students abroad. Li also helped set up the country’s first coal mines, telegraph networks and railway tracks in the 1870s.
China’s infant industries faced the same kind of insuperable hurdles that free-trading Britain had imposed on Egypt and Ottoman Turkey; they could not compete with European, American and Japanese manufacturers. Unlike countries directly occupied by European powers, this was the situation of the ‘semi-colony’ in which, as Liang Qichao pointed out in 1896, ‘a hundred times more than Western soldiers, Western commerce weakens China’.19 Still, with Li Hongzhang’s help, a modicum of industrial manufacturing soon became visible with the country’s first cotton mills and iron works.
British businessmen, who wished to prop up the ailing Manchus as much as they could, were eager to help. Dining with some of them in Hong Kong in 1889, Rudyard Kipling did not think a modernized China was a good idea. He deplored the men who were doing their best to ‘force upon the great Empire all the stimulants of the West – railways, tramlines, and so forth. What will happen when China really wakes up?’20 Kipling was right to worry; but this China still lay a century ahead. For now, as the Ottomans had learnt, piecemeal modernization was revealed as inadequate – in 1884 the French took only an hour to destroy the Chinese navy’s arsenal in Fuzhou that Li Hongzhang had helped set up.
The smallest move to imitate their Western adversaries provoked a backlash from the most powerful conservative forces in the country, the scholar-gentry, who worried about the loss of their judicial and moral authority over citizens exposed
to European modes of thinking and action. In a country as large and old as China, the shock of the West did not really travel deeply enough to begin to force change until the last decade of the century. The intellectual world of the scholar-gentry, defined by strict adherence to Confucian values and absolute loyalty to the emperor, remained more or less unimpaired. Self-made young men in the provinces, such as Sun Yat-sen, had begun to dream of the overthrow of the Manchus, but for much of the scholar-gentry there was no question of even slightly modifying the imperial system which was presided over by the politically reactionary and fiscally profligate Dowager Empress Cixi, who spent nearly the entire national treasury on building a new Summer Palace.
China, which had entered the nineteenth century with a favourable balance of trade, was running massive foreign debts at the end of it. Up to a quarter of government revenue went into paying foreign debts and indemnities. Foreigners administered virtual mini-colonies within sixteen cities: as in Ottoman Turkey and Egypt, they were protected from the local police and courts even for the gravest crimes.
The harsh lessons of the international system could no longer be kept at bay, not after neighbouring Japan, which most Chinese saw as inferior, trounced China in battle in 1895. At the Chinese port city of Weihaiwei, the Japanese, creeping up overland from the rear, turned China’s own guns on the Chinese fleet in the bay. As Japan secured the choicest spoils of war in the subsequent Treaty of Shimonoseki with China, imperialists elsewhere were further emboldened. The Western scramble for Africa and South-east Asia was already under way. Qing China seemed an even easier picking.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 16
