Qiying’s Diplomacy: Soothing the Barbarians
Pottinger now faced
yet another Chinese negotiator, the third to be sent on this
supremely unpromising assignment by a court still fancying itself
supreme in the universe, the Manchu prince Qiying. Qiying’s method
for handling the British was a traditional Chinese strategy when
confronted with defeat. Having tried defiance and diplomacy, China
would seek to wear the barbarians down by seeming compliance.
Negotiating under the shadow of the British fleet, Qiying judged
that it befell the court’s ministers to repeat what the Middle
Kingdom’s elites had done so often before: through a combination of
delay, circumlocution, and carefully apportioned favors, they would
soothe and tame the barbarians while buying time for China to
outlast their assault.
Qiying fixed his
focus on establishing a personal relationship with the “barbarian
headman” Pottinger. He showered Pottinger with gifts and took to
addressing him as his cherished friend and “intimate” (a word
specially transliterated into Chinese for this express purpose). As
an expression of the deep friendship between them, Qiying went so
far as to propose exchanging portraits of their wives and even
proclaimed his wish to adopt Pottinger’s son (who remained in
England, but was henceforth known as “Frederick Keying
Pottinger”).34
In one remarkable
dispatch, Qiying explained the approach to a Celestial Court that
found the seduction process difficult to comprehend. He described
the ways he had aspired to appease the British barbarians: “With
this type of people from outside the bounds of civilization, who
are blind and unawakened in styles of address and forms of ceremony
. . . even though our tongues were dry and our throats parched
(from urging them to follow our way), still they could not avoid
closing their ears and acting as if deaf.”35
Therefore, Qiying’s
banquets and his extravagant warmth toward Pottinger and his family
had served an essentially strategic design, in which Chinese
conduct was calculated in specific doses and in which such
qualities as trust and sincerity were weapons; whether they
reflected convictions or not was secondary. He continued:
Certainly we have to curb them by sincerity, but it has been even more necessary to control them by skillful methods. There are times when it is possible to have them follow our directions but not let them understand the reasons. Sometimes we expose everything so that they will not be suspicious, whereupon we can dissipate their rebellious restlessness. Sometimes we have given them receptions and entertainment, after which they have had a feeling of appreciation. And at still other times we have shown trust in them in a broad-minded way and deemed it unnecessary to go deeply into minute discussions with them, whereupon we have been able to get their help in the business at hand.36
The results of this
interplay between Western overwhelming force and Chinese
psychological management were two treaties negotiated by Qiying and
Pottinger, the Treaty of Nanjing and the supplementary Treaty of
the Bogue. The settlement conceded more than the Chuan-pi
Convention. It was essentially humiliating, though the terms were
less harsh than the military situation would have allowed Britain
to impose. It provided for payment of a $6 million indemnity by
China, the cession of Hong Kong, and the opening of five coastal
“treaty ports” in which Western residence and trade would be
permitted. This effectively dismantled the “Canton System” by which
the Chinese court had regulated trade with the West and confined it
to licensed merchants. Ningbo, Shanghai, Xiamen, and Fuzhou were
added to the list of treaty ports. The British secured the right to
maintain permanent missions in the port cities and to negotiate
directly with local officials, bypassing the court in
Beijing.
The British also
obtained the right to exercise jurisdiction over their nationals
residing in the Chinese treaty ports. Operationally, this meant
that foreign opium traders would be subject to their own countries’
laws and regulations, not China’s. This principle of
“extraterritoriality,” among the less controversial provisions of
the treaty at the time, would eventually come to be treated as a
major infringement of Chinese sovereignty. Since the European
concept of sovereignty was unknown, however, in China
extraterritoriality came to be a symbol at the time, not so much of
the violation of a legal norm as of declining imperial power. The
resulting diminution of the Mandate of Heaven led to the eruption
of a flurry of domestic rebellion.
The
nineteenth-century English translator Thomas Meadows observed that
most Chinese did not at first appreciate the lasting repercussions
of the Opium War. They treated the concessions as an application of
the traditional method of absorbing the barbarians and wearing them
down. “[T]he great body of the nation,” he surmised, “can only look
on the late war as a rebellious irruption of a tribe of barbarians,
who, secure in their strong ships, attacked and took some places
along the coast, and even managed to get into their possession an
important point of the grand canal, whereby they forced the Emperor
to make certain concessions.”37
But the Western
powers were not so easily soothed. Every Chinese concession tended
to generate additional Western demands. The treaties, conceived at
first as a temporary concession, instead inaugurated a process by
which the Qing court lost control of much of China’s commercial and
foreign policy. Following the British treaty, U.S. President John
Tyler promptly sent a mission to China to gain similar concessions
for the Americans, the forerunner of the later “Open Door” policy.
The French negotiated their own treaty with analogous terms. Each
of these countries in turn included a “Most Favored Nation” clause
that stipulated that any concession offered by China to other
countries must also be given to the signatory. (Chinese diplomacy
later used this clause to limit exactions by stimulating
competition between the various claimants for special
privilege.)
These treaties are
justly infamous in Chinese history as the first in a string of
“unequal treaties” conducted under the shadow of foreign military
force. At the time, the most bitterly contested provisions were
their stipulations of equality of status. China had until this
point insisted on the superior position ingrained in its national
identity and reflected in the tributary system. Now it faced a
foreign power determined to erase its name from the roll of Chinese
“tribute states” under threat of force and to prove itself the
sovereign equal of the Celestial Dynasty.
The leaders on both
sides understood that this was a dispute about far more than
protocol or opium. The Qing court was willing to appease avaricious
foreigners with money and trade; but if the principle of barbarian
political equality to the Son of Heaven was established, the entire
Chinese world order would be threatened; the dynasty risked the
loss of the Mandate of Heaven. Palmerston, in his frequently
caustic communications to his negotiators, treated the amount of
the indemnity as partly symbolic; but he devoted great attention to
berating them for acquiescing to Chinese communications whose
language revealed “assumptions of superiority on the part of China”
or implied that Britain, victorious in war, remained a supplicant
asking for the Emperor’s divine favor.38 Eventually, Palmerston’s view prevailed,
and the Treaty of Nanjing included a clause explicitly ensuring
that Chinese and British officials would henceforth “correspond . .
. on a footing of perfect equality”; it went so far as to list
specific written Chinese characters in the text with acceptably
neutral connotations. Chinese records (or at least those to which
foreigners had access) would no longer describe the British as
“begging” Chinese authorities or “tremblingly obeying” their
“orders.”39
The Celestial Court
had come to understand the military inferiority of China but not
yet the appropriate method for dealing with it. At first, it
applied the traditional methods of barbarian management. Defeat was
not unknown in the course of China’s long history. China’s rulers
had dealt with it by applying the five baits described in the
previous chapter. They saw the common characteristic of these
invaders as being their desire to partake of Chinese culture; they
wished to settle on Chinese soil and partake of its civilization.
They could therefore gradually be tamed by some of the
psychological methods illustrated by Prince Qiying and, in time,
become part of Chinese life.
But the European
invaders had no such aspiration nor limited goals. Deeming
themselves more advanced societies, their goal was to exploit China
for economic gain, not to join its way of life. Their demands were
therefore limited only by their resources and their greed. Personal
relationships could not be decisive, because the chiefs of the
invaders were not neighbors but lived thousands of miles away,
where they were governed by motivations obtuse to the subtleness
and indirection of the Qiying type of strategy.
Within the space of a
decade, the Middle Kingdom had gone from preeminence to being an
object of contending colonial forces. Poised between two eras and
two different conceptions of international relations, China strove
for a new identity, and above all, to reconcile the values that
marked its greatness with the technology and commerce on which it
would have to base its security.