CHAPTER 3
From Preeminence to Decline
AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY PROGRESSED, China
experienced almost every imaginable shock to its historic image of
itself. Before the Opium War, it conceived of diplomacy and
international trade mainly as forms of recognition of China’s
preeminence. Now, even as it entered a period of domestic turmoil,
it faced three foreign challenges, any one of which could be enough
to overturn a dynasty. These threats came from every direction and
in heretofore barely conceivable incarnations.
From across the
oceans in the West came the European nations. They raised not so
much the challenge of territorial defense as of irreconcilable
conceptions of world order. For the most part, the Western powers
limited themselves to extracting economic concessions on the
Chinese coast and demanding rights to free trade and missionary
activity. Paradoxically this was threatening because the Europeans
did not view it as a conquest at all. They were not seeking to
replace the existing dynasty—they simply imposed an entirely new
world order essentially incompatible with the Chinese
one.
From the north and
west, an expansionist and militarily dominant Russia sought to pry
loose China’s vast hinterland. Russia’s cooperation could be
purchased temporarily, but it recognized no boundaries between its
own domains and the Chinese outer dominions. And unlike previous
conquerors, Russia did not become part of the Chinese culture; the
territories it penetrated were permanently lost to the
empire.
Still, neither the
Western powers nor Russia had any ambition to displace the Qing and
claim the Mandate of Heaven; ultimately they reached the conclusion
that they had much to lose from the Qing’s fall. Japan, by
contrast, had no vested interest in the survival of China’s ancient
institutions or the Sinocentric world order. From the east it set
out not only to occupy significant portions of Chinese territory,
but to supplant Beijing as the center of a new East Asian
international order.
The ensuing
catastrophes are viewed with considerable dismay in contemporary
China, as part of an infamous “century of humiliation” that ended
only by the reunification of the country under an assertively
nationalist form of Communism. At the same time, the era of China’s
hobbling stands in many ways as a testimony to its remarkable
abilities to surmount strains that might break other
societies.
While foreign armies
were marching across China and extorting humiliating terms, the
Celestial Court never stopped asserting its claim to central
authority and managed to implement it over most of China’s
territory. The invaders were treated as other invaders had been in
previous centuries, as a nuisance, an unwelcome interruption of the
eternal rhythm of Chinese life. The court in Beijing could act in
this manner because the foreign depredations were mostly on the
periphery of China and because the invaders had come for commerce;
as such it was in the interest of the invaders that the vast
central regions, including most of the population, remain
quiescent. The government in Beijing thereby achieved a margin of
maneuver. All the exactions had to be negotiated with the imperial
court, which was therefore in a position to play off the invaders
against one another.
Chinese statesmen
played their weak hand with considerable skill and forestalled what
could have been an even worse catastrophe. From the point of view
of the balance of power, the objective configuration of forces
would have suggested the impossibility of China’s survival as a
unitary, continent-sized state. But with the traditional vision of
Chinese preeminence under often violent challenge and the country
lashed by waves of colonial depredation and domestic upheaval,
China eventually overcame its travails by its own efforts. Through
a painful and often humiliating process, China’s statesmen in the
end preserved the moral and territorial claims of their
disintegrating world order.
Perhaps most
remarkably, they did so using almost entirely traditional methods.
A segment of the Qing ruling class wrote eloquent memorials in the
classical style about the challenges posed by the West, Russia, and
a rising Japan, and the resulting need for China to practice
“self-strengthening” and improve its own technological
capabilities. But China’s Confucian elite and its generally
conservative populace remained deeply ambivalent about such advice.
Many perceived the importation of foreign-language texts and
Western technology as endangering China’s cultural essence and
social order. After sometimes bruising battles, the prevailing
faction decided that to modernize along Western lines was to cease
to be Chinese, and that nothing could justify abandoning this
unique heritage. So China faced the era of imperial expansion
without the benefit of a modern military apparatus on any national
scale, and with only piecemeal adaptations to foreign financial and
political innovations.
To weather the storm,
China relied not on technology or military power but instead on two
deeply traditional resources: the analytical abilities of its
diplomats, and the endurance and cultural confidence of its people.
It developed ingenious strategies for playing off the new
barbarians against one another. Officials charged with managing
China’s foreign relations offered concessions in various cities—but
they deliberately invited multiple sets of foreigners to share in
the spoils, so that they could “use barbarians against barbarians”
and avoid dominance by any one power. They eventually insisted on
scrupulous adherence to the “unequal treaties” with the West and to
foreign principles of international law, not because Chinese
officials believed them to be valid, but because such conduct
provided a means to circumscribe foreign ambitions. Faced with two
potentially overwhelming contenders for dominance in northeast
China, and possessing almost no force with which to repulse them,
China’s diplomats set Russia and Japan against each other,
mitigating to some degree the scope and permanence of the
encroachments by each of them.
In light of the
contrast between China’s military near impotence and its
expansively articulated vision of its world role, the rearguard
defense to maintain an independent Chinese government was a
remarkable achievement. No victory celebration attended this
accomplishment; it was an incomplete, decades-long endeavor marked
by numerous reversals and internal opponents, outlasting and
occasionally ruining its proponents. This struggle came at
considerable cost to the Chinese people—whose patience and
endurance served, for neither the first nor the last time, as the
ultimate line of defense. But it preserved the ideal of China as a
continental reality in charge of its own destiny. With great
discipline and self-confidence, it kept the door open for the later
era of Chinese resurgence.