Wei Yuan’s Blueprint: “Using Barbarians Against Barbarians,” Learning Their Techniques
In navigating the
treacherous passage of assaults by the Western European nations
with their superior technology and the new ambitions of both Russia
and Japan, China was well served by its cultural cohesion and the
extraordinary skill of its diplomats—all the more remarkable in the
face of the general obtuseness of the imperial court. By the middle
of the nineteenth century, only a few members of the Chinese elite
had begun to understand that China no longer lived in a system
marked by its predominance and that China had to learn the grammar
of a system of competing power blocs.
One such official was
Wei Yuan (1794–1856), a midranking Confucian mandarin and associate
of Lin Zexu, the Guangzhou governor whose crackdown on the opium
trade had triggered British intervention and eventually forced him
into exile. While loyal to the Qing Dynasty, Wei Yuan was deeply
concerned about its complacency. He wrote a pioneering study of
foreign geography using materials collected and translated from
foreign traders and missionaries. Its purpose was to encourage
China to set its sights beyond the tributary countries on its
immediate borders.
Wei Yuan’s 1842
“Plans for a Maritime Defense,” in essence a study of China’s
failures in the Opium War, proposed to apply the lessons of
European balance-of-power diplomacy to China’s contemporary
problems. Recognizing China’s material weakness vis-à-vis the
foreign powers—a premise that his contemporaries generally did not
accept—Wei Yuan proposed methods by which China might gain a margin
for maneuver. Wei Yuan proposed a multipronged strategy:
There are two methods of attacking the barbarians, namely, to stimulate countries unfriendly to the barbarians to make an attack on them, and to learn the superior skills of the barbarians in order to control them. There are two methods of making peace with the barbarians, namely, to let the various trading nations conduct their trade so as to maintain peace with the barbarians, and to support the first treaty of the Opium War so as to maintain international trade.1
It was a
demonstration of the analytical skill of Chinese diplomacy that,
faced with a superior foe and potentially escalating demands, it
understood that holding fast to even a humiliating treaty set a
limit to further exactions.
In the meantime, Wei
Yuan reviewed the countries that, based on European principles of
equilibrium, could conceivably put pressure on Britain. Citing
ancient precedents in which the Han, Tang, and early Qing Dynasties
had managed the ambitions of aggressive tribes, Wei Yuan surveyed
the globe, reviewing the “enemy countries of which the British
barbarians are afraid.” Writing as if the slogan “let barbarians
fight barbarians” were self-implementing, Wei Yuan pointed to
“Russia, France, and America” in the West, and “the Gurkhas [of
Nepal], Burma, Siam [Thailand], and Annam [northern Vietnam]” in
the East as conceivable candidates. Wei Yuan imagined a two-pronged
Russian and Gurkha attack on Britain’s most distant and poorly
defended interests, its Indian empire. Stimulating long-running
French and American animosities toward Britain, causing them to
attack Britain by sea, was another weapon in Wei Yuan’s
analysis.
It was a highly
original solution hampered only by the fact that the Chinese
government had not the slightest idea how to implement it. It had
only limited knowledge of the potential allied countries in
question and no representation in any of their capitals. Wei Yuan
came to understand China’s limits. In an age of global politics, he
asserted, the issue was not that “the outer barbarians cannot be
used”; rather, “we need personnel who are capable of making
arrangements with them” and who knew “their locations [and] their
interrelations of friendship or enmity.”2
Having failed to stop
the British advance, Wei Yuan continued, Beijing needed to weaken
London’s relative position in the world and in China. He came up
with another original idea: to invite other barbarians into China
and to set up a contest between their greed and Britain’s, so that
China could emerge as the balancer in effect over the division of
its own substance. Wei Yuan continued:
Today the British barbarians not only have occupied Hong-kong and accumulated a great deal of wealth as well as a proud face among the other barbarians, but also have opened the ports and cut down the various charges so as to grant favor to other barbarians. Rather than let the British barbarians be good to them in order to enlarge their following, would it not be better for us ourselves to be good to them, in order to get them under control like fingers on the arm?3
In other words, China
should offer concessions to all rapacious nations rather than let
Britain exact them and benefit itself by offering to share the
spoils with other countries. The mechanism for achieving this
objective was the Most Favored Nation principle—that any privilege
granted one power should be automatically extended to all
others.4
Time is not neutral.
The benefit of Wei Yuan’s subtle maneuvers would have to be
measured by China’s ability to arm itself using “the superior
techniques of the barbarians.” China, Wei Yuan advised, should
“bring Western craftsmen to Canton” from France or the United
States “to take charge of building ships and making arms.” Wei Yuan
summed up the new strategy with the proposition that “before the
peace settlement, it behooves us to use barbarians against
barbarians. After the settlement, it is proper for us to learn
their superior techniques in order to control them.”5
Though initially
dismissive of calls for technological modernization, the Celestial
Court did adopt the strategy of adhering to the letter of the Opium
War treaties in order to establish a ceiling on Western demands. It
would, a leading official later wrote, “act according to the
treaties and not allow the foreigners to go even slightly beyond
them”; thus Chinese officials should “be sincere and amicable but
quietly try to keep them in line.”6