The Erosion of Authority: Domestic Upheavals and the Challenge of Foreign Encroachments
The Western treaty
powers, of course, had no intention of being kept in line—and in
the aftermath of the Qiying-Pottinger negotiations, a new gap in
expectations began to appear. For the Chinese court, the treaties
were a temporary concession to barbarian force, to be followed to
the degree necessary but never voluntarily broadened. For the West,
the treaties were the beginning of a long-term process by which
China would be steadily drawn into Western norms of political and
economic exchange. But what the West conceived of as a process of
enlightenment was seen by some in China as a philosophical
assault.
This is why the
Chinese refused to submit to foreign demands to broaden the
treaties to include free trade throughout China and permanent
diplomatic representation in the Chinese capital. Beijing
understood—despite its extremely limited knowledge about the
West—that the combination of the foreigners’ superior force,
unfettered foreign activity within China, and multiple Western
missions in Beijing would seriously undermine the assumptions of
the Chinese world order. Once China became a “normal” state, it
would lose its historic unique moral authority; it would simply be
another weak country beset by invaders. In this context, seemingly
minor disputes over diplomatic and economic prerogatives turned
into a major clash.
All of this took
place against a backdrop of massive Chinese domestic upheaval,
masked to a large degree by the imperturbable self-confidence
projected by Chinese officials charged with managing contacts with
foreigners—a trait unchanged in the modern period. Macartney had
already remarked in 1793 on the uneasy accommodation between the
Qing’s Manchu ruling class, Han Chinese bureaucratic elite, and
mostly Han general population. “Scarcely a year now passes,” he
noted, “without an insurrection in some of the provinces.”7
The dynasty’s Mandate
of Heaven having been put into question, domestic opponents
escalated the scope of their defiance. Their challenges were both
religious and ethnic, providing the basis for conflicts of
encompassing brutality. The far western reaches of the empire
witnessed Muslim rebellions and the declaration of short-lived
separatist khanates, suppressed only at a major financial and human
cost. In central China, an uprising known as the Nian Rebellion
drew considerable support from Han Chinese laboring classes and,
beginning in 1851, conducted a nearly two-decades-long
insurgency.
The most serious
challenge came from the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), mounted by a
Chinese Christian sect in the south. Missionaries had existed for
centuries, though severely circumscribed. They began to enter the
country in larger numbers after the Opium War. Led by a charismatic
Chinese mystic claiming to be Jesus’s younger brother and an
associate asserting telepathic powers, the Taiping Rebellion aimed
to replace the Qing with a new “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”
ruled by its leaders’ bizarre interpretation of imported missionary
texts. Taiping forces succeeded in wresting control of Nanjing and
much of south and central China from the Qing, ruling in the mode
of a nascent dynasty. Though little known in Western
historiography, the conflict between the Taiping and the Qing ranks
as one of history’s most devastating conflicts, with casualties
estimated in the tens of millions. While no official figures exist,
it is estimated that during the Taiping, Muslim, and Nian upheavals
China’s population declined from roughly 410 million in 1850 to
roughly 350 million in 1873.8
The Treaty of Nanjing
and its French and American counterparts came up for renegotiation
in the 1850s, while China was torn by these civil conflicts. The
treaty powers insisted that their diplomats be permitted to reside
year-round in the Chinese capital, signifying that they were not
tributary envoys but the representatives of equal sovereign states.
The Chinese deployed their wide array of delaying tactics with the
added incentive that given the fate of preceding negotiators, no
Qing official could possibly have wanted to concede the point of
permanent diplomatic representation.
In 1856, an intrusive
Chinese inspection of a British-registered Chinese ship, the
Arrow, and the alleged desecration of
its British flag, provided a pretext for the renewal of
hostilities. As in the 1840 conflict, the casus belli was not
entirely heroic (the ship’s registration, it was later discovered,
had technically lapsed); but both sides understood that they were
playing for higher stakes. With China’s defenses still in an
inchoate state of development, British forces seized Guangzhou and
the Dagu Forts in northern China, from which they could easily
march on Beijing.
During the
negotiations that followed, the gap in perceptions was as wide as
ever. The British pressed on with missionary conviction, presenting
their negotiating positions as a public service that would at last
bring China up to speed with the modern world. Thus London’s
assistant negotiator Horatio Lay summed up the prevailing Western
view: “[D]iplomatic representation will be for your good as well as
ours, as you will surely see. The medicine may be unpleasant but
the aftereffects will be grand.”9
Qing authorities were
not nearly so enthusiastic. They acceded to the treaty terms only
after a flurry of anguished internal communications between the
imperial court and its negotiator and another British threat to
march on Beijing.10
The centerpiece of
the resulting 1858 Treaty of Tianjin was the concession that London
had sought in vain for over six decades—the right to a permanent
embassy in Beijing. The treaty further permitted foreign travel on
the Yangtze River, opened additional “treaty ports” to Western
trade, and protected Chinese Christian converts and Western
proselytizing in China (a prospect particularly difficult for the
Qing given the Taiping Rebellion). The French and Americans
concluded their own treaties on similar terms under their Most
Favored Nation clauses.
The treaty powers now
applied their attention to establishing resident embassies in a
clearly unwelcoming capital. In May 1859, Britain’s new envoy,
Frederick Bruce, arrived in China to exchange ratifications of the
treaty that would grant him the right to take up residence in
Beijing. Finding the main river route to the capital blocked with
chains and spikes, he ordered a contingent of British marines to
clear the obstacles. But Chinese forces shocked Bruce’s party by
opening fire from the newly fortified Dagu Forts. The ensuing
battle resulted in 519 British troops killed and 456 wounded.11
It was the first
Chinese victory in battle against modern Western forces, and
shattered, at least temporarily, the image of Chinese military
impotence. Yet it could only stall the British ambassador’s advance
temporarily. Palmerston dispatched Lord Elgin to lead a joint
British and French march on Beijing, with orders to occupy the
capital and “bring the Emperor to reason.” As retaliation for the
“Dagu Repulse” and a symbolic show of Western power, Elgin ordered
the burning of the Emperor’s Summer Palace, destroying invaluable
art treasures in the process—an act still resented in China a
century and a half later.
China’s seventy-year
campaign of resistance against Western norms of interstate
relations had now reached undeniable crisis. Efforts at diplomatic
delay had run their course; force had been met with superior force.
Barbarian claims of sovereign equality, once dismissed in Beijing
as risible, shaded into ominous demonstrations of military
dominance. Foreign armies occupied China’s capital and enforced the
Western interpretation of political equality and ambassadorial
privileges.
At this point,
another claimant to China’s patrimony stepped into the fray. By
1860, the Russians had been represented in Beijing for over 150
years—with an ecclesiastical mission, they were the only European
country permitted to establish a residence. Russia’s interests had
in some ways trailed those of the other European powers; it had
gained all the benefits extended to the treaty powers without
joining the British in the periodic exercises of force. On the
other hand, Moscow’s overall objective went much further than
religious proselytizing or commerce along the coast. It perceived
in the Qing’s decline an opportunity to dismember the Chinese
Empire and reattach its “outer dominions” to Russia. It set its
sights in particular on the lightly administered and ambiguously
demarcated expanses of Manchuria (the Manchu heartland in northeast
China), Mongolia (the then quasi-autonomous tribal steppe at
China’s north), and Xinjiang (the expanse of mountains and deserts
in the far west, then populated mostly by Muslim peoples). To that
end, Russia had moved gradually and deliberately to expand its
presence along these inland frontiers, poaching the loyalties of
local princes through offers of rank and material benefit,
underscored by a menacing cavalry.12
At the moment of
China’s maximum peril Moscow surfaced as a colonial power, offering
to mediate in the 1860 conflict—which was, in fact, a way of
threatening to intervene. Artful—others might argue
duplicitous—diplomacy was underpinned by the implicit threat of
force. Count Nikolai Ignatieff, the Czar’s brilliant and devious
young plenipotentiary in Beijing, managed to convince the Chinese
court that only Russia could secure the evacuation of the Western
occupying powers from the Chinese capital, and to convince the
Western powers that only Russia could secure Chinese compliance
with the treaties. Having facilitated the Anglo-French march on
Beijing with detailed maps and intelligence, Ignatieff turned and
convinced the occupying forces that with the approaching winter the
Beihe, the river route in and out of Beijing, would freeze, leaving
them surrounded by hostile Chinese mobs.13
For these services
Moscow exacted a staggering territorial price: a broad swath of
territory in so-called Outer Manchuria along the Pacific coast,
including the port city now called Vladivostok.14 In a stroke, Russia
had gained a major new naval base, a foothold in the Sea of Japan,
and 350,000 square miles of territory once considered
Chinese.
Ignatieff also
negotiated a provision opening Urga (now Ulan Bator) in Mongolia
and the far western city of Kashgar to Russian trade and
consulates. To compound the humiliation, Elgin secured for Britain
an expansion of its Hong Kong colony into the adjacent territory of
Kowloon. China had enlisted Russia to forestall what it believed to
be a further assault by the treaty powers dominating China’s
capital and its coast; but in an era of Chinese weakness, “using
barbarians against barbarians” was not without its
costs.