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Managing Decline

China had not survived for four thousand years as a unique civilization and for two millennia as a united state by remaining passive to near-rampant foreign intrusions. For all that period, conquerors had been obliged either to adopt Chinese culture or to be gradually engulfed by their subjects, who masked their practicality by patience. Another such period of trial was at hand.

In the aftermath of the 1860 conflict, the Emperor and the court faction that had urged resistance to the British mission fled the capital. Prince Gong, the Emperor’s half brother, assumed the role of de facto head of government. Having negotiated the conclusion of hostilities, Prince Gong summed up, in a memorial to the Emperor in 1861, the appalling strategic choices:

Now the Nian rebellion is ablaze in the north and the Taiping in the south, our military supplies are exhausted and our troops are worn out. The barbarians take advantage of our weak position and try to control us. If we do not restrain our rage but continue the hostilities, we are liable to sudden catastrophe. On the other hand, if we overlook the way they have harmed us and do not make any preparations against them, then we shall be bequeathing a source of grief to our sons and grandsons.¹⁵

It was the classic dilemma of the defeated: can a society maintain its cohesion while seeming to adapt to the conqueror—and how to build up the capacity to reverse the unfavorable balance of forces? Prince Gong invoked an ancient Chinese saying: “Resort to peace and friendship when temporarily obliged to do so; use war and defense as your actual policy.”¹⁶

Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao. The Gong memorial demonstrated great geopolitical acumen in its assessment of the kind of threat represented by the various invaders. Despite the imminent and actual threat from Britain, the Gong memorial put Britain last in the order of the long-range danger to the cohesion of the Chinese state and Russia first:

Both the Taiping and Nian are gaining victories and constitute an organic disease. Russia, with her territory adjoining ours, aiming to nibble away our territory like a silk worm, may be considered a threat at our bosom. As to England, her purpose is to trade but she acts violently, without regard for human decency. If she is not kept within limits, we shall not be able to stand on our feet. Hence she may be compared to an affliction of our limbs. Therefore we should suppress the Taiping and Nian first, get the Russians under control next, and attend to the British last.¹⁷

To accomplish his long-range aims toward the foreign powers, Prince Gong proposed the establishment of a new government office—an embryonic foreign ministry—to manage affairs with the Western powers and analyze foreign newspapers for information on developments beyond China’s borders. He hopefully predicted that this would be a temporary necessity, to be abolished “[a]s soon as the military campaigns are concluded and the affairs of the various countries are simplified.”¹⁸ This new department was not listed in the official record of metropolitan and state offices until 1890. Its officials tended to be seconded from other, more important departments as a kind of temporary assignment. They were rotated frequently. Though some of its cities were occupied by foreign forces, China treated foreign policy as a temporary expedient rather than a permanent feature of China’s future.¹⁹ The new ministry’s full name was the Zongli Geguo Shiwu Yamen (“Office for the General Management of the Affairs of All Nations”), an ambiguous phrasing open to the interpretation that China was not engaging in diplomacy with foreign peoples at all, but rather ordering their affairs as part of its universal em pire.²⁰

The implementation of Prince Gong’s policy fell into the hands of Li Hongzhang, a top-ranking mandarin who had risen to prominence commanding forces in the Qing campaigns against the Taiping Rebellion. Ambitious, urbane, impassive in the face of humiliation, supremely well versed in China’s classical tradition but uncommonly attuned to its peril, Li served for nearly four decades as China’s face to the outside world. He cast himself as the intermediary between the foreign powers’ insistent demands for territorial and economic concessions and the Chinese court’s expansive claims of political superiority. By definition his policies could never meet with either side’s complete approbation. Within China in particular Li left a controversial legacy, especially among those urging a more confrontational course. Yet his efforts—rendered infinitely more complex by the belligerence of the traditionalist faction of the Chinese court, which periodically insisted on meeting the foreign powers in battle with minimal preparation—demonstrate a remarkable ability to navigate between, and usually mitigate, late-Qing China’s severely unattractive alternatives.

Li made his reputation in crisis, emerging as an expert in military affairs and “barbarian management” during China’s midcentury rebellions. In 1862 Li was sent to administer the wealthy eastern province of Jiangsu, where he found its main cities besieged by Taiping rebels but secured by Western-led armies determined to defend their new commercial privileges. Applying the maxims of the Gong memorandum, Li allied himself with—and established himself as the ultimate authority over—the Western forces in order to destroy their common foe. During what was effectively a joint Chinese-Western counterinsurgency campaign, Li forged a working relationship with Charles “Chinese” Gordon, the famous British adventurer later killed by the Mahdi in the siege of Khartoum in the Sudan. (Li and Gordon eventually fell out when Li ordered the execution of captured rebel leaders to whom Gordon had promised clemency.) With the Taiping threat quelled in 1864, Li was promoted to a series of increasingly prominent positions, emerging as China’s de facto foreign minister and the chief negotiator in its frequent foreign crises.²¹

The representative of a society under siege by vastly more powerful countries and significantly different cultures has two choices. He can attempt to close the cultural gap, adopt the manners of the militarily stronger and thereby reduce the pressures resulting from the temptation to discriminate against the culturally strange. Or he can insist on the validity of his own culture by flaunting its special characteristics and gain respect for the strength of its convictions.

In the nineteenth century Japanese leaders took the first course, aided by the fact that when they encountered the West their country was already well on the way to industrialization and had demonstrated its social cohesion. Li, representing a country wracked by rebellion for whose defeat he needed foreign help, did not have that option. Nor would he have shed his Confucian provenance, whatever the benefits of such a course.

An account of Li Hongzhang’s travels within China serves as a grim record of China’s turmoil: within one fairly representative two-year period in 1869–71, he was catapulted between southwest China, where French representatives had raised a protest over anti-Christian riots; to the north, where a new set of riots had broken out; back to the far southwest, where a minority tribe on the Vietnamese border was in revolt; then to the northwest to address a major Muslim rebellion; from there to the port of Tianjin in the northeast, where a massacre of Christians had drawn French warships and a threat of military intervention; and finally to the southeast, where a new crisis was brewing on the island of Taiwan (then known in the West as Formosa).²²

Li cut a distinctive figure on a diplomatic stage dominated by Western-defined codes of conduct. He wore the flowing robes of a Confucian mandarin and proudly sported ancient designations of rank, such as the “Double-Eyed Peacock Feather” and the “Yellow Jacket,” that his Western counterparts could only observe with bewilderment. His head was shaved—in the Qing style—except for a long braided ponytail, and covered by an oblong official’s cap. He spoke epigrammatically in a language that only a handful of foreigners understood. He carried himself with such otherworldly serenity that one British contemporary compared him, with a mixture of awe and incomprehension, to a visitor from another planet. China’s travails and concessions, his demeanor seemed to suggest, were but temporary obstacles on the route to the ultimate triumph of Chinese civilization. His mentor, Zeng Guofan, a top-ranking Confucian scholar and veteran commander of the Taiping campaigns, had advised Li in 1862 how to use the basic Confucian value of self-restraint as a diplomatic tool: “In your association with foreigners, your manner and deportment should not be too lofty, and you should have a slightly vague, casual appearance. Let their insults, deceitfulness, and contempt for everything appear to be understood by you and yet seem not understood, for you should look somewhat stupid.”²³

Like every other Chinese high official of his era, Li believed in the superiority of China’s moral values and the justness of its traditional imperial prerogatives. Where he differed was less in his assessment of China’s superiority than in his diagnosis that it lacked, for the time being, a material or military basis. Having studied Western weaponry during the Taiping conflict and sought out information on foreign economic trends, he realized that China was falling dangerously out of phase with the rest of the world. As he warned the Emperor in a bluntly worded 1872 policy memorial: “To live today and still say ‘reject the barbarians’ and ‘drive them out of our territory’ is certainly superficial and absurd talk. . . . They are daily producing their weapons to strive with us for supremacy and victory, pitting their superior techniques against our inadequacies.”²⁴

Li had reached a conclusion similar to Wei Yuan’s—though by now the problem of reform was exponentially more urgent than in Wei Yuan’s time. Thus Li warned:

The present situation is one in which, externally, it is necessary for us to be harmonious with the barbarians, and internally, it is necessary for us to reform our institutions. If we remain conservative, without making any change, the nation will be daily reduced and weakened. . . . Now all the foreign countries are having one reform after another, and progressing every day like the ascending of steam. Only China continues to preserve her traditional institutions so cautiously that even though she be ruined and extinguished, the conservatives will not regret it.²⁵

During a series of landmark Chinese policy debates in the 1860s, Li and his bureaucratic allies outlined a course of action they named “self-strengthening.” In one 1863 memorandum, Li took as his starting point (and as a means of softening the blow for his imperial readership) that “[e]verything in China’s civil and military system is far superior to that in the West. Only in firearms is it absolutely impossible to catch up with them.”²⁶ But in light of its recent catastrophes, Li counseled, China’s elite could no longer afford to look down on foreign innovations, “sneer[ing] at the sharp weapons of foreign countries as things produced by strange techniques and tricky craft, which they consider it unnecessary to learn.”²⁷ What China needed was firearms, steamships, and heavy machinery, as well as the knowledge and the techniques to produce them.

In order to enhance Chinese capacity to study foreign texts and blueprints and converse with foreign experts, young Chinese needed to be trained in foreign languages (an undertaking heretofore dismissed as unnecessary, since all foreigners presumably aspired to become Chinese). Li argued that China should open schools in its major cities—including its capital, which it had fought so long to safeguard from foreign influence—to teach foreign languages and engineering techniques. Li framed the project as a challenge: “Are Chinese wisdom and intelligence inferior to those of Westerners? If we have really mastered the Western languages and, in turn, teach one another, then all their clever techniques of steamships and firearms can be gradually and thoroughly learned.”²⁸

Prince Gong struck a similar note in an 1866 proposal urging that the Emperor support the study of Western scientific innovations:

What we desire is that our students shall get to the bottom of these subjects . . . for we are firmly convinced that if we are able to master the mysteries of mathematical calculation, physical investigation, astronomical observation, construction of engines, engineering of water-courses, this, and this only, will assure the steady growth of the power of the empire.²⁹

China needed to open up to the outside world—and to learn from countries heretofore considered vassals and barbarians—first to strengthen its traditional structure and then to regain its preeminence.

This would have been a heroic task had the Chinese court been unified behind Prince Gong’s foreign policy concept and Li Hongzhang’s execution of it. In fact, a vast gulf separated these more outward-looking officials from the more insular traditionalist faction. The latter adhered to the classical view that China had nothing to learn from foreigners, as given voice by the ancient philosopher Mencius in Confucius’s era: “I have heard of men using the doctrines of our great land to change barbarians, but I have never yet heard of any being changed by the barbarians.”³⁰ In the same vein Wo-ren, the chancellor of the prestigious Hanlin Academy of Confucian scholarship, assailed Prince Gong’s plans to hire foreign instructors in Chinese schools:

The foundation of an empire rests on propriety and righteousness, not on schemes and stratagems. Its roots lie in the hearts of men, not skills and crafts. Now for the sake of a trivial knack, we are to honor barbarians as our masters. . . . The empire is vast and abundant in human talents. If astronomy and mathematics must be studied, there are bound to be some Chinese who are well-versed in them.³¹

The belief in China’s self-sufficiency represented the combined experience of millennia. Yet it supplied no answer to how China was to confront its immediate peril, especially how to catch up with Western technology. Many of China’s top-ranking officials still seemed to assume that the solution to China’s foreign problems lay in executing or exiling its negotiators. Li Hongzhang was stripped of his rank in disgrace three times while Beijing challenged the foreign powers; but each time he was recalled because his opponents could find no better alternative than to rely on his diplomatic skills to solve the crises they had generated.

Torn between the compulsions of a weak state and the claims of a universal empire, China’s reforms proceeded haltingly. Eventually a palace coup forced the abdication of a reform-leaning Emperor and returned the traditionalists, headed by the Empress Dowager Cixi, to a predominant position. In the absence of fundamental internal modernization and reform, China’s diplomats were, in effect, asked to limit the damage to China’s territorial integrity and to stem further erosions in its sovereignty without being supplied the means to alter China’s basic weakness. They were to gain time without a plan for using the time they gained. And nowhere was this challenge more acute than in the rise of a new entrant into the balance of power in Northeast Asia—a rapidly industrializing Japan.

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Managing Decline

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