Chapter 3: From Preeminence to Decline
1 “Wei Yuan’s Statement of a Policy for Maritime
Defense, 1842,” in Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, eds.,
China’s Response to the West: A Documentary
Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979), 30.
2 Ibid., 31–34.
3 Ibid., 34.
4 Opinion differs as to whether the inclusion of
Most Favored Nation clauses in these initial treaties represented a
concerted Chinese strategy or a tactical oversight. One scholar
notes that in some respects it curtailed the Qing court’s scope of
maneuver in subsequent negotiations with the foreign powers, since
any Western power could be sure it would gain the benefits afforded
to its rivals. On the other hand, the practical effect was to
prevent any one colonizer from attaining a dominant economic
position—a contrast to the experience of many neighboring countries
during this period. See Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, The Rise of Modern China, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 190–92.
5 “Wei Yuan’s Statement of a Policy for Maritime
Defense,” in Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s
Response to the West, 34.
6 Prince Gong (Yixin), “The New Foreign Policy of
January 1861,” in Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West, 48.
7 Macartney’s Journal, in J. L. Cranmer-Byng, ed.,
An Embassy to China: Being the journal kept by
Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung,
1793–1794 (London: Longmans, Green, 1962), 191,
239.
8 John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman,
China: A New History, 2nd enlarged ed.
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 216. For an account of the
Taiping Rebellion and the career of its charismatic leader Hong
Xiuquan, see Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese
Son (New York: W. W. Norton 1996).
9 Hsü, The Rise of Modern
China, 209.
10 Ibid., 209–11.
11 Bruce Elleman, Modern
Chinese Warfare, 1795–1989 (New York: Routledge, 2001),
48–50; Hsü, The Rise of Modern China,
212–15.
12 Mary C. Wright, The Last
Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-Chih Restoration,
1862–1874, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1962), 233–36.
13 Hsü, The Rise of Modern
China, 215–18.
14 Commenting acidly on the loss of Vladivostok 115
years later (and on President Ford’s summit with Soviet General
Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in that city), Deng Xiaoping told me that
the different names given to the city by the Chinese and the
Russians reflected their respective purposes: the Chinese name
translated roughly as “Sea Slug,” while the Russian name meant
“Rule of the East.” “I don’t think it has any other meaning except
what it means at face value,” he added.
15 “The New Foreign Policy of January 1861,” in
Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to
the West, 48. For consistency within the present volume, the
spelling of “Nian” has been changed in this passage from “Nien,”
the spelling more common at the time of the quoted book’s
publication. The underlying Chinese word is the same.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Christopher A. Ford, The
Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010),
142–43.
20 I am indebted to my associate, Ambassador J.
Stapleton Roy, for bringing this linguistic point to my
attention.
21 This account of Li’s career draws on events
related in William J. Hail, “Li Hung-Chang,” in Arthur W. Hummel,
ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing
Period (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1943), 464–71; J. O. P. Bland, Li
Hung-chang (New York: Henry Holt, 1917); and Edgar
Sanderson, ed., Six Thousand Years of World
History, vol. 7, Foreign
Statesmen (Philadelphia: E. R. DuMont, 1900),
425–44.
22 Hail, “Li Hung-Chang,” in Hummel, ed.,
Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period,
466.
23 “Excerpts from Tseng’s Letters, 1862,” as
translated and excerpted in Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West, 62.
24 Li Hung-chang, “Problems of Industrialization,”
in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell, Imperial China: The Decline of the Last Dynasty and the
Origins of Modern China, the 18th and 19th Centuries (New
York: Vintage, 1967), 238.
25 Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West, 87.
26 “Letter to Tsungli Yamen Urging Study of Western
Arms,” in ibid., 70–72.
27 “Li Hung-chang’s Support of Western Studies,” in
ibid., 75.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 As cited in Wright, The
Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism, 222.
31 As cited in Jerome Ch’en, China and the West: Society and Culture, 1815–1937
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 429.
32 According to the fourteenth-century “Records of
the Legitimate Succession of the Divine Sovereigns” (a work later
widely distributed in the 1930s by the Thought Bureau of Japan’s
Ministry of Education): “Japan is the divine country. The heavenly
ancestor it was who first laid its foundations, and the Sun Goddess
left her descendants to reign over it forever and ever. This is
true only of our country, and nothing similar may be found in
foreign lands. That is why it is called the divine country.” John
W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in
the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986),
222.
33 See Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan
Rising (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 37–38.
34 See Karel van Wolferen, The
Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless
Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989), 13.
35 On the classical conception of a Japancentered
tributary order, see Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the
Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004), 14; and Marius B. Jansen, The
Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000),
69.
36 Jansen, The Making of
Modern Japan, 87.
37 Cited in Ch’en, China and
the West, 431.
38 Masakazu Iwata, Okubo
Toshimichi: The Bismarck of Japan (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1964), citing Wang Yusheng, China and Japan in the Last Sixty Years (Tientsin:
Ta Kung Pao, 1932–34).
39 The occasion of the 1874 crisis was a shipwreck
of a Ryukyu Islands crew on the far southeast coast of Taiwan, and
the murder of the sailors by a Taiwanese tribe. When Japan demanded
a harsh indemnity, Beijing initially responded that it had no
jurisdiction over un-Sinicized tribes. In the traditional Chinese
view, this had a certain logic: “barbarians” were not Beijing’s
responsibility. Seen in modern international legal and political
terms, it was almost certainly a miscalculation, since it signaled
that China did not exert full authority over Taiwan. Japan
responded with a punitive expedition against the island, which Qing
authorities proved powerless to stop. Tokyo then prevailed on
Beijing to pay an indemnity, which one contemporary observer called
“a transaction which really sealed the fate of China, in
advertising to the world that here was a rich Empire which was
ready to pay, but not ready to fight.” (Alexander Michie,
An Englishman in China During the Victorian
Era, vol. 2 [London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1900],
256.) What made the crisis additionally damaging to China was that
until that point, both Beijing and Tokyo had laid claim to the
Ryukyu Islands as a tribute state; after the crisis, the islands
fell under Japan’s sway. See Hsü, The Rise of
Modern China, 315–17.
40 Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West, 71.
41 As quoted in Bland, Li
Hung-chang, 160.
42 Ibid., 160–61.
43 “Text of the Sino-Russian Secret Treaty of
1896,” in Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s
Response to the West, 131.
44 Bland, Li
Hung-chang, 306.
45 For an account of these events and of the
Chinese court’s internal deliberations, see Hsü, The Rise of Modern China, 390–98.
46 In contrast with earlier indemnities, most of
the Boxer indemnity was later renounced or redirected by the
foreign powers to charitable enterprises within China. The United
States directed a portion of its indemnity to the construction of
Tsinghua University in Beijing.
47 These strategies are recounted in compelling
detail in Scott A. Boorman, The Protracted
Game: A Wei-ch’i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary
Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1969).
48 Jonathan Spence, The Search
for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999),
485.