Authors: Odd Westad
Some Chinese like to see their country’s history as cyclical: Over thousands of years China has gone from splendor to decay to regeneration. They believe that we are now at the beginning of a regeneration phase: China will, in the future, become increasingly central and powerful. And they take great pride in the fact that China in so many fields is now steaming toward becoming the world’s preeminent power. Whichever way one wants to approach history, there is, though, one fundamental change from the eighteenth century, when our story begins: Nobody today expects the past to return, at least not in the exact form that it once had. It is part of the modern condition to look more to the future than to the past, and so do the Chinese, even those who believe in great cycles of development. China’s future relations with the world may in form constitute a return to some of what has gone before, but in content they will undoubtedly be altogether new.
I
N THE FIRST PART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
, China began a series of transformations that would change the country forever. Although some of these changes had domestic roots, most were linked to new contacts with the West. But this evolving relationship was not simply an issue of Western impact and Chinese response. For China, it was a complex period of change, in which new practices were formed out of established Chinese patterns. As the Qing state came under pressure from within and without, the room for families and individuals to engage in forms of activity—trade, studies, religious affairs—that took them abroad or at least introduced them to foreigners or foreign ideas in China increased. The story of China’s ninteenth century is therefore not just about imperialism and destruction but also about something new being born, something that is a hybrid of what comes from the inside and from the outside. Some of this hybridity flourished while the Qing empire stumbled from one crisis to the next and came to set the stage for much of what happened later.
The decline in the position of the state in China was crucial to the country’s nineteenth-century metamorphosis. The Qing’s humiliation in its military encounters with the West was one part of this story, but there were also important historical links with the troubled position of the dynasty after the Qianlong emperor’s death in 1799. The Manchus
had attempted to control the country and its neighbors in ways that no other rulers had done before, and by the early nineteenth century they were suffering the consequences of imperial overstretch: The coffers were emptying out, the military was tired of engagements abroad, and the population was becoming weary of a police state that was less and less effective. The framework within which the Qing dynasty had to rule was changing, and it would have taken strong emperors and significant modification of policies to overcome the challenge posed by the new conditions. The Western attacks on China, beginning with the Opium War in 1839, meant that the empire had much less time to change than most people would have expected as the century began. Still, the Qing fought for its position both within China and outside; it was no pushover for its domestic enemies or its international rivals, even when these combined against them. As China’s political crises unfolded, the dynasty learned much about how it could cling to power and about how it could turn new ideas to its advantage. But the state could no longer control knowledge the way it had done in the eighteenth century. Instead, it had to face a revolution in information and practices that gradually spread throughout the country. This revolution in thought and behavior was the early breakthrough of a new form of Chinese modernity, created in constant interaction with the outside world.
C
HINESE WHO ENCOUNTERED FOREIGNERS
in the year 1800—the fourth year of the Jiaqing emperor’s reign—would in most cases have regarded them as yet another group of Qing dynasty subjects. The empire was vast and contained people of different skin colors, different languages, and different faiths. Although its physical borders were ill-defined, China’s political power covered much of Asia from the Korean peninsula to the Tianshan mountains in Central Asia and from Lake Baikal in Siberia to the coasts of Burma. Immediately outside the main circle of imperial control were the tributary states. All of these accepted, in some form or the other, the suzerainty of the Qing emperor, but
mostly managed their own affairs themselves. In Korea, the Qing emperor had direct political influence. In faraway Thailand and Nepal, the tribute relationship was more ceremonial, though still adhered to. But Qing power was fraying at the edges. In Vietnam, officially a Chinese tributary state, the Qing had recently lost most of their sway by backing the losing side in a long civil war.
The situation on the southern borders in 1800 was typical of the ups and downs of China’s relationship with its neighbors. On the one hand, the empire was generally regarded by Chinese and foreigners alike as the center of the larger region, first and foremost in terms of culture and politics. On the other, a Chinese emperor could easily overreach when throwing his weight around in local contests for power within a tributary state. By the late eighteenth century, the Qing dynasty was already less than successful in some of these expeditions: In the 1760s, Qianlong had tried to intervene in Burma to keep the country within the Chinese zone of influence. The expedition was ineffective and costly—at least 70,000 Chinese soldiers died—and the Burmese kept their independence. A war with a newly unified Vietnam in the 1780s was disastrous (as a similar engagement would be two hundred years later): China lost several thousand men in a badly planned and ultimately futile attempt at influencing the outcome of Vietnam’s civil strife. The Vietnamese king soon sought imperial pardon, however, and emphasized his country’s desire again to be allowed to pay tribute to the Court in Beijing. But the Qing’s loss of prestige was considerable.
Some historians see China’s feebleness in tending its regional hegemony in the late eighteenth century as a consequence of domestic weakness. Most of these arguments are unlikely to hold up to historical scrutiny, just as America’s loss in Vietnam two hundred years later is difficult to explain as a by-product of internal decline. Qing China would have prevailed in these engagements, if it had not been for political aimlessness and strategic folly. There were indeed difficulties emerging in a domestic context toward 1800, but none of these had
any major impact on China’s foreign affairs. The main reason for the decline in foreign policy prowess was the feebleness of decision making as the Qianlong emperor had become old and closed-minded, leaving a vacuum at the center of the small group who made foreign policy decisions. As with all authoritarian political systems, Qing China was only as strong as a narrow ruling elite allowed it to be.
Qianlong had ruled for sixty years when he abdicated in 1796, but the old man had no intention of giving up power even then. He only stepped down in order not to insult the memory of his illustrious grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, by ruling longer than he had done. Increasingly feeble, Qianlong remained the source of all authority until he died at eighty-eight, in 1799. All through his life, Qianlong had believed in military solutions to China’s many border problems. At first, his campaigns had generally been successful. Claiming (and probably believing) that he was simply acting to secure China’s borders, rather than expanding the empire, by the 1750s he had taken control of much of Central Asia and sent his military to oversee the mountain passes into India, forcing Nepal to accept China’s suzerainty. Inside the empire, he had brought Tibet and Mongolia, as well as the rich province of Sichuan, more firmly under Beijing’s control. But the military expeditions had been costly and had taken their toll on the emperor himself. By the late 1760s Qianlong had lost the genius for deal-making and compromise that in the past had so often made it possible for him to claim great victories. His increasing inflexibility and isolation from the world outside the Qing Court made him a lesser ruler than what he had once been.
Qianlong’s son and grandson, the Jiaqing (1796–1820) and Daoguang (1820–1850) emperors, were ineffectual leaders, who had none of the nous of the first Qing emperors. Jiaqing, the fifteenth son of Qianlong, was a very earnest and rather square ruler, in both body and mind, when he finally became the real emperor of China at the age of thirty-nine. He had been his father’s third choice for successor (both of his predecessors had died before the end of Qianlong’s rule).
Jiaqing spent his first years in power dealing with what he saw as the twin misfortunes of the past reign: official corruption within the regime and religious fanaticism among some of his subjects. His limited success in stamping out graft gave him some popularity, but reduced his personal power. His efforts to contain religious zealotry were less successful, especially his preoccupation with suppressing the White Lotus Society, a Buddhist millenarian sect with much support among poor settlers in central China. The campaign drained the treasury and dragged on for eight years, up to 1804, before his father’s generals took charge with their old methods of combining resettlement, protected villages, and the use of local militia to fight insurgents.
In the end, Jiaqing crushed the White Lotus Society. But he was criticized both for having exaggerated its significance to begin with and for ham-fistedness in putting down what, in the end, had begun to look like a large-scale rebellion against Qing rule. The White Lotus upheaval was seen by many as self-inflicted damage by the Qing. While his father had been able to spin his most mindless interventions as victories, Jiaqing could not present even his victories as victories, and his personal prestige deteriorated. In 1803 a mob attacked him in the street, and in 1813 a band of conspirators attempted to storm the Forbidden City. When Jiaqing died suddenly in 1820—struck by lightning, it was said, on his way to one of his summer palaces—one of his advisers remarked that his manner of departure was the most exciting initiative the emperor had ever undertaken.
Jiaqing’s rule had diminished the stature of the emperor, and the weakness of the office haunted his son and successor, Daoguang, during his thirty-year reign. Daoguang was a well-meaning but weak-willed man, often ill and given to sudden reversals of policy dependent on the content of the most recent report or recommendation to reach him. As his reign wore on, he increasingly became hostage to powerful factions at Court. His uncles, cousins, consorts, ministers, and palace servants formed strong groups that fought among themselves for power
and influence. The emperor himself sought guidance from the practice of his great forebears—his grandfather Qianlong and his great-great grandfather Kangxi especially—and from established ritual and routine. But while the Qing founders had been innovators (though masking their innovations as a return to the great tradition), Daoguang labored helplessly with returning China to a glorious past he did not understand, while observing his empire sliding into disarray and subjugation.
H
ISTORIANS HAVE DEVELOPED
a number of explanations for China’s nineteenth-century economic and social difficulties, few of which now seem to hold up to source-based examination. Among them are the effects of excessive population growth, exhaustion of resources, inherent technological backwardness, and a lack of market mechanisms. The problem with all of these views is that they find little support in the evidence that has become available recently. New research shows, for instance, that during the eighteenth century, China’s agricultural productivity compared well with any other major part of the world. The rural standard of living in the most productive regions of China (the lower Yangzi river area) was approximately the same as that in the most productive regions in Europe (England) in the same period. In terms of population growth, fertility rates in China seem to have increased in ways comparable to those of European populations, with the economically successful regions becoming the most populous. Although economic growth and population growth put pressure on available resources, the ecological situation in China was not much worse than that in Europe. In some areas it was far better, in part due to efficient and cheap transport. The technology available to farmers and artisans was advanced enough to sustain high productivity (in global comparative terms) and a high level of output in agriculture and handicrafts.
By the early nineteenth century, the Chinese economy was stable but not flourishing. It had reached a plateau in productivity that only a technological transformation could transcend. As long as domestic
politics remained relatively stable and major war was avoided, a dramatic increase in poverty was unlikely. But so was cataclysmic change of the kind that overtook Europe between 1750 and 1850. There political ferment, interstate wars, cheap and accessible energy, and resources from the Americas combined to favor new technologies over old and begin the expansion of an integrated capitalist market. It was, in other words, Europe—and especially England—that was the exception, not China.
While quite a few of the disasters that befell China in the nineteenth century were economic or social, almost none seem to have originated from built-in weaknesses in the development of the empire. Quite the contrary, they were the products of misrule, foreign invasion, wars, and rebellions. There were two major trends in the domestic economy of nineteenth-century China that need some attention, though, so that we may understand their implications for foreign affairs. One was the relative impoverishment of the periphery as the state disintegrated. The other was the shift in patterns of trade in the rich Chinese coastal areas from the interior of China to abroad, mainly (but not exclusively) to Southeast Asia. Both of these trends were, of course, intimately linked to political events. But they combined to create a China that in the mid and late nineteenth century was much more unequal and much less integrated than it had been a century earlier. The disappearance of state-organized transport disadvantaged regions along the economic frontier from Shandong through North China and the middle Yangzi to the great rivers in the south, where Chinese had been moving in large numbers in the eighteenth century to extract raw materials for the economic center. Meanwhile, the increase in foreign trade outcompeted some of these areas; rice from Southeast Asia, for instance, replaced rice from Hunan in feeding the growing cities along the coast and on the Yangzi river.