Authors: Henry Kissinger
To give them … elaborate clothes
and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach … and, as for those who come to surrender, the emperor [should] show them favor by honoring them with an imperial reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their mind. These are what may be called the five baits.
The hallmark of China’s diplomatic rituals, the kowtow—kneeling and touching one’s head to the ground to acknowledge the Emperor’s superior authority—was an abasement, to be sure, and proved a stumbling block to relations with modern Western states. But the kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor’s return gifts.
Traditionally, China sought to dominate psychologically by its achievements and its conduct—interspersed with occasional military excursions to teach recalcitrant barbarians a “lesson” and to induce respect. Both these strategic goals and this fundamentally psychological approach to armed conflict were in evidence as recently as China’s wars with India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, as well as in the manner in which core interests vis-à-vis other neighbors are affirmed.
Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line
could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer. Ironically, the only foreigners who achieved something akin to this status were conquerors. In one of history’s most amazing feats of cultural imperialism, two peoples that conquered China—the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchus in the seventeenth—were induced to adopt core elements of Chinese culture to facilitate the administration of a people so numerous and so obdurate in its assumption of cultural superiority. The conquerors were significantly assimilated by the defeated Chinese society, to a point where substantial parts of their home territory came to be treated as traditionally Chinese. China had not sought to export its political system; rather, it had seen others come to it. In that sense, it has expanded not by conquest but by osmosis.
In the modern era, Western representatives with their own sense of cultural superiority set out to enroll China in the European world system, which was becoming the basic structure of international order. They pressured China to cultivate ties with the rest of the world through exchanges of ambassadors and free trade and to uplift its people through a modernizing economy and a society open to Christian proselytizing.
What the West conceived of as a process of enlightenment and engagement was treated in China as an assault. China tried at first to parry it and then to resist outright. When the first British envoy, George Macartney, arrived in the late eighteenth century, bringing with him some early products of the Industrial Revolution and a letter from King George III proposing free trade and the establishment of reciprocal resident embassies in Beijing and London, the Chinese boat that carried him from Guangzhou to Beijing was festooned with a banner that identified him as “The English ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China.” He was dismissed with a letter to the
King of England explaining that no ambassador could be permitted to reside in Beijing because “Europe consists of many other nations besides your own: if each and all demanded to be represented at our Court, how could we possibly consent? The thing is utterly impracticable.” The Emperor saw no need for trade beyond what was already occurring in limited, tightly regulated amounts, because Britain had no goods China desired:
Swaying the wide world
, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the State; strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to dispatch them from afar … As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things.
After the defeat of Napoleon, as its mercantile expansion gathered pace, Britain attempted another overture, dispatching a second envoy with a similar proposal. Britain’s display of naval power during the Napoleonic Wars had done little to change China’s estimate of the desirability of diplomatic relations. When William Amherst, the envoy, declined to attend the kowtow ceremony, offering the excuse that his dress uniform had been delayed, his mission was dismissed, and any further attempt at diplomacy was explicitly discouraged. The Emperor dispatched a message to
England’s Prince Regent
, explaining that as “overlord of all under Heaven,” China could not be troubled to walk each barbarian envoy through the correct protocol. The imperial records would duly acknowledge that “thy kingdom far away across the oceans proffers its loyalty and yearns for civilization,” but (as a nineteenth-century Western missionary publication translated the edict):
henceforward no more envoys
need be sent over this distant route, as the result is but a vain waste of travelling energy. If thou canst but incline thine heart to submissive service, thou mayest dispense with sending missions to court at certain periods; that is the true way to turn toward civilization. That thou mayest for ever obey We now issue this mandate.
Though such admonitions seem presumptuous by today’s standards—and were deeply offensive to the country that had just maintained the European equilibrium and could count itself Europe’s most advanced naval, economic, and industrial power—the Emperor was expressing himself in a manner consistent with the ideas about his place in the world that had prevailed for millennia, and that many neighboring peoples had been induced to at least indulge.
The Western powers, to their shame, eventually brought matters to a head over the issue of free trade in the most self-evidently harmful product they sold, insisting on the right to the unrestricted importation of—from all the fruits of Western progress—opium. China in the late Qing Dynasty had neglected its military technology partly because it had been unchallenged for so long but largely because of the low status of the military in China’s Confucian social hierarchy, expressed in the saying “Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers.” Even when under assault by Western forces, the Qing Dynasty diverted military funds in 1893 to restore a resplendent marble boat in the imperial Summer Palace.
Temporarily overwhelmed by military pressure in 1842, China signed treaties conceding Western demands. But it did not abandon its sense of uniqueness and fought a tenacious rearguard action. After scoring a decisive victory in an 1856–58 war (fought over an alleged improper impoundment of a British-registered ship in Guangzhou), Britain insisted on a treaty enshrining its long-sought right to station a resident minister in Beijing. Arriving the next year to take up his post
with a triumphal retinue, the British envoy found the main river route to the capital blocked with chains and spikes. When he ordered a contingent of British marines to clear the obstacles, Chinese forces opened fire; 519 British troops died and another 456 were wounded in the ensuing battle. Britain then dispatched a military force under Lord Elgin that stormed Beijing and burned the Summer Palace as the Qing court fled. This brutal intervention compelled the ruling dynasty’s grudging acceptance of a “legation quarter” to house the diplomatic representatives. China’s acquiescence in the concept of reciprocal diplomacy within a Westphalian system of sovereign states was reluctant and resentful.
At the heart of these disputes was a larger question: Was China a world order entire unto itself or a state like others that was part of a wider international system? China clung to the traditional premise. As late as 1863, after two military defeats by “barbarian” powers and a massive domestic uprising (the Taiping Rebellion) quelled only by calling in foreign troops, the Emperor dispatched a letter to Abraham Lincoln assuring him of China’s benign favor: “
Having, with reverence, received
the commission from Heaven to rule the universe, we regard both the middle empire [China] and the outside countries as constituting one family, without any distinction.”
In 1872, the eminent Scottish Sinologist James Legge phrased the issue pointedly and with his era’s characteristic confidence in the self-evident superiority of the Western concept of world order:
During the past forty years
her [China’s] position with regard to the more advanced nations of the world has been entirely changed. She has entered into treaties with them upon equal terms; but I do not think her ministers and people have yet looked this truth fairly in the face, so as to realize the fact that China is only one of many independent nations in the world, and that the “beneath the sky,” over which her emperor has
rule, is not
all
beneath the sky, but only a certain portion of it which is defined on the earth’s surface and can be pointed out upon the map.
With technology and trade impelling contradictory systems into closer contact, which world order’s norms would prevail?
In Europe, the Westphalian system was an outgrowth of a plethora of de facto independent states at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Asia entered the modern era without such a distinct apparatus of national and international organization. It possessed several civilizational centers surrounded by smaller kingdoms, with a subtle and shifting set of mechanisms for interactions between them.
The rich fertility of China’s plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political, economic, and cultural influence—even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards. Its comparative advantage resided in the wealth of its economy, which produced goods that all of its neighbors desired. Shaped by these elements, the Chinese idea of world order differed markedly from the European experience based on a multiplicity of co-equal states.
The drama of China’s encounter with the developed West and Japan was the impact of great powers, organized as expansionist states, on a civilization that initially saw the trappings of modern statehood as an abasement. The “rise” of China to eminence in the twenty-first century is not new, but reestablishes historic patterns. What is distinctive is that China has returned as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization and as a contemporary great power on the Westphalian model. It combines the legacies of “All Under Heaven,” technocratic modernization, and an unusually turbulent twentieth-century national quest for a synthesis between the two.
The imperial dynasty collapsed in 1911, and the foundation of a Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen in 1912 left China with a weak central government and ushered in a decade of warlordism. A stronger central government under Chiang Kai-shek emerged in 1928 and sought to enable China to assume a place in the Westphalian concept of world order and in the global economic system. Seeking to be both modern and traditionally Chinese, it attempted to fit into an international system that was itself in upheaval. Yet at that point, Japan, which had launched its modernization drive half a century earlier, began a bid for Asian hegemony. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 was followed by Japan’s invasion of large stretches of central and eastern China in 1937. The Nationalist government was prevented from consolidating its position, and the Communist insurgency was given breathing space.
Though emerging as one of the victorious
Allied powers with the end of World War II in 1945, China was torn apart by civil war and revolutionary turmoil that challenged all relationships and legacies.
On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, the victorious Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the words “The Chinese people have stood up.” Mao elaborated this slogan as a China purifying and strengthening itself through a doctrine of “continuous revolution” and proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order. The entire institutional spectrum came under attack: Western democracy, Soviet leadership of the Communist world, and the legacy of the Chinese past. Art and monuments, holidays and traditions, vocabulary and dress, fell under various forms of interdict—blamed for bringing about the passivity that had rendered China unprepared in the face of foreign intrusions. In Mao’s concept of order—which he called the “great harmony,” echoing classical Chinese philosophy—a new China
would emerge out of the destruction of traditional Confucian culture emphasizing harmony. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, would serve as a precursor to the next. The process of revolution must be ever accelerated, Mao held, lest the revolutionaries become complacent and indolent. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote Mao:
The cycle, which is endless
, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.
In the end, this upheaval was designed to produce a kind of traditional Chinese outcome: a form of Communism intrinsic to China, setting itself apart by a distinctive form of conduct that swayed by its achievements, with China’s unique and now revolutionary moral authority again swaying “All Under Heaven.”