What was truly remarkable, after this long series of
challenges, was that the Qing dynasty did not collapse right away, but
managed to survive for the whole of the nineteenth century and on until
1912. In partial explanation, Qing statesmen described this survival as
a “restoration” (zhongxing), a
venerable phrase frequently applied to other dynasties that had managed
to weather waves of crises and restore moral and political order to the
empire. The idea of restoration had both a nostalgic and a bittersweet
ring to it: those past restorations, although significant, had been
impermanent, for each of the “restored” dynasties had eventually passed
away. Unlike those of the past, moreover, the Qing restoration took
place without strong imperial leadership.
Emperor Tongzhi,
whose name is given to this restoration period, was only five years old
at his accession to the throne in 1861, and died in 1875 before having
had a chance to exercise personal power. His “reign” was presided over
by his mother, Cixi, acting as regent, by his uncle Prince Gong ..., by one or two influential grand councilors, but above all by an exceptional group of provincial officials who had risen to prominence fighting the Taiping, the Nian, or the Muslim rebels. Zeng Guofan,
Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang were probably the best known of these,
but there were scores of others of comparable skill. Acting sometimes
in concert and sometimes independently, these officials managed to
reinvest the Qing dynasty with a sense of purpose, shore up the
economy, and develop significant new institutions. This was a
remarkable achievement in the context of what had appeared to be a
disintegrating Chinese state. (SMC, 186)
 The
Confucian doctrine that Zeng [Guofan] espoused was an austere yet
eclectic one that sought to reconcile three approaches to Confucian
truth. One approach insisted on the primacy of moral principle and
personal ethical values acquired through education; one espoused the
methods of textual scrutiny and rigor that had come to dominate kaozheng
thinking in Qianlong’s reign; one believed in the “practical” learning
of statecraft thinkers like He Changling, seeking a sturdy foundation
on which to rebuild a sound and honest administrative structure.
Zeng’s synthesis was arrived at
after years of study and reflection during the dark days that followed
China’s defeat in the Opium War. ... Convinced that a kind of spiritual
collapse lay behind the mid-Qing crisis, Zeng’s approach to restoration
was to rebuild schools and reinstitute a strict Confucian curriculum.
He wished to encourage able students to take the conventional exams
rather than purchase honorary degrees and titles from the Qing
government, which had been selling them by the thousands in an attempt
to raise more revenue to meet military costs. ... [He] developed a
careful system of interviews and rankings to help him choose ... staff
members: true to his principles, he tried to gauge their honesty,
efficiency, and intellectual prowess before hiring them; he always
rejected those who were opium addicts, boastful, shifty-eyed, or coarse
in speech and manner. By the 1870s, dozens of Zeng’s former staff had
been promoted by the central government to substantive office. It was a
tribute to Zeng’s loyalty to the Qing that he did not try to exploit
this situation and build up his own power base, or seize power in his
own name.
Despite the weight Zeng placed on traditional
scholarly and moral values, he was not a simple-minded conservative.
For instance, he not only encouraged the use of the Western-officered
Ever-Victorious Army, he was also quick to see the value of making
selective use of Western technology. The first person to present Zeng
with convincing arguments for such a policy was the scholar Feng
Guifen ... [who] argued that China must learn to “strengthen itself” (ziqiang)
by including foreign languages, mathematics, and science in the
curriculum: Chinese students excelling in these subjects should be
granted the provincial examination degree.
| China was a hundred times
larger than France and two hundred times larger than England, Feng
wrote, so “why are they small and yet strong? Why are we large and yet
weak?” The answer lay in the greater skills of foreigners in four
main areas: utilizing all their manpower resources, exploiting their
soil to the full, maintaining close bonds between ruler and subjects,
and ensuring “the necessary accord of word with deed.” |
In order to start building China’s
strength, Feng argued, “what we then have to learn from the barbarians
is only one thing, solid ships and effective guns.” This could be
achieved by establishing shipyards and arsenals in selected ports, and
by hiring foreign advisers to train Chinese artisans to manufacture
such wares in China. Since Feng felt that “the intelligence and wisdom
of the Chinese are necessarily superior to those of the various
barbarians,” the conclusion was clear: China would first learn from
foreigners, then equal them, and finally surpass them. (SMC, 187-9)
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Do you agree with Feng about the four main points that China needed to learn from the West?
- utilizing all their manpower resources
- exploiting their
soil to the full
- maintaining close bonds between ruler and subjects
- ensuring the necessary accord of word with deed
What about his belief that the place to start was learning how to build solid ships and effective guns?
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 The events of the 1850s had forced China’s
leaders to acknowledge the existence of a wider world, and they slowly
developed a number of devices to help them interact with it. The first
of these had been the foreign-managed Inspectorate of Customs, created
in 1854 as a response to the threat of Taiping attack on Shanghai, and
designed to collect tariffs equitably and generate new revenues for the
Qing from the import dues on foreign goods. ... Under the direction of the capable Robert Hart,
who was born in Northern Ireland and had served in the British
consulates at Ningbo and Canton before transferring his services to the
Qing, the Imperial Maritime Customs was erected on the foundation of
the small foreign Inspectorate of Customs of 1954, and in the 1860s
became an internationally staffed bureaucracy with agencies in all the
treaty ports. Hart was able to make large sums of money available to
the Peking government, some of which supported the college and other
modernizing projects. Equally important, his staff accumulated accurate
statistics on trade patterns and local conditions all over China. (SMC, 191-5)
The allied British and American occupation of
Peking in 1860 and the court’s flight to Manchuria necessitated a
second institution that would provide some more formal means of
negotiating with foreigners. The Qing solution, after protracted
debate, was to establish a special new agency in 1861: the Office for
the Management of the Business of All Foreign Countries, usually known
by its Chinese abbreviation, the Zongli Yamen. This was the first
significant institutional innovation in the central Peking bureaucracy
that the Qing had made since Emperor Yongzheng created the nucleus of
the Grand Council in 1729.
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The Zongli Yamen was supervised by a
controlling board of five senior officials (initially all Manchus),
among whom the emperor’s uncle, Prince Gong, was the de facto
leader. ... Prince Gong, the most important Manchu to emerge as a
reformer in the Tongzhi Restoration period, was at this time only
twenty-eight. Bitterly anti-foreign as a youth, he had moved gradually
to a position of patient wariness and eventually to open respect for
the West. ...
[In 1862, Prince Gong] obtained the court’s permission to open an
interpreter’s school in Peking. Its small body of students, aged
fourteen and under, would be chosen from each of the eight banners and
paid a stipend to learn English and French. ... New government-sponsored
language schools opened in Shanghai, Canton, and Fuzhou, and in 1867
Prince Gong and [his second-in-command] Wenxiang began a campaign to
transform the Peking school for interpreters into a full-fledged
college. They proposed adding to the curriculum such subjects as
mathematics, chemistry, geology, mechanics, and international law, and
hiring foreigners as instructors. Despite vigorous protests from
conservative senior officials that the Chinese had no need for
“barbarians as teachers” to instruct them in
“trifling arts,” ... the
reformers carried the day. The college, with its new curriculum, was
opened in February 1867. (SMC, 191-4)
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[Zeng
Guofan] ordered thirty-five-year-old Yung Wing to travel to the United
States and buy the machinery necessary for establishing a small arsenal
in China. The choice of Yung was a shrewd one, for the man, born to a
poor family near Macao and educated at missionary schools there and in
Hong Kong, had first traveled to the United States in 1847. After three
years of preparatory school in Massachusetts, Yung had worked his way
through Yale and received his B.A. in 1854, becoming the first Chinese
to graduate from an American university. ...
[O]nce he decided to trust Yung, Zeng went
all the way, giving him 68,000 taels in cash from the Canton and
Shanghai treasuries to purchase the basic tools needed to establish a
machine shop in China. After Yung Wing had traveled to Europe and made
preliminary estimates and enquiries ... he continued on to the United
States. ... With the Civil War raging, it was hard to find an American
firm that would fill the Chinese order, but at last the Putnam Machine
Company in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, agreed to take on the work. ...
According to Yung Wing, Zeng “stood and watched [the machine’s]
automatic movement with unabashed delight, for this was the first time
he had seen machinery and how it worked.” The machines were first used
to make guns and cannon; but by 1868, with the help of Western
technicians and special grants from the foreign customs dues, a
Chinese-built hull and boiler were successfully combined with a
refurbished foreign steam engine, and the SS Tianqi (“The Auspicious”) was launched.
A second arsenal and shipyard was
established at Fuzhou in Fujian province by Zuo Zongtang, shortly
before he was transferred to the northwest to suppress the Muslim
rebels. At both Shanghai and Fuzhou arsenals, schools for the study of
mechanical skills and navigation were founded under the direction of
foreign advisers, and translation projects for technical works were
started on an ambitious scale. (SMC, 189-90)
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Response to the Unequal Treaties
1878 Circular to Chinese Ministers Abroad
7. As regards Jurisdiction, i.e. Exterritoriality. By the Treaties foreigners in China are not amenable to the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities, i.e. they
are exterritorialized. If they have disputes among themselves, their
own authorities are to settle them; if they commit an offense, their
own authorities are to punish them according to their own national
laws. But foreigners claim much more than this: they interpret the
extraterritorial privilege as meaning, not only that Chinese officials
are not to control them, but that they may disregard and violate
Chinese regulations with impunity. To this we cannot assent. China has
not by any Treaty given foreigners permission to disregard or violate
the laws of China: while residing in China they are as much bound to
observe them as Chinese are; what has been conceded in the Treaties in
this connection is merely that offenders shall be punished by their own
national officials in accordance with their own national laws.
8. The “Most favored Nation” is found in all the Treaties, and it is well that it should be so, for
it is difficult for China to distinguish between foreigners or say
which belongs to which nationality; and so much is this so, that even
non-Treaty Power foreigners are treated like the others. ... But foreign
governments ... are not always fair in their interpretations of it. For
example, if China for a consideration
grants a certain country a new privilege on such and such conditions,
this would be of the nature of a special concession for a special
consideration. ... [But] there are some who, while demanding the
privilege, refuse to be bound by the conditions attached to it. In a
word, as regards this “most favored nation” clause, we hold that if one
country desires to participate in the privileges conceded to another
country, it must consent to be bound by the conditions attached to them
and accepted by that other. (DC, First Edition, 157-9)
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Throughout the
1860s, as officials from the Zongli Yamen struggled to understand their
new world and to adjust to it, violence by the Chinese against the
Western missionaries formed a harsh accompaniment. In Sichuan and
Guizhou and Guangdong, in the rich Grand Canal commercial city of
Yangzhou and the barren hills of Shaanxi, missionaries and their
converts were harassed, beaten, and occasionally killed, their property
threatened or destroyed. Finally, in the summer of 1870 in Tianjin, the
very city that had given its name to the 1858 treaties and where many
foreign diplomats had made their homes during the protracted
negotiations over residence in Peking, the violence burst into hideous
prominence.
For months rumors had spread through the city that the Christians
had been maiming and torturing children, and practicing every kind of
sexual aberration. The Catholics, whose huge new Tianjin church had
been built — despite public protest — on the site of a former imperial
park and temple, came in for the worst abuse. Seeing himself as the
Catholics’ main protector, the French consul Henri Fontanier
protested several times to the city officials: but they did little to
calm the agitation, and large crowds of Chinese continued to menace the
foreigners. Frustrated and angry, Fontanier, two pistols tucked into
his belt and accompanied by an aide with a drawn sword, rushed into the
magistrate’s yamen. Furious at the Chinese magistrate’s
bland prevarication, Fontanier drew one pistol and fired; missing the
magistrate, he killed a bystander. A crowd of hostile Chinese, already
assembled outside the office, exploded with their own rage. Fontanier
and his aide were killed along with several French traders and their
wives. The church was burned. The convent of the Catholic Sisters of
Mercy was broken into by a mob, and the ten sisters there were
attacked, stripped, and killed. By day’s end, sixteen French men
and women were dead, along with three Russians whom the crowd had
thought were French. (SMC, 196)
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A Chinese View of Christianity
The Roman Catholic religion had its origin
from Jesus, and is practiced by all the Western countries, and taught
by them to others; it exhorts men to virtue. The founder was nailed by
wicked men on a cross, and cut to death. His disciples then scattered
about the world to disseminate the doctrine. The Principal is called
the Fa Wang Fu [the Kingly Father of the Doctrine]. Sexual congress
without shame is called “a public meeting,” or “a
benevolent society.” When they marry they use no go-between, and
make no distinctions between old and young. Any man and woman who like
may come together, only must first do obeisance to the bishop, and pray
to Shangdi [God]. The bride must invariably first sleep with the
spiritual teacher, who takes the first fruits of her virginity. ... When
these [foreign] devils open a chapel, they begin with their female
converts by administering a pill. When they have swallowed it, they are
beguiled, and allow themselves to be defiled. Then after the priest has
outraged them, he recites an incantation. The placenta then is easily drawn out, and is chopped up to make an ingredient for their hocussing drugs.
At Tientsin [i.e. Tianjin] they used
constantly to beguile and entice away young children in order to scoop
out their eyes and hearts. When the people discovered it, they tore
down their tall foreign houses, and found heaped up inside bodies of
kidnapped children, boys and girls.
All these facts should make us careful not
to incur similar dangers. We should unite hands and hearts to keep out
the evil before it is upon us.
His Excellency the Commander-in-chief for the Canton province. (DC, 153-4) |
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