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Conservatives and Progressives
The Confucian statesmen whose skill, integrity, and
tenacity helped suppress the rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century
showed how imaginatively the Chinese could respond to new challenges.
Under the general banner of restoring order to the Qing Empire, they
had managed to develop new structures to handle foreign relations and
collect custom dues, to build modern ships and weapons, and to start
teaching international law and the rudiments of modern science.
“Self-strengthening” had not proved an empty slogan, but an
apparently viable road to a more secure future. ... [W]ith forceful
imperial leadership and a resolute Grand Council, it appeared that the
Qing dynasty might regain some of its former strength.
Unfortunately for the survival of the
dynasty, forceful leadership was not forthcoming. Tongzhi, in the name
of whose rule the Tongzhi Restoration of central and provincial
government had been undertaken, died suddenly at the age of eighteen in
January 1875, shortly after taking up power in person. The official
cause of death was smallpox, but it was widely rumored that he had
exhausted himself with wild living and overindulgence in the pleasure
quarters of Peking. ... The only way
for [his mother, Empress Dowager] Cixi to preserve her own power was to
continue in her role as regent; accordingly she appointed her
three-year old nephew, Guangxu, as emperor, thus assuring herself of
years more activity as the power behind the throne. (SMC, 208-9)
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 Cixi was a complex and able woman, though also tough-minded
and ruthless when she considered it necessary. She was the only woman
to attain a high level of political power in China during the Qing, and
was consequently blamed for many of the dynasty’s woes by men who
thought she should not have been in power at all. ... [Her political
power] sprang from her position as coregent for her son Tongzhi from
1861 to 1873, and as coregent for her nephew Guangxu from 1875 to 1889.
She also was the ultimate political authority while Guangxu languished
in palace seclusion — on her orders — from 1898 to 1908. Highly literate
and a competent painter, Cixi kept herself well informed on all affairs
of state as she sat behind a screen (for propriety’s sake) and listened
to her male ministers’ reports. Politically conservative and
financially extravagant, she nevertheless approved many of the
self-strengtheners’ restoration ventures; at the same time, she tried
jealously to guard the prerogatives of the ruling Manchu imperial line. (SMC, 209) |
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Although self-strengthening programs continued to be
implemented during the last decades of the nineteenth century, a
disproportionate number of them were initiated by one man, Li
Hongzhang. ... He sought to diversify China’s enterprise into areas that would have long-range effects on the country’s
overall development. These initiatives would involve the Qing
government and individual merchant capitalists in joint operations
under a formula called “government supervision and merchant
management.” (SMC, 210)
Nanjing Jinling Arsenal (金陵造局), built by Li Hongzhang in 1865
Li Hongzhang carried forward earlier
efforts at educational reforms as well. He originally threw his support
behind the proposal for an educational mission in the United States, an
idea first formulated by Yung Wing and backed by Zeng Guofan. The court
gave its consent, and in 1872 the first group of Chinese boys aged
twelve to fourteen ... were sent to Hartford, Connecticut. ... Upon their
return to China, many of the students became influential in the armed
services, engineering, and business; but Li Hongzhang henceforth
dispatched his most promising students to France, Germany, or Great
Britain, where the governments did not object to their receiving
technically advanced military and naval training. He also established
both a naval and a military academy in Tianjin itself. (SMC, 210-2)
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The world of international diplomacy
was even more inhospitable to the Qing. Here Li Hongzhang
worked — sometimes on his own, sometimes in conjunction with Robert
Hart, and sometimes with the Zongli Yamen — to handle a wide
range of difficult problems. (SMC, 212)
 When the French expanded their colonial empire by occupying Hanoi and Haiphong in 1880 — despire Chinese claims to special rights in the area —
and began to pressure China for new concessions in Vietnam, Li
Hongzhang urged caution. But his pleas were swept aside by the excited
urging of belligerent Chinese and Manchus, who insisted that the Qing
take a strong stand on this matter of principle. ... The admiral in
command of the French fleet in the region responded to these
intermittent hostilities by moving his forces into the harbor at Fuzhou
and anchoring near the Chinese fleet.
Li Hongzhang had urged a negotiated
settlement with the French, however humiliating it might
seem, because he knew how frail the newly developed Chinese navy was.
When negotiations broke down in August 1884 and the French fleet in
Fuzhou opened fire, Li was catastrophically proved correct, and the
disparities between a developed industrial power and Qing China
made once more clear to all. The Chinese flagship was sunk by torpedoes
in the first minute of battle; within seven minutes, most of the
Chinese ships were hit; within one hour every Chinese ship was sunk or
on fire and the arsenal and docks destroyed. The French counted 5 dead,
the Chinese 521 dead and 51 missing. Although the Qing subsequently won
some indecisive land battles in the southwest, French control over
Indochina was now assured. A year later the British emulated French
aggressiveness and declared Burma a protectorate. (SMC, 212-3)
During the 1890s tensions heightened as
Japanese designs on the peninsula became apparent. In 1894, when the
outbreak of a domestic rebellion threatened the Korean king, both China
and Japan seized the opportunity to send troops to protect the royal
family. The Japanese, who were able to move more troops faster than the
Chinese, seized the Korean palace on July 21 and appointed a
“regent” loyal to their interests.
That same day the Qing commissioned a British
transport to convey some 1,200 Chinese reinforcements to Korea.
Intercepted by a Japanese cruiser and refusing to surrender, the
transport was fired on by the Japanese and sunk; fewer than 200 men
survived. By the end of the month, Japanese land troops had defeated
the Chinese in a series of battles around Seoul and Pyongyang; in
October the Japanese crossed the Yalu River and entered Qing territory.
The following month another Japanese army seized the strongly fortified
harbor at Lüshun, massacring many of the Chinese in the city.
Japan’s land forces were now poised to enter China proper through
Shanhaiguan, as Dorgon had done two and a half centuries before.
The north China navy, despite Li’s
efforts to conserve it, was now to suffer a fate similar to the
southern navy’s, with yet more damaging consequences to
China’s self-strengthening goals. This northern fleet, consisting
of 2 battleships, 10 cruisers, and 2 torpedo boats, had already been
badly damaged by the Japanese in a September battle off the mouth of
the Yalu, and had retreated to the heavily defended port of Weihaiwei
on the northern side of the Shandong peninsula. There the Chinese
admiral retired his fleet behind a protective curtain of contact mines
and took no further part in the fighting. But in a brilliant maneuver
carried through in January 1895, a Japanese force of 20,000 troops and
10,000 field laborers marched across the Shangdong promontory and
seized the Weihaiwei defensive forts from the landward side. Turning
the guns on the Chinese fleet and simultaneously penetrating the mine
fields with torpedo boats, they destroyed one of the battleships and
four cruisers. The two senior Chinese admirals and the senior Qing
commandants of the forts all committed suicide. (SMC, 213-5)
The terms of the ensuing Treaty of
Shimonoseki, made final in April 1895, were disastrous for
China. ... China had to recognize “the full and complete
independence and autonomy of Korea,” which, under the
circumstances, effectively made Korea a Japanese protectorate. The Qing
also promised to pay Japan 200 million taels in war indemnities, added
four more treaty ports — including Chongqing, far up the Yangzi in
Sichuan province — and ceded to Japan “in perpetuity”
all of Taiwan, the Pescadores, and the Liaodong region of southern
Manchuria. ... Russian, German, and French protests forced the Japanese
to relinquish the claim to Liaodong in exchange for an additional
indemnity of 30 million taels, but all the other treaty stipulations
were confirmed. Many of China’s brightest young scholars,
assembled in Peking for the triennial jinshi
examinations, braved the court’s wrath by passionately denouncing
the Treaty of Shimonoseki and calling for a new, bolder program of
economic growth and governmental reform to offset China’s tragic
losses. But the Qing court seemed paralyzed. It was a dark conclusion
to the brightest hopes of the era of self-strengthening. (SMC, 215)
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Look at Japan. She opened her country
for Western trade later than we did, and her imitation of the West also
came later. Yet only in a short period her success in strengthening
herself has been enormously impressive. She succeeds because she has
been able to proceed with the four tasks [i.e. development of
individual talents, full utilization of land resources, functioning
of each object to its maximum capacity, and free circulation of
merchandise] on a nationwide basis, with no opposition to speak of.
There is no such thing as an impossible task — a so-called
impossible task will become possible if there are enough dedicated
people to perform it. The difficulty with China is not only the lack of
enough dedicated people to perform but also the ignorance of too many
people on the importance of performance. Had our difficulty been the
former and nothing else, we could certainly hire foreigners to perform
for us. Unfortunately, our real difficulty has been the latter, namely,
the ignorance of too many people on the importance of performance. Had
there been foreigners able and willing to work for us, the ignorant
among us would obstruct and sabotage and make sure that these
foreigners could not succeed. Here lies the real reason why we have not
accomplished much; public opinion and entrenched ideas simply will not
allow it. (DC, 157-8) |
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In
the years after the Sino-Japanese War, a formulation became widespread
that gave philosophical reassurance to those worried about the value of
“self-strengthening”: “Chinese learning should remain the essence, but
Western learning be used for practical development.” Generally
abbreviated as the ti-yong
idea (from the Chinese words for “essence” and “practical use”), this
was a culturally reassuring position in a time of ambiguous, often
painful, change.
It affirmed that there was indeed a fundamental
structure of Chinese moral and philosophical values that gave
continuity and meaning to the civilization. Holding on to that belief,
China could then afford to adopt quickly and dramatically all sorts of
Western practices, and to hire Western advisers. (SMC, 217)
Was this the best strategy for modernizing China?
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In this context, the emperor Guangxu, who
undoubtedly had a wider view of the options facing China than any of
his predecessors and had even been studying English, decided to assert
his own independence as ruler, and to act on the country’s
behalf. Between June and September 1898 he issued an extraordinary
series of edicts, earning for this period the name of the
“Hundred Days’ Reforms.” Although most of the edicts
dealt with proposals that had already been raised by self-strengthening
reformers and by the jinshi
protestors of 1895, there had never before been such a coherent body of
reform ideas presented on imperial initiative and backed by imperial
prestige. ...
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In developing this
reform program, several important personnel changes were
made. ... Several reformist thinkers, among them Kang Youwei, were
appointed as secretaries in the Grand Council or the Zongli Yamen so
they could be in on important discussions and memorialize the emperor
through their superiors. ... But many senior officials, viewing
Guangxu’s reform program with a jaundiced eye, saw it as
detrimental to the long-term good of China and destructive of
China’s true inner values. Guangxu seems to have mistakenly
thought that his aunt Cixi would support his vision of a new China and
would help him override this opposition. In fact she was disturbed by
some of the proposed changes that threatened to weaken the Qing ruling
house, and was worried that the faction supporting Guangxu seemed
dangerously subordinate to pressures and influences from both the
British and the French.
Although the evidence is contradictory, it seems
that a number of the reformers feared there might be a coup against the
emperor, and accordingly approached some leading generals in an attempt
to win their support. This led to a backlash when news of the scheming
was reported to the empress dowager, who, on September 19, 1898,
suddenly returned to the Forbidden City. Two days later, she issued an
edict claiming that the emperor had asked her to resume power. She put
Guangxu under palace detention and arrested six of his reputedly
radical advisers. Before they could even be tried on the vague
conspiracy charges, her order that they be executed was carried out, to
the dismay of the reform party and of many foreigners in China. (SMC,
220-1)
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During 1898 and 1899, as part of their general
wave of imperialist expansion, the foreign powers intensified their
pressures and outrages on China. ... In this atmosphere of hostility and
fear, a vigorous force began to develop in China. The many guises in
which it appeared can be encompassed under the blanket term nationalism,
which for the Chinese comprised a new, urgent awareness of their
relationship to foreign forces and to the Manchus. It carried as well a
corresponding sense of the Chinese people as a unit that must be
mobilized for its own survival. (SMC, 222)
The
Boxers United in Righteousness, as they called themselves, began to
emerge as a force in northwest Shandong during 1898. ... Some Boxers
believed they were invulnerable to swords and bullets in combat, and
they drew on an exclectic pantheon of spirits and protectors from folk
religion, popular novels, and street plays. Although they lacked a
unified leadership, Boxers recruited local farmers and other workers
made desperate by the disastrous floods that had been followed by
droughts in Shandong; they began to call for the ending of the special
privileges enjoyed by Chinese Christian converts and to attack both
converts and Christian missionaries. ... [By the spring of 1900, still]
without any coordinated leadership, Boxer
groups began to drift into Peking and Tianjin in early June. Roaming
the streets, dressed in motley uniforms of red, black, or yellow
turbans and red leggings, and with white charms on their wrists, they
harried — and sometimes killed — Chinese converts and even
those who possessed foreign objects — lamps, clocks, or matches.
The Boxers also killed four French and Belgian engineers and two
English missionaries, ripped up railway tracks, burned the stations,
and cut telegraph lines. Powerful provincial officials wavered, as did
the Qing court, sometimes protecting foreigners by meeting Boxer force
with force of their own, at other times seeming to condone or even
approve the Boxer show of antiforeign “loyalty.” (SMC, 222-3)
Praising the Boxers now as a loyal militia, on June 21, 1890,
the empress dowager issued a “declaration of war” against the foreign
powers, which stated in part:
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towards us, infringed upon our territorial integrity, trampled our
people under their feet. ... They oppress our people and blaspheme our
gods. The common people suffer greatly at their hands, and each one of
them is vengeful. Thus it is that the brave followers of the Boxers
have been burning churches and killing Christians. (SMC, 223-4) |
On August 4, 1900, a foreign expeditionary force
of about 20,000 troops, consisting mainly of soldiers from Japan,
Russia, Britain, the United States, and France, and operating under a
complex joint-command structure, left Tianjin. Boxer resistance quickly
crumbled, key Qing commanders committed suicide, and the Western troops
entered Peking and raised the Boxer siege on August 14. ...
[A] formal
peace treaty known as the Boxer Protocol
was signed in September 1901. ... [The Qing] agreed to pay an indemnity
for damages to foreign life and property of 450 million taels ..., a
staggering sum at a time when the entire annual Qing income was
estimated at around 250 million taels. The Chinese were to pay the
indemnity in gold, on an ascending scale, with 4 percent interest
charges, until the debt was amortized on December 31, 1940. With all
interest factored in, total Chinese payments over the thirty-nine-year
period would amount to almost 1 billion taels (precisely 982,238,150). (SMC, 224-5)
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