The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century

by Jonathan E. Hillman

  Misreading this situation, Western companies believed they could win over the Chinese government by simply demonstrating the railway’s commercial potential. In 1873, a British firm considered giving the emperor of China a railway as a wedding present, an idea that was publicly supported by several British nobility. “The Emperor of China is not likely to come to Europe to see railways, so it is proposed to take the railway to him,” a British newspaper explained. “If the railway itself were brought within reach of the personal knowledge of the Emperor and his Court, the present hesitation (and whatever there may be left of opposition) would soon give place to an enthusiastic desire for railway travelling.”37 The British chargé d’affaires in Beijing discouraged the idea, which faded away as less generous schemes moved forward.

  While some Western companies tried persuasion, others decided to ask forgiveness rather than permission. In 1872, a senior U.S. diplomat in Shanghai, O. B. Bradford, began leasing land for the construction of a “carriage road” from Shanghai’s waterfront into the city. To avoid violating a U.S. treaty with China, Bradford sold his lease to a British firm, which concealed its true purpose under a front organization named “Woosung Road Company.”38 By mid-February 1878, the company laid about a mile of railway track. Ignoring the objections of the local authorities after the project was discovered, it imported a locomotive, began operations, and continued extending the line until August, when a Chinese man walked in front of the train and was killed.

  Both sides were eager to defuse tensions, and they reached a deal allowing the Chinese government to purchase the railway. The Chinese were satisfied because they reasserted control, making the foreign project their own. The British were satisfied because they believed that the project had served its purpose. The Woosung Road Company even made a handsome profit, in a fraction of the normal time. Before the railway was halted, it was carrying enough passengers that it became commercially profitable. This commercial success, its British backers assumed, would naturally lead to more railway projects.

  What the Qing government did next shocked the British. It began disassembling the railway, a move that the British viewed as the very antithesis of progress. In fact, Chinese officials had local economic interests to protect. The railway could carry cargo that would otherwise travel along Woosung Creek on Chinese vessels.39 Chinese officials also worried that foreign companies would use the line to smuggle goods between Shanghai and Woosung and that more railways would quickly follow.40 In seeking to avoid the railway’s disruption, Chinese officials understood the unintended consequences of railways even better than their Western counterparts did.

  Recognizing that the Woosung railway was built by foreign companies to serve foreign interests, Chinese officials attempted to transform the project to better serve their own interests. They planned to reassemble the railway in Formosa (Taiwan) to strengthen its defense from attack. The rails were moved but never reassembled, perhaps due to a lack of funding.41 After the Woosung’s removal, a handful of rail projects emerged in the following two decades, but it would take a military defeat to shift the government’s position.

  At the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, the Qing government had less than two hundred miles of rail, and its defeat marked a major turning point in the government’s industrial policy.42 Chinese officials singled out railways, and Japan’s successful modernization program, as a key element of national power. Tellingly, the government body responsible for China’s foreign affairs was put in charge of railway matters.43 Just as foreign threats shaped the Qing’s early railway policy, which was mainly defensive and sought to limit the influence of foreign powers, they brought about a major shift at the end of the nineteenth century.44

  That shift put China in a position that is even more familiar to many of its partners along the BRI. Building railways required foreign capital and expertise, and China was lacking both. It began borrowing heavily. Early loans typically had interest rates in the range of 5–6 percent and ran for thirty years, but later commitments were higher interest and shorter duration. A particularly egregious example was a single-year loan at 9.5 percent interest—the infrastructure equivalent of modern payday-lending scams.45

  As the weaker party in these negotiations, China agreed to terms that favored its larger foreign partners. Lenders also secured construction rights, which they used to extract additional commissions for supplying materials, and rights to railway profits until the loans were repaid. By 1931, foreign loans for railways were approximately half of the Chinese government’s total foreign debt, and nearly 40 percent of those payments were in default.46 China was the victim of the predatory lending practices for which it is now criticized.

  “Shout It from the Rooftops”

  Like the U.S. transcontinental railway and the Suez Canal, a third global link completed in 1869 would eventually carry far-reaching and unintended consequences. That year, as the British eyed the Suez’s maritime route to India, they were desperate for a reliable telegraph connection.47 In 1853, the British government had begun connecting India’s major cities, and by 1865, India had twenty-eight thousand kilometers of telegraph. British authorities depended on these lines to suppress an uprising two years later, cementing their strategic importance to the empire. At the same time, London was establishing itself as the central node in global telegraph networks, but the empire lacked a fast and reliable link to its crown jewel.

  The existing connection’s poor performance reflected the technical challenges of early telegraphy and the Eurasian supercontinent’s geopolitical landscape. In 1865, sending a message from Britain to India took five to six days and involved twelve to fourteen relay stations.48 At each transfer station, staff received, decoded, and physically handed the message to another operator, who recoded and transmitted on the next system.49 Sometimes messages arrived mangled by the operators who had relayed them. It was an international game of telephone before the telephone, and it was expensive to play. A twenty-word message cost five British pounds, or the equivalent of roughly US$800 today.

  Early telegraph wires faced design and operation challenges. In the telegraph’s first few decades, there were no international standards, and wires were produced according to various specifications.50 Through trial and error, engineers were still figuring out what materials were best for different climates and how to protect wires against common threats, from ships’ anchors to stormy seas. The first cable to India was laid in two sections, from the Red Sea to Aden and Aden to Karachi.51 Both failed, leaving the British government to rely on a connection laid in 1865 from the Persian Gulf to Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire sat between Britain and its prize possession.

  The British government blamed the countries through which the wires passed. As one member of Parliament demanded, something must be done to “avoid the delays, and errors arising from transmission at the hands of those working the present land route, comprising half-educated half-castes, Turks, Austrians, etc., who all combine in mutilating and mangling the plain English of our messages.”52 His colleagues applauded. Others pointed out the risk of espionage as messages traveled across Europe’s chessboard of rivalries.

  The solution was more wires touching friendly territory and dedicated operators. In 1866, a select committee appointed by the House of Commons concluded, “That, having regard to the magnitude of the interests—political, commercial and social—involved in the connection between this country and India, it is not expedient that the means of intercommunication by telegraph should be dependent upon any single line, or any single system of wires, in the hands of several foreign governments, and under several distinct responsibilities, however well such services may be conducted as a whole, in time of peace.” The following year, the British government pledged to provide support for surveying new routes to its eastern colonies, negotiating access with foreign governments, and laying cables.53

  Sensing a windfall, the Prussian firm Siemens und Halske proposed a new line through Persia and Russi
a that avoided the Ottoman Empire. It was a family effort for the Siemens brothers. One brother handled negotiations with Britain, another dealt with Russia, a third handled Persia, and a fourth helped automate the process for passing messages between receiving stations. The project was complete in 1869 and went into service the next year. The first message from London to Kolkata took twenty-eight minutes. Ecstatic, Werner Siemens wrote to his brother Carl, “Shout it from the rooftops that the 10 to 12 hours to the Red Sea have been beaten by our one minute to Tehran and 28 minutes to Calcutta.”54 In early 1870, a competing cable was laid via the Red Sea, touching only Egypt and further minimizing Britain’s dependence on foreign territories.55

  Before long, Britain’s commercial dominance of global telegraph networks provided strategic dividends. At the turn of the century, the British government developed a separate system of cables, known as the “All Red” routes, which touched only Britain and its possessions. As the network grew, the British treasury opposed some of these projects on economic grounds. But it was largely outmaneuvered by the British Army, Navy, and other defense organizations, which “developed a virtual fetish” for the routes, as the historian Paul Kennedy writes.56 These investments had little commercial value, but they proved prescient in the coming years as competition among Europe’s great powers escalated and finally spiraled out of control.

  For German officials, the guns of August were followed by a deadly silence. On August 5, 1914, a day after declaring war on Germany, Britain cut five of Germany’s telegraph cables, which remained disabled for the duration of the war.57 Britain’s advantages stemmed not only from owning and operating physical infrastructure but also from the abilities of its companies and the international standards they set.58 Britain’s largest telegraph company manufactured two-thirds of the cables used during the nineteenth century and almost half thereafter. In 1896, there were thirty cable-laying ships in the world, and twenty-four were British owned.59 Britain’s monopolizing the expertise to lay cables meant that its rivals struggled to repair damaged cables.

  What British officials did not foresee was the telegraph’s potential to fracture their empire from the inside out. The Indo-European telegraph cable, and the vast network of which it was a part, carried not only Britain’s colonial commands but also potent ideas for change. Nationalist movements used these tools in their fights for independence, and Britain’s censors were unable to stem the flow of news and communication. As the historian Daniel Headrick explains, “The increasing ability of Indians to acquire and disseminate ideas and information, using the very media of communication that the British had introduced, did not make British rule permanent, but undermined it instead.”60

  The vast majority of the world’s governments were eager to adopt the telegraph during the 1860s and 1870s, but the Chinese government worked to prevent and then tightly control its introduction. Considering the new technology, Shen Baozhen, the same Chinese official who later oversaw the dismantling of the Woosung railway, worried in 1865, “It will be even more difficult to prevent dissemination of unfounded rumors in newspapers, frightening people.”61 Like China’s caution with railways, its initial resistance to the telegraph and eventual adoption of it were driven in large part by national security concerns.

  Initially, the gravest threat was not the information carried by the telegraph lines but the foreign powers that were eager to build them. As China’s leading foreign-affairs body concluded in 1870, “When foreigners are allowed to take one step forward, they rush ahead. . . . With galloping speed [they will] incessantly attempt to penetrate into the interior and with ever-changing ventures pursue their shrewd schemes.”62 Telegraph wires were even more vulnerable than railways to theft or damage, Chinese officials reasoned, and any loss could invite foreign powers to intervene directly.

  Of course, the Qing government’s official position reflected a variety of views, not all of them opposed to the telegraph. There was interest among China’s merchant class in extending the telegraph network, for example, but there were also other reasons for opposition. Provincial officials worried that the telegraph would erode their autonomy by increasing the central government’s responsiveness and demands.63 Foreign diplomats had similar concerns. Officially, British diplomats were among the most active advocates for the introduction of telegraph lines in China. Privately, they expressed concerns about London’s micromanagement of their affairs from afar.64 The representatives of the empire loathed imperiousness when it threatened their own power.

  Foreign firms pressed ahead with a series of creative, and legally dubious, attempts to land cables in China. In the late 1860s, Chinese authorities agreed to allow underwater cables that landed on ships. They may have reasoned the underwater cables were less vulnerable to theft and vandalism, or perhaps they recognized they would be unable to prevent the foreign companies from proceeding. Playing a game of red-light, green-light, the foreign firms inched closer to shore without formal permission. They moved from floating vessels to docks, to makeshift structures near the beach, and finally into the open air within the treaty ports and land controlled by foreigners. Among the first open-air cables was a line erected along the path of the Woosung railway. Chinese officials initially ordered it dismantled along with the railway in 1878 but later changed their position.65

  By the late 1870s, Chinese officials had begun to recognize that their policy was self-defeating. Initially, they had worried that adopting the telegraph would give foreigners an information advantage. China also lacked the technical expertise to operate, let alone construct, the lines. Foreigners providing those services would have access to Chinese official messages before the intended recipients did. But foreign powers were utilizing that same technology on their shores while they relied on older methods. “Apparently the foreigners are very persistent in their intention to construct telegraph lines,” Shen Baozhen wrote in 1870. “If we merely allow them to construct telegraphs on their own, then when there is a need to communicate on secret matters, they will be informed in one or two days, while after more than ten days have passed, we shall still be ignorant.”66

  Security concerns drove the expansion of China’s telegraph network in the following decades. Relying initially on foreign support, especially the Great Northern, a Danish firm, for engineers, supplies, and even teachers for a telegraph school, the Chinese government gradually developed its own expertise. New lines emerged to help address changing security threats.67 During the mid-1880s, reacting to French forces in Vietnam, China added lines in its southern provinces. A decade later, as tensions escalated with Japanese forces in Korea, China built more lines in the north. The technology that was viewed as a dangerous back door for foreign powers became a necessity for keeping foreign powers at bay.

  But like the British, the Qing government was unable to dull the other side of the telegraph’s sword. The same wires that carried the central government’s orders also helped the revolutionary groups that sought to overthrow it. In 1911, years of popular resentment and government missteps exploded as Chinese military units and provinces began breaking away from the government. The telegraph was not the cause of the Qing’s fall, but it was a consequential tool, available to groups that protected the status quo as well as forces fighting for change. The same events might have unfolded slowly decades earlier, in the era of couriers on horseback, giving the government time to put down the initial uprising. But with the telegraph, news traveled faster than government forces could, and the uprising became a revolution.68 Having unsuccessfully fought the introduction of the telegraph, the Qing dynasty fell after adopting it.

  China’s Turn

  China’s experience as a target of colonialism may be more important than its imperial past. During the second half of the nineteenth century, China faced the impossible choice between pursuing its economic aspirations with foreign investment and the political imperative of maintaining its sovereignty. Shortly after suffering defeats to the British, China was understandably
too defensive, favoring sovereignty at the expense of new technology that others, including Japan, were successfully adopting. Its caution ultimately became a liability, and it paid a price during the Sino-Japanese War for not developing its railway system, during the Boxer Rebellion for developing that system, and afterward when it borrowed too heavily to catch up.

  From President Xi down, Chinese officials uniformly and emphatically reject accusations of colonialism along the BRI. “No matter what stage of development it reaches, China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansion,” Xi explained at the National Communist Party Congress in 2017, a line that other officials have repeated.69 To reassure the world about China’s future intentions, Chinese officials and academics reflexively point to the past, claiming that it is not in China’s “DNA” to colonize other countries.70 Of course, as the Qing dynasty consolidated power, it employed many of the same techniques for control within its expanding contiguous borders as European powers applied outside their own.71

  Dangerously, China now confronts the challenge faced by past empires but without having made the same mistakes internationally as those that came before it. In the wake of two world wars, Western powers have established international institutions that set guidelines for foreign lending, capping interest rates and conducting environmental- and social-impact assessments, among other requirements. Chinese officials promise that they care about these objectives as well, but they have been unwilling to implement the same practices.