Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  By 1750, the fourteenth year of Qianlong’s reign, the Qing empire had consolidated its rule over all of China and was expanding its imperial government into Central Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. Unlike their predecessors, the Manchu emperors regulated the empire’s foreign relations, so that all smaller states in the region, from Korea to Burma, explicitly recognized the preeminence of the Central Kingdom and of the Qing. At home the empire was at peace, with considerable economic expansion, especially in agriculture (although China also had a large manufacturing sector, some of which specialized in porcelain and silk for export). Irrigation and transport were well developed, and markets had begun to emerge, dealing in everything from land to tools to candlesticks for the afterlife. It was an increasingly specialized society, in which written contracts and agreements between individuals and families were taking on major roles.8

  The impact of the state could be seen in all walks of life. A bit like the absolutist kings of the French prerevolutionary era, the Qing aspired to control every aspect of the lives of their subjects and to regulate those they could not directly control. Like their European counterparts they of course failed in many of these pretensions, but they did set a pattern in ideological terms that the Qing state continued to adhere to up to its collapse in the twentieth century. This pervasiveness of the state was closely linked to dreams of expansion. Qianlong believed that Qing rule was in form universal, in the sense that its principles should be applied by all peoples who were culturally advanced enough to appreciate and use them. It was this universalism, more than anything else, that in the late eighteenth century drove the empire to engage in costly military expeditions at its frontiers. These excursions would, by the early nineteenth century, empty the imperial coffers and contribute to a general sense of exhaustion and malaise.

  Qing China is often presented by historians, even today, as insular and inward looking. But nobody within their region who came up against Kangxi or Qianlong in real time would have viewed them as looking inward. The Qing were continuously expanding outward. They focused primarily on their land borders, though Kangxi conquered Taiwan in 1683. By 1750, the Qing operated in three distinct spheres of foreign affairs: Central Asia, where the theme was expansion; coastal Asia, where the theme was trade and tribute; and Russia, where the theme was diplomacy. Policy on all of these fronts was coordinated to leave the Qing emperors time to fully impose their rule on China, while exterminating those enemies at the frontiers whom Beijing thought capable of threatening its rule. Having themselves taken China by force, the Qing wanted to prevent any new contenders from doing the same to them.

  The dramatic Qing penetration of Central Asia is a story of intense conflict and, eventually, of genocide. In the early eighteenth century, Zungharia was a mighty khanate led by Mongols, covering all the territory between western Central Asia and the Mongolian heartland, down to the Tibetan borders, an area roughly similar to modern India in size. It had been intermittently at war with the Qing for more than seventy years. In the 1750s Qianlong unleashed what he called “the final solution” to the Zunghar problem. After having defeated Zungharia in battle, he ordered his army to kill all of the Zunghar elite whom they could lay their hands on, causing what has been called the eighteenth-century genocide par excellence. Then he incorporated most of eastern Zungharia and the minor khanates to its south into China, creating one region that Qianlong, triumphantly, referred to as China’s new frontier (Xinjiang).9

  Along the Asian coastline, the Qing were equally forceful but less violent. In the south and east, China was surrounded by states that all stood in some form of tributary relationship to the emperor in Beijing. (The only exception was Japan. The Qing regarded it as a tributary state but in reality had no authority over it.) Countries from Korea to Nepal had dynamic affiliations with China based on some form of ritual subservience, such as the regular paying of tribute to the emperor.10 All of these relationships were different in character, though, and there was no overall “tributary system,” unlike what some historians have claimed. Instead it makes sense to talk of a Sino-centric system, in which Chinese culture was central to the self-identification of many elite groups in the surrounding Asian countries. China was a constant reference point in their orientation (much like the United States is now for Europeans). But the states that paid tribute were generally good at using the relationship for their own purposes. Very often the suzerainty of the emperor was invoked by smaller countries to secure trading privileges for themselves, sometimes disguised as tribute, or assistance from China in local power struggles.

  Until the arrival of the British and the French in the nineteenth century, Russia was China’s only imperial neighbor. But in spite of the Qing determination to respect Russian territory to the north, it was a very unequal relationship. Distance and overall strength did not favor the Russians, so they were careful not to provoke quarrels with the Qing. The treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 (the twenty-eighth year of the mighty Kangxi’s reign) drew a borderline more or less straight east from where the northern Mongolian frontier is today. It gave China the whole Amur basin and what is now the Russian maritime province, including the island of Sakhalin. The agreement helped to keep the peace and allowed licensed trade along the borders. It gave the Qing free hand to expand westward in return for renouncing rights to what they considered the frozen wastes of the north. The treaty with Russia was China’s first with a European power and was for the Qing a useful introduction to the practice of European diplomacy. They already had decent introductions to the subject from two of Kangxi’s top diplomatic advisers, the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon and his Portuguese colleague Tomas Pereira.11

  Aside from Russia and eastern Asia, in 1750 the rest of the world mattered less to China in security terms than it did in terms of cultural knowledge. Kangxi had received at Court Asian islanders, Indians, Arabs, and Persians and ordered his scholars to expand their knowledge about these foreign domains. For a while some of his favorite companions were European Jesuit priests, such as Gerbillon and Pereira, who could present the latest findings on astronomy, military affairs, architecture, and painting. Kangxi guarded against any proselytizing by them or by Muslims or Buddhists that could undermine the primacy of the Qing state. But while Christian preaching had been prohibited in 1721, after a narrow-minded decree from Pope Clement XI had forbidden Chinese Christians from participating in the state rituals of the Qing, Jesuits stayed in China up to the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773. Some even stayed on after that, such as Qianlong’s European translator Jean Amiot, who died in Beijing in 1793, only six years before the emperor’s own death.

  By 1750 the Qing dynasty had reached the peak of its position in Asia. It was, as its emperor liked to emphasize, secure against invaders and broadly self-sufficient in terms of agricultural supplies. Its forms of interaction with the rest of the continent were decided in Beijing, and even though its imperial court could not determine the policies of other courts, it often had a decisive influence on them through diplomacy, education, or culture. The Qing capital was recognized as the center of the eastern Asian region, the city to which outsiders were drawn and from which important judgments on thinking, taste, and style emanated. Moreover, its elite was firm in its conviction that the Qing political system was the only rational way of administering the empire, and that it served as a model for how states should be organized not just in Asia but worldwide.

  COMPLETED IN 1750, the Gardens of Perfect Brightness (Yuanmingyuan) in northwestern Beijing were the great symbol of Qing power and its universalist urges. Qianlong commissioned the vast pleasure park to demonstrate his esthetic knowledge and the power of his empire. Five times bigger than the Forbidden City (the massive palace complex in central Beijing where the imperial family lived), the park was intended to show everything under heaven, a kind of eighteenth-century World’s Fair. In its sprawling collection of palaces and gardens, there were Chinese-style buildings from various dynasties and structures and landsca
pes from the Chinese hinterlands, Korea, and Southeast Asia. But strangest for Chinese visitors were the buildings at the back of the park, which had been designed by the Milanese painter and architect Giuseppe Castiglione in Italian baroque style. The main edifice, a large building overlooking the central fountain, was called the Hall of Calm Seas. It housed the emperor’s collection of European works of art, including the French clocks that particularly fascinated him.

  The Yuanmingyuan symbolized the pretensions of the Qing and the centrality of their capital until it was plundered and destroyed by British troops when they invaded Beijing during the Opium Wars in 1860. When I first came to the Chinese capital as a student 120 years later, the ground where it had stood was almost empty, except for a few scattered anti-imperialist billboards at the entrance (“Beat Down All Imperialists and Their Running Dogs!”) and skimpy vegetable plots of poor peasants. For me, it was a good spot for an afternoon’s stroll and the ideal place to meet friends and girlfriends, providing shelter from the prying eyes that populated Beijing. But some local people refused to go there because it was ridden with ghosts of a past best forgotten.

  The idea for this book came during one of my hikes through the remains of the Gardens of Perfect Brightness in 2006. I had been at Peking University, across from the ruined gardens, lecturing on the relationships between China and the rest of the world. Once started, the book took a considerable while to complete—the amount of reading that had to be done was large and, worse, seemed to double every six months or so, given the interest China stirred in the 2000s. What drove me on was a need to present my students and other readers with a somewhat revisionist take on China’s foreign relations—one that stresses cultural transformations and hybrid identities as much as conflicts and nationalisms, and one that gives equal treatment to missionaries and diplomats, businessmen and revolutionaries, workers and bosses. Most conventional histories of Chinese international affairs have, until very recently, centered on relations between states in one form or another. While there is nothing wrong in discussing how governments develop their foreign policies, such presentations do not give us a full picture of how the relationships between the international and the domestic evolve, or how different groups of people interact. They focus much too narrowly on the central functions of the state—administration, communications, war—and thereby build up an image of construction and destruction that does not always coincide with how most people have seen their own interaction with the international or the foreign.

  This fixation on the state within Chinese historiography has challenged me to try to tell a story that is not teleological, that does not move from the Qing collapse to the establishment of the People’s Republic with the resurrection of the state as the central, necessary aim and outcome. At the same time I also want to explain why (contested) images of the state have been so important to many Chinese for a very long time—it is much easier to complain about the state when you have it than when you do not. But I did not want readers to believe that state weakness and power were the only key lines in the history of China’s modern international affairs.

  Instead of discussing only diplomacy and wars, in this book I try to take readers on a much deeper journey into China’s international past. Restless Empire deals with history very much as the lived experience of different groups in society, from top to bottom. When it focuses on the state, as it does during periods when the state was strong, it is in order to give an overview of how Chinese elites saw their own role and that of the outside world. While it has no overall hypotheses of single factors that have driven China’s interaction with the world, the book does emphasize the rapidity of change in the modern era and China’s unique ability to absorb such change. It also argues for China’s capacity to form hybrid or at least eclectic forms of social identities, and its propensity for internalizing worldviews created elsewhere. These points are not drivers of history, but they are helpful indications of where I want to go in order to explain what happened.

  AT THE CENTER OF THIS BOOK is the tale of China’s metamorphoses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a time when people who viewed themselves as Chinese transformed their lives and practices into those of participants in global forms of modernity. Chinese who embraced the new—when given a chance to do so—always far outnumbered those who did not. Chinese traveled, studied, and settled abroad in order to understand and benefit from the new world that was opening to them. In many ways their experience with the international was very similar in timing and significance to that of European peasants (my grandparents, for instance) who entered a new world of capitalist markets. The market was harsh and exhilarating at the same time. It presented opportunities and dangers, attractions and horrors, and it increasingly preoccupied even those who stood apart from it either geographically or ideologically. China’s international history over the past 250 years is the story of its encounter with capitalist modernity and of how Chinese shaped that modernity and were shaped by it in roughly equal turns.

  Destruction and violence also play important roles in this story. As the history of the Gardens of Perfect Brightness shows, the incursions of Western armies into China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were immensely destructive for those regions that were hit by them.12 But the real disasters in terms of destruction and violence came from the middle of the twentieth century on, when the Japanese attack on China set off wars and terror that—for the Chinese peasantry, especially—lasted up to the mid-1970s.

  For many Chinese, the combination of war and Maoism came as the perfect storm. War confirmed that the outside world hated China. Mao Zedong’s Communism confirmed that there was a way to modernity beyond capitalism and foreign influence. The latter could not have thrived without the former. But as things were, China set its course in the bloody 1940s toward what would become the greatest tragedy of its modern history: the mass killings, the terror, and the self-humiliation of the Maoist years, in which twenty million died and countless more lives were wrecked. These were crimes mainly committed by Chinese against other Chinese—so awful that most people in China still prefer not to talk about them—but they were inspired by the ideas of Communist shortcuts to modernity that also wreaked havoc elsewhere in the twentieth century.

  When Maoism died with Mao in the 1970s, China began its tortuous road back toward international capitalist modernity that its leaders had tried to circumvent for a generation. Some historians of China say that the work of building a new country today was made easier by Maoist destruction in previous decades: Mao killed off Old China and, unintentionally, left a blank slate on which the laws of market development could be written. I am not so sure. China in the 1970s could have gone in many different directions—from genocidal terrorism of the Cambodian kind to democratic development such as on Taiwan. The potential for market developments was there, not because of the destructiveness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but despite it, since China had experimented with integrated markets for a long time before the Communists attempted to destroy them. These origins are a central part of the story told in this book, not just because of their significance for the present, but also because they created so much of China’s journey through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  The past shapes the present. Today’s China is shaped by its modern metamorphosis, by the transformations wrought by both external and internal pressure. History is therefore the most fundamental background on which to understand present-day Chinese foreign relations. In our own time, some use China’s troubled past as an excuse for its authoritarianism or its occasional international power-mongering. That should not be so. China’s bloody twentieth century saw Chinese do far more damage to themselves than foreign powers managed to do, and in far more harmful ways for the longer term. China can take this lusterless legacy and turn it in either of two very different directions. It could behave with increasing aggression as its power grows, in the way that many Chinese feel China was treated by others when
it was weak. But such outward hostility would most likely be a sign of continued weakness at home, a China that struggles with its past without coming to terms with it, and which is inherently unstable as a result. The other option is a China that seeks cooperation with others based on its own values and lessons of the past. Such a China would likely be stable at home, because it could focus attention on peaceful political change and thereby achieve a more legitimate and more dynamic government. Only time will tell which direction China will go in, but wherever it moves, its history will set the fissures in the terrain that it moves across.

  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.