Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  CHINESE GOING ABROAD ENTERED into a complex world of competing ethnic and social groups, rival cultures, and chaotic forms of governance, but the situation they left behind in China was also complicated in terms of identifications and representations. We now know that the populations in and around the Chinese core area have defined themselves ethnically in many different ways over the past 5,000 years. The group that today increasingly sees itself as “Han” Chinese, and which the present Chinese government believes includes up to ninety-two percent of the people who live in their country (and almost twenty percent of the global population), originated in the central northern areas of today’s China, mostly along the Yellow river, and became the culturally dominant group for a much larger area in the Han Dynasty from around 200 BC. During and after that dynasty its culture spread to other parts of what is currently China, especially the south and the west. Some of this dissemination occurred through conquest, some by assimilation, and some—especially after the breakdown of the Han empire—by involuntary migration from the core areas. The Sinification of south China was to a large degree a product of refugees from the north who fled the collapse of the northern states in the post-Han era. By 1800 this process of cultural and ethnic unification was well advanced (although in some parts of the country it is still continuing today).1

  For the Qing state, ethnicity was a troublesome issue. The imperial family had its own origins in a non-Chinese population, termed the Manchu, and liked (at least when it served its purposes) to flaunt its “otherness.” The cohesion of the inner group within the Qing project to some extent depended on its setting itself apart from the ocean of Chinese over which it ruled. But at the same time the Qing state was an empire, comprised of a myriad of different groups within its realm, and worked out a complicated set of rules for how to deal with each of them. Some of these defined groups were identified according to language and culture, such as the Manchus themselves, Mongols, or Tibetans, or the multifarious populations of the south, such as the Miao (called Hmong in Indochina), Bai, or Dai (Thai). Others were seen through the prism of religion: Muslims who were culturally Chinese, Kazakhs who happened to be Lamaist Buddhists, and the variety of religious practices among groups in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, or Taiwan. Most Qing emperors struggled bravely to extend their knowledge of all these groups, including their languages and religions, but even the hard-working Qianlong had to admit that he sometimes got his Kazakhs mixed up with his Turks and therefore could not treat them all according to the established protocol of the Qing.

  Definitions were not easy. Even the elites among those who were defined as the numerically dominant population—those who possessed Chinese written culture, Confucian social organization, and ancestral links to the Chinese heartland—would in the early nineteenth century have found it difficult to define exactly what a “Chinese” person was. Since China had no concept of nation similar to what was slowly being developed in Europe, terms such as “us” and “our land” referred to one’s villages, region, or province and not to the country—to an even greater extent than what was common among peasants further west in Eurasia.

  Core Chinese culture was not exclusive. The imperial examinations, the essential prerequisite for serving the empire, remained remarkably open up to the late nineteenth century. The elites of all groups could put their best sons forward, as long as they had embraced Chinese culture and were willing to keep their beliefs and ethnicity to themselves. The empire pretended to be universal and the key to all meaningful civilization. But for most people, as an ancient saying goes, “Heaven is high and the emperor far away”: While accepting the legitimacy of the imperial state, their primary identities were local or clan-oriented.

  There is no simple answer to the question of what it meant to be Chinese during this period. Most people had multiple identities. Judging from written testimony, it was quite possible to be a little bit Chinese, a larger portion Sichuanese or Cantonese, and a servant of the empire (or its sworn enemy) all within the span of a day. Identities and loyalties were much like the eclectic religion practiced in country temples all over China. There were many deities and many forms of worship, but what was closest to you were your ancestors and your local heroes, symbolizing your land and your ancestral village. And if at the heart of the empire, identities were complex, they were transmuted at its edges. People could be very Chinese one day and much less so the next, depending on what opportunities or protection China gave them.

  So, who were foreigners in the Chinese view? The answer depended of course on whom you asked. For most of those who lived in or originated from the Chinese core area, foreigners were people who were not culturally Chinese, even though the definition of “culturally Chinese” was itself highly contested. Lacking a modern nationalism—and living under a dynasty that at times prided itself on its foreignness, a narrow definition of what was nei (inside) or wai (outside) was not fruitful for people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. Yet the Qing inherited from earlier states a value system that the Chinese often called Huayiguan, meaning—in a cultural context—“Chinese superior, others inferior.” Over centuries this worldview had influenced the Chinese eye in seeing other peoples and their behavior. As a form of cultural ethnocentrism, it was probably stronger at the time than any similar European phenomenon, not least because it had been shared for half a millennium or more by large parts of the elites of China’s immediate neighbors.

  During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Chinese view of foreigners was influenced by two main sources: Chinese travelers who returned from abroad and foreigners who settled in China. From the former came a number of written accounts of foreign lands. In most cases these books were stories retold several times over, and—like volumes published in Europe, especially in the eighteenth century—they often commented as much on China as on the ostensible subject of their investigations. In general they represented the empire as being at the center of three concentric circles. Immediately outside the center were the peoples and countries on the edges of China—those colonized and those influenced by Chinese civilization. The second circle contained those who were outside Chinese culture, but still, at least occasionally, paid tribute to the emperor. The third included those who had no relationship with China and its civilization, unknown peoples of whom only few accounts existed. Perhaps not surprisingly, those farthest away from the core were represented as the most strange and barbaric. Tales of madcap beliefs, sexual perversions, and cannibalism abounded. “Outer barbarians” smelled bad, dressed inappropriately, and were strange in appearance. In some cases these “wild men” were closer to animals than to humans. For such peoples, the Qing state believed in the ancient saying of “leaving them outside, not inviting them in, not governing or educating them, not recognizing their countries.”2

  China’s knowledge of the geographical world increased sharply in the eighteenth century. Although Asian geography had been mapped since the twelfth century and a succession of complete European world maps had been available at least since the late sixteenth century, it was during Qianlong’s reign that scholars began to incorporate a more accurate sense of where Europe was and what it looked like into their publications. Whereas all imperial cartography up to the mid-1800s understandably centered on the world with which China interacted—the magnificent ten-volume Huang Qing zhigongtu (Chart of the Tribute-Bearing People of the Imperial Qing, from 1761) is a good case in point—newer atlases included more information on European countries, some of it quite accurate. In 1794 the geographer Zhuang Tingfu printed a scroll that not only gave an exact account of Europe’s geography but discussed the countries there and the relationships between them. A masterful cultural compromise, Zhuang’s work puts China at the center of the earth, while praising Western cartography as an instrument in the world-historical process of allowing all peoples to pay homage at the imperial court.3 As in the West, mapmaking in imperial China was not just about accurate renditions but about centrality, culture, and power.<
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  In the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, images of foreigners in China blended stereotypes of those well-known through Asian land-borders with those of the emerging sea-based periphery. In ways similar to the European encounter with peoples from the outer world, the definitions of what was civilized or barbaric behavior were seen through a prism of judgments already established in dealing with European “others.” It is remarkable to see the degree to which traits already assigned to Mongols or Kazakhs reappear in early Chinese descriptions of the Dutch or Swedes. Just as established stereotypes of the Irish often were transferred by English writers to Native Americans or Africans, Chinese stereotypes of the known world were transferred onto the newly emerging one. As China’s world was becoming bigger, its ethnographers tried to explain it by recognizable though slightly shopworn habits of mind. When more became known about them, Europeans were established as “wild men” of new kind. They were China’s “others”—faraway peoples who were the objects of Chinese “occidentalism,” fascinating because they were different, threatening because they were outside the realm of civilization.

  OF ALL THE EUROPEAN STATES, China’s first regular foreign relations were with Russia. Indeed, it can be argued that China’s first foreign relations—in anything approaching the Western sense—with any country were with that other expanding empire moving into East Asia from the north. Already by the early Qing period, hunters and traders claiming some form of allegiance to the Russian Tsar had appeared on China’s frontiers. Kangxi was engaged in the massive attempt to control all of eastern Central Asia that his grandson Qianlong would complete. He knew enough about the West and worried enough about Russian power to decide to pacify this new group of barbarians in ways different from those used before.

  In 1689, against the advice of many of his counselors, Kangxi entered into the Treaty of Nerchinsk, China’s first-ever treaty in any way similar to European treaties between states. In doing so, not only did he recognize a foreign monarch, the Tsar, who was not in an express tribute relationship to himself, but he agreed—at least in principle—to a border demarcation line between the two states along the Amur river. The greatest of the Qing emperors was a practical man: It was crucial that Russia remain neutral while he moved to crush the western Mongols, the Zunghars. In ways similar to today’s Shanghai Group—the twenty-first-century Sino-Russian collaboration against Central Asian Muslim “terrorists”—Kangxi and his successors wanted to see Russia get enough, in terms of trade and territory, so that it would be willing to stand aside while the Qing colonized the land from Kashgar to Ulaanbaatar. It turned out to be a remarkably successful grand bargain from the perspective of both empires, though the Zunghars, slaughtered to almost the last man, woman, and child by the 1750s, would have disagreed.

  From the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, China and Russia—the two great imperial projects of north and east Asia—managed not only to avoid war but to cooperate, at least to a limited extent. In 1727, they signed the Kiakhta Treaty, which reaffirmed and regularized the stipulations of the earlier agreement: Beijing would accept two hundred Russian merchants into the capital every third year, while also allowing for a flourishing border trade (which by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century turned increasingly private). The economic importance of this trade was not negligible, especially for Russia. By the end of eighteenth century, ten percent of its foreign trade came and went across the border with China. All the way up to the late nineteenth century, the trade advantage was with the Chinese: The Russians sold fur (sable, tiger, and wolf were highly valued in China), and the Chinese exported manufactured goods: silk and porcelain, later cotton and furniture. The Tsar’s general Alexander Suvorov rode against Napoleon under banners made from Chinese silk.4

  While the Qing, at home, tried to pass its relations with the Russians off as tribute, it was clearly very different from the exchanges China had with any other country. Often in diplomacy, a little bit of make-believe can go a long way: The first Chinese “diplomatic” relations were remarkably stable because both sides read into them what they wanted to see. The Tsar’s advisers believed that the Chinese would, over time, ally themselves with the Russians to the detriment of other European powers. The Qing nobles knew that keeping the Russians off their back would allow them to proceed with their colonization of China’s Central Asian domains. And although the Chinese side benefited more from the trade, the Russians got products that they valued. The expanding trade did not lead to the kinds of political problems that we shall see later in the case of the Guangzhou trade with the West. Likewise, the Orthodox priests who served in Beijing were there for the small Russian community, not to proselytize among the Chinese. Like the Jesuits a century earlier, they were cultural interpreters, not collectors of souls. As a result, relations between the two empires remained remarkably nonconfrontational, until the Qing in the mid-nineteenth century—already wounded by its internal wars and its wars against Britain—became a tempting victim for a new round of Russian imperialism.

  CHINA HAD BEEN A TRADING EMPIRE for a very long time by 1800, although—given its size—it was only natural that most of the trade took place inside its borders or with its immediate neighbors. Distances were vast and communications slow and cumbersome, but land and water transport compared favorably with that in the West. While the state controlled and regulated all forms of trade and provided supplies to the population in cases of emergencies or natural disasters, various forms of private or semiprivate trade were spreading throughout the empire, aided by tax incentives, or rather tax neglect. The Court’s attitude to the merchant trade was snobbish, and so it neglected to impose comprehensive commercial taxation. As markets expanded in almost all parts of the country, so did private banking institutions and sophisticated brokerage practices.

  Even in the field of foreign trade, in the early nineteenth century the Qing were ceding control to private interests. Part of the reason why China’s hold on its region had been manifested through physical tribute was that this practice allowed rulers to show their magnificence through the display of foreign luxury goods. The emperors publicly proclaimed that China was entirely self-sufficient, but they loved having their portraits painted wearing furs from Siberia or holding a musical instrument from Southeast Asia.

  In reality the Qing from the mid-eighteenth century gradually opened up for an extensive foreign trade, roughly divided into three zones. The first was based on the tribute relationships: Commerce in Thailand, for instance, grew along the routes originally developed for bringing presents to the emperor by sea through the Guangdong ports. After the Qing in the 1720s rescinded the prohibition on Chinese engaging in seaborne foreign trade, most of the shipping engaged was from Guangdong and Fujian, or from Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. By the early nineteenth century, the whole concept of tribute was mixed in with trade in a very pragmatic manner. The Thai kings, who attempted to run a monopoly on foreign trade, benefited from selling Chinese imports such as silk, tea, and copper. Chinese merchants prospered by reselling imported Thai dried goods and rice.

  The two other zones of trade involved dealing with European powers. The Kiakhta system opened up and regulated trade with Russia along a border that from the late seventeenth century stayed remarkably stable. The third zone was more troubled: By the mid-eighteenth century the emperor tried to organize the seaborne trade by European merchants in a flexible system that borrowed elements of both the Russian trade and that with tributary states. The Canton system, as this routine was called, was based on setting up the port of Guangzhou (Canton) as the only harbor open to trade with Western ships. The foreigners, of whom most belonged to the British East India Company (EIC), could only come during the October to March trading season, get a Chinese permit when passing through Portuguese-held Macao, and then anchor at Huangpu just south of Guangzhou city. There they could establish contact with licensed Chinese merchants. On the Chinese side, the trade was organized by a sup
erintendent of maritime customs for Guangdong province, appointed directly by the emperor. He licensed local merchants and collected duties and fees from them before each foreign ship was allowed to leave: The Chinese merchants, in other words, were responsible for the conduct of each ship with which they were trading.

  By the late eighteenth century, the Guangzhou trade had begun to grow significantly, fueled to a great extent by the increasing British fondness for Chinese tea. As the EIC colonized India for Britain, a British-organized Asian trade began to integrate parts of South China with the emerging world market: Products from South Asia, such as cotton, were imported through Guangzhou, while British ships brought tea, porcelain, and silk back to Europe. The Chinese merchants and middlemen involved grew rich, and, more importantly, were able to set up their own trade links, which extended from the Pearl river delta upland, along the coast, and into the great rivers, as well as to parts of Southeast Asia where they had links already. As the modern world came into being, some Chinese were already finding their place in it. And the Qing, in spite of their mercantilist approach to foreign trade, found the taxes and duties earned through the Guangzhou system far too enticing to crack down on it, as long as the empire’s sovereignty was not threatened.

  As he lay dying, Qianlong lamented his failure to find the kind of balanced foreign relations he had sought since his early days in power. He had inherited a system in which rituals and institutions were well laid out, and which was reasonably well equipped to deal with China’s mid-eighteenth-century world. But by the end of his reign, the old emperor saw that the world was changing, and in dealing with these changes Qianlong and his successors were drawn in two different directions. One was to take refuge in the established practices of the Qing when handling outsiders; another was to open up for new forms of interaction. On practical trade China chose change, though a change that was intended to be slow and measured. On diplomacy it moved back and forth between, at times, finding new forms within the ideological framework set and, at others, upholding supremacy, arrogance, and intransigence of the sort well-known to past and present imperial enterprises elsewhere.