Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  There was always a surplus of peasants wanting to work in the cities, but conditions for those who labored in the nascent industries were often poor, whether they were employed by foreigners or Chinese. Hours were long, living conditions filthy, and wages low compared to the cost of living in the cities. Sick or pregnant workers were fired, and children were hired to do the most dirty or dangerous jobs. Women workers, who came to the cities in increasing numbers from the turn of the century on, especially to work in the textile industry, were vulnerable to sexual exploitation by their bosses and often felt that they had to send the greater amount of their wages back to their parents in their home village. Although many Chinese became workers not of their own free will, but because their families or clans decided that they had to, others were drawn to the cities by the freedom from family control that they offered. As in other countries at the dawn of industrialization, factory life in China was hard and hazardous, but the foreignness of the cities broke the monotony of farming and held out the hope of rich rewards to those who most eagerly broke the set moral guidelines of the past.

  MANY CHINESE FIRST ENCOUNTERED foreigners as missionaries. As the empire was forced to open its doors in the mid-1800s, Christian missions sprung up in the treaty ports and itinerant missionaries began traveling to most parts of the country. In spite of both official and popular Chinese resentment, much cultural and educational interaction took place through Christian missions. Education and science, not religion, became the most significant fields of missionary enterprise. Still, the Christian faith came to have a deep impact on some parts of Chinese society, as did the many religious amalgams and cultural translations that came out of these contacts.

  While the social and economic dislocation in China in the nineteenth century provided fertile ground for the entry of a new transcendental faith, the association of Christianity with foreign aggression diminished the effectiveness of the missionaries’ message. Although many were impressed with the personal courage and sacrifice shown by foreign and Chinese Christians, many more were disgusted with the demands foreign governments made to pave the way for Christian proselytizing. When France declared itself a protector of all Catholic missionaries in China, or when the British or Germans exacted revenge for attacks against Christians, much of the goodwill on which Christianity could expand was destroyed. The sense that Christians were one of many Western groups out to smash the existing order in China also damaged their cause. In village after village, disputes, often violent, broke out when Christians refused to contribute to popular festivals or the upkeep of the village temple. In some areas reports of churches being vandalized were followed by news of temples or sacred images being destroyed. The attitude of Confucian officialdom toward Christians remained profoundly negative. A Christian man brought before a Shanxi magistrate after a brawl over the man’s refusal to help pay for the annual Chinese opera performance was asked which country he was from. When he answered that he was a man of the Qing, the magistrate exploded:

  If you are a person of the Qing dynasty then why are you following the foreign devils and their seditious religion? You didn’t pay your opera money when requested by the village and you were beaten. But how can you dare to bring a suit? You certainly ought to pay the opera subscription. If you don’t you won’t be allowed to live in the land of the Qing. You will have to leave for a foreign country.5

  Two constituencies among which Christian missionaries made some early inroads—as would the Communists later—were women and ethnic minorities. Even though their position could be strong in some regions and clans, especially in the south, women were the largest oppressed group in nineteenth-century China. They lacked the rights of men and were under the command of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and even sons. For some of the most exploited women, Christianity, with its emphasis on choice and personal salvation, proved a way out, but often at the cost of breaking with their families or even their community. Some ethnic minorities, such as the Miao people in southern China or the Taiwan aboriginals, also had relatively high numbers of converts. After the end of the Taiping movement, groups among the Hakka joined with local missions—such as the Swiss-German Basel Mission—in order to defend against revenge from non-Hakka neighbors. The Deng clan—from among whom one of the key leaders of Communist China, Deng Xiaoping, would later emerge—was one such group of Hakka.

  China’s encounter with Christianity from the sixteenth century on had primarily happened through European Catholics, but most of the nineteenth-century missionaries were British or American Protestants. They were young men and women inspired by the Great Awakening in the United States and evangelical revivals in Britain. Some of the most influential of these missionaries were interested more in propagating Western educational ideals than in saving souls. Robert Morrison, sent by the London Missionary Society, started publishing books in Chinese in the 1830s. Elijah Bridgeman, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, published magazines in English and Chinese in Guangzhou. Unlike most foreign military officers, diplomats, and traders, the missionaries often learned Chinese, and so they became translators and interpreters of China to the West and the West to China. Some of them retired to fill the first positions for the study of China in Western universities. James Legge started as a Scottish missionary in Hong Kong, became the first professor of Chinese at Oxford, and made celebrated translations of the Confucian Classics.

  Few societies have ever put more emphasis on the value of education in its various forms than did Qing China. Basic literacy rates were reasonably high compared to the rest of the world. Between a third and a half of men and up to ten percent of women could read. There were many schools in major cities, but competition for entry was fierce. Most Chinese knew that the path to success was literacy, knowledge of the classics, and taking some form of examination. Families whose members included officials and scholars had an advantage, but in each generation a few poorer families were able to put one of their sons through the imperial examination system and gain a status their forebears could only have dreamed of. No wonder whole clans pooled resources to educate their young in schools serving their area or lineage, or in order to put someone of special talent through a private, public, or official institute or even an imperial academy.6

  What changed in the late nineteenth century was not the prominence of education but its content and organization. In addition to the kinds of schools that had existed since at least the Song dynasty, China now also got schools run by missionary societies and as well as secular schools, often run by Chinese, that concentrated on science in addition to the classics. Schools for women also began to spread, especially after 1900. A central tenet of the Self-strengthening Movement, launched by Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and others in the 1860s, was that the ideal person was someone who could combine an essence of Chinese learning with an outer form of Western science and technology. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s academies that taught Western Studies appeared, often in or around the new shipyards or arsenals that delivered the weapons the Qing needed for their protection. Well into the twentieth century, however, most Chinese continued to go to schools where Western science, geography, or languages made only occasional and fleeting appearances, and where the purpose was the improvement of one’s character through study of Confucian texts. But some of the students who early on did receive training outside the Confucian curriculum were going to become crucial to China’s future as bridge builders between two very different visions of human existence.

  By the 1870s more and more Chinese were going abroad for their formal education. Building on the knowledge transmitted by pioneers who had left earlier—people like Rong Hong (known in the West as Yung Wing), who had graduated from Yale in 1854 as the first Chinese with a US college degree—both the government and individual families began sending young people to America and Europe, and, as we shall see, a bit later also to Japan. Zeng Guofan was behind one key government effort, the Chinese Educational Mission, which sen
t 120 young men to study in the United States from 1872 on. Similar expeditions were set up for Germany, Britain, and France. As happened with the next big wave of Chinese students going abroad, over a century later, in the 1980s and 1990s, some of the those who went away stayed away, while others returned to China, giving good service to their country as doctors, teachers, shipbuilders, officers, and railway and mining engineers.

  The most prominent example of a foreign-trained student from the late nineteenth century, Sun Yat-sen, became the first president of the Chinese republic in 1911. A southerner like most of the others who went overseas, Sun left Guangzhou as a thirteen-year-old in 1879 for Hawaii, where his elder brother was a successful merchant. Sun was educated in Honolulu, attending the same school from which Barack Obama would graduate a hundred years later. Sun then went on to study medicine in Hong Kong, becoming one of the first graduates from its new medical college.

  One example of the further career of the boys who were sent to study in America in the 1870s was Tang Shaoyi, who attended Columbia College in New York. Tang became a leading Qing-era communications’ expert, diplomat, and provincial governor. After the collapse of the dynasty he served as prime minister and minister of finance and was a key adviser to Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. He was assassinated in 1938 when attempting to negotiate with the Japanese. Another was Rong Shangqian, who attended Hartford Public High School, joined the Qing military, fought as a captain, and was wounded both in the Sino-French war and in the Sino-Japanese war. Rong later became a railway administrator and died a very old man in Shanghai in 1954. Tang, Rong, and the other pioneers of Chinese education abroad came to have a strong influence on China, often serving under three different governments in their homeland.

  By the early twentieth century, education in China provided a fertile ground for encounters between natives and foreigners. The number of translations from other languages increased, expanding the influence of non-Chinese learning. The schools and universities inside the foreign settlements received more and more Chinese students, as did the foreign-run universities in the Chinese cities, such as Yanjing University in Beijing, a precursor to today’s Peking University, and Guangzhou Christian College, which became Lingnan University in 1916. Qinghua University was established in Beijing in 1911, primarily as a preparatory school for students who would later study in US universities on state scholarships. New groups of students were particularly eager to avail themselves of these opportunities; by 1905 there were 10,000 Chinese young women in Protestant missionary schools.7 The meeting of different cultures through schools and universities formed twentieth-century China by the impact it had on the minds of those who came to lead the country. By 1905, when the Qing abolished imperial examinations because of “the strenuous difficulties of the times,” Chinese education was already on its way to becoming the hybrid of Confucian didactic values and empirical study that we see today.8 The topics for the last countrywide exams (an emergency session held in Kaifeng in 1902) symbolize this fusion:

  SECTION 1:

  The military policies of Guanzi (725–645 BC)

  The policies of Han Wendi (179–156 BC) toward southern Vietnam

  Imperial use of laws

  Evaluation procedures for officials

  The proposals of Liu Guangzu (1142–1222) for stabilizing the Southern Song dynasty

  SECTION 2:

  The Western stress on travel as a part of studying

  The Japanese use of Western models for educational institutions

  The banking policies of various countries

  The police and laws

  The industrial basis of wealth and power9

  During the nineteenth century, Chinese views of nature and of the human body began slowly to change under the influence of Western science and medicine. While in no sense a one-way exchange, foreign concepts had, by 1900, permeated the Chinese view of the universe and the human place in it in an unprecedented manner. There are perhaps no fields of contact between China and the world that are more important than these. China has its own millennia-old traditions of science and medicine. As the country’s interaction with the West grew, its doctors and scientists began embracing new forms of knowledge in areas from gynecology to astronomy that transformed their understanding of life and its physical conditions. By the early twentieth century China’s intelligentsia had joined the same mesmeric search for scientific truth as had Europeans, Americans, and other Asians, using the same measures and standards.

  Because many of the crucial breakthroughs in knowledge around the world happened just as China’s contact with the West expanded, the growth of science as a unitary field of investigation saw Chinese involved almost from the beginning. One good example is public hygiene. When British troops occupied Tianjin in 1860, they filled in the ditches near their camp because of fear of the “miasma” generated by stagnant water. In the process, they accidentally cut the city’s drainage system, causing massive flooding and disease.10 But some young British doctors with the troops began wondering whether the Chinese method for keeping cities clean might not be the best weapon against epidemics. The benefits of sanitation were discovered at about the same time in Europe and in China, and it was the combined work of European and Chinese doctors that removed some of the most immediate health risks from the growing Chinese cities.

  As with other forms of knowledge, missionaries were key to transmitting Western medicine and science to a Chinese audience. In 1838 the American Peter Parker organized the Medical Missionary Society in Guangzhou, which instructed its Chinese students in the latest Western medical treatments. The British missionary Benjamin Hobson published in Chinese translation major Western works on science. Working with Chinese translators, including the mathematician Li Shanlan, Hobson put out books on astronomy (1849), physiology (1851), surgery (1857), and internal medicine (1858). While eager for new knowledge, Chinese doctors and scientists were understandably reluctant to throw out the old, keeping a healthy skepticism against parts of Western surgery and pharmacology well into the twentieth century. The gifted Wuxi optician and chemist Xu Shou, who had begun experiments inspired by Western chemistry in the 1850s, often called for the integration of Chinese and Western medicine. But as the number of Chinese trained in Western institutions—whether in China or abroad—increased, the dominance of Western approaches to science began to be established.

  Only a small number of Chinese had access to translations or compendia of foreign knowledge, so changes in perceptions happened much more slowly in the general population. Some foreigners and Chinese in the last third of the nineteenth century began to publish popular magazines on science, by far the most important being by the remarkable Anglican missionary John Fryer. Fryer worked at the Jiangnan Arsenal and established the Shanghai Polytechnic in the mid-1870s. His Gezhi huibian (called the Chinese Scientific and Technical Magazine in English) reached well beyond the scientific community.11 Its letters to the editor show the increasing awareness of new forms of interpretation; one reader from Qingzhou pointed out in 1880 that “Chinese books say that the rainbow . . . is the improper qi of Heaven and Earth, [caused by] the prolonged intercourse of sun and rain: it is the intercourse of those who ought not to engage in intercourse. . . . How do scientists explain it?”12 Even in teaching, old habits died hard. The writer Guo Moruo tells of one of his science teachers around the turn of the century who misread the second character of the expresssion tianran jingxiang (natural conditions) as tianlong jingxiang (the appearance of heavenly dragons), and so interspersed his science lecture with manifestations of celestial creatures cruising the skies.13

  THROUGHOUT THEIR HISTORY, the Chinese have traveled as much as any other group, but the past 200 years have seen more travel, to more places, by more people than ever before. The breakthrough for this new round of travel was in the nineteenth century, when the combination of foreign influences, new forms of conveyance, and state weakness combined to create a climate particularly favorable for venturing
abroad. From the majority of those who made use of these opportunities—traders, workers, and emigrants of all sorts—we have very few written accounts of their experiences. But even the Chinese elite travelers who did report back have generally been overlooked, at least compared with the plentiful Western reports from travel in China that remain in print. The Chinese eye saw Europe, the Americas, Western Asia, and Africa with as much exoticism, cultural bias, guesswork, and misunderstanding as foreigners saw China. Traveling without doubt increased knowledge, both through personal experience and through writing, but in China as elsewhere it was and is knowledge delivered within a particular cultural context through which the traveling eye interprets the impressions it receives.