Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  11. Ng Chin-keong, “Shooting the Eagles: Lin Changyi’s Agony in the Wake of the Opium War,” in Maritime China in Transition, 1750–1850, ed. Wang Gungwu and Ng Chin-keong (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004).

  12. Ibid.

  13. The episode in the spring of 1847, when Hong took a two-month break from his incipient insurgency to study the Bible with the American Baptist missionary Issachar Jacox Roberts (from Sumner County, Tennessee), is a farcical case in point: Roberts thought that he had finally made a Chinese convert, only to be told that he was in fact presented with the son of God.

  14. The battle is described in Supplement to The London Gazette, 27 November 1860, p. 4771.

  15. Quoted from Bernard Brizay, Le Sac du Palais d’Été: L’Expédition Anglo-Française de Chine en 1860 (Troisiéme Guerre de l’Opium) (Monaco: Rocher, 2003), 268.

  CHAPTER 2: IMPERIALISMS

  1. Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

  2. Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 14–32.

  3. Frank H. H. King, The History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), vol. 1, 504.

  4. Madeline Zelin and Andrea McElderry, eds., “Business History in Modern China.” Special issue, Enterprise & Society 6, no. 3 (2005).

  5. Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 65.

  6. See Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China, Michigan Studies on China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979).

  7. John K. Fairbank, ed., Cambridge History of China, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 583.

  8. John C. Ferguson, “The Abolition of the Competitive Examinations in China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 27 (1906), 79.

  9. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 596–597.

  10. Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 84–85.

  11. Fryer, born in England in 1839, lived in China for over thirty-five years, before becoming the first professor of Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1895.

  12. David Wright, Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 168; see also James Reardon-Anderson, The Study of Change: Chemistry in China, 1840–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  13. For this and other stories of the encounter with Western learning in the late nineteenth century, see Guo Moruo, Quanji [Complete Works] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1985), vol. 11.

  14. Wu Tingfang, America, Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (London: Anthem Press, 2007), p. 60.

  15. Zhigang, Chu shi taixi ji [First Mission to the Far West] (Beijing: Shishutang, 1877) quoted from R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, eds., Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 27.

  16. Liu Xihong, Yingzhao siji [Private Notes on England], in Zhong Shuhe, ed., Zouxiang shijie congshu [A Collection of Books on Setting out into the World] (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1986), 48–49.

  17. Suebsaeng Promboon, “Sino-Siamese Tributary Relations, 1282–1853” (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1971), 292.

  18. Rune Svarverud, International Law as World Order in Late Imperial China: Translation, Reception and Discourse, 1847–1911, Sinica Leidensia 78 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 90–91.

  19. Ibid., 136.

  20. Zhongguo jindai duiwai guanxi shi ziliao xuanji (1840–1949) [Selection Materials from the History of Modern Chinese Foreign Relations (1840–1949)], book 1, vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1977), 241–43.

  21. Zeng Jize, Chushi Ying Fa E guo riji [Diary of Embassies in England, France, and Russia], ed. Zhong Shehe (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1985), 178.

  22. Qingyibao, 45 (May 1900).

  CHAPTER 3: JAPAN

  1. Harry Harootunian, “The Functions of China in Tokugawa Thought,” in The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions, ed. Akira Iriye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 12.

  2. J. Mason Gentzler, Changing China: Readings in the History of China from the Opium War to the Present (New York: Praeger, 1977), 70–71.

  3. Edwin Pak-Wah Leung, “The Quasi-War in East Asia: Japan’s Expedition to Taiwan and the Ryūkyū Controversy,” Modern Asian Studies 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1983): 260.

  4. Norihito Mizuno, “Early Meiji Policies Towards the Ryukyus and the Taiwanese Aboriginal Territories,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 3 (May 1, 2009): 683–739.

  5. Peter Zarrow, “Anti-Despotism and ‘Rights Talk’: The Intellectual Origins of Modern Human Rights Thinking in the Late Qing,” Modern China 34, no. 2 (January 2008): 186.

  6. Han Fuqing, Qingmo liu Ri xuesheng [Chinese Students in Japan in the Late Qing Period] (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan, Jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1975), 127–128.

  7. Yi Manson et al., “Memorial Submitted by Ten Thousand Men,” in Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 335.

  8. “It is obvious”: Choe Ik-hyon, “Memorial against Peace,” 1876, Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 333. “But the plan to assassinate”: Seo Jae-pil, one of the young coup-makers who fled to Japan, later went to the United States, where he took the name Philip Jaisohn, trained as a medical doctor, and became a political mentor to Syngman Rhee and, after World War II, to the young Kim Dae-jung. Seo died at eighty-seven in 1951.

  9. Ki-Baik Lee, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 284.

  10. The Chinese suffered at least 35,000 dead and wounded soldiers and sailors, seven times more than the Japanese; see Zhang Mingjin, Luori xia de longqi: 1894–1895 Zhong Ri zhanzheng jishi [The Setting Sun of the Dragon Banner: A True Record of the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War] (Beijing: Beijing Yanshan, 1998).

  11. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 275.

  12. Ibid., 269–270.

  13. Isaac Taylor Headland, Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People (New York: F. H. Revell Co., 1909), 357. All of Guangxu’s edicts are in Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan. Guangxu Xuantong liang chao shangyu dang, 37 vols. (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996).

  14. Bary and Lufrano, Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2, 312.

  15. Ibid., 317–318.

  16. Sushila Narsimhan, Japanese Perceptions of China in the Nineteenth Century: Influence of Fukuzawa Yukichi (New Delhi: Phoenix, 1999), 181.

  17. Geoffrey Jukes, The Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905 (Oxford: Osprey, 2002), 21.

  18. Harry J. Lamley, “Taiwan under Japanese Rule,” in Taiwan: A New History, ed. Murray A. Rubinstein (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006), 223.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Herbert P. Bix, “Japanese Imperialism and the Manchurian Economy, 1900–31,” The China Quarterly, no. 51 (July 1, 1972): 425–443.

  21. Sun Yat-sen, China and Japan: Natural Friends—Unnatural Enemies (Shanghai: China United Press, 1941), 150–151.

  CHAPTER 4: REPUBLIC

  1. Loren Brandt, “Reflections on China’s Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Economy,” in Reappraising Republican China, ed. Frederic Wakeman and Richard Louis Edmonds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28–54.

  2. Philip P. Pan, “‘Saints’ in Rome Are ‘Henchmen’ to Beijing,” Washington Post, September 30, 20
00; Christian Century, 18 October 2000.

  3. I remember, as a child in Norwegian Lutheran Sunday school, seeing blood-curdling pictures of Christians being hacked to death by the heathen Boxers; a fair number of the missionaries killed were Scandinavians.

  4. Philip W. Sergeant, The Great Empress Dowager of China (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1910), 241.

  5. In one town near Beijing: Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 180; see also Joan Judge, “The Politics of Female Virtue in Turn-of-the-Century China: The Case of Tongzhou,” paper delivered at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, San Francisco, April 2006. “There are things that I”: George Lynch, The War of the Civilisations, Being the Record of a “Foreign Devil’s” Experiences with the Allies in China (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), 142. A major Japanese newspaper: Editorial, Yorozu Choho, December 1901; quoted from Robert A. Bickers and R. G. Tiedemann, eds., The Boxers, China, and the World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); see also Bickers, “Boxed Out: How the British Museum Suppressed Discussion of British Looting in China,” Times Literary Supplement, 5129 (2001): 15.

  6. Victor Purcell, The Boxer Uprising: A Background Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

  7. The Philadelphia Press declared: Philadelphia Press, 11 April 1898. In notes outlining: Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: With the Annual Message of the President Transmitted to Congress, December 5, 1899 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 129–130.

  8. Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 209.

  9. Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, the founder of St. John’s University, was born in Lithuania in 1831, went to Germany to study for the rabbinate, there became a Christian, emigrated to America, trained for the priesthood, and in 1859 was sent by the Episcopal Church to China, where he began translating the Bible into Chinese. Schereschewsky later developed Parkinson’s Disease, was largely paralyzed, resigned his position as Bishop of Shanghai, and spent the rest of his life completing his Bible translation, the last two thousand pages of which he typed with the one finger that he could still move. He died in Tokyo in 1906.

  10. Jacobson to Reichmarineamt, 27 January 2005, quoted in Klaus Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland, 1897–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 238.

  11. Governor of Jiaozhou, Meyer-Waldeck, to Tirpitz, 14 October 1912, quoted in Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou.

  12. Von Falkenhausen’s China link came back to save him after he in 1951 was sentenced to twelve years in prison for having been military governor of Belgium during World War II. One of his key defendants was Qian Xiuling, a Chinese chemist who had settled in Belgium before the war, and who had served as a conduit between the German commander and the Belgian resistance. Von Falkenhausen served only three months of his sentence. Qian’s life was made into a sixteen-episode television series in China in 2002 (see Beijing qingnian bao, 11 December 2001). The best overview of Germany’s role in republican China is William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).

  13. The Times, 20 July 1909.

  14. Issued 29 January 1901; quoted from Richard S. Horowitz, “Breaking the Bonds of Precedent: The 1905–6 Government Reform Commission and the Remaking of the Qing Central State,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (October 2003): 775–797.

  15. E-Tu Zen Sun, “The Chinese Constitutional Missions of 1905–1906,” The Journal of Modern History 24, no. 3 (September 1952): 251–268.

  16. Edwin John Dingle, China’s Revolution, 1911–1912 (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1912), pp. 49–50.

  17. Minbao, April 1906, p. 8.

  18. Tsou Jung [Zou Rong], The Revolutionary Army: A Chinese Nationalist Tract of 1903, introduction and translation with notes by John Lust, Matériaux pour l’étude de l’extréme-orient moderne et contemporain, textes; 6 (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).

  19. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus & Han (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 188–192.

  20. Michael Gasster, “The Republican Revolutionary Movement,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu, vol. 11: Late Ch’ing, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 494.

  21. Su Quanyou, “Yuan Shikai yu Zhili gongye [Yuan Shikai and Zhili Industry],” Lishi Dang’an, no. 1 (March 2005): 77–82.

  22. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

  23. B. L. Putnam Weale, The Fight for the Republic in China (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1917), 229–230.

  24. See for example Frank J. Goodnow, “The Adaptation of a Constitution to the Needs of a People,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 5, no. 1 (October 1914): 36–37.

  25. K. S. Liew, Struggle for Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

  26. Angus W. McDonald, “Mao Tse-tung and the Hunan Self-Government Movement, 1920: An Introduction and Five Translations,” The China Quarterly, no. 68 (December 1976): 751–777.

  27. Urgunge Onon and D. Pritchatt, Asia’s First Modern Revolution: Mongolia Proclaims Its Independence in 1911, illustrated edition (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1997). For Russian policy, see Nakami Tatsuo, “Russian Diplomats and Mongol Independence, 1911–1915,” in Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan, ed. Stephen Kotkin and Bruce A. Elleman (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 69–78.

  28. Russo-Chinese Agreement concerning Outer Mongolia, 5 November 1913, in Putnam Weale, The Fight for the Republic in China, 248.

  29. Tsepon W. D. Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 246–48.

  30. Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  31. Sheng even joined the Soviet Communist party in 1938; for a biography, see Cai Jin-song, Sheng Shicai wai zhuan [An Unofficial Biography of Sheng Shicai] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi, 2005).

  32. Guoqi Xu, China and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 245.

  33. Quoted in ibid., 252.

  34. As a result of the protests, China became the only major country that refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Cao Rulin, the minister who had his house burned down, survived the ordeal and later moved to Detroit, where he died at the ripe age of ninety-one. His memoirs are in Cao Rulin, Cao Rulin yisheng zhi huiyi [Cao Rulin Remembers His Life] (Taibei: Zhuanji wenxue, 1970).

  35. Quoted from Spence, The Search for Modern China, 303.

  36. Lu Hsun, “A Happy Family,” in Lu Hsun, Selected Stories of Lu Hsun (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1960).

  37. Liang Qichao, “Travel Impressions from Europe,” in William Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano, eds., Sources of East Asian Tradition Volume 2: The Modern Period, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

  38. Li Dazhao, quoted in Jerome Ch’en, “The Chinese Communist Movement to 1927,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank, vol. 12: Republican China 1912–1949, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 513.

  39. Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 237.

  40. “Sun Yat-sen Appeals,” New York Times, 16 May 1921, 14.

  41. Joint Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, June 1925, CAB/24/174, UK National Archives, London.

  42. S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).

  43. Xiangdao, 31 (July 1923).

  44. Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolu
tion, 1919–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000).

  45. Arthur Waldron, in his excellent From War to Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), emphasizes the effects of the civil wars in the north as being especially conducive to GMD success (pp. 246–274); he is undoubtedly right.

  46. Kuo Mo-Jo and Josiah W. Bennett, “A Poet with the Northern Expedition,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 3, no. 1 (November 1943): 5–36.

  47. Kuo Mo-Jo and Josiah W. Bennett, “A Poet with the Northern Expedition,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 3, no. 4 (August 1944): 362–380.

  48. Clarence Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How, Missionaries of Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China, 1920–1927 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 250.

  49. Quoted in Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking, 1986), 328.

  50. British Foreign Secretary, CAB/23/54, UK National Archives.

  51. Sir William Tyrrell to the Committee on Imperial Defense, 28 July 1926, CAB/24/181, UK National Archives.

  CHAPTER 5: FOREIGNERS

  1. Renmin ribao, 4 April 2006.

  2. In Taiwan, the younger generation: In 2010 fifty-two percent of Taiwanese still saw Japan as their favorite country (the People’s Republic of China scored five percent); “Japan Taiwan’s Favorite Country, Survey Reveals,” Taipei Times, 24 March 2010. In spite of war: Frank Dikötter, The Age of Openness: China before Mao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

  3. Harry Alverson Franck, Roving Through Southern China (New York: The Century Co., 1925), 75–76.

  4. Frederic E. Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 215–216.

  5. Across the street the Cathay Hotel: The lavish structure is now known as the Peace Hotel—Heping fandian. In Beijing new public buildings: It is now the “internal information” office of the official Chinese news agency Xinhua (see Sang Ye and Geremie R. Barmé, “A Beijing That Isn’t [Part I],” at http://www.chinaheritagenewsletter.anu.edu.au/features.php?searchterm=014_BeijingThatWasnt.inc&issue=014).