3
Westernizing the East
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the concept of the ‘West’ was identified with western Europe, the beacon of the world, the template of modernity. And modernity then meant industrial capitalism. On a number of indices, the United States was already an industrial powerhouse and hence part of ‘the West’, even though, in 1880, it was not yet so widely evident that the next century would become the American Century. Geography notwithstanding, large parts of Italy, all of Portugal, all of Greece, all of Ireland, and much of Spain were not part of this world. Japan had just begun its march towards industrial capitalism: an ‘eastern’ nation reaching out to become western.
The opposition between an abstract East and West has been ‘as old as written history’ or, at least as Ancient Greece and Rome.1 It was further strengthened by the division between the Roman Catholic West and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The identification of ‘Europe’ with western Europe and the concomitant negative view of the East (but not of the Far East) had been a common trope since the days of the Enlightenment, though occasionally Islam was viewed positively by eighteenth-century secular philosophers, as a purer revealed religion, devoid of the imperfections of Judaism and Christianity.2
Voltaire, in his Histoire de Charles XII – an eighteenth-century literary success – published in 1731 and translated almost immediately into English – assumed, not wrongly, that his readers would be those who lived in ‘civilized’ western Europe and not in the cold areas of the North, let alone the distant and remote areas of eastern Europe.3 Muscovites, he explained, were less civilized than the Mexicans before the arrival of Hernán Cortés, ignorant of all arts and commerce, innumerate, and their Christianity contaminated by all sorts of superstitions.4 In his Histoire de l’Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, published thirty years later, Voltaire pointed out that reformers such as Tsar Peter the Great did not try to emulate Persia or Turkey but looked for a model in ‘our part of Europe’, ‘where all kind of talents are celebrated for eternity’.5
The West meant enlightenment, progress, secularism, and human rights, and even the rights of women. Montesquieu in his De l’esprit des lois (1748) asserted that customs such as polygamy (which he regarded as primitive) indicated that it was in Asia that ‘despotism feels, so to speak, so natural’, so at home.6 The way women were treated in non-European countries was seen as an index of backwardness. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Yan Fu, a westernizing Chinese scholar, wrote that of all the ‘noxious practices’ that plagued China, two stood out, one the addiction to opium, the other the practice of binding the feet of women.7 A few decades earlier, Karl Marx, in a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (12 December 1868), declared that ‘Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex …’8
Such views were often put forward by western men unaware of the double standards they were deploying. Thus Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, convinced of the inferiority of Islamic religion and society, held the view that the Muslim segregation of women (keeping them veiled and in ignorance) was the ‘fatal obstacle’ to the development of civilization in Egypt, the main cause of its ‘complete failure’ as a social system.9 But once back in Britain, far from championing women, Cromer became President of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. In this as in so much else, he was not on the side of history well before women achieved the suffrage. The Married Women’s Property Act 1882 finally allowed women to own property in their own right, while the Guardianship of Infants Act 1886 increased women’s chances of receiving custody of their children after a divorce.10
It was not the case that ‘the feminine ferment’ (to use Marx’s words) was a western prerogative. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female poets such as Qiu Jin (1875–1907), in her manifesto A Respectful Proclamation to China’s 200 Million Women Comrades, raged against footbinding and the denial of education to girls. In one of her poems she wrote:
Unbinding my feet I clean out a thousand years of poison,
With heated heart arouse all women’s spirits.11
She was executed in 1907 for conspiring against the Qing Dynasty. The anarchist and feminist He Zhen tackled labour and sexuality in the years leading up to the Chinese revolution of 1911, stressing the centrality of the liberation of women, and the crucial role they would play in any revolution.12 Women were on the march even in some Islamic countries. In Iran they were actively involved in the defence of the achievements of the modernizing constitutional revolution of 1906. Morgan Shuster, writing in 1912, witnessed the demonstrations of Iranian women in favour of the Constitutional Reform and against Russian and British interference:13
having themselves suffered from a double form of opposition, political and social, they were the more eager to foment the great nationalist movement for the adoption of constitutional forms of government and the inculcation of Western political, social, commercial, and ethical codes.14
The ‘Europe’ that was seen as emblematic of civilization was a social space defined by the lifestyles and attitudes of a privileged minority of urban dwellers, not that of the brutish, stunted, ill, and barely literate mass of its inhabitants. Some members of the elites of the Ottoman Empire and Japan wanted modernity, but they also wanted to preserve their ‘soul’, their culture, their tradition, and thought that the fabled Western package could be dismantled into its various components and that one could pick and choose.
The success of the West, its primacy, had been relatively recent and not earlier than the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when areas such as East Asia were not much behind Europe in being able to develop an industrial system.15 The technological advantages that some parts of Europe possessed around 1850 were not as obvious in 1750 as they would be later; in fact, manufacturing in some parts of India or China were more advanced than in some parts of western Europe.16 Nor was there a particularly significant gap between north-western Europe and the more advanced regions of China in terms of consumption levels or life expectancy. The work of Joseph Needham (the multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China) shows that China was well ahead of Europe in most branches of science until the eighteenth century. Printing had been introduced centuries before Gutenberg. In 200 BC the Chinese were casting iron, a technology that reached Europe only around 1400. Chinese paper technology took one thousand years to reach the West.17 Under the golden age of the Song Dynasty (960– 1279) the compass was introduced (a century before it surfaced in the West); the navy was the largest in the world; paper money was issued before anywhere else; rice cultivation, thanks to new irrigation systems, increased exponentially; the population reached 100 million in 1100 (more than in the whole of Europe); textile production improved, particularly of cotton and silk; gunpowder was perfected; there was expansion of shipbuilding, of ceramic production, and of iron and steel; finally a remarkably meritocratic examination method to select state functionaries was established and a system of indirect taxes collection was set up.18 Much of this golden age was due to state intervention and much of this intervention was due to threats from external forces, above all the Mongols, who, led by Kublai Khan, took over China and established the Yuan Dynasty in 1271.19 Under the following dynasty, that of the Ming emperors (1368–1644), China became a proto-industrial society producing cotton, silk, ceramics, and paper on an industrial scale, creating a thriving market economy.20
Around 1800, China was still more prosperous than most of Europe.21 Already in the eighteenth century the agriculture of Jiangnan (the area south of the Yangtze River including Shanghai) was one of the ‘most commercial and externally oriented agricultures in the pre-modern world’. It was a major producer and exporter of silk and cotton, producing more cotton cloth than Britain.22 By the mid-nineteenth-century one in five of Jiangnan’s inhabitants lived in towns
(out of a population of 436 million).23 This put Jiangnan ahead of European countries in terms of urbanization, except for the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands; and its population at that time was greater than any country in Europe except for Tsarist Russia.24 Guangdong (Canton) was not far behind Jiangnan. By the 1860s there were 30,000–40,000 weavers belonging to the silk guild in Nanhai County (Guangdong) alone.25 It is thus not surprising that Jiangnan was the site of the main effort of the Chinese Empire to industrialize in the second half of the nineteenth century and is now China’s major industrial and commercial region.26
As late as the 1750s, the Chinese were just as well educated as average Europeans: in the eighteenth century the Chinese lower classes had greater access to education than their equivalents in the West.27 Even in the nineteenth century, literacy rates were relatively high in Qing China: between 30 and 45 per cent of men and between 2 and 10 per cent of women.28
In the nineteenth century it was commonplace in intellectual quarters to assume that China was relatively prosperous even while disparaging her artistic achievements. Thus Ernest Renan, in the 1850s, wrote that China at the end of the eighteenth century was more advanced than all others, yet, when it came to art ‘China has nothing which warrants the name of art’ (‘la Chine n’a rien qui puisse mériter le nom d’art’).29 There might have been something true in Hegel’s remark (one of the many unverifiable remarks so frequent in his writings) that ‘The History of the World travels from East to West’, though the second part of the sentence, ‘… for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning’, is questionable.30
Traditional China consisted of an enormous territory ruled by a central authority, deeply introspective, not needing anything at all from the outside world, and discouraging rationalist inquiries and innovations.31 There had been exceptions: both the Kangxi emperor (1654–1722) and the Qianlong emperor (1711–99) were open to western influences, especially in the arts, but on the whole China tended to absorb rather than import. Foreign invasions such as that from Mongolia, which established the Yuan Dynasty (13th–14th century), and from Manchuria, which established the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), did not lead to foreign rule but rather to the absorption of foreign rulers into the Chinese political framework.32 In fact from the thirteenth century to the end of the Chinese Empire (1911) the only period in which China was ruled by native Han emperors was from 1368 to 1644 (the Ming Dynasty) – 276 years. In a sense the ethnic origin of Chinese emperors mattered little: it was assumed that they were not just rulers of China but emperors of the world, lords of humanity, sons of heaven.33
In 1793, George III sent a diplomat, George Macartney, bearing many gifts, to seek to convince the Chinese to relax barriers to trade. The letter sent by the Qianlong emperor to the king has remained famous:
our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. But as the tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces, are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal mark of favour, that foreign hongs [merchants] should be established at Canton, so that your wants might be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence.
He then asked not to be importuned again, adding: ‘I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea, nor do I overlook your excusable ignorance of the usages of our Celestial Empire.’34
This was widely interpreted as a sign of Chinese arrogance and refusal to modernize, though it is possible that the Qianlong emperor was simply seeking to buy time and prepare a more sturdy defensive system.35 Indeed, as Macartney departed, the emperor made sure the military might of China was on display at all times.36
The belief that China did not need anything endured for decades. Robert Hart, the British Inspector General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, a true expert on China and resident there for almost fifty years, wrote in 1901 that:
Trade, it is true, has grown, and the revenue derived from it has multiplied; but as yet it is far, far from what our predecessors looked for; and the reason is not that the Chinese Government actively opposed foreign commerce, but that the Chinese people did not require it. Chinese have the best food in the world, rice; the best drink, tea; and the best clothing, cotton, silk and fur. Possessing these staples and their innumerable native adjuncts, they do not need to buy a penny’s worth elsewhere; while their Empire is in itself so great, and they themselves so numerous, that sales to each other make up an enormous and sufficient trade, and export to foreign countries is unnecessary.37
The Chinese Empire, once ‘the centre of the universe’, received its coup de grâce from the West when the British and the French, followed by Russia and the United States, forced the Chinese authorities to allow the traffic of opium into their country by waging the so-called Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60). The spread of opium, which had already established itself in the Chinese army in 1832, climbed steadily among the people throughout the nineteenth century and, massively, among the peasantry in the 1870s.38 By 1900 a high government official, Zhang Zhidong, wrote that ‘Opium has spread with frightful rapidity and heart-rending results throughout the provinces. Millions upon millions have been struck down by the plague … wrecking the minds and eating away the strength and wealth of its victims.’39
Not realizing their weakness, the Chinese had at first tried to resist foreign arrogance with words that could not be backed by deeds. In 1839, alarmed by the penetration of opium into China, under the protection of British military force, the imperial commissioner, Lin Zexu (Lin Tse-hsü), was sent to Guangzhou (Canton) to stamp out the opium trade. Opium dealers were arrested, their cargo was confiscated and destroyed, culminating in over one million kilos being thrown into the sea in a lengthy operation that was concluded on 26 June (now UN International Day against Drug Abuse). Then Lin Zexu, realizing that the problem had to be tackled at source, wrote a famous letter to Queen Victoria:
among the crowd of barbarians … there are those who smuggle opium to seduce the Chinese people and so cause the spread of the poison to all provinces. Such persons who only care to profit themselves, and disregard the harm to others, are not tolerated by the laws of heaven and are unanimously hated by human beings. His Majesty the Emperor, upon hearing of this, is in a towering rage … Yet [these] barbarian ships … come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit … By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? … Of all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not beneficial to people … Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries? Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them … If China, again, cuts off this beneficial export, what profit can the barbarians expect to make? … How can you bear to go on selling products injurious to others in order to fulfil your insatiable desire?40
There was no reply. But the British retaliated forcefully in favour of their freedom to trade throughout China, including in drugs (at the time opium was legal in most countries, including Great Britain, something of which commissioner Lin Zexu was not aware, as he probably did not realize that most Westerners could get by for far longer than ‘a single day’ without rhubarb). It was the beginning of the Opium War.
There were, of course, dissident voices in Britain, notably that of the young William Gladstone, who, on 8 April 1840, attacked the government, pointing out that the Chinese ‘gave you notice to abandon your contraband trade. When they found that you would not, they had a right to drive you from their coasts on account of your obstinacy in pers
isting in this infamous and atrocious traffic.’ Adding that he could not think of ‘a war more unjust in its origins, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country in permanent disgrace …’41 A civil servant, Robert Montgomery Martin, member of the legislative council in Hong Kong, fulminated in 1846:
Have we simply remained passive, and allowed the crimes and the murders caused by the opium trade to go on silently, unnoticed and unapproved by Her Majesty’s government? … Better – far better – infinitely better – abjure the name of Christianity; call ourselves heathens – idolaters of the ‘golden calf’ – worshippers of the ‘evil one’ … Why the ‘slave trade’ was merciful compared to the ‘opium trade’. We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans … But the opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded, and annihilated the moral being of unhappy sinners … No blessing can be vouchsafed to England while this national crime is daily calling to Heaven for vengeance … We stand convicted before the nations of the world …42
Karl Marx, quoting this passage in 1858, pointed out the irony that:
the representative of the antiquated world appears prompted by ethical motives, while the representative of overwhelming modern society fights for the privilege of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest markets …43
During the final phase of the Second Opium War, in 1860, British and French troops under the orders of Lord Elgin (the worthy son of the Lord Elgin who had removed the marbles from the Parthenon some decades earlier) destroyed Beijing’s summer palace, or Yuanming yuan (the Gardens of Perfect Brightness). The Treaties of Nanking (1842) and Tientsin (1858) and the Conventions of Peking (1860) imposed free trade on China; coerced it to open a number of ports to Western trade; required it to cede Hong Kong to Britain; abolished all internal taxes, thus ensuring that Western goods could transit freely inside China; allowed missionaries and Western merchants unimpeded access to the country, the former to proselytize, the latter to make money. To cap these indignities China had to pay indemnities to Britain and France out of Chinese customs revenues.44 After 1895 the Chinese government was forced to grant railway and mining concessions to various Western nations and to Japan. By 1911, 41 per cent of the railway mileage in China was owned by foreigners. Numerous mining concessions were granted between 1896 and 1913 to the British, Germans, Russians, Americans, Belgians, etc.45 Just before the First World War there were no fewer than forty-eight treaty ports where foreigners had the absolute right to settle, trade, and enjoy immunity from local prosecution for any crime they might commit. Some of these treaty ports had no reason to exist except for furthering the national pride of certain European states who wished to show that they were part of the European power system, as was the case with the Italian concession of Tianjin (Tientsin), in which Italy had no real interest.46
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