In 1902, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was first translated into Chinese. The primary concern of Yan Fu, the translator (who also translated John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, and was inspired by social Darwinism), was the wealth and power of China, which, he felt, had been damaged not only by foreign imperialism but by the attitude of Chinese intellectuals who despised commerce and trade.94 Merchants were ranked lowest in the social order by classical Confucianism, which scorned businessmen even though commerce had played such an important role in Chinese history.95 On their own, however, these despised businessmen could not industrialize the country. Yan Fu was convinced that since ‘the wealth and power of modern Europe are attributed by experts to the science of economics’ and that ‘Economics began with Adam Smith, who developed the great principle … that in serving the greater interest, the interest of both sides must be served’, then China had to learn from Adam Smith.96 The West, explained Yan Fu, exalted dynamism, and assertiveness; its commitment to liberty released the potential of individuals. That’s why the West was rich and powerful. China should turn her back on ‘the way of the Sages’ and the traditionalism that kept her people weak and ignorant.97 The Chinese could not simply borrow technology from the West but had to transform their entire society and government. Westerners were a new kind of ‘barbarians’ (yi), with their own culture. They were different from the old barbarians who had invaded China in ancient times and who had only physical strength and so could be civilized by the superior culture of the Chinese.98 These sentiments became part of the so-called ‘New Culture Movement’, an anti-traditional intellectual school whose foremost representative was Lu Xun. His A Madman’s Diary (1918), inspired by Gogol’s short story, was influential for its satirical attack on Confucian culture.
By 1918, Yan Fu, disillusioned with the West, had turned conservative and went back to Confucius and Mencius:
I have been the witness of seven years of Republic in China and four years of a terrible war in Europe … I have come to realise that all the progress of the West in the last three centuries has led its peoples to become inhuman, to kill each other, to lose integrity and a sense of honour. I think now of the teachings of Confucius and Mencius; they seem to me the embodiment of universal wisdom and the bringers of much benefit to our country.99
Despite this Yan Fu was praised by Mao Zedong, on the morrow of the communist victory in 1949, as one of the four national figures who, before the birth of the Communist Party, had turned to the West to find ‘the truth’, the others being Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion, Kang Youwei, the architect of the so-called Hundred Days Reform Movement of 1898, and Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese revolution of 1911.100
The so-called Xinzheng (New Policy) between 1906 and 1911 manifested itself when leading officials were dispatched, once again, to Europe and the United States to find out what was best about those cultures, as Japan had done decades before.101 But what successful Western states and Japan possessed, and China did not, was the institutional capacity to project their power throughout society.102 Not only was the state not strong enough but the country never had the kind of institutions – banks, joint-stock companies – or legislative framework that might have helped entrepreneurs to develop capitalism.103 Furthermore the enormous outflow of funds to pay the indemnities arising from the Boxer wars and the war against Japan resulted in increased taxation and weakened considerably the possibility of reforms (even though by then there was a much greater consensus behind them).104
Not surprisingly the reform movement in China faltered yet again. The problems were too immense for a small ruling class that had long ruled over a very large population (400 million by 1900). It was necessary, it was felt, to devolve further power to local government and create ‘new’ citizens.105 The Empress Dowager Cixi issued an edict in November 1906 promising a constitution, a national assembly, and to curb the powers of the central state.106 But reforms arrived too late to save the imperial system. In 1908, Emperor Guangxu died in mysterious circumstances, still in palace detention under orders from his aunt the empress, who may have had him poisoned with arsenic, while she herself was on her deathbed, just to make sure he would never rule.107 She died the following day, having appointed as her successor the two-year-old Puyi, who became the last emperor of China. Reforms continued anyway, the throne having become almost an irrelevancy. A new constitution was promulgated in 1908.108
A nationalist movement, led by Sun Yat-sen (the ‘father’ of modern China), continued to gather ground, leading to the collapse of the Qing state in 1911. The Qing Dynasty had ruled since 1644, longer than any European royal house, and had been the last rulers of an empire that had unified China in 221 BC. The last days of the last emperor, after well over two thousand years, had finally arrived. The new Chinese republic was led by Sun Yat-sen. The republic continued the tasks set by previous reformers. Thus, the New Policy of 1906 to 1911 was not the last gasp of a dying system but the foundation of a new state.109 Building it, however, took far longer than anyone expected. The country remained in a constant state of turmoil throughout the twentieth century: first a civil war, as regional landlords fought each other; then, just as China was about to be united under the Kuomintang, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931), the war of resistance against Japan (1937–45); then, after yet another bloody civil war, the communists took over and re-established sovereignty in 1949. Not that calm prevailed in the ‘Middle Kingdom’: the Great Leap Forward (the ‘Three Bitter Years’, 1958–61) resulted in a massive famine; and then the Great Cultural Revolution disrupted the economy for almost another decade.110 Finally, after 1978, there was a turn to a market economy denoted, somewhat defensively, as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
Before the nineteenth century, the East had looked down on the West or, rather, had not bothered to look at all, since there was little to learn from it. China had been the technological world leader until about 1400.111 Then Europeans, having long felt inferior, at last turned the tables and European admiration turned to disdain. China, they discovered, was an empire in decay, stagnant and backward, able to offer the surging West only some trade and some souls to be saved.112 Yet the West feared China even when China was down: one of the most distinguished nineteenth-century sinologists, the diplomat Sir Thomas Wade, contributor to the romanization of mandarin (the famous Wade-Giles transliteration system), insisted that China must never be allowed to have a fleet or a strong army.113 And in 1850, Lord Palmerston as Foreign Minister noted, in a similar vein, that China was one of ‘These half-civilized governments’ which ‘require a dressing every eight to ten years to keep them in order’.114
Previously, however, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the West had been transfixed by Qing China: oriental gardens and pagodas decorated Kew and Tivoli; porcelain and lacquered cabinets were imported or imitated; rooms were decorated in the ‘Chinese’ style in palaces and castles throughout Europe from the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to Kilkenny Castle in Ireland; rococo artists, such as Antoine Watteau, were inspired by Chinese motifs; Chinese ‘wisdom’ (there is always a good deal of fantasy in all worship) was admired by great thinkers of the age, notably Voltaire and Leibniz, both also admirers of Confucius.115 Voltaire’s chapter on China in his Essai sur les moeurs is full of praise for the distant country.116 Hegel declared that China ‘is this wondrously unique empire that astonished Europeans, and has continued to do so …’117 Later in the nineteenth century, not just China worship but also general admiration for non-Western societies and for the ‘Orient’ (usually but not always the Middle East) became a reaction against the vulgarity of Western culture, against the ugliness of its coal-based industrialization. In France there was a proliferation of societies aimed at cultivating the knowledge of the ‘Orient’, such as the Société des peintres orientalistes français, founded in Paris in 1893.
Of course what writers and artists of the Orient such
as Flaubert, Pushkin, David Roberts (a Scottish painter famous for his sketches of the Middle East), and Delacroix hoped to discover was a Western invention, their invention. There was often a feeling of condescending superiority in this admiration, as Edward Said explained in his famous Orientalism (1978); nevertheless there was much to admire. The Chinese had refined the division of labour without it becoming a question of factory production. Silks, stone carvings, and metalwork were produced in large workshops by a minute specialization where each aspect of the production process was in the hands of an individual workman. By the beginning of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) the Chinese were able to weave complex patterns in silk that remained the envy of the West for centuries.
In 1697 Gottfried Leibniz, in his Preface to Novissima Sinica, comparing China and Europe, lamented that the European did not try to learn from the Chinese who ‘… vies with us in many other ways in almost equal combat … they surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy’.118 From the seventeenth century, reports written by Jesuits who had gone out to convert ‘heathens’ extolled their wealth and taste, their sophisticated culture and art, their astonishing bureaucracy, and their apparently benevolent and tolerant rulers (more tolerant than Christian rulers – admittedly not a difficult feat). Matteo Ricci (known by the Chinese as Li Madou), one of the first Jesuits to reside in China, from 1582 until his death in Beijing in 1610, admired many aspects of Chinese culture, though he was perplexed at its apparent ‘immorality’. While distancing himself from Buddhism and neo-Confucianism, he held the view that traditional Confucianism and Christian beliefs were not incompatible.119 David Hume, writing in 1752, thought that China was ‘one of the most flourishing empires in the world, though it had very little commerce beyond its own territories’.120 The Chinese state, before it was fatally damaged by nineteenth-century wars and foreign interventions, was quite sturdy: it promoted new crops; it dealt with flood control; it manipulated currencies; it developed a banking system, and attempted to cope (less and less successfully) with what, traditionally, Chinese governments were supposed to do above all else: preventing or dealing with ‘natural’ disasters and famines.121 Natural disasters were regarded as signs that the Mandate of Heaven, the right to rule, could be in jeopardy.
The relatively high level of economic development reached by China in the eighteenth century did not endure in the nineteenth. Much of its industry, except for ceramics, was still at the handicraft stage at a time when it had to face the damaging competition of Western industries.122 While Western states were favouring capitalist development, the imperial state was erecting obstacles to it. Thus, when in 1801, some merchants in Pingquan (Zhili) applied for permission to open copper mines (mining was forbidden or restricted), the imperial response was negative. The authorities were worried about what would happen once the mines were depleted and the workforce dispersed: ‘Can there be no risk that they will stir up trouble?’ So mining in that region was banned ‘in perpetuity’.123 Such anxieties about development were deeply engrained. Scholars such as Yü Yueh (1821–1905) thought technology would be harmful in the long run because it quickly consumed natural resources that were limited in supply (and how right he was, though such views were, until recently, regarded as eccentric). In the 1870s, Liu Ping-chang, governor of Kiangsi, cited this (apparently ecological) reason for continuing to oppose modern mining. Others such as Wang Ping-hsieh (an intellectual who opposed foreign influence) claimed that the introduction of Western technology would exacerbate social injustice.124
Why China failed to produce an industrial revolution to match that of Great Britain has long been a matter of controversy among economic historians, who have only recently begun to observe their distance from the previous excessively Eurocentric perspective.125 China’s GNP in 1820 was estimated to have been one-third that of the rest of the world. By 1949 it had collapsed to 1 per cent, though by 2013 it had climbed back to 12.3 per cent.126
In Japan things developed differently. The country, earlier than China, had been swept by a wave of enthusiasm for Western progress, though its adoption of Western mores proceeded quite differently. There was a ‘revolution’ in favour of modernity and industrialization but it looked more like a palace coup rather than a rebellion led by several of the tozama han (han are domains ruled by quasi-independent lords) to ‘return’ the emperor to power. This was the Meiji Restoration (Taisei Hōkan) of 1868.127 Considering the importance of this event, it was, by all standards, a remarkably non-violent affair. The Meiji ‘revolutionaries’, unlike their counterparts in the United States or France, or, fifty years later, the Russian communists, did not have a global ideology or universalist slogans and had no wish or ambition to inspire people in the rest of the world. They did very little to benefit their own class; quite the contrary, they removed its privileges. They were nationalists who aspired to protect Japan and secure its place in the world. It was, of course, the nationalism of the elite, not one born of a popular sense of political solidarity. This nationalism, which had arisen largely as a response to external threats, had been compelled to confront its main obstacle: the Tokugawa feudal system. Under this system, the common people, the peasantry, were outside the state and expected to do little else other than to pay taxes; merchants were expected to worry only about enriching themselves; and the sole political class was that of the samurai, who were expected to mind the affairs of the state.128 The Meiji Restoration blew all this apart and created the basis for the modern Japanese nation and hence for modern Japanese nationalism. In 1860, Yokoi Shōnan, a reformer and a scholar (assassinated in 1869 by a conservative samurai), offered his verdict on the previous 260 years of Tokugawa rule when he exclaimed that Commodore Matthew Perry (whose fleet had compelled Japan to open its ports to Western trade in 1852–4) had indeed been ‘correct in regarding this country as a country without any government’.129
Although the new Meiji government included some advocates of the anti-Western ‘expel the barbarians’ policy, even they soon realized that the only true defensive policy was the modernization of Japan. The Meiji Restoration was thus a ‘bourgeois revolution’ but one carried out by the lower ranks of the samurai class and members of the intelligentsia. Capitalists and merchants played no role at all, nor did ‘the people’ since there was very little popular social unrest.130
The rule of the emperor (tenno, or Heavenly Sovereign) had traditionally been purely formal, with even fewer powers than a constitutional monarch in the West. The real power was in the hands of the Tokugawa Bakufu (the feudal quasi-military ruler called by Westerners the Shogun). This had been made possible by the establishment of a new state structure. Power could no longer be shared between the Imperial Court and the Bakufu. As Iwakura Tomomi (later a leading member of one of Japan’s exploratory missions to the West) said: ‘You can’t have two suns in one heaven … Hence it is my desire that we should act vigorously to abolish the Bakufu.’131 After January 1868 the administration was formally handed over to the young tenno Meiji (the 122nd Emperor of Japan), who was only sixteen.132 A new central authority emerged under the patriotic slogan of fukoku kyōhei (‘enrich the nation; strengthen the army’).133 The modernization of the country in the Western sense was a consequence. Members of the old ruling class were enticed into the construction of capitalism – a kind of unconscious co-optation similar to what Antonio Gramsci would have called a ‘passive revolution’. The Kōbushō (the Ministry of Industry), at breakneck speed, and with no grand preordained plan, imported and applied Western technology, constructed the first railways, created, against fierce opposition, a nationwide telegraph network, employed hundreds of foreign engineers and experts, and used many of them to train Japanese counterparts.134
The Meiji leaders resembled contemporary elites in the Third World, torn between admiration for the West and a hatred of it. They represented a major rupture with the past, undoing over two centuries of self-imposed isolation since the days, in the seventeenth
century, when Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third Shogun, expelled all Westerners, except for the Dutch, and imposed a regime of strict state control over Japan’s trade and communication with the outside world. The objective behind the self-imposed isolation was the same as that behind its eventual termination: the desire to preserve Japan from foreign conquest. Thus Aizawa Seishisai, the historian and thinker, wrote in his New Theses (Shinron, 1825): ‘When those barbarians plan to subdue a country not their own, they start by opening commerce and watch for a sign of weakness. If an opportunity is presented, they will preach their alien religion to captivate the people’s hearts.’135 He was right: it was the deployment of force by Commodore Matthew Perry and his US fleet that had shattered Japan’s isolation and provided the impetus for reform. At first, in the 1850s and 1860s, the impact with the West sparked off a xenophobic movement under the slogan Sonnōjōi (‘Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians’). The government did not try to restrain the activities of militant nationalists, since they shared the same pro-emperor ideology, and the government feared Western-oriented radicals more than these romantic traditionalists.136 Even Kōno Hironaka, the Liberal leader, had been, at first, attracted by the ‘Expel the Barbarians’ movement. He then read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (he said while he was on horseback) and then, as he wrote, ‘in a flash’ his entire way of thinking was ‘revolutionized’: ‘Now all these earlier thoughts of mine, excepting those concerned with loyalty and filial piety, were smashed to smithereens.’137
This attitude gave way to a general pro-Western enthusiasm in a period known as bunmei kaika (‘civilization and enlightenment’), which manifested itself in the building of Western-style homes, the wearing of Western clothes (compulsory for government officials, but seldom adopted by ordinary Japanese), and the import of beef. The ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873.138
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