The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  The greatest credibility problem for the Yellow Peril is that, historically, it has developed in isolation from opinion and events in China itself. It has thrived on delusional stereotypes generated by Westerners uninterested in what the Chinese themselves have made of events such as the Opium War and their subsequent relations with European invaders – the subject of this book’s remaining chapters. As Sax Rohmer himself proudly told his biographer, ‘I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese!’89

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE NATIONAL DISEASE

  In the late 1870s, a bespectacled Chinese man in his mid-twenties passed a couple of years in London. Most weekdays he spent around the neoclassical heartland of British imperial technology: Greenwich Naval College. Most Sundays, he would drop in on the Chinese embassy, sometimes re-emerging onto the capital’s gaslit streets only late at night. Who was he? What was he doing in England? Was he part of a sinister Qing plot to steal the military and scientific secrets of the West, decades before Sax Rohmer dreamed up the idea?

  Yan Fu – the young man in question – was, like Fu Manchu, a son of imperial China: the twenty-seventh generation of a clan of eastern China that could trace its ancestors back to the tenth century and that, like most ambitious families in the empire, had for hundreds of years been fixated on pushing its scions through the civil-service examination system, and into a lucrative official posting. But three generations before Yan, the clan had begun to run short of money for the expensive business of examination preparation and started a successful doctor’s practice in the deep, green, forested valleys of Fujian. As a boy, therefore, Yan had been schooled in both the Chinese classical and medical traditions.

  In 1868, when Yan was aged fourteen, his conventional education changed course: he was sent off to the provincial capital to study at the Fuzhou Shipyard School, one of the new-style academies of Western science and technology that had sprung up after China’s second war with Britain. In 1871, after five years studying English, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, physics, mechanics, chemistry, geology, astronomy and navigation, he graduated at the top of his class. After he had spent another five years putting his training to practical use on a Chinese military vessel patrolling between Singapore, Japan and Taiwan, the Qing government decided to dispatch him to England to study ‘the newest and most ingenious arts of the West’. This enterprise was part of the ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’: a new Qing attempt – following a series of military defeats – to figure out how the West had achieved its scientific control of the world. China, pronounced Prince Gong (the brother of the emperor who agreed the Treaty of Beijing with Lord Elgin in 1860), must ‘make a thorough study of the various kinds of [military] equipment to gain knowledge of all the secrets of the foreigners . . . Now that we know what they depend on for victory, we should try to master it.’1 Europe’s growing presence in China, declared one of the leading statesmen of the day, Li Hongzhang, ‘was one of the great transformations of the past 3,000 years’.2

  Up to this point, Yan Fu’s education and career – with its loyalty to Chinese tradition and dedication to modern military science – bear passing resemblance to Rohmer’s paranoid hypotheses about ambitious Orientals conspiring to beat the West at its own game. But here, Yan’s life story departs from the Yellow Peril narrative. His decision to study Western science was not part of a grand, premeditated scheme – it sprang from economic necessity. After his father died when Yan was thirteen, the family finally abandoned all hope of supporting the boy through studying for the civil-service exams – in later life, Yan Fu recalled how his mother toiled at needlework to keep the family fed and clothed, and how he would be woken through the night by the sound of her weeping. The Fuzhou Shipyard, by contrast, could offer attractive incentives: free board and lodging, and a stipend of four silver dollars a month (with a bonus of ten silver dollars to students who came top in the quarterly exams).

  The bribery was necessary, for in late-nineteenth-century China a Western education remained a disreputable life choice. ‘Only the truly desperate stooped to studying Western sciences’, remembered the writer Lu Xun, who took classes in medicine at one of the east-coast academies in the 1890s. ‘By following the course I had fixed upon, I would be selling my soul to foreign devils’.3 To praise the modernity of Western methods, to seek employment in the new Qing Foreign Office or (even more unthinkably) in an embassy abroad, was to court career catastrophe. Guo Songtao, the Qing ambassador to London during Yan Fu’s time in Britain, was a case in point. For his pro-Western views, he was physically assaulted, multiply impeached and eventually dismissed and sidelined from politics, while his house in China was vandalized. ‘The empire cold-shoulders him’, ran one contemporary scrap of doggerel. ‘He cannot serve human beings / So how can he serve demons?’4

  Secondly, Yan Fu had little interest in waging war on the white race. Quite the opposite: through his study of science and English, he fell in love with the West – and not just with the iron-plated steamers and guns that he was supposed to be studying, but also with its thinkers, writers and political and legal institutions. This, Yan concluded during his years abroad, was the foundation of Western strength. ‘The reason why England and the other countries of Europe are wealthy and strong is that impartial justice is daily extended’, he declared to Guo, during one of their Sunday conversations. ‘Here is the ultimate source.’5 Yan Fu remains a celebrity in China today for a remarkable series of translations that he completed after his return from England: Smith’s Wealth of Nations, J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois. Yan Fu sought an idiom that would convince China’s educated elites of the profundity of Western thought, rendering canonical texts of the modern West in the pure classical Chinese of the first millennium BC. ‘The books with which I concern myself are profound and abstruse’, Yan Fu reasoned. ‘They are not designed to nourish schoolboys’.6 But he is famed also as a leading representative of the first generation of Chinese men after the Opium Wars to launch upon a pointedly introspective quest – one of the country’s key intellectual shifts of the nineteenth century – to understand China’s weakness, and Western strength.

  In their long discussions in London, Yan Fu and Ambassador Guo whiled away the hours assessing the virtues of the West and bemoaning the sins of China and the Chinese. For according to his diary, Guo shared with Yan Fu an extravagantly high opinion of China’s imperialist adversaries (and of Great Britain in particular) – a fact that was all the more extraordinary given the discourteous reception that he received in Britain. On his arrival in London, Punch ran a cartoon and seven poetic stanzas of impeccable offensiveness, in which Guo was caricatured as a monkey (‘With his eyes aslant, and his pigtail’s braid / Coiled neatly round his close-shaved head . . . As stubborn as pigs and as hard to steer / With a taste for cheap buying and selling dear’), peering at the stately lion of the British empire.7 A week later, the magazine devoted a whole page of tasteless doggerel to the bound feet of Guo’s wife, whom it christened ‘the tottering Lily’ and depicted as a décolleté Geisha.8

  Yet Guo’s enthusiasm was undented. Even on his voyage to England, during which he suffered constant discomfort (in addition to seasickness, he was afflicted by a sore throat, laboured breathing, dizziness, swollen gums, toothache, a smarting nose and heart pain), he sportingly retained an appreciation for everything Western that he saw: the Europeans’ ‘ceremonial courtesies’ he found ‘refined and civilised’, their navigational techniques extraordinarily commendable. ‘That country certainly produces admirably talented men’, he remarked, observing German officers seeking exercise in a game of leapfrog. ‘Admirable!’9 Given Great Britain’s not particularly creditable record in China, Guo also took a surprisingly positive view of its long-term intentions towards his country. The British have, he considered, ‘surrounded China and press close upon her.

  With their hands reaching high and their feet travelling far, they rise up like eagles and glar
e like tigers . . . Yet for all this, they have not the slightest intention of presuming on their military strength to act violently or rapaciously . . . the nations of Europe do have insight into what is essential and what is not and possess a Way of their own which assists them in the acquisition of wealth and power . . . Their governmental and educational systems are well-ordered, enlightened and methodical.10

  If Great Britain and the West were a repository of all that was worth emulating, the (in Guo’s view) stupid, smug Chinese were by contrast a source of disgust. ‘Surely this is not the time for China to indulge in highflown talk and vain boasting in order to aggrandise herself!’ he sighed on the subject of anti-European prejudice. ‘After thirty years of foreign relations, our provincial authorities still know nothing . . . The weakening of the Song and the downfall of the Ming, were both the outcome of the actions of such irresponsible and ignorant people.’11

  Guo and Yan held in common another passionate belief: that opium lay at the root of China’s problems. ‘Personally,’ analysed Guo, ‘I think there is something in the Chinese mind which is absolutely unintelligible. I refer here to opium-smoking. Nothing the West has done has been more harmful to us than opium.’ From here, it would seem an easy and logical step for Guo to lash out at the West for its behaviour towards China. But he took his argument in another direction. ‘Even English gentlemen themselves are ashamed of the fact that they have used this harmful trade as an excuse for provoking hostilities with China, and are making a serious effort to eradicate the evil. Yet our Chinese scholar-officials complacently degrade themselves by smoking opium, and do so without remorse. This has been for several decades already our national disgrace, exhausting much money and man-power, and poisoning the lives of our people. And yet there is not one man who feels ashamed of it.’12

  Opium, in Guo’s opinion, was both cause and symptom of the rot in the Chinese national character. To him, the Chinese were doubly contemptible: for having allowed themselves to become addicted to opium, and for failing to feel ashamed of their weakness. Rather than dwelling on the fact that so much opium had reached China in British imperialist vessels, he saw the drug also as a self-inflicted poison. Yan was similarly concerned with Chinese culpability, proposing harsh punishments for officials who refused to give up the habit. Yan and Guo’s identification of opium as the crucial national vice was another emblem of the pair’s esteem for European opinion. For it was during these years that opium was reinvented in Great Britain as a social pathology: as China’s own special disease of the will that it was threatening to export to the West.

  Men like Yan Fu were responsible for propagating a new and influential set of nationalistic ideas for reforming China in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: ideas that were both intensely critical of their own country, and admiring of its redoubtable Western challengers. The years following the Treaty of Beijing had been difficult for the Qing empire. After the defeat of 1860, the Xianfeng emperor had been forced to accept the principle of a modern international world system: ‘England is an independent sovereign state’, he pronounced. ‘Let it have equal status with China.’13 By 1884, the Qing had lost its old claims to authority over Indochina, following a disastrous naval engagement with France in which, within one hour, every Chinese ship had been destroyed, and at the end of which 521 Chinese (compared with only five French sailors) had lost their lives. Ten years later, China’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War demolished the ritual facade of the old tribute system, as the Chinese empire found itself vanquished by a country that it had always viewed as a cultural tributary. In 1894, the Japanese government – hungry for its own colonies, with its own political and military modernization underway – seized upon the pretext of a domestic rebellion to dispatch troops into Korea. Within four months of a Qing force being sent to defend China’s ‘vassal’, Japan’s victory was so comprehensive that it could demand, as peace terms, 200 million ounces of silver in war indemnities, Taiwan and a substantial piece of the ancient Qing homeland, Manchuria.14

  It is hard to overestimate the impact of this defeat on China’s educated classes. It galvanized a nascent national press: news of the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki spread rapidly from the coastal cities (where most of China’s newspapers and books were produced), and into the countryside, in second-, third- and fourth-hand copies of periodicals avidly read by anyone literate enough to understand their shocking message. Reports of the war moved the population at large in a way the Opium Wars never had. ‘The Shanghai newspapers carried news about the war with Japan every day’, remembered one provincial reader. ‘Previously young Chinese people paid no attention to current events, but now we were shaken . . . [Now] most educated people, who had never before discussed national affairs, wanted to discuss them: why are others stronger than we are, and why are we weaker?’15 Concerned Chinese drew one conclusion from the defeat: that the last thirty years of ‘self-strengthening’ had been full of futile half-measures, and that more urgent, more daring, more thoroughgoing reform had to take place.

  The outcome of the war generated a new vision of a Western-dominated world in which China might quite simply be swallowed up by ambitious imperialists. ‘They will enslave us and hinder the development of our spirit and body’, Yan Fu worried. ‘The brown and black races constantly waver between life and death, why not the 400 million yellows?’16 It created new, anxious alliances of radical reformers who generated petitions and memorials protesting the humiliation and proclaiming the need to ‘arouse the country’s spirits’ to protect it from imminent disaster.17 Around this moment, Yan Fu and others like him responded with an ambitious blueprint for transforming China – this weak, loose empire – into a muscular, cohesive nation.

  After a couple of decades spent languishing at the intellectual margins of Qing China in the unfashionable discipline of Western technical studies (sometimes less flatteringly translated from the Chinese as ‘barbarian affairs’), Yan Fu now found his public voice and his audience, generating for the new press commentaries on and translations of key Social Darwinist tracts: Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Spencer’s Study of Sociology. In his exquisite classical Chinese, Yan described to a panicky readership the world of international warfare. ‘In the so-called struggle for survival,’ he explained, ‘people and animals . . . compete for resources for their own survival . . . Races compete with races, and form groups and states, so that these groups and states can compete with each other. The weak will be eaten by the strong, the stupid will be enslaved by the clever . . . Unlike other animals, humans fight with armies, rather than with teeth and claws.’18

  Like the Social Darwinist that he was, Yan was not particularly inclined to question the morality of the balance of power in this brave new world – to him, the foreign invasions that China had endured since 1840 were an inescapable phenomenon of nature. ‘If a people is dispirited and stupid . . . then the society will disintegrate, and when a society in disintegration encounters an aggressive, intelligent, patriotic people, it will be dominated at best, and at worst exterminated’.19 (‘The tides of the world are unstoppable’, agreed Guo Songtao.20) Instead, Yan believed that China must recognize its own flaws and remedy them with the ideas and culture of the West. ‘What are China’s principal troubles?’ he asked. ‘Are they not ignorance, poverty and weakness?’21 Why, he wanted to know, had China failed to pick itself up since the defeat of 1842? ‘The people’s intelligence is not up to the task, and their physical strength and morality are not advanced enough to carry it through.’ The West’s ‘expertise in machinery . . . their steam engines and weaponry’ were only ‘scratches on the surface . . . they are not the blood veins of strength.’ No: the West owed its global supremacy to the two principles of ‘truth in learning’ and ‘justice in politics’. In comparison, almost everything about Chinese tradition struck Yan as hopeless. ‘There are almost innumerable practices in the customs of China, from law and institutions, scholarship and learning, to the ways we eat and live
, owing to which the people’s strength is enervated and the quality of the Chinese race debased.’22

  If the struggle for survival depended on the cohesion of the group, the Chinese had to bond themselves into the same species of social and political unit that had worked so well for the West and for Japan: the nation. And to do this, the Chinese needed to discipline themselves. The Chinese body politic required a radical overhaul, to teach its constituents to ‘live together, communicate with and rely on each other, and establish laws and institutions, rites and rituals for that purpose . . . we must find a way to make everyone take the nation as his own.’ And the modern West was to be China’s only teacher through all this; anyone who disagreed, Yan proclaimed, was ‘a mindless lunatic.’23

  The proposals of men like Yan were not only dependent on Western ideas; they relied on a new vocabulary translated into Chinese from European languages, via Japan. Even the early Chinese word for modern, modeng, was transliterated from the European term, entering China along with words such as bicycle, newspaper, democracy, party, election, telephone, international, photography and revolution. Through the 1890s and 1900s, a neologism, Zhonghua minzu, was adopted from the Japanese to refer to the concept of ‘the Chinese nation’ created by men like Yan Fu, and began to appear with increasing regularity in the writings of radicals and revolutionaries. Chinese nationalism was in important ways translated from the West.

  Yan’s sermons were imitated and amplified by his younger peers: by a rising generation of Chinese thinkers and activists who devoted themselves to educating the Chinese people into a modern nation. And of all these self-appointed engineers of Chinese nationalism, few were more influential than a young Cantonese scholar called Liang Qichao. Liang was a child prodigy who had rushed through to the penultimate stage of the civil-service exams by the age of seventeen. That year (1890), however, he began to read histories of the world and translations of Western works. ‘As though with the thunderous sound of the surf and the roar of a lion . . . as though cold water had been poured over my back . . . and I had been hit over the head’, Liang later recalled, he turned against the ‘useless old learning’ in which he had been schooled. ‘Only then, for the first time in my life, did I begin to understand scholarship.’24 Through the 1890s, he scolded those who ‘thought that China was better in all respects than the West, that she was only inferior in her military power . . . Parliaments were the basis of a strong country’.25