China

by John Keay

  The western thrust fared better. Anqing was secured and Wuchang retaken – though later lost again to a provincial army from Hunan. With forces reckoned in the hundreds of thousands, plus control of the vital Yangzi corridor over a distance of around 500 kilometres (310 miles), the Taiping kingdom now bestrode the empire. Suzhou, Shanghai and the other teeming cities of the delta were threatened. Trade in the region was at a standstill; the wider world took notice. Anglo-American missionaries, sensing a triumph beyond their wildest dreams, urged support of the rebels. The Reverend W. A. P. Martin expected them to ‘revolutionise the empire, rendering all its vast provinces open to the preachers of the Gospel’.24 But the French were sceptical; Catholic images were as liable to be vandalised as Buddhist or Confucian ones. And the other foreign powers, though initially sanguine, grew more cautious when the northen expedition failed and a Qing army held steady around the Ming Hongwu emperor’s tomb in the hills behind Nanjing. All observers, too, had deep reservations about the Taipings’ inexperience, the more so when their literary productions were scrutinised and first-hand reports of the Heavenly Kingdom began to filter out.

  Most foreigners who reached Nanjing could not fault Taiping discipline and dedication. They were impressed by an idealism and a puritanical abstinence unknown among contemporary militias, by the important role assigned to women (including military deployment), by the pervading spirit of fraternity, and by the common ownership of resources. On paper, and to an unascertainable extent in practice, the taiping tianguo was as much commonwealth as kingdom. The sexes were segregated, equal rights were enjoyed by each, and land was made available to all. But there was a naivety and presumption in it all. Even the missionaries were taken aback by Taiping ignorance; they baulked at the sight of animal sacrifices in Taiping chapels, were riled by patronising comments about ‘Our Lord’ (meaning Hong) being ‘Your Lord too’, and were embarrassed by Taiping questionnaires asking for God’s personal details (‘How tall is God? And how broad? How large his abdomen? Does he write verse? How rapidly?’, etc.).25

  This questionnaire came in response to one of a more political nature submitted by a British mission to Nanjing in 1854. The attitude of the British was crucial and, though initially ambivalent, was already souring. The Taiping kings – Hong’s seniormost commanders had just been crowned as subkings of the Heavenly Kingdom’s four compass points – were as disrespectful of foreigners as any Qing official. They, and Hong himself, had already embraced a life of luxury, surrounded by concubines, that was at odds with both their emphasis on the Ten Commandments and the austerities expected of their hard-working subjects. There were also deep divisions within the leadership. In 1856 a horrific bloodbath took the lives of tens of thousands when two overbearing kings were toppled and their supporters massacred. The ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’ was looking more like a hellish kingdom of great purges. It was this, as well as the movement’s military setbacks, which slewed international opinion against the Taipings and in favour of the Qing.

  For the Qing, too, the attitude of the British was crucial. The British had the largest fleet and the only one capable of reopening the Yangzi. The young Xianfeng emperor (r. 1851–61), though deeply suspicious of Anglo-Taiping contacts and distrustful of foreigners in general, had already asked the British for naval assistance in attacking the Taipings. It had been declined on the grounds that the British were neutral. The other powers took a similar line, happily advertising their contacts with the rebels if only to cow the Qing. In the case of the British, this was more like holding the Qing to ransom; for they had just tabled a demand for the revision of the 1842 treaty confident that the Taiping menace would find the Qing court at its most amenable.

  Revision of the treaty meant rewriting it. Backed by the French and Americans, the British were now demanding more treaty ports, commercial access to the interior of China, a permanent ambassador in Beijing, the legalisation of the opium trade, the suppression of piracy and the lifting of internal transit dues. That was the first list; but as with the earlier treaty, cause was soon found to extend it. The interplay of negotiation and bombardment that ensued also closely resembled that which preceded the first treaty. Talks got under way but were suspended when in late 1856 a Chinese-owned but Hong Kong-based lorcha (small freighter) was suspected of piracy and seized by the Guangzhou authorities. The ship was called the Arrow and its legal status was highly debatable. But the incident was enough to ruffle British feathers and precipitate the ‘Arrow War’ (1856–60).

  Despite the demands of other wars in the Crimea and then India (the Great Rebellion or Mutiny), sufficient shipping was found for an Anglo-French task force. It stormed Guangzhou, captured and deported its governor, took over the city and then sailed north. In April/May 1858 the Anglo-French force took the Dagu forts at the mouth of the Beihe and reached Tianjin. Beijing was again at the foreigners’ mercy; and again the Qing capitulated. The result was the punitive Treaty of Tianjin. With more insults to redress and more expenses to recoup, the British and French now imposed terms so heavy that one of their own negotiators considered them unreasonable. ‘We asked or rather dictated what . . . the Chinese could neither safely promise nor be fairly expected to perform.’26 Expanding and adding to the earlier list, the British and French demanded the opening of six new treaty ports, four in the hitherto closely guarded areas of Taiwan, Shandong and Manchuria. The Yangzi, and with it the richest provinces of the empire, was also to be opened to foreign trade as soon as the Taiping occupation permitted; and there were to be four treaty ports on the river, including Nanjing and Hankou. Travel in and around the treaty ports was to be unrestricted, and passports afforded to those who wished to go farther afield. Christian preachers were to be protected (it was attacks on Catholic missionaries which had provoked the French into participating in the task force); the new British ambassador in Beijing was to be accompanied by family and retainers and suitably accommodated; the noxious word yi was never again to be used of foreigners; and the import of opium, though its use was still banned, was legalised subject to a not unreasonable rate of duty.

  Of all these concessions, that for a resident British ambassador in Beijing proved the least palatable – as it had when Macartney came calling sixty-five years earlier. Mainly because of it, the court prevaricated over ratification. In 1859, in the course of pressing for ratification, an Anglo-French detachment was repulsed at the Dagu forts. This all-too-rare triumph led the Qing court to repudiate the treaty and led the foreigners to plan drastic action. Within a year some twenty thousand British and French troops stormed Dagu, took Tianjin and, when fired up by news of the execution of some of their captured colleagues, sacked the Qing emperors’ summer retreat at Jehol. In the process the Summer Palace, a fanciful Louvre designed for the Qianlong emperor by the Jesuits, was looted and burned. Though no great loss to architecture, it was a body blow to Qing prestige. Despite the emperor’s absence – he had fled Jehol for Manchuria just in time – the court sued for peace on the same day.

  The negotiations that produced the 1860 ‘Convention of Peking’ were less notable for their terms – ratification of the 1858 treaty, another massive indemnity, a bit of the Kowloon peninsula to be added to Hong Kong, and Tianjin made a treaty port – than for the negotiators. On behalf of the court, Prince Gong, a brother of the Xianfeng emperor, emerged as a realistic and resourceful representative. He would preside over the empire’s foreign relations for the next thirty years, winning the respect of his adversaries and the reputation of a reformer. When the Xianfeng emperor died, aged thirty, a year after the Peking Convention, his mother, the Dowager Empress Cixi, engineered a succession of minors. It ensured her ascendancy but introduced an element of uncertainty to the succession. Prince Gong was one of those who provided the stability, continuity and realism that would lead to the period being acclaimed one of zhongxing, ‘restoration’.

  The other newcomer to the negotiations was Russia. Taking advantage of the Qing’s embarrassmen
ts at the hands of the Western powers and the Taipings, the tsarist government had again taken up the question of Manchuria’s north-eastern borders. Russian expeditions had re-explored the Heilongjiang (Amur River) and could find little sign of Manchu administration either north of it or in the long coastal region east of its Wusuli (Ussuri) tributary. The Qing claimed the whole vast area as part of their Manchu patrimony but had forbidden Han settlement there, or anywhere else in Manchuria. The Russians claimed it mainly for the potential, at its southernmost tip, of a warm-water port on the Pacific.

  Sino-Russian negotiations to resolve the matter coincided with those between the Anglo-French forces and the Qing over the Tianjin Treaty. Skilfully interposing themselves as intermediaries while promising secret support to the Qing, and taking every advantage of Qing weakness, the Russian delegates secured a treaty ‘that opened the entire northern frontier of the Qing empire, from Manchuria to Xinjiang, to Russia’s political and commercial influence’; moreover the subsequent demarcation of the Manchurian frontier awarded them all the territory north of the Heilongjiang and east of the Wusuli border.27 There, in due course, would be constructed Vladivostok, Russia’s only year-round Pacific port.

  Back in Nanjing, the God-worshippers of the Taiping kingdom followed all these developments with interest. Little attempt was made, however, to take advantage of them until 1861, by when it was too late. In that year Taiping forces thrust east into the Yangzi delta, taking Suzhou, then Hangzhou and Ningbo, and threatening Shanghai. Reassurances were given to the foreigners about their concessions and their trade; and in Ningbo, a treaty port, the Taiping occupation proved exemplary. But the Westerners had by now secured all their demands from Beijing and were anxious only to enjoy them in peace, especially in respect of access to the Yangzi ports. They were therefore as keen as the Qing to see the rebellion ended. Guns and gunboats, transport, munitions and loans were made available to the Qing. More famously, volunteer units composed mainly of Chinese irregulars but equipped, drilled and officered by French, Americans and British fought alongside the Qing troops. The French-officered unit was called the ‘Unvanquished Army’, while its Anglo-American equivalent was the ‘Ever-Victorious Army’. The names were translations of those given them by the Chinese for recruitment purposes, not hard-earned accolades; both in fact suffered their share of reverses. But with modern rifles, howitzers, horse-drawn field guns and inspirational commanders – initially the American buccaneer Frederick T. Ward, latterly the God-fearing British hero Charles Gordon – they helped beat off attacks on Shanghai and reclaim the cities of Zhejiang and Jiangsu.

  By 1863 the Taiping forces were disintegrating and their capital itself coming under ever closer siege. It fell the following year amid the sort of massacre with which the name of Nanjing has become synonymous. Hong Xiuquan, the latterly reclusive ‘Heavenly King’, was not among the victims. He had died a few weeks earlier of supernatural causes; a surfeit of ‘manna’ was diagnosed by his physicians. The martyrdom to which a Son of God was entitled was denied him. Heaven’s revenge, though confidently predicted, also failed to manifest itself. Harried and dispersed to the four corners of the empire, the remnants of his forces were absorbed by other rebel groups and by 1870 the movement was extinct.

  In Nanjing today, a Ming garden complex houses the little ‘Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Historical Museum’. Integration being the modern message, the exhibits and photographs tell less about the Taipings and more about those who suppressed them. Prominence goes to the dashing exploits of the Ever-Victorious and Unvanquished armies. But well represented too are armies from Hunan and Anhui under their provincial generals Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang. Zeng, his protégé Li (both of whom would also be involved in ending the Nian revolts) and Zuo Zongtang (who finally extinguished the Muslim revolts in the west in the 1870s), represented the real legacy of two decades of rebellion.

  With the Manchu Banners proving too moribund to check the rebels, provincial governors and governors-general led by Zeng Guofan’s example in Hunan had been encouraged to raise and train their own forces. To pay for them, they were granted fiscal rights that included the sale of degrees and imposts on internal trade. Known as likin, the latter in particular brought in large revenues destined exclusively for the provincial administrations at a time when imperial revenues from conventional taxation were declining owing to the disturbances. The new armies, better paid and equipped, gave a good account of themselves and had largely contained the Taipings throughout the late 1850s. But the situation was potentially as explosive as that at the end of the Tang dynasty when over-militarised governors of the frontier provinces had exacted a heavy price for coming to the aid of the dynasty.

  In the late nineteenth century it was the empire rather than the dynasty which suffered. With military and financial resources of their own, the provincial administrations assumed a prominence and displayed a dynamism that helped shore up the dynasty and stabilise the economy. But this reprise, or ‘restoration’, was attained at a price. To foreign observers in particular it looked as if the empire itself was ripe for fragmentation. The Russians debated plans for detaching Mongolia, Manchuria and Xinjiang; the British began to take an interest in Tibet; the French, lately established in what they called ‘Indo-Chine’, showed a proprietary interest in Guangxi and Yunnan; and a Japan transformed by the Meiji reforms staked a claim to the Ryukyu Islands and an interest in Korea that would soon extend to Manchuria.

  16

  REPUBLICANS AND NATIONALISTS

  1880–1950

  BRUSH TO PEN

  WHEN REVIEWING CHINA’S RECORD DURING THE twentieth century, historians of the future may see things differently. The wars and the revolutions that loomed so large to contemporaries, the men who led them and the ideologies that polarised them are likely to be set alongside less conspicuous developments that seemed at the time secondary or intermittent. Already all those revolutions – republican, Nationalist, communist, cultural – may be bracketed within a finite sequence, a sixty-year continuum of turbulence whose horrors are mercifully diminished by a longer perspective and a more pragmatic present. The ideologies have been declawed, the revolutionaries cut down to size, the wars consigned to museums and monuments. Attention is switching to other, longer-term agents of change.

  One of these is the integration into public life of the half-billion Chinese formerly condemned to subservience on the grounds of gender. Female emancipation is ongoing and not, of course, unique to China. But as visitors often noted, women in Qing China had farther to go than most. Not just irrelevant, they were largely invisible. Literacy was denied to all but a determined handful; for the rest, drudgery lasted a lifetime and strict confinement was reckoned a privilege. This struck late-nineteenth-century observers as ironical given that China was effectively ruled by a woman. But Cixi, the diminutive dowager empress who presided over the empire as either regent or power-broker throughout its last half-century (1862–1908), did so in silence from behind a large silken screen. A presence rather than a person, as dread and devious as her Victorian counterpart was dumpy and reassuring, she betrayed none of the spirited allegiance to her sex shown by the Tang empress Wu Zetian.

  In an edict of 1902 she did, though, eventually ban foot-binding. Protestant missionaries, some of them women, had been railing against female infanticide ever since the 1850s. Chinese reformers had anticipated them; so had the Catholic missions. But the Protestants, often American, were more numerous and better at organising; and while both infanticide and arranged marriages drew their fire, it was foot-binding which concentrated it. The first of many anti-foot-binding societies had been formed in the treaty port of Xiamen in 1874. As of 1895 a high-profile ‘Natural Foot Society’ based in Shanghai lobbied hard for official action. Reform-minded activists took up the cry and duly persuaded the dowager empress – who as an unbound Manchu probably disapproved of the custom anyway – to ban it. Christian schools, which unlike Confucian academies and local crammers had been ad
mitting girls since a Miss Aldersley opened the first in Ningbo shortly after the Opium War, generally made admission dependent on the pupils’ feet being unbound. But the link thus established between big feet and a foreign education seems to have cut both ways, for as late as 1909 ‘only around 13,000 girls were enrolled in schools [all run by missions] in the whole of China, and a few hundred more overseas’.1

  Despite the efforts of missionaries, of social mavericks such as the Taipings and a few pioneering reformers who had been exposed to Western thought, dramatic change had to await all those wars and revolutions. When mobilising the masses, it helped to magnify them by including women; realising the nation’s potential meant extending educational opportunity to everyone, regardless of gender; discipline, deprivation and the other burdens of resurgence must also be shared. Yet nowhere in the world would so many emerge from such abject inconsequence, or overcome such hobbling handicaps, as the women of China in the twentieth century.

  Another theme, common to many reform programmes and also designed to equalise opportunity, concerned the Chinese language in both its spoken and written form. The matter was of the essence. What distinguished China’s ruling elite and preserved its monopoly of office was familiarity with a demanding body of literature written in a refined and archaic medium (called wenyan). Government was conducted exclusively in this medium, as was scholarship and literary composition. The examination system with its formulaic ‘eight-legged’ essays was designed to assess not a candidate’s intelligence or ability but his mastery of this higher culture and his moral eligibility to be inducted into it. It has been estimated that male literacy in late Qing times was as high as 30–45 per cent (and female as low as 2–10 per cent), but for the most part this was literacy of a different kind, informal and basic in that it embraced the limited number of written characters needed to express vernacular speech. It afforded little understanding of the classical language and less of the ancient texts that gave that language its rich resonances and satisfying allusions. Popular works had long been written in the vernacular, including famous novels such as The Dream of the Red Chamber (or Story of the Stone) in the eighteenth century; but all that pertained to higher culture and government, the essence of Chinese identity, was beyond the reach of the majority of Chinese.