by John Keay
Bringing culture to the masses, let alone acquainting them with those sciences and humanities on which the foreigners’ superiority seemed to be grounded, meant going back to basics. In 1859 Yung Wing, the product of a missionary education and the first Chinese to have acquired an American degree (at Yale), had been invited to Nanjing. There the Taiping leaders were interested in acquiring foreign firepower. Although the programme of reforms that he drew up proved too ambitious for them, four years later Yung Wing was summoned by Zeng Guofan, the scholarly general and governor of Hunan whose provincially raised army was then closing in on the Taipings. As a leading advocate of modernisation, Zeng Guofan was planning China’s first munitions factory and arsenal (at Shanghai) and wanted Yung Wing’s advice on equipping it. Yung, instead of recommending machine tools specifically designed for ‘making guns, engines, agricultural implements, clocks etc’, advised buying machinery that could make the machines to make such things. ‘A machine shop that would be able to create . . . other machine shops’ was what was needed, one equipped with ‘lathes of all sizes, planers and drills’. ‘I should say that a machine shop in the present state of China should be of a general and fundamental character and not one for specific purposes,’ he declared.2 The governor agreed; Yung was packed off back to America, found the machinery he wanted, and by 1868 the Shanghai arsenal was turning out not only ordnance but ships and boilers.
An approach no less ‘general and fundamental’ was required in addressing the language problem, though in this case the answer was found nearer to home. It lay in universalising the use of the vernacular – or rather, of the written form of the northern vernacular known as baihua, and by foreigners as Mandarin. Pronunciation continued to vary in different regions and among different communities (Cantonese, for example). Moreover the name of the language changed in line with the political climate, the Nationalists calling it guoyu, the ‘National Language’, and the communists putonghua, the ‘Common Speech’. And the language itself underwent extensive adaptation with the incorporation of new grammatical structures and a vast vocabulary of foreign loan-words. Nevertheless it remained recognisably Chinese and so preserved the 3,000-year continuity of the oldest of the world’s still widely used tongues. Agitation for the adoption of baihua followed the abolition of the examination system in 1905 and is closely associated with a second generation of reformers, among them Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu. Both these men had travelled and studied abroad before joining the faculty of Beijing University, and both championed the vernacular as part of their assault on a Confucian value system that they saw as irreconcilable with a modern state. In 1920 Chen Duxiu became a founder member of the Chinese Communist Party, and it was under the party’s aegis that the classical language would be completely eclipsed.
The script posed similar problems. Missionaries and interpreters such as Thomas Wade, a prime negotiator in the 1858 Tianjin Treaty and later the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge, explored the possibilities of rendering Chinese characters in the alphabetic Roman lettering of most Western languages; this led to the still-common ‘Wade-Giles’ system of transliteration, Herbert Giles being Wade’s successor at Cambridge. In Vietnam, where Chinese characters had been the only script for 2,000 years, an equivalent system of Romanisation was adopted in the schools in 1906 and nationally in the 1920s. Partly thanks to French encouragement, partly to Vietnamese enthusiasm for distancing their culture from China’s, this quoc ngu completely replaced the Chinese characters.
But in China reformers were chary of so fundamental a change. It would mean debasing their whole written heritage as well as adding immeasurably to the work of the Qing translation bureau, already burdened with having to render official business in Manchu and Mongol as well as Chinese. Unexpectedly the solution – though by no means a perfect one – to making the script more accessible lay ultimately in technology. As the soft brush and the inkstone, those cherished accoutrements of the scholar, made way for the steel nib and the lead pencil, then the biro, typewriter and keypad, the written characters were necessarily simplified and standardised and their components dissected. Writing was liberated from the lofty constraints of calligraphy, and the unadorned characters could attain popular currency as a vernacular script. Like the spoken language, they still retain a recognisable relationship to the earliest written characters as found on the oracle bones and turtle plastrons of the Shang.
Simultaneously printing and publishing underwent a revolution of their own. Though movable type had been familiar to the Chinese for centuries, its use had been limited, largely because of a preference for woodblock fonts. The 1859 introduction of metal typecasting using an electrotype process was the brainchild of William Gamble, an Irish-American missionary keen to leaflet China’s masses with the Christian message. ‘Thanks to Gamble’s invention, the American Presbyterian Mission Press was able to supply complete Chinese fonts to printers in other parts of China (including to the leading Shanghai newspaper Shenbao) and, indeed, all over the world.’3 Gamble’s process remained in use for over a century ‘until the advent of computer generated fonts in the 1970s’. Shanghai became the centre of the printing industry, as of most other industries. And Shenbao, founded by the Englishman Ernest Major in 1872, established itself as both the leading Chinese-medium newspaper and the pioneer in photolithography and then rotary printing. Among the numerous other publications and periodicals produced by the Shenbao press was the first journal in the vernacular. It started publication in 1876 – and ceased in 1876. Ahead of its time, it was yet the forerunner of several hundred such publications by the 1920s.
The first period of modernisation from which all these long-term developments date – roughly from 1860 when Anglo-French forces had stormed the Summer Palace until the 1880s when another catastrophic series of defeats provoked more radical change – is generally characterised by the then current slogan of ‘Self-Strengthening’ (ziqiang). The term had first appeared in a series of essays submitted by a concerned scholar in 1860. These stressed the need to learn from the foreigners by studying their languages and sciences and by emulating their example in the exploitation of their nations’ resources and manpower. The object was thereby to re-establish the ascendancy of the empire and reprise the authority of the Qing, not to overthrow them. As in Japan, where a parallel transformation was under way, the initiative came more from within than from the strangers without, and more from above than from the degree-less masses below.
The Self-Strengthening movement is particularly associated with that group of provincial governors-general who, by raising revenues and armies of their own rather than relying on the decrepit Banners or the gentry-led militias, had defeated the mid-century rebellions. Zeng Guofan, the Hunan governor-general who had harried the Taipings, was the classic example. A distinguished Confucian scholar, Zeng accepted the need for some foreign technology (as in his Shanghai arsenal) and guidance (he had endorsed the services of the Ever Victorious Army), yet he still emphasised traditional panacea, such as recruiting only officials of the highest principles. Of a similar bent was Zuo Zongtang, who as governor-general of Shaanxi and Gansu doggedly suppressed the Muslim revolts there and in Xinjiang. Before taking up his north-western assignment, Zuo too had established an arsenal and dockyard, this time in Fuzhou. Like Zeng Guofan’s Shanghai foundation, it would spawn a naval base and an officer-training academy.
Li Hongzhang, Zeng Guofan’s imposing protégé, was younger and more pragmatic. As governor of Anhui he had assisted in the suppression of the Taipings and had then wiped out the Nian bands. Transferred to Tianjin as governor-general of the important capital province around Beijing, and as commissioner of trade for all its ports, Li Hongzhang occupied a pivotal position until his death in 1901. Under a joint initiative involving ‘official supervision, merchant management’, Li started a shipping line that took over the coastal transport of grain from the Yangzi to the north, then a coal mine to supply his ships with a return cargo, a railway line to get the c
oal to the ships, and a telegraph line to get the orders to the mine. The telegraph and the railway were among the first in China. At Tianjin he set up another naval and munitions facility and in Shanghai a cotton mill. All involved foreign expertise and some offshore capital. In the 1870s Li was responsible for a programme that sent more than a hundred students to the United States for further education. The exercise was aborted when the US government refused them access to the Annapolis and West Point academies; instead students were sent to Europe and then Japan.
As a Self-Strengthener, Li Hongzhang was not above strengthening himself. But his personal fortune seems to have come less from business than from international diplomacy. His influence in this sphere was second to none thanks to his rapport with the Dowager Empress Cixi, the respect he commanded among the foreign community, and the strategic and commercial importance of his Tianjin power base. Not even Prince Gong, Cixi’s nephew, who was nominally in charge of foreign relations, was inclined to overrule Li Hongzhang. As for the Zongli Yamen, a newly created agency for foreign affairs, according to the foreigners it was but a run-down office full of experts in the art of frustration. Through the devastating crises that were about to expose China’s international weakness, Li Hongzhang’s most useful associate would prove to be an Irishman, the estimable Robert Hart, who served as the Beijing-based Inspector General of Maritime Customs.
The collection of China’s maritime dues had first passed to the safekeeping of British officials when in 1854 the court’s customs receipts were threatened by the anti-Manchu Triads’ occupation of Shanghai. The Triads in fact behaved quite responsibly, but British supervision of customs collection was reconfirmed when the city was then menaced by the Taipings. Indeed, foreign regulation and supervision were being revealed as rather advantageous. They guaranteed a substantially increased yield; and since this revenue proved dependable and was remitted directly to the imperial exchequer, the court could raise loans for the construction of the new shipyards and academies on the strength of it. The system was therefore retained and extended to the other treaty Ports, and the headquarters of the service was moved to Beijing. What looked like a massive infringement of China’s sovereignty was, for once, an amicable and profitable collaboration – indeed, a fine example of the Self-Strengthening slogan about ‘offical supervision, merchant management’. Hart, a Chinese scholar himself and a model of discretion, proved the ideal Qing employee; his service acquired a reputation for exceptional probity; and its customs receipts, amounting to 20 per cent of the empire’s total revenue but over 50 per cent of its disposable revenue, ‘must be regarded as a principal underpinning of the Qing government’s finances’.4
The international crises that taxed the self-strengthening Li Hongzhang (assisted by the discreet Hart, the affable Prince Gong and the bumbling Zongli Yamen) began obscurely enough. In 1871 tsarist Russia unexpectedly occupied the Ili region west of Urumqi in northern Xinjiang. The occupation was supposedly a temporary arrangement to protect Russian trade through the area; in this respect it could be likened to the 1841 British seizure of Hong Kong; foreign encroachment across China’s interminable land borders often bore an uncanny resemblance to that on the coast. But more obviously the occupation was a Russian retort to British feelers in the southern part of Xinjiang. There Yaqub Beg, a Kokand-backed adventurer and Islamic zealot, had in 1865 seized Kashgar, Yarkand and the other oasis-cities, and had then been courted by several British exped itions from across the mountains in India. Briefly the British saw Yaqub Beg as a potential Timur who would reunite the Muslim khanates of central Asia and so interpose a barrier against the supposed Russian advance towards India. Zuo Zongtang put paid to this pipe-dream. Having quelled the Muslim revolts in Shaanxi and Gansu, he reclaimed Xinjiang for the Qing in 1876–78. But the Russians stayed put in Ili. Although their trade was no longer endangered, they demanded an indemnity and concessions as the price of withdrawal. The Zongli Yamen responded by sending an ill-informed Manchu to St Petersburg. He caved in to Russian demands in the 1879 Treaty of Livadia; the treaty caused such a furore in Beijing that it was immediately repudiated; and Li Hongzhang had to rescue what he could in a second treaty, that of St Petersburg, in 1881. Advised by Hart and backed by the British, he got the return of most of Ili, a reduction in the indemnity and the retraction of many of the concessions. Xinjiang was then constituted as a regular province of the empire and opened to Han immigration.
Neither side had wanted a war so far from home, but bellicose Qing officials took comfort in the belief ‘that by their forcefulness they had induced the Tsarist court to accept many of their demands’.5 This was a dangerous delusion; in reality the Russians had backed down in the face of international disapproval and domestic instability. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the empire, an assertive Japan was registering a strong interest in Korea and had seized the Ryukyu archipelago, the chain of islands (including Okinawa) strung between Japan and Taiwan.
Both the Koreans and the Ryukyu islanders customarily sent tribute missions to Beijing. The status of tributary relationships was, however, unclear in terms of contemporary international law, itself a consensus unilaterally devised by the Western powers and only recently divulged to the Qing court in a translation into Chinese of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law. The translation had been made by an American missionary, W. A. P. Martin – and not without prejudice or difficulty since it meant devising new compounds of Chinese characters to convey even the approximate sense of basic concepts like ‘human rights’ and ‘jurisdiction’. Li Hongzhang and his colleagues had nevertheless accepted Martin’s work, having already spotted encouraging inconsistencies between Wheaton’s precepts and Western practice. Prince Gong declined to write a preface for it – the language was too inelegant and China had her own traditions in such matters – but he saw international law as offering some hope to a government keen to renegotiate one-sided treaties and expose the iniquities of extraterritoriality.
The French had been especially suspicious of the Reverend Martin’s work. Their chargé d’affaires had urged his American counterpart in Shanghai to ‘kill him – choke him off; he’ll make us endless trouble’.6 The trouble expected by the French was more in relation to Vietnam than China. From Saigon, taken in 1859, France had been acting in flagrant disregard of Wheaton’s precepts by launching a series of forays into northern Vietnam. They were not always successful. Fierce resistance came not only from the Vietnamese themselves but from a bewildering array of other adversaries, including the multicoloured ‘flags’ (bands of Red Turbans and other Chinese rebel armies from Guangxi and Yunnan who had sought refuge in the Vietnam hills) as well as the sizeable Qing contingents sent south to assist the Vietnamese in suppressing them.
When in 1882 the French seized Hanoi, for a third time, and bombarded the approaches to the ancient capital of Hué, the Vietnamese court wearily conceded defeat. The subsequent Franco-Vietnamese treaty gave the French virtual control of Tonkin (Haiphong, Hanoi and the Red River basin) and was immediately contested by the more bellicose of the dowager empress’s counsellors in Beijing. Not only was Vietnam a Chinese tributary, they stated, but there were Chinese troops there to prove it. Precisely, retorted the French, the Chinese must therefore be the invaders. Both Beijing and Paris then boosted troop levels, and by 1883 they were at war. Li Hongzhang hastened to soothe matters by agreeing to a withdrawal of Chinese troops in return for French recognition of China’s southern border. But events on the ground overtook this agreement when in 1884 a French expeditionary force was routed by Qing forces at Bac-le. Such a defeat was so embarrassing to French pride that one observer could think of ‘no greater since Waterloo’.7 A worse followed at Langson, just south of today’s border, in March 1885; it brought down the French government. But by then France’s navy was wreaking a savage revenge on the coast of China itself.
Steaming north, Admiral Courbet bombarded the great port of Fuzhou, pulverised the shipping that constituted China’s
southern fleet, and seized the port of Chilung (Keelung) in northern Taiwan, plus the Pescadores Islands. In Tianjin, Li Hongzhang again hastily convened a meeting with the French minister in Beijing (ambassadors at the time were called ‘ministers’ and their embassies, however permanent, ‘legations’). A new treaty, dated June 1885, ended the hostilities, if not the rancour. ‘Ironically enough the agreement . . . was almost identical to the one reached a year earlier.’8 France got a free hand in Vietnam in return for relinquishing Taiwan and the Pescadores and recognising the Sino-Vietnamese frontier.
Throughout these troubles in the south Li Hongzhang and Hart had managed to keep the empire’s northern fleet, based at Tianjin, well out of range of the foreigners’ guns; in fact they strengthened it. Not for long, though; for in 1894 events in Korea precipitated China into another war, this time with a resurgent Japan. Like Vietnam, Korea had sent regular tribute missions to Beijing and had been otherwise independent. But in 1876 the Japanese, tearing a leaf from the Westerners’ book, had secured a handful of Korean treaty ports and insisted on extraterritorial rights for their residents there. The Western powers followed suit with encouragement from Li Hongzhang, who saw internationalising the Korean situation as the best way to advertise China’s special relationship with the country and offset Japanese influence. This worked to the extent that in 1885 Beijing and Tokyo signed an agreement not to send troops into Korea unless the other did, and then only in equal numbers. For the first time since its conquest by the Mongols, the Korean court accepted the presence and oversight of a resident Chinese commissioner (it was the young Yuan Shikai, Li’s protégé and later republican China’s first president). But all these careful arrangements came to nothing when in 1894 a sectarian rebellion in Korea, not unlike that of the Taipings in its size and fervour, threatened the throne. The king asked for and, despite Li’s protests, received Chinese troops; the Japanese sent larger forces of their own and rapidly overran the country; and an intervention supposedly designed to shore up the Korean monarchy turned into all-out war between Qing China and Japan.