From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Qingyi Bao (‘Journal of Pure Critique’), the newspaper he started soon after arriving in Japan, carried reports on the Philippine resistance to the United States, and Britain’s difficulties with the Boers in South Africa. The modern competition for territory and resources began to preoccupy Liang above all, whether he was writing about the unification of Italy or the French subjugation of Vietnam. In Japan he also met many revolutionary thinkers and activists from India, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines; many of these had flocked to Japan after its defeat of Russia in 1905. Liang was in Japan in April 1907 when some Japanese socialists, Indians, Filipinos and Vietnamese formed the Asian Solidarity group in Tokyo, and he may not have disagreed much with another Chinese exile in Japan, Zhang Taiyan (1869 – 1936, also known as Zhang Binglin), the scholar of Buddhism, who, summing up the prevailing sentiments of cultural pride, political resentment and self-pity among Asian refugees, claimed in the society’s manifesto that

  Asian countries … rarely invaded one another and treated each other respectfully with the Confucian virtue of benevolence. About 100 years ago, the Europeans moved east and Asia’s power diminished day by day. Not only was their political and military power totally lacking, but people also felt inferior. Their scholarship deteriorated and people only strove after material interests.39

  Liu Shipei, an anarchist and one of the society’s members, was clear about what needed to be done. ‘Today’s world is a world of brute force’, he wrote in his article ‘On the Recent Trends in Asia’, ‘and the territory of Asia is a ground upon which the white race uses its brute force. We must eliminate their involvement in Asia.’40 Ou Jujia, an associate of Liang Qichao, exhorted the Chinese people to learn from the Filipinos who, though stateless, had put up a strong fight against the Americans. The condition of the Philippines impressed itself particularly forcefully on Chinese emigres in Japan. Ma Junqu, another intellectual in Liang’s circle, hailed Jose Rizal, the anti-imperialist poet who had been executed by the Spanish in 1896, as the quintessential Asian patriot. Liang himself saw the Filipinos as ‘pioneers of independence for Asia’, who, if successful, he wrote in 1899, would ‘bring to two the number of new states in the Eastern Pacific’ (one being Japan, the other the Philippines) which could then form ‘a united Asian force that could resist the thrust of Europe’s drift eastward’.41

  Zhang Taiyan wrote about his friendship with Indian revolutionaries living in exile in Tokyo, and his own distress at learning about India’s abysmal condition under British rule. He attended a commemorative meeting for Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Indian rebel king who had harassed the Mughal Empire, convinced that the king’s guerrilla tactics would be needed to drive the British out of India. Chinese commentators also followed the Boer War (1899 – 1902), seeing it as another struggle of a weak people for freedom from the West. When the United States brutally suppressed the anti-imperialist revolt in the Philippines, another Chinese exile in Japan, Tang Tiaoding, mournfully described the events, concluding with a denunciation of ‘white people’s histories’:

  They provide plenty of indisputable evidence on the extent of the primitive customs and ignorance of the native people, as proof of why these people deserve to be conquered. This type of praise [for themselves] and condemnation [of others] is done with an eye towards the final judgment of history. Egypt, Poland, Cuba, India, South Africa, all these regions: just read the books on the history of their perishing! … I had often felt that the situation demanded that these countries could not but perish … But now I know that these books were all written by white people, where truth and falsehood are confused … I know one thing for sure: if you seek the truth about the Philippines in the history books of the Spaniards, you would not doubt for a moment that the country is ignorant and vile, and you would only wonder why it had not perished sooner … Learned people of my country! Are there any of you who are getting ready to write our history? Do not let white children, laughing behind our backs and clapping their hands with glee, take up their pens and paper [to write our history for us]!42

  Liang was certainly not going to allow the white children’s version of Asian history to prevail. He published, often with his own introduction, the histories of what were described in China as ‘lost’ (wangguo) countries. In 1901, as Western powers imposed yet another treaty on the Chinese in the wake of the Boxer Rising, he wrote an angry summing-up of the manifold ways in which the West subjugated weaker countries; caustically titled ‘On the New Rules for Destroying Countries’, it could just as easily have been written by al-Afghani. Liang described the endless subtle ways in which European merchants and mine-owners had progressively infiltrated and undermined many societies and cultures. The essay detailed these methods, which included cajoling countries into spiralling debt (Egypt), territorial partition (Poland), exploiting internal divisions (India), or simply overwhelming adversaries with military superiority (the Philippines and the Transvaal). ‘To those who claim’, Liang wrote, ‘that opening mining, railroad, and concessionary rights to foreigners is not harmful to the sovereignty of the whole, I advise you to read the history of the Boer War.’43

  Liang concluded that the power of the European powers and the United States had ‘increased relative to the power of those whom they have attacked in the modern competition among peoples’.44 Soon he began to move from his idea of a Chinese people to the idea of the state as the essential unit, the defender of the people. As he saw it, the Boers, a strong people saddled with a weak state, had nevertheless been pushed back by the British.

  A few years before Lenin identified imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, Liang described how the West’s unprecedented economic expansion had led it organically to the conquest of Asia. By tying imperialism to individual economic interests, Western countries had given it a popular base among their own populations. It wasn’t just motivated by the political ambitions of rulers; it claimed a degree of consent from the ruled.

  This made modern imperialism very different from the expansionism of tyrants like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, and posed a unique danger to peace.

  The motivating force [of modern international competition] stems from the citizenry’s struggle for survival which is irrepressible according to the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Therefore the current international competitions are not something which only concerns the state, they concern the entire population. In the present-day international struggles in which the whole citizenry participate (and compete) for their very lives and properties, people are united as if they have one mind. The international competitions of the past, which were the concerns of the rulers and their ministers, would subside after a period. But the current international struggle will last forever because it is constantly a matter of concern for the life and property of the people. How dangerous this is! How will we, who bear the brunt of this international struggle, stave it off?45

  India, in particular, was a horror story about a ‘lost country’ that had failed miserably in the international struggle: ‘small capitalists’ from Britain had taken over an entire continent by training Indians to be soldiers; Indians enforced British policies at the expense of their own compatriots. China was in danger of repeating that experience because her people had developed no sense of a corporate interest or national solidarity – the basis of European power and prosperity.

  One reason for this was that the country’s neighbours were so vastly inferior that the Chinese people had felt themselves to be the whole world. The conceit, once shared by Liang himself, could no longer be maintained in an international system where China had to either recognize the reality of conflict and competition with other societies or sink. For, ‘In the world there is only power – there is no other force. That the strong always rule the weak is in truth the first great universal rule of nature. Hence, if we wish to attain liberty, there is no other road: we can only seek first to be strong.’46

  THE BOXER RISING: MORE LESSONS FROM DEFEAT


  Events in China confirmed and sharpened Liang’s anxiety. While he was fund-raising among the Chinese community in Hawaii in the spring of 1900, the Boxer Rising broke out. Led by a shamanistic secret society devoted to traditional martial arts, the revolt was directed against foreigners, especially missionaries, who, deep in China’s interior, were seen to be undermining and insulting Chinese beliefs and practices. As spontaneous as the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Rising attracted a motley crowd of disgruntled Chinese including peasants and decommissioned soldiers, smugglers, and even some officials and gentry.

  The Boxer Rising revealed the resourcefulness of ordinary people’s resistance as well as the depth of popular resentment of the foreign presence in China, and of the pressures it put on local officials. Few Chinese people ever saw a white man, but their lives were deeply affected by the new facts created by foreigners in China: the subjection to global economic cycles, for instance, which threw people out of work.

  A country whose standard of living was superior to Europe’s before 1800 had steadily become through the nineteenth century a helpless giant before Western missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and soldiers. Foreign debts and indemnities placed a crippling burden on the national exchequer. The government had to borrow heavily for the smallest attempt at modernization; even the railway, a symbol of progress everywhere else, only served to push China deeper into debt while opening up large parts of China’s interior to foreign troops.

  The Boxers reflected a long-simmering public rage by tearing up railway tracks. When Boxer attacks on Westerners and Chinese converts to Christianity spread to Beijing in June 1900, Western powers protested to the dowager empress, who calculated that she could use the Boxers against the Westerners and rid China of them altogether. The decision reflected a total ignorance of the real balance of power in the world. Her opportunistic declaration of war while the foreign legation was under siege by the Boxers was soon matched by a military mobilization against her by all the major world powers. Twenty thousand troops drawn from several countries, including Japan, marched to Beijing to relieve the siege and loot the city.

  Among the British contingent was a north Indian solider, Gadhadar Singh, who felt sympathetic to the anti-Western cause of the Boxers even though he believed that their bad tactics had ‘blanketed their entire country and polity in dust’. His first sight of China was the landscape near Beijing, of famished Chinese with skeletal bodies in abandoned or destroyed villages, over whose broken buildings flew the flags of China’s joint despoilers – France, Russia and Japan. River waters had become a ‘cocktail of blood, flesh, bones and fat’. Singh particularly blamed the Russian and French soldiers for the mass killings, arson and rape inflicted on the Chinese. Some of the soldiers tortured their victims purely for fun. ‘All these sportsmen’, Singh noted, ‘belonged to what were called “civilized nations”.’47

  ‘Even hearts of stone’, Singh wrote, ‘would have melted and felt compassion.’ ‘It was not necessary for my heart to be moved by pity’, he added, ‘because I had come to fight against the Chinese. But … I felt an emotion that was born not out of duty but in the mind.’ Trying to understand his sympathy for the Chinese, Singh realized it was because the Chinese were Buddhist, like many Indians, and therefore ‘neighbours and fellow residents of Asia’.48

  Not many soldiers experienced such tender regard for the Chinese. Dispatching a German punitive force to China in 1900, the kaiser had exhorted them to be as brutal with the ‘heathen culture’ as Attila the Hun, so that ‘no Chinaman will ever again dare to even squint at a German!’ The French writer Pierre Loti witnessed the devastation inflicted by Western troops on the capital city: ‘Little grey bricks – this is the sole material of which Beijing was built; a city of small, low houses decorated with a lacework of gilded wood; a city of which only a mass of curious debris is left, after fire and shell have crumbled away its flimsy materials.’49

  Re-living her escape from the barbarian-besieged capital in 1860, the dowager empress fled Beijing disguised in the blue costume of a peasant. Her representatives signed another agreement with Western powers that, among other penalties, imposed an indemnity almost twice the size of the government’s annual revenues. They promised to build monuments to the Christian missionaries murdered by the Boxers and, while accepting restrictions on the size of their military, had to countenance an increased foreign military presence on Chinese soil.

  Chastened by this turn of events even the dowager empress now contemplated some radical reforms. She began slowly, but by the time she died in 1908 she had taken enough steps to ensure the construction of a modern state. Soon after Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905, she abolished the traditional examinations for the civil service that had served as the backbone of the imperial state for over a millennium. In their place, the Qing court established modern schools with a Western curriculum and sent Chinese students abroad, to Europe and the United States as well as to Japan. The news, reaching the then fiery nationalist Aurobindo Ghose (1872 – 1950) in distant India provoked him to rapturous praise for an apparently rising neighbour:

  China has been educating, training and arming herself with a speed of which the outside world has a very meagre conception. She has sent out a Commission of Observation to the West and decided to develop constitutional Government within the next ten years. She has pushed forward the work of revolutionising her system of education.50

  Thousands of young Chinese were thus first introduced to modern sciences, engineering, medicine, law, economics, education and military skills. In his inland province of Hunan, the sixteen-year-old Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976) was one of the first students at a school imparting what was called the ‘New Knowledge’. The teenaged Mao read about the American and French revolutions and Rousseau and Washington, and he learnt about the full scale of China’s degradation at the hands of the West from a teacher who had studied in Japan. Decades later, he recalled to the American writer Edgar Snow that

  I began to have a certain amount of political consciousness, especially after I read a pamphlet telling of the dismemberment of China. I remember even now that this pamphlet opened with the sentence: ‘Alas, China will be subjugated!’ It told of Japan’s occupation of Korea and Taiwan, of the loss of suzerainty in Indo-China, Burma and elsewhere. After I read this I felt depressed about the future of my country and began to realize that it was the duty of the people to help save it.51

  Among other reforms, the army was modernized. A new, professional elite of army men soon emerged, particularly under Yuan Shikai (1859 – 1916), a general in the old Qing army. The military academy established by Yuan south of Beijing initially trained, among others, the future Nationalist leader – and Mao’s rival – Chiang Kai-shek (1888 – 1975). A glamorous militarist strain appeared in Chinese urban life which had so far conferred prestige on silk-robed Confucian gentlemen with a gift for poetry and calligraphy. Voluntary organizations dedicated to modernizing and strengthening China sprang up in both China and the Chinese diaspora.

  The reforms also had consequences not obvious to the Qing reformists. Students who had become deeply politicized by their stay in Japan returned to form enduring anti-Qing alliances with like-minded graduates of the new schools and military academies. Many of these were radical nationalists in the European Social Darwinist style, borrowing from the examples of Germany and Japan to posit a Han ‘national essence’ against alien Manchus.

  For the radical nationalists, Manchu or ‘foreign’ rule over China constituted a greater evil than Western imperialists. The most famous of them, an eighteen-year-old student from Sichuan called Zou Rong, published a tract titled ‘The Revolutionary Army’ in 1903, which denounced Han Chinese habits of mental slavery and argued for redemption through a bloody extirpation of the Manchus. Anticipating Frantz Fanon’s views of the emancipatory quality of revolutionary violence, Zou wrote that

  Revolution is a universal rule of evolution. Revolution is a universal principle of the worl
d. Revolution is the essence of the struggle for survival or destruction in a time of transition. Revolution submits to heaven and responds to men’s needs. Revolution rejects what is corrupt and keeps the good. Revolution is the advance from barbarism to civilization. Revolution turns slaves into masters.52

  In the same year, Zhang Taiyan, the classical scholar and a close colleague of Zou Rong, wrote an open letter to Kang Youwei ridiculing him for his continuing support of the Manchu emperor, a ‘despicable little wretch who cannot so much as tell the difference between a bean and a noodle’. He also mocked Kang for expressing the fear that revolution in China would lead to terrible bloodletting, dictatorship and foreign invasions: ‘Can a constitutional system,’ he asked, ‘ever be achieved without bloodshed?’53 Zhang claimed that violence in the cause of racial-ethnic revenge was as morally justified as revolution for human rights: ‘As for those peoples who, following the model of the devilish [American president] McKinley, engaged in expansionism under the pretext of helping others, we should make it a principle to kill them without pardon.’54

  Zhang also attacked Kang Youwei’s praise for Indian literature and philosophy. ‘Indians’, he wrote, ‘have generally not cared if their national territory is lost or if their race declines … Chinese determination is stronger than the Indian, and we can foresee that Chinese accomplishments will certainly surpass those of the Indians.’55 Zhang was imprisoned for his remarks about the emperor. In jail, where he embarked on a life-changing study of Buddhism, he wrote more rousing missives: