by Yong Zhao
The year 1840 marked the beginning of China's modern history of defeat, frustration, and humiliation. That's when the British government sent in forces, armed with far superior military technology, to force China to take in more opium and other Western goods. The Chinese launched a futile and costly resistance, but their spears and traditional firearms were no match for the modern muskets and cannons, nor were their junks for the steam-powered warships. In 1842, after two years of military defeats, representatives of the Chinese emperor began negotiations with representatives of Queen Victoria. They climbed aboard the HMS Cornwallis, anchored on the Yangtze River at Nanjing, with British warships poised to attack the city. The resulting Treaty of Nanjing forced China to open five ports for trade, pay $21 million in reparations to Britain over three years, and cede Hong Kong to the British queen. Even worse, the treaty imposed a fixed tariff rate, essentially allowing a foreign country to set the rate in China; gave British subjects extraterritorial privileges at treaty ports; and granted most-favored-nation status to Britain. The Treaty of Nanjing set a precedent for China's foreign relations with other countries, and its effects lasted for almost a century.
Although the Treaty of Nanjing brought the First Opium War to an end, it did not end the export of opium to China or war against China. Quite the contrary. The amount of opium coming into China jumped from thirty thousand chests in the 1830s to seventy thousand chests in 1858—twenty years after the treaty—when the Second Opium War broke out. This time, the French joined the British. The Anglo-French army pushed all the way to Beijing, forced the entire imperial court to flee, and robbed and burned the old Summer Palace. The war ended with the Chinese empire opening more ports to foreign trade, ceding the territories of Kowloon, permitting foreign legations in Beijing, allowing Christian missionary activities, legalizing opium imports, and agreeing to pay 2 million taels of silver in indemnity to Britain and France. (The tael was a commonly used weight and currency measure in China at the time.)
More defeats and treaties would come. By the time the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, China had signed hundreds of “unequal treaties,” always in the wake of military defeat or threat, with virtually all Western powers and Japan. It had ceded vast amounts of land to Russia, Japan, Britain, and other countries; opened almost all major cities as treaty ports; paid hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations; and compromised both its sovereignty and its dignity.
What the First Opium War did end, though, was the idea that China was the world, or at least the most privileged and civilized center of the universe—a view that had been reinforced by emperors and their scholar-officials for thousands of years. The admission in the Treaty of Nanjing that Britain was equal to China was a historical transformation. A mere fifty years before, in 1793, when Lord George Macartney went to Beijing as the first British ambassador, he refused to kowtow to Emperor Qianlong despite the insistence of his host. Macartney was considered a bearer of tribute from Britain rather than a guest. One of his missions was to convey Britain's desire to establish trade with China. But the emperor rejected the suggestion, declaring in a letter to King George III: “Our dynasty's majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.”17
The Opium War taught the Chinese that the West had something they could use: modern technology. But they still maintained the belief that the Chinese way was superior. As a result, the progressive scholars and government officials began the self-strengthening movement, also known as the Westernization movement. “Chinese learning as the base, Western learning as utility,” they insisted. The idea was to maintain Chinese culture as the core values and adopt Western technology for its utilitarian value only: Westernization the Chinese way.
The movement's most important goal was to improve military technology, which was perhaps the only thing deemed worth learning from the West anyway. The emperor established Western-style shipyards and arsenals and brought in Westerners to teach the Chinese how to manufacture warships, guns, and cannons on the assumption that the superior Chinese wisdom and intelligence, plus the technology they would learn from Western countries, would enable the Chinese to defeat the Westerners with their own technology. But the rifles and ships built in China were more expensive and of lower quality than the ones directly imported from the West. So the Chinese also purchased guns, cannons, and warships. Equipped with a modern fleet purchased from Britain and Germany, China established a powerful modern navy that in 1888 was number one in Asia. This peerless navy was promptly crushed in 1894—not by a Western country this time but by Japan. China was forced to sign yet one more “unequal treaty” that paid Japan 200 million taels of silver in indemnity, ceded the Liaodong Peninsula and Taiwan with its nearby islands to Japan, and opened more treaty ports.
Defeat by Japan made the Chinese realize that superior technology did not guarantee victory and their problem went much deeper than guns and warships. Keju, the imperial examination and system, was the root cause of China's defeat. “The cession of Taiwan and Liaodong was not caused by the imperial court, but by bagu; the two-million taels indemnity should be blamed on the imperial court, but bagu,” a reform-minded scholar, Kang Youwei, told Emperor Guangxu in 1898.18 Bagu or Baguwen (eight-part essay) was the dominant format of keju during the Qing dynasty. Bagu asked the test takers to interpret original sentences from one of the Confucian classics. The interpretation must be either three hundred or five hundred Chinese characters long and contain eight predefined parts.
“Today's sufferings are the consequence of uneducated people in China, which resulted from selecting officials through bagu,” Kang informed the emperor. “Those who study for bagu don't read books written after the Qin and Han Dynasties, let alone attempt to understand happenings in other countries around the world, but they could achieve high positions in the government. Thus despite the large number of officials, we cannot find anyone to be capable of carrying out important tasks.” “You are right,” Emperor Guangxu agreed. “Westerners pursue useful knowledge, but all we Chinese pursue are useless knowledge.”19
At the suggestion of Kang Youwei and other like-minded intellectuals, Emperor Guangxu launched a battery of reform efforts: abolishing keju, establishing Western-style universities, translating Western books into Chinese, and sending students to Japan and Western countries. The reform, however, lasted only 103 days. It ended in a bloody crackdown by Empress Dowager Cixi, Emperor Guangxu's aunt, who had installed him as the emperor at the age of four. Guangxu was put under house arrest, Kang Youwei fled to Japan, and six prominent reform leaders were executed in public.
Keju survived, but not for long. Another military defeat three years later made even Empress Dowager Cixi a reformer. In 1900, military forces of the alliance of eight nations (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the Untied Kingdom, and the United States) marched into Beijing to rescue the diplomatic legations under siege by the Boxer rebels. Cixi and her court officials fled to Xi'an. After yet one more “unequal treaty” (the Boxer Protocol) that cost China 450 million taels of silver as indemnity to the eight nations, Empress Dowager Cixi launched a set of moderate reforms and stopped using Baguwen as a form of keju.
Her actions did not calm the rising anger toward the imperial court and the people's frustration with the exam. On September 2, 1905, a group of powerful military leaders, governors, and high-level officials—including Yuan Shikai, the second president of the Republic of China, who invited Frank Goodnow to consult on the Chinese constitution—sent a plea to the imperial court. To save China, “we must start to popularize schools; to popularize schools, we must start by ending keju,” reasoned Yuan Shikai and his cosigners. Confronted by such a powerful group, the imperial court did not feel it had a choice. On the same day, Emperor Guangxu sent out a decree
to the entire empire: “All keju exams are to end.”20 Six years later, in 1911, the Qing dynasty was replaced by the Republic of China, ending over two thousand years of imperial rule.
For two thousand years, China had remained the same, despite the many changes in dynasties and emperors. The changes brought in new emperors but no new ideas. The new emperors simply repeated what their predecessors did. There were good and bad emperors, periods of war and periods of peace, times of unification and times of division, but the essential social structure, governing principles of human relationships, views of human nature and the natural environment, and moral and ethical code remained the same. There was no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.
Before the Western powers arrived, the Chinese wanted to keep their way forever because they were sure it was the best way. The humiliation that the West delivered made the Chinese reconsider their position, and ultimately they decided that the Chinese way must be abandoned. It was holding China back from modernization. Borrowing technology was not sufficient to develop a modern nation; China needed people with different capabilities and thinking from what the emperors desired. China ended its imperial rule and exam.
What China decided to abandon a century ago is now being highly praised—and copied by the West—in the most recent wave of Sinomania. What have been identified as the great attributes of the Chinese culture, society, and education that led to China's recent rise as a world power are the very attributes the Enlightenment Sinophiles praised three hundred years ago—suggesting that China, despite its efforts to change, remains the same today as it was three hundred years ago, or two thousand years ago. Yet these traits have been generally agreed on as the cause of China's last decline. Has the world changed so much that what did not work before works now? Or is the recent rise of China also the result of what made ancient China prosperous—and like China's ancient prosperity, will it soon end, unless transformative changes occur?
Notes
1. H. B. Pak, China and the West: Myths and Realities in History (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1974), 55.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. A. H. Rowbotham, “Voltaire, Sinophile,” PMLA 47 (1932): 1050–65.
6. Ibid.
7. A. R. Davis, “The Character of a Chinese Scholar-Official as Illustrated by the Life and Poetry of T'ao Yuan-Ming,” Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association 1, no. 1 (1958): 37.
8. K. Winston, “Advisors to Rulers—or, What the Kennedy School of Government Can Learn from Chinese Scholar-Officials, and Vice Versa,” working paper, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge, MA, 2005.
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Y. Sun, Wuquan xianfa [The five-power constitution], March 20, 1921, http://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%BA%94%E6%AC%8A%E6%86%B2%E6%B3%95.
11. Weiwei Zhang, “Meritocracy, versus Democracy,” New York Times, November 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/opinion/meritocracy-versus-democracy.html?_r=0.
12. More information about this series can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China.
13. J. Y. Lin, “Needham Puzzle, Weber Question and China's Miracle: Long Term Performance since the Sung Dynasty” (paper presented at the World Economic Performance: Past, Present and Future—Long Term Performance and Prospects of Australia and Major Asian Economies, 2006), http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/docs/seminar/papers-nov2006/Lin-Paper.pdf.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 12–13.
16. J. K. Fairbank and M. Goldman, China: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 360.
17. E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 325.
18. G. Li, “Feichu Keju Bainian” [A century after the demolition of keju], 2005, http://news.xinhuanet.com/comments/2005–08/29/content_3415631.htm.
19. W. Hu, Dizhi de Zhongjie [The end of imperial rule] (Beijing: Zhongguo Dangdai Chubanshe, 2011).
20. Li, Feichu Keju Bainian.
3
Governance without Governing: The Retreat of Authoritarianism and China's Economic Boom
The first action that altered China's modern history was not the result of careful planning by the elite leaders of the Communist government in Beijing, but a secret meeting of eighteen peasants in a remote village. The peasants were not motivated by grand aspirations to change history or restore China's greatness. They acted on instinct, driven by the simple need to avoid fleeing from their homes or starving to death.
The historic meeting took place on November 24, 1978, about two years after the passing of Chairman Mao, who led the Chinese Communist Party to defeat the Nationalists. Mao founded the People's Republic of China in 1949. His government spent the next thirty years engaged in Soviet-style political campaigns and illusionary economic activities, all designed to build China into a Communist superstate that could rival the Western imperialists. After three decades of collectivization movements, China practically eradicated private property ownership, wiped out commercial activities, suppressed all capitalist thoughts, and turned all citizens into members of the state. All economic activities were planned and dictated by the state.
The vast peasant population in China was, just like the city dwellers, confined to the place where they were born by the hukou system, a population management mechanism to limit mobility and thus potential unrest. Used by various Chinese emperors, hukou essentially “made the state a feudal master over its farmers,” notes Ted Fishman in China Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World. “By 1960, the Communists had all but sealed most of the country's people off, not just from the world, but from China's own cities.”1
As members of the state workforce, the peasants worked in commune teams and followed farming programs rigidly prescribed and seriously enforced by the government. They had to grow exactly what the government told them and in ways the government dictated, regardless of their local context. “All farmers in China know this joke,” write Guidi Chen and Chuntao Wu, well known for their writings about Chinese agriculture. “There are only four people in China who know about farming—Secretaries of the Community Party Commission of the province, the prefecture, the county, and commune. They tell the farmers what to grow, when to sow, how much to grow, when to harvest and how much they will receive at the end of the year.”2
The results of these tight controls were disastrous. “In the 20 years between 1958 and 1978, Chinese society was practically in a state of stagnation,” summarized Deng Xiaoping, the reform-minded leader who has been credited for the reforms responsible for China's recent surge. “Neither the national economy nor people's living standards had significant improvement.”3
In 1978, China was one of the world's poorest nations, with nearly one-third of a population over 900 million living under the poverty line set by China. Using the international standard of poverty (per capita cost of living below $1.00 a day), more than half of China's population lived in poverty.4 Its per capita GDP in 1980 was $193, lower than Chad's and Burkina Faso's. The annual income for Chinese farmers was 133 renminbi (RMB)—about $19.00—in 1978.
Then came the “secret meeting” of eighteen peasants in an isolated village in Anhui Province, a meeting that would soon be enshrined as the beginning of the new China.
The Peasants Who Saved China
“It was just after dinner on November 24, 1978,” Chen and Wu write in Stories of Xiaogang Village, recounting the meeting that changed China:
Xiaogang Village, without electricity, let alone street lights, was already in pitch darkness. The cities might still be busy and noisy, but there was only complete silence in the village, for most of the village members had gone to bed.
All of a sudden, the dogs began barking. Eighteen men of the Xiaogang production team sneaked out of their houses. They quietly walked toward the house of Yan Lihua in the piercingly cold northwe
stern wind, heads down and arms wrapped around them.5
The meeting site had been chosen after much deliberation, according to Chen and Wu. Yan Lihua lived alone in a five-room house at the west end of the village, away from others and thus ideal for keeping the meeting a secret. His grandfather, parents, and two brothers had all starved to death during the 1961 famine.
The meeting had to be secret because at the time, such meetings were illegal. What the villagers decided to do that night could have landed them in prison, even sentenced them to death. Their decision was to divvy up the village land and assign plots to each family, allowing them to work their own land. “I have two conditions,” Yan Hongchang, the village leader, reportedly said. “First, Xiaogang Village has been receiving grains from the government every year, but from next year on, we must set aside enough grains for the government and collective upon our first harvest.” Yan's second condition was to keep this a secret: “What we will do is to maintain the appearance of working in teams. We will keep it from the above. No one is allowed to tell outsiders or our government leaders. If you do, you are the enemy to all of us.” He promised his fellow villagers, “If you agree to these two conditions, I dare to take the lead.” Their response was even bolder than what he'd asked: “If our team leader is imprisoned for breaking up the team,” one of the villagers said, “the rest of the villagers will take care of his land and support his children until [they reach the age of] eighteen.” The eighteen peasants drew up a simple agreement in plain language: “We divvy up the land and assign to each family. Head of each family sign and stamp to agree that if it works, we guarantee payment to the government and will not ask the government for food anymore. If not, we leaders will rest in peace even if imprisoned or beheaded. All members of the team also promise to support our children until they are eighteen years old.” Below the agreement were twenty names, each representing one family in the village. The peasants signed the document with red fingerprints. Two families were absent because the heads of their households had not returned from a begging trip. Their relatives signed the document on their behalf.