Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (5 page)

control of their own territory. Foreigners under treaty rights had

‘extraterritoriality’ (that is, they were not subject to Chinese law); a whole series of ‘treaty ports’ were established in which foreigners had new trading rights (and some places, such as Hong Kong, were fully colonized); and new and disruptive infl uences, notably Christian missionaries, had to be allowed into China’s exterior for the fi rst time. The Qing rulers, overall, remained hostile to the foreign presence within China, trying to minimize it as much as their new, weaker status allowed. Within China itself, the ordinary population showed little enthusiasm for the arrival of foreigners in their midst, regardless of whether they were bringing guns or bibles with them.

The foreign presence often had unexpected results. One of the most notable was the Taiping War of 1851–64. Infl uenced by missionaries, a delusional failed examination candidate named Hong Xiuquan from Guangdong announced that he was the
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younger brother of Jesus, and that he had come to lead a Christian mission to end the rule of the Manchu ‘devils’ of the Qing dynasty.

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Recruiting in China’s impoverished south, his Society of God Worshippers quickly attracted tens of thousands of followers.

Hong declared that he was establishing the Taiping Tianguo (the Heavenly State of Great Peace), and his army swept through China. By the early 1860s, the Taiping was effectively a separate state within Qing territory, with its capital at Nanjing, in charge of much of China’s cultural heartland. The regime was ostensibly Christian, but its interpretation demanded the recognition of Hong’s semi-divine status, and Taiping rule was harsh and coercive. However, the regime did manage the remarkable feat of conquering a huge area of central China for nearly eight years, including the major city of Nanjing. For a while, it looked as if the Taiping might bring the Qing crashing down. Certainly Karl Marx had hopes of this, and of aftershocks even further afi eld, writing in a New York newspaper in 1853: ‘The Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general 22

crisis.’ Eventually, the retraining of local armies by loyal generals such as Zeng Guofan, as well as the stresses within the Taiping movement itself, brought the rebellion to an end, although not before countless people had died in what was perhaps the bloodiest civil war in history: contemporary accounts suggest that 100,000 people died in the fi nal battle of Nanjing alone.

The following decades did see the Qing make efforts to reform its practices, and the ‘self-strengthening’ movement of the 1860s involved notable attempts to produce armaments and military technology along Western lines. Yet imperialist incursions continued, and the attempts at ‘self-strengthening’ were dealt a brutal blow during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5. Fought between China and Japan (the latter was now a fl edgling imperial power in its own right) over control of Korea, it ended with the
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humiliating destruction of the new Qing navy, and the loss not only of Chinese infl uence in Korea, but also the cession of Taiwan to Japan as its fi rst formal colony.

Most general histories, not least those written in China itself, have
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been highly dismissive of the last decades of Qing rule, regarding it as a period when a corrupt dynasty that refused to adapt to a new and hostile world was fi nally overthrown. For years, Marxist Chinese historians viewed the period as ‘feudal’, and argued that its overthrow set the stage for a new ‘modern’ era that would eventually usher in the rule of the CCP. For this reason, it was essential to portray everything in China before Mao came to power as ‘feudal’ or in some sense a failed modernity. However, it is now clear that signifi cant steps towards modernity were taken in the late Qing.

One reason was that there was a powerful Asian example of how reform might be carried out: Japan. The island country across the sea would remain in Chinese minds as both dangerous menace and modern mentor for a century, just as it looms large in Chinese minds in the contemporary era. The events that had inspired and 23

concerned the Chinese had followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

A group of Japanese aristocrats, worried by ever-greater foreign encroachment on Japan, had overthrown the centuries-old system of the Shogun, who acted as regent for the emperor. Instead, they ‘restored’ the emperor to the throne under a new reign-title of ‘Meiji’ (‘brilliant rule’), and governed in his name. These aristocrats swiftly determined that the only way to protect Japan was to embrace an all-out programme of modernization. They showed little of the ambiguity that conservatives in the Qing court had done. In quick succession, Japan replaced its culture of elite samurai warriors with a conscripted citizen army; the country was given a constitution that established it as a nation-state; and a parliamentary system was set up, although with a heavily limited male-only franchise. Modernization did not mean abandonment of Japan’s past, however; the traditional folk religion of Shintô was reconstituted as State Shintô, a more formalized religion that would give spiritual sustenance to the nation. Meiji Japan also
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intervened heavily in the economy. The end results were clear.

By the fi rst decade of the 20th century, Japan had 528 merchant
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ships, nearly 40,000 miles of railways, and over 5 million tons of coal mined per year. These headily swift changes in a country which the Chinese had always regarded as a ‘little brother’ gave Chinese reformers plenty of material for consideration.

One of the boldest proposals for reform, which drew heavily on the Japanese model, was the programme put forward in 1898 by reformers including the political thinker Kang Youwei (1858–1927). Kang was driven by the conviction that the previous vision of Chinese modernity, based on ‘self-strengthening’, had failed because it had not been comprehensive enough in its aims. Kang illustrated the need for more thorough reform to the emperor by putting forward two contrasting case studies: Japan, which had reformed successfully, and Poland, a state which had failed so comprehensively that it had disappeared from the map, carved up by powerful neighbours in 1795. The reforms were not just led from the top. Among the phenomena that emerged 24

from that period of change were a greater participation by lower-level Chinese elites in the demand for popular rights, a new fl ourishing of political newspapers, and the establishment of Peking University, which remains to this day the most prestigious educational institution in China. The reformers also strongly advocated changes in the position of women. However, in September 1898, the reforms were abruptly halted, as the Dowager Empress Cixi, fearful of a coup, placed the emperor under house arrest and executed several of the leading advocates of change.

Two years later, Cixi made a decision that helped to seal the Qing’s fate. In 1900, North China was rife with rumours of spirit possession and superhuman powers exercised by a mysterious group of peasant rebels known as ‘Boxers’. Unlike the Taiping,
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the Boxers were not opposed to the dynasty. Rather, they wanted to expel the infl uences that they believed were destroying China from within: the foreigners and Chinese Christian converts. In summer 1900, China was convulsed by Boxer attacks on these groups. Fatefully, the dynasty declared in June that they supported
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the Boxers, relabelling them as ‘righteous people’. Eventually, a multinational foreign army forced its way into China and defeated the uprising. The imperial powers then demanded compensation from the Qing: the execution of offi cials involved with the Boxers, and a sum of 450 million taels (US$ 333 million) to be repaid over 39 years. The Boxer Uprising marked the last time, until Mao’s victory, that a Chinese government made a serious attempt to expel foreigners from China’s territory. Unlike Mao half a century later, the Qing failed.

That failure, and the huge fi nancial burden and political disgrace which it had brought upon the dynasty, led to the most single-minded attempt at modernization that the Qing had ventured: yet another reinterpretation of what modernity meant in a Chinese context. In 1902, the Xinzheng (‘new governance’) reforms were implemented – this was the ‘new China’ of the 1910

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book with which the fi rst chapter began. This was a remarkable and comprehensive set of changes to China’s politics and society.

In many ways, it echoed the abortive 1898 reforms of just four years before; but the intervening period had seen the Qing try, and fail, once and for all to expel foreign infl uence through support for the Boxers.

This set of reforms, now half-forgotten in contemporary China, looks remarkably progressive, even set against the standards of the present day. In 1900–10, elections were proposed at the subprovincial level, to be held in 1912–14, with the promise of an elected national assembly to come. The elections never happened because of the republican revolution of 1911, but it is possible now to look back and imagine an alternative world in which Qing China transformed into a constitutional monarchy, as indeed did happen in its southwestern neighbour, Siam (Thailand), in 1932. The more immediate example to hand was
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Japan, and it is notable that many of the reforms of the period, such as in education, technology, and the police and military were
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heavily shaped by Chinese who had learned from the Japanese example.

The elections were limited (as were most such elections in the West at the time) to men (not women) of property and education, but the granting of such rights to any group showed how far society had changed in the last years of the Qing. Figures such as Zhang Jian, who set up factories in Nantong, a small city near Shanghai, were becoming typical of a new commercial middle class, and the dynasty actively encouraged the formation of bodies such as Chambers of Commerce to articulate the interests of such groups.

The most signifi cant cultural shift in the reforms came in 1905, with the abolition of the almost thousand-year-long tradition of examinations in the Confucian classics to enter the Chinese bureaucracy. When it had fi rst been implemented, the 26

objective, rational standards of the entrance examination had made the system far more impressive than anything the rest of the world could offer in deciding who would govern; but by the early 20th century, the system had become infl exible, and the term ‘eight-legged essay’, referring to a standardized form of composition which the candidates had to write, had become synonymous with backwardness and conservatism to many reformers. In 1905, the dynasty replaced the system with alternative examinations in science and languages.

So there were signifi cant reforms during what turned out to be the last decade of Qing rule. Nonetheless, the dynasty
did
collapse, unlike the Japanese empire of the time. Why, if the dynasty was not simply a corrupt shell, and had real potential for reform, did it do so?

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First, the economic crisis of the late Qing was real, and in particular, there was a problem with agricultural productivity.

Historians trace its origins to the late 18th century, meaning that the foreign invasions exacerbated, but did not create the
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crisis itself. In addition, the imposition of favourable tariff rates for the foreign powers meant that China’s capacity to produce competitively in its domestic market or for export was hampered. Despite later arguments that the impact of imperialism actually helped China to develop, the British and French were clearly not investing in China to assist the Chinese economy, but rather to boost their own imperial economies.

(Japan, which swiftly renegotiated treaty rights that were over-favourable to foreigners, saw its much smaller economy grow much faster over the same period.) In addition, the Qing made a particularly unwise choice in 1900 when it supported the Boxer Uprising.

After the failure of the Boxers, the Qing dynasty was forced to pay an immense indemnity, a fi nancial burden that led in part to the initiation of the Xinzheng reforms. Taxation revenue continued to 27

3. This picture dates from the 1930s, but from the mid-19th century,
famines struck frequently in China, fuelling popular disillusionment
with government

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be unreliable and marred by massive corruption in the late Qing,
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despite the reforms.

Second, ever since the Taiping, authority in China had become much more localized and militarized. The huge increase in the Chinese population during the Qing had made it ever harder for the bureaucracy to cope with administering society as a whole. Tax collection, the basis on which any society operates, had become insuffi cient and corrupt, with local offi cials adding ‘surtaxes’

that lined their own pockets rather than going into the state’s coffers. Silver shortages also led to infl ation, causing further tax rebellions.