#21 Understanding Colonialism: The Invasion of China
Colonisation in the 19th and 20th centuries: The Invasion of China
The colonial history of China is particularly important as we consider her rise on the world stage once again. Readers of this blog may remember my brief discussion about The Silk Road early at the outset of these discussions of world history. Before the advent of national economic statistics across the world, it was impossible to measure the comparative wealth of different peoples. Yet, the evidence we do possess shows that China and India were considerably more wealthy than anywhere else in the world until Britain invaded China in the 1840s. Up to this point in time, China did not want to trade any goods that the West could provide, except for gold and silver. After Britain’s invasion in the 1840s China’s wealth greatly diminished.
China was first invaded by Britain in 1839. The British, with several Indian traders, had been able to buy finished opium from the East India Company and had sold it on in ever larger quantities into China for 40 years with no qualms about selling narcotics to ‘native’ peoples. Conversely, the Chinese government did not consider British or European traders as people of equal status. English envoys had been unwilling to go through the kowtowing rituals traditionally demanded by the Chinese and as a result, traders were kept at arm’s length in the small trading area of Canton, with limited access to the local people. From there, the British traded opium illegally, avoiding Chinese authorities in the port. The demand for opium from those addicted was high.
In 1839, the central authorities in Peking sent a senior official and scholar of the Qing dynasty, Lin Zexu, to keep order. He arrested 1700 Chinese opium traders, confiscated 70,000 opium pipes and expropriated and destroyed large volumes of the drug. The British traders ignored all this. In exasperation, Lin Zexu wrote a long letter to Queen Victoria, copied in part here:
“It is only our high and mighty emperor, who alike supports and cherishes those of the Inner Land, and those from beyond the seas - who looks upon all mankind with equal benevolence---who, if a source of profit exists anywhere, diffuses it over the whole world---who, if the tree of evil takes root anywhere, plucks it up for the benefit of all nations;---who, in a word, hath implanted in his breast that heart (by which beneficent nature herself) governs the heavens and the earth!…
…But, during the commercial intercourse which has existed so long, among the numerous foreign merchants resorting hither, are wheat and tares, good and bad; and of these latter are some, who, by means of introducing opium by stealth, have seduced our Chinese people, and caused every province of the land to overflow with that poison. These then know merely how to advantage themselves; they care not about injuring others! This is a principle which heaven's Providence repudiates; and which mankind conjointly looks upon with abhorrence! Moreover, the great emperor hearing of it, actually quivered with indignation.
Now we have set up regulations governing the Chinese people. He who sells opium shall receive the death penalty and he who smokes it also the death penalty. Now consider this: if the barbarians do not bring opium then how can the Chinese resell it, and how can they smoke it. The fact is that the wicked barbarians beguile the Chinese into a death trap…
Considering that these said foreigners did yet repent of their crime, and with a sincere heart beg for mercy; that they took 20,283 chests of opium piled up in their store-ships, and through Elliot, the superintendent of the trade of your said country, petitioned that they might be delivered up to us, when the same were all utterly destroyed.
We have heard that in your own country opium is prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity: ---this is a strong proof that you know full well how hurtful it is to mankind. Since when you do not permit it to injure your own country, you ought not to have the injurious drug transferred to another country, and above all others, how much less to the Inner Land! Of the products which China exports to your foreign countries, there is not one which is not beneficial to mankind in some shape or other. There are those which serve for food, those which are useful, and those which are calculated for re-sale; but all are beneficial. Has China ever yet sent forth a noxious article from its soil?”
The letter expresses several key cultural differences at the time. Lin Zexu appealed to moral decency in trying to stop the opium trade, which most Chinese people at the time believed was the highest principle of living. Yet he and the entire entourage of the ancient regime failed to understand the spirit and drive of European capital: that money and profit were the key drivers of international trade. The letter is certainly compelling and there is a humanitarian quality to Lin Zexu’s writing as he makes arguments that many of us would make today if anybody dared to import narcotics into our country.
But the British did have the audacity; both the traders and government in London considered the Chinese as racially inferior. In response, the British government in London sent a flotilla of warships with the most up-to-date weaponry, and the Indian government assembled troops at Fort William in Calcutta. A battalion of the 26th Cameroons, a contingent of Bengal volunteers, the 18th Royal Irish stationed in Ceylon, Sepoys and Sappers were also sent. The opium traders’ ships were used to transport them. And so, a privately owned company invaded China alongside the British state.
The invasion intended to force the Chinese government to allow the importation of opium. The British succeeded, negotiating a one-sided settlement that ended hostilities. They also took control of the island of Hong Kong, ceded by the Qing dynasty, demanded trading rights from five major ports, and a large sum of silver as compensation, in 1841/3.
Map of the Qing Empire circa 1820 by Philg88: Attribution Wikimedia Foundation, www.wikimedia.org, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Click here for another great resource from ARC GIS showing Chinese trade before and after the Opium Wars.
The British invasion was only the beginning. Over the next 60 years, every colonising power invaded China: Russia from the north, Japan from the east, with the USA also sending in armed forces. By the end of the 19th century, China had also been invaded by Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Australia. All invading states had obtained access to trade and ports, as well as rights to send in missionaries. The central Chinese state became bankrupt; and by the end of the 19th century, the Empress and her entourage had decamped from their traditional city houses, travelling on foot into the mountains to avoid the various invading forces.
Every 21st-century Chinese child knows about the terrible upheavals to their country during the 19th century. Chinese dynastic death throes were painful, as the authorities in the Ch'ing dynasty fought to maintain their civilisation.
During this time, China lost her vassal states: Korea, Taiwan, Nepal, Burma, Indo-China and Japan. The relationships with these states had not been those of equals, but neither had they been colonised. All had remained independent and free to create their own societies, with their own dynamic, which we see re-appearing in new forms today. China was forced to concede territory, sign unequal treaties, pay compensation to each invading power, and by the end of the century borrow from western capital sources. Pitted against all this was the huge weight of Chinese tradition, 3000 years of stability which was unequalled globally. The scholarly class had administered policy across the Chinese empire, along with a landowning class with a Confucian ideology emphasising tradition and family ties. China had great wealth and an understanding of the glories of its civilisation. At the core of Chinese power lay rituals and expressions of heaven and earth, of the emperor as the son of heaven, of celestial purity. These were notions foreign to western thought and understanding.
Most English-speaking historians have relied on English-speaking records for these years. Two novels from translated edicts, newspapers and excerpts of original documents from the accounts of real people provide us with an account of the Chinese court and emperor over the 19th century years. Anchee Min's work shows us an ancient world of wealth, power, and art confronted by western arms and belligerence: a world entirely different from our own. The Forbidden City, for example, was a complex of palaces and gardens run by thousands of eunuchs in the centre of Peking. This was a city which the British put to the torch in an orgy of violence and destruction in 1856.
Chinese intellectuals were asking many of the right questions; why are the colonisers so small and yet so strong? Why are we so large and yet so weak? Their conclusion, like so many others, was in identifying superior military technology. So, they learned the superior technology of the barbarians to control them, which while tactically correct, was not sufficient.
Like other powers, the Chinese maintained their political centre in the form of the Ch'ing Emperor.
This emperor was a child, and it was his mother, the Empress Tz'u-hsi, who ruled the crumbling empire. Tz'u-hsi was born a commoner and had become a concubine, giving the previous emperor a child. She eventually became the all-powerful figure of the Chinese Empire, and while China was being attacked on all fronts, she had to cope with multiple rebellions from within: the Taiping in 1864, the Nien in 1860, and from the Muslim west in 1862.
As Anchee Min reflects on this time in The Last Empress:
“By 1900, various invading powers The French, Dutch, Belgium's, Russians, Americans, and Japanese had begun to partition China among themselves. But the country was too vast and homogeneous to make this work. Each colonial power demanded extra territory and the establishment of treaty ports. Large areas of land were also leased in perpetuity to the invaders. These were called 'concessions' where the invaders set up their own laws, land sales, taxation, and policing.”
The people of China of course had been poisoned with Opium. Chinese governments never built defences from sea invasion, as they had never imagined an enemy as aggressive and unscrupulous as that which hit her in the 19th century. The utter humiliation of that time has to be understood if we are to understand China today.
During World War One, European and American colonising attentions were focused on survival, and by the end of the war in 1918, the Chinese were beginning to reclaim their country. By 1949, China had become among the 10% of the poorest people on earth. The ravages of the colonial invasions followed by Mao Tse-Tung's rebellion led to a full-scale revolution. This presented the necessary conditions to throw off ancient ways. Marxists took power after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty. Mao Tse-tung promised to deliver his peoples from 100 years of the humiliation of western colonisation, and for this alone his name will be revered in China.
Chinese History:
Chinese colonial history does not suffer from the same constraints that a reader will find when reading Indian or Russian colonial historians in English. China's role in European colonial history was simply different and has played a lesser role in the European imagination. Today, as China rises once again in world history, the volume of comment is rising exponentially. For the period I cover in this small excerpt, see:
R H Tawney, Land and Labour in China, George Allen and Unwin, 1932
John Fairbank, East Asia: The Modern Transformation, 1964, despite its age chapters 2 5 and 8 remain essential reading
Joseph Needham: When Asia was the world
Anchee Min, Empress Orchid and The Last Empress, Houghton Mifflin 2004 and 2007.
These are both set out as historical novels about the Chinese Court from the 1850s to the end of the century when the Empress died. In an author’s note, she says: "All the characters in this book are based on real people. I tried my best to keep the events they were in history. I translated or transcribed the decrees, edicts and newspaper articles from the original documents..."
Martin Jacques, When China Rules The World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, 2012
W. G. Sebald The Rings of Saturn chapter 6, for a brief but superb resume of Chinese 19th-century history
Maps
Chinese Trade Before and After the Opium Wars [ https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=cb0d5e67206b4789b381f2bf1f3147af%20%20 ]
Qing Empire c. 1820 [ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Maps_of_the_Qing_Dynasty#/media/File:Qing_Empire_circa_1820_EN.svg ]
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The colonial history of China is particularly important as we consider her rise on the world stage once again. Readers of this blog may remember my brief discussion about The Silk Road early at the outset of these discussions of world history. Before the advent of national economic statistics across the world, it was impossible to measure the comparative wealth of different peoples. Yet, the evidence we do possess shows that China and India were considerably more wealthy than anywhere else in the world until Britain invaded China in the 1840s.