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British traders was not, as claimed by contemporary historians in the People’s Republic, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese empire; it was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports (clocks, watches, furs). ‘Opium is like gold’, wrote James Matheson’s first partner, Robert Taylor, in 1818. ‘I can sell it any time.’17 Even that was untrue: the Qing state’s erratic, ongoing campaign against the drug through the early decades of the nineteenth century, together with opportunistic over-production in India, made profit margins wildly
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Drugs have a universal talent for dismaying the authorities: not only do they consume otherwise usefully productive money and time but, more crucially, they loosen inner psychological constraints, and the sense of restraint that holds convention together.
Curiously – for it was a dynasty preoccupied with questions of security and sovereignty – the Qing had long allowed itself to be dependent on foreign silver supplies: on imports from South America, gained through Chinese trading in the Philippines, or through exports to Europe. In the forty years up to 1829, Mexico was producing around 80 per cent of the world’s silver and gold. But independence movements between the 1810s and 1820s caused an estimated 56.6 per cent decline in world silver production relative to the 1790s.
It was the further, unfortunate collision of two elements at court – an anxious, harassed emperor, and a clique of ambitious moralizers – that led to 1839’s confrontation with Britain.
The root cause of decline was the same as in other spheres of government: over-extension, and failure of funds. As the empire began to malfunction, so the population began to complain, with growing militancy.
Han Chinese men were spending lifetimes over-educating themselves to face demoralizingly low examination pass-rates, while watching less talented foreign rivals overtake them – a sure recipe for ill-feeling.
This culture of pressure and rivalry tended to produce two, highly contrasted species of official: the creatively corrupt libertine, and the puritan. And it was the tension between the two that helped produce the Opium War, with all its unfortunate consequences. No
But what big theories tend to leave out is the inevitably extemporized nature of the empire: British policy abroad was usually designed under exceptional pressure, in alien environments, by operatives without local linguistic competence and isolated (in the pre-telegraphic age) for months at a time from counsel back home.
Again, however, the Qing world would probably not have recognized itself in Britain’s caricature. Far from self-sufficient, Qing China was fully – vulnerably – dependent on international commerce to bring in the essentials of existence: rice, pepper, sugar, copper and wood from south-east Asia, Taiwan, Japan and Korea; and New World silver to pay its taxes, and therefore government and armies.
As a result, by the start of the nineteenth century, it becomes remarkably difficult to define what European observers so confidently called China. What we have instead is a cross-bred state, held together by coercive cosmopolitanism: by a sense of unbounded entitlement to rule and control, justified by the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, the Manchu Way, Tibetan spirituality and European firepower.
The Chinese empire (as it remains today) is probably best seen as an impressive but improbable high-wire act, unified by ambition, bluff, pomp and pragmatism.
But on closer inspection, this episode exposes the fault-lines, and not the patriotic cohesion, of the Chinese empire. The warriors of Sanyuanli and its vicinity might have been fired by fury at the British, but this was a fury that scorned the rest of Chinese society – and especially the government. ‘We do not need official troops, nor the help of the state’, proclaimed one of the notices generated by the militia.
It was perhaps the dismissal of Charles Elliot that marked the true turning point in this war: from here on, the campaign would be more about gunboats than diplomacy. True enough, back in the spring of 1839, Elliot had brayed as loudly as anyone for an instructive war that would ‘teach’ China to fall in line with civilized European trading norms. But once he’d got his war, he spent a curious amount of time avoiding it: calling regular pauses for talks, for trading, for elaborate negotiating banquets.
For Elliot was fundamentally pessimistic about what could reasonably be achieved in China, preferring to measure success not by the criterion of how much could be won, but rather by that of how much mischief had been prevented. ‘The least that is necessary for your purposes in China is best,’ he mused, after the signing of the tough Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, ‘and those purposes, or that purpose, is the security of your trade.
The situation begs the question of what kind of political and social community Qing China was, that a bloody struggle against foreign invaders should for so many become an unmissable opportunity to fleece the government and to dispatch ignorant, untrained members of the populace to almost certain deaths. ‘The whole system of Chinese policy’, noted Pottinger in late November 1841, ‘shows that whatever may be the feelings of the emperor towards his subjects, the mandarins and all the government officers are indifferent to their affairs, further than suits their own purposes.’7
Opium was apparently the only thing saving the British balance of payments from ruin. Although pianos and cutlery did not appeal to Chinese consumers through the 1840s and 1850s, drugs still did. As Palmerston candidly admitted in March 1857, ‘At present the nature of our commerce with the Chinese is such that we can pay for our purchases only partly in goods; the rest we must pay in opium and in silver.’
Amid the smoke and triumph, it was easy to forget that this was a war – a world war, pitting Britain, France, and at times the United States and Russia against the Chinese empire – that was provoked (in contravention of international law) by a young British alpha male, exploited by a cantankerous monomaniac and waged by a melancholy plenipotentiary who thought it ‘wretched’.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, as Asia and Africa had fallen before Western science and industry, theorists of the European empires had sought convincing explanations for their supremacy, fixing the world into racial types distinguished by immutable characteristics – with the whites clearly at the top, and the ‘yellows’ and ‘blacks’ below. The conspicuous popularity of the drug amongst the Chinese became a symptom of the moral weakness and torpor of this alien, inexplicable race.
British bad conscience was merging with imperialist loathing for China: the outcome would be the ‘Yellow Peril’.33
The simple truth was that Chinese labourers in Australia, South Africa, America and Britain were quieter, harder-working, more reliable and more sober than their white counterparts. Given the practical superiority of Chinese populations, white workers therefore had little choice but to shift the grounds of attack: from a question of labour efficiency to one of a moral, racial clash between Asians and Anglo-Saxons. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a hate campaign against the Chinese flourished in Britain, the United States and settler societies such as South Africa and
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Secondly, Yan Fu had little interest in waging war on the white race. Quite the opposite: through his study of science and English, he fell in love with the West – and not just with the iron-plated steamers and guns that he was supposed to be studying, but also with its thinkers, writers and political and legal institutions. This, Yan concluded during his years abroad, was the foundation of Western strength. ‘The reason why England and the other countries of Europe are wealthy and strong is that impartial justice is daily extended’, he declared to Guo, during one of their Sunday conversations.
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The press explosion of the late Qing – the mass of newspapers that jibed at the establishment through the first decade of the twentieth century, creating a public opinion that made nationalism and revolution possible – could not have taken place outside the foreign concessions in cities such as Shanghai, where extraterritoriality permitted a degree of intellectual freedom not possible elsewhere in the empire. In 1904, the fugitive Liang Qichao risked his life to return to Shanghai – a price of 100,000 ounces of silver still on his head – to start a new paper. In 1911, the accidental bomb
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Sun Yat-sen. It was Sun’s late, ambivalent decision of the 1920s – taken in desperation to win Soviet funding for his faltering revolution – to name imperialism as the cause of all modern China’s problems that transformed the Opium War into the inaugural trauma of Chinese history, and into a vital ingredient of twentieth-century patriotic propaganda.
The basic task, proclaimed Chen Duxiu, one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, ‘is to import the foundation of Western society, that is, the new belief in equality and human rights.’ For people like Chen, the real enemy was not the West, but China’s own Confucianism: ‘We must be thoroughly aware’, he reminded his readers in 1916, ‘of the incompatibility between Confucianism and the new belief, the new society and the new state.’
Our gravest failure has been in [political] education. We did not provide enough education to young people, including students. For many of those who participated in the demonstrations and hunger strikes it will take years, not just a couple of months, of education to change their thinking.’
Pragmatism, at least as much as patriotism, is the religion of the contemporary PRC.
