Research Essay: Portrayal of China in Western Media

Copyright © 1990 by Jonathan D. Spence All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

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First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spence, Jonathan D.

The Search for Modern China / by Jonathan D. Spence.—1st ed. p. cm.

1. China—History—Ch'ing dynasty, 1644-1912. 2. China—History—20th century. I. Title. DS754.S65 1990 951'.03—dc20 89-9241

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 37 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3NU 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

C H A P T E R 6 China and the Eighteenth-Century World

M A N A G I N G T H E F O R E I G N E R S

The Qing state had no Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Relations with non-Chinese peoples were instead conducted by a variety of bu-

reaus and agencies that, in different ways, implied or stated the cultural inferiority and geographical marginality of foreigners, while also defending the state against them.

In the north and northwest, relations with the Mongols, Zunghars, and Russians were handled mainly by the Lifan Yuan, or Office of Border Affairs, which had been founded by Hong Taiji in 1638. Staffed exclusively by Manchus and Mongols, the Lifan Yuan's task was to keep things quiet in China's dangerous northwest crescent, whence so many of her conquerors in the past had come. To this end, the office forged an elaborate system of agreements regulating the visits of central Asian caravan traders to China. Imperial daughters were commonly married off to influential Mongol princes, forming a protective network of personal alliances, bolstered by Qing gar- risons located at strategic points in the region. Muslims, some of whom were of central Asian origin and some Chinese, were watched with care but generally allowed to practice their religion in peace; and after a Qing military presence in Lhasa became established under Yongzheng, the tribes that owed religious allegiance to the lamaist Buddhist hierarchy of Tibet ceased to be a grave threat. The variety of tasks coordinated by officials in the Lifan Yuan did, therefore, give the bureaucrats considerable skill and breadth of experience in dealing with "foreign policy" problems, and made

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the Great Wall largely redundant as an aspect of northwest frontier defense. European missionary contact with China was supervised mainly by the

imperial household, an autonomous bureaucratic institution in Peking. This agency managed a wide range of the emperor's affairs, including the stock- piling of bullion and food reserves, the maintenance of imperial estates and palaces, the manufacturies for precious silks and porcelain, and the collec- tion of extra revenues from such items as the salt monopoly and the transit dues on internal and foreign trade. It was most commonly the bondservants in the imperial household—often men of considerable wealth and power— who dealt directly with the missionaries and escorted papal embassies. Their general role in missionary business underlined the prevailing view that this dimension of foreign affairs was an aspect of the court's prestige rather than of national policy. The Jesuits especially found their role much constricted by this arrangement and tried to emphasize their independence in letters back to European colleagues. Some of the Jesuits, along with other Catholic missionaries and Chinese priests, worked secretly inside China, sheltered by their converts. All faced serious punishment if caught by the authorities.

Interaction with non-Chinese peoples in Korea and on the southern cres- cent of China's coastal and land frontiers, in countries such as Burma, Thai- land, Vietnam, and the Ryukyu Islands, was supervised by officials in the Ministry of Rituals. These countries shared many of the basic values of Chinese culture, a Chinese-style calendrical system, some form of script adapted from Chinese models, similar types of food and dress, the practice of Confucianism and Buddhism, and the outlines of Chinese bureaucratic organization. By freighting its international relations with the weight of custom and symbol prescribed by this ministry, China tried to control these states without excessive military expenditures. Emissaries from these coun- tries were expected to make a formal acknowledgment of China's cultural and political prestige by employing a language of subservience in diplo- matic documents and by making the ritual prostrations (kowtow) before the Chinese emperor in royal audiences. In return these countries were allowed to conduct a controlled volume of trade with China, mainly through special delegations, termed "tribute missions" by the Chinese, which the countries were permitted to send on a fixed annual schedule to Peking. After ritual gifts had been offered to the emperor, both the diplomatic personnel and the merchants accompanying these embassies to Peking were allowed to trade, although all of them had to live in hostels managed by the Ministry of Rituals and had to leave China with their goods at the end of each stipulated visit.

Within this system, there was considerable flexibility. The most frequent missions were those from Korea, which came every year; Korean visitors

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mingled freely with Qing scholars and officials, and left vivid accounts of the social and cultural life in Peking and of the political attitudes of the Confucian literati. Embassies from Japan, however, had completely ceased during the later Ming, and Japan's continuing refusal to acknowledge Chi- na's ritual superiority, when combined with the Tokugawa government's decision to restrict all foreign residence and trade to Nagasaki, meant that formal Qing relations with Japan were minimal. The military dimension of "tributary" relations emerged in 1788, when the Chinese invoked their right and obligation to go to the aid of the ruling Le in Vietnam. As we have seen, the Chinese swiftly switched their support from the Le to the Nguyen ruling house when the Nguyen accepted the traditional tributary position of deference to the Qing state. In the Ryukyu Islands, there was a curious case of divided loyalties. The islanders were in fact controlled by the southern Japanese lords of Satsuma, but on ritual occasions continued to profess themselves loyal tributary subjects of the Qing. Contemporary eighteenth-century accounts show Japanese ships retreating discreetly out of sight when Chinese diplomatic missions visited the islands, only to return promptly as soon as the Chinese left.

These three broad patterns of foreign management—with the northwest, the missionaries, and the south—shared some fundamental Chinese prem- ises of great importance. At their root was the assumption that China was the "central" kingdom and that other countries were, by definition, periph- eral, removed from the cultural center of the universe. The Chinese, there- fore, showed little interest in precise information or detailed study of foreign countries. Even during the peak periods of eighteenth-century "evidential" \aozheng research, the interest of scholars in geography and linguistics was largely concentrated on Chinese territory. Chinese descriptions of foreign countries continued to contain an exotic blend of mystical tales and fantasy in which foreigners were often likened to animals or birds and were described in patronizing or deliberately belittling language.

Those Chinese who chose to leave China and go overseas for trade or travel were seen as having abandoned their country; and even though an extensive Chinese trade developed with Southeast Asia, the Qing state showed no interest in standing up for Chinese rights there or elsewhere in the world. (An exception was the case of Taiwan, but that had been formally incorporated as a part of Fujian province.) The Qing were basically unin- terested in the potential governmental gains to be made from foreign trade, although they were willing to skim a certain amount off for themselves through the imperial household. They distrusted traders and—as in the 1660s—were willing to take harsh measures against their coastal popula- tions in order to achieve military or diplomatic goals. They reserved for

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themselves the absolute right to regulate foreigners trading with China, not only as to location and frequency, but down to the smallest details of per- sonnel and goods involved.

This body of Qing beliefs and practices was bound to clash with those of the Western powers, especially after the newly expanding states of Britain, France, and Holland all began to develop major overseas empires at the expense of the earlier dominant partners, Spain and Portugal. One can trace this process of cultural opposition through the gradual emergence in China of a fourth type of "foreign management" structure, commonly known as the "Canton System." In the early Qing, Dutch and Portuguese embassies both tried to establish broad trading privileges with China but had to be content with the status of "tributary nations," registered with the Ministry of Rituals and permitted to send trade missions only at stipulated intervals. British ships sporadically appeared off the east China coast beginning in 1635; and under the Qing, perhaps because the British had the sense not to seek formal relations, British merchants were permitted to trade with the Chinese in Zhoushan (Chusan), Xiamen (Amoy), and Canton. All the Western powers benefited when the Qing ended the coastal trade-restriction policy in the 1680s and the idea of their "tributary" status was generally dropped. In an attempt to control foreign trade and increase their profits by regulat- ing prices, in 1720 Chinese merchants in Canton formed their own monop- olistic guild called the Cohong (from gonghang, £ ij or "combined merchant companies"). In 1754 these "Hong" merchants were each ordered by the Qing to stand surety for the foreign crews' good behavior and for the pay- ment of transit dues.

The British East India Company, founded in 1600 and granted a monop- oly of east Indian trade by the British government, was now rising rapidly from a small operation to a position of global significance as it attracted sizable new investments and started to conquer territories in the subconti- nent of India itself. During the Qianlong reign, its directors began to chafe at Qing restrictions, as did the British government itself. In 1741, the British discovered the importance of having a Far Eastern base (the Portuguese already had Macao, the Spaniards Manila, and the Dutch Batavia) when a commodore in the Royal Navy, George Anson, on assignment to attack Spanish shipping in the East, put into Canton harbor after his flagship suffered severe storm damage. Anson apparently believed that the Chinese, following the international laws of the sea now prevalent in the West, would treat him hospitably as a benevolent neutral. But the Canton bureaucracy erected dozens of administrative hurdles, refused to meet with him or acknowledge his messages for weeks on end, charged him what he con- sidered outrageous prices for the shoddy supplies they provided, and refused

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to let him make many of the repairs he wanted. Anson's published account of his alleged mistreatment was widely circulated and translated into sev- eral European languages, helping to build a ground swell of anti-Chinese feeling in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

The East India Company tried to enlarge the scope for China trade and negotiation in 1759 by sending James Flint, a company trader who had learned Chinese, to present complaints to the Qing court concerning the restrictions on trade in Canton and the rampant corruption there. By dint of tenacity and a certain amount of bribery, Flint, sailing first to Ningbo and then to Tianjin in a small 70-ton vessel, the Success, was able to have his complaints carried to Peking. The emperor initially seemed to show flexibility, and agreed to send a commission of investigation to the south. But after the Success, sailing back to Canton, was lost at sea with all hands except for Flint (he had traveled south independently), the emperor changed his mind. Flint was arrested and imprisoned for three years for breaking Qing regulations against sailing to northern ports, for improperly present- ing petitions, and for having learned Chinese.

The Qing response to the growing number of foreign traders who began to push at their doors in the later eighteenth century was to reinforce all the preceding rules, while protesting that they wished justice done to all foreigners. All European trade was restricted to the one port of Canton after 1760, and foreigners were forbidden residence there except during the trading season, which ran each year from October to March. The Europe- ans now had to deal exclusively with the licensed Chinese Hong mer- chants—of whom there were normally around ten—despite the indulgence of many in sharp business practices and the considerable number who went bankrupt by overextending their resources. Westerners could communicate their grievances or petitions only to these Hong merchants, who in turn forwarded any written materials to the Hoppo, the court-appointed trade official. (Like Cohong, Hoppo derived from the Western pronunciation of a Chinese word—in this case, for Qing government personnel.) The Hoppo, if he chose, might then communicate with the provincial governor or with Peking; or he might, on a myriad grounds of procedure or impropriety, refuse to forward the documents at all.

It was a complex and exasperating procedure, far from the kind of dip- lomatic and commercial equality among nations that Western powers were beginning to take for granted. Tensions on both sides increased after the 1770s as British traders in particular, worried by the trade deficits that forced them to offer hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of silver bullion each year in exchange for Chinese silks, porcelains, and teas, began to ship opium grown in India to southern Chinese ports and to exchange it

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there for Chinese manufactures and produce. The stakes became higher each year as the passion for tea drinking grew in both Britain and America: by 1800, the East India Company was buying over 23 million pounds of China tea at a cost of £3.6 million. (From 1784 onward, merchants in the newly independent United States, free now to trade where they chose, began to send their ships to the lucrative China tea market directly; but they too were subjected to the restrictions that bound Europeans.)

It was near the end of Qianlong's reign that the British East India Com- pany, acting in agreement with King George Ill's government, decided to try to rectify the situation in a direction they believed was consonant with the new dignity of Britain as a world power. They selected as their emissary to China Lord George Macartney, a politically well-connected peer from Northern Ireland who had had diplomatic experience at the court of Rus- sia's Catherine the Great. Macartney had also gained practical experience as governor of Grenada in the Caribbean and administrator of the region of Madras in eastern India. The British embassy traveled in a man-of-war of 66 guns, with two support vessels, each loaded with expensive gifts designed to show the finest aspects of British manufacturing technology. Macartney was accompanied by a retinue of almost 100, including scientists, artists, guards, valets, and Chinese language teachers from the Catholic college in Naples.

Leaving London in September 1792, Macartney's ships touched briefly at Canton in June 1793, but were allowed to proceed directly to Tianjin and land there since they claimed to be saluting Qianlong on his eightieth birth- day. Once ashore, the embassy was escorted to Peking with much pomp but with the official status of "tribute emissaries." Macartney managed to persist in his refusal to prostrate himself full-length on the ground before the emperor in the ritual kowtow, agreeing instead to bow on one knee to Qianlong as he would to King George. Despite this stubbornness, Macart- ney was courteously received in September 1793 by Heshen and by the emperor at the northern summer palace of Rehe (Jehol). In his audience, Macartney asked for British rights of diplomatic residence in Peking, the ending of the restrictive Canton trading system, the opening of new ports for international commerce, and the fixing of fair and equitable tariffs. Unfailingly bland, neither the Qing emperor nor his minister would yield to any of the British requests.

Qianlong instead sent an edict to George III explaining that China would not increase its foreign commerce because it needed nothing from other countries. As Qianlong wrote, "We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country's manufactures. There- fore, O king, as regards your request to send someone to remain at the

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capital, while it is not in harmony with the regulations of the Celestial Empire we also feel very much that it is of no advantage to your country."1

Macartney had no counterforce to employ. He could only leave China by the designated land route to Canton, taking as many notes about the coun- try as he could along the way and jotting in his journal his personal view that this awesome-appearing country had grave internal weaknesses that threatened to destroy it. He drew his main metaphor, suitably enough, from the sea across which he had traveled with such cost of time and discomfort. "The Empire of China," he wrote in his journal, "is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbors merely by her bulk and appearance." But with lesser men at the helm, Macartney added, China would slowly drift until "dashed to pieces on the shore." China's opposition to British goals was ultimately futile, wrote Macartney, since it was "in vain to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge," as the Qing were doing. "The human mind is of a soaring nature and having once gained the lower steps of the ascent, struggles incessantly against every difficulty to reach the highest."2

The entire venture had cost the East India Company a small fortune, for which the company had received no return. It was not an auspicious open- ing to the era of face-to-face diplomatic relations, although Macartney him- self did nicely. He had insisted on an annual allowance of £15,000 before undertaking the venture, and had cleared a profit of over £20,000 from his mission. At least China had not stood in the way of his own personal prog- ress.

A L I E N S A N D C H I N E S E L A W

One of Lord Macartney's more interesting acquisitions in China was a copy of the Qing dynasty's legal code. When this code was brought back to England and translated by a scholar who had learned his Chinese as a member of Macartney's retinue, it made clear what had seemed probable to generations of British traders—namely, that the Chinese and the Euro- peans had very different views of what constituted "the law" and, accord- ingly, that recourse to legal expedients might exacerbate rather than lessen international tensions.

Although based on a wide range of prior experience and precedent, Chinese law was codified and interpreted by the state. There was no independent judiciary either in the provinces or in Peking: it was the county magistrate who acted as the local representative of justice. A series of reviews by the

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prefect and the judicial intendant of a given province could bring a case to the Ministry of Punishments in Peking. Appeals by plaintiffs were also possible but only within a rigorous hierarchy that culminated in a "court" of senior officiais. Death sentences did have to be reviewed by the magis- trate's superiors, and technically the emperor himself passed final judgment on all crimes meriting execution. But that was not always possible in prac- tice and often arbitrary. In local insurrections, rebels were customarily exe- cuted immediately to discourage their followers and to prevent the possibility of their being freed from jail by other dissidents. In cases involving foreign- ers, summary executions were also common.

The county magistrates acted essentially as detectives, judges, and jury. They accumulated the evidence, then evaluated it, and finally passed sen- tence. Punishments for particular crimes were prescribed in the legal code, which magistrates had to follow. Although these officials often relied on a member of their clerical staff who was allegedly "expert" in the law, there was no independent profession of law and no lawyers. Those who tried to intervene from outside in criminal cases were castigated for their interfer- ence. Suspects were routinely treated with great harshness in jail, and often beaten or tortured with wooden presses if they refused to confess. Confes- sion always preceded the "trial," the result of which was therefore a fore- gone conclusion unless some startling new exonerating evidence could be produced. Since the beatings with a heavy wooden pole sometimes used to extract confessions could lead to a suspect's death or cripple him for life, it is not surprising that many Chinese feared the legal structure, although they did use the magistrates' courts in serious disagreements over real estate, inheritances, and other economic matters.

In most other disputes the Chinese had recourse to mediators who were either respected members of the local community or leaders of influential lineage organizations. Those threatened with suit in such cases might well pay to hush a case up; and the junior personnel of the magistrate's official staff—the so-called "yamen runners"—routinely supplemented their mea- ger incomes by accepting bribes to keep matters quiet. Those accused of committing criminal acts such as theft, rape, or homicide would also try to pay their way free, with gifts to the magistrate's staff or even to the mag- istrate himself. The grim and possibly fatal experience of a stay in prison (which description, of course, applied as well to the filthy, crowded prisons of Europe at the time) could be ameliorated by regular payments to one's jailers and by distribution of food to one's fellow inmates.

The Qing penal system also maintained the hierarchical social values that were propagated through the state's Confucian teachings. Crimes against the emperor and his family were the most serious, and crimes against

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bureaucrats or state property were also severely punished—by execution or prolonged periods of exile. Within the family structure, fathers committing a given crime against their sons were punished far more lightly than sons who committed the same crime against their fathers, and the same was true of husbands harming their wives, or older relatives their younger ones. In one case in which a father killed his son by burying him alive, the Ministry of Punishments carefully reviewed the facts and concluded that the gover- nor had acted wrongly in sentencing the father to be beaten for the crime. Fathers who killed sons should be beaten only if they had acted "unreason- ably," argued the ministry. In this case, the son had used foul language at his father, an act that deserved the death penalty: "Thus, although the killing was done intentionally, it was the killing of a son who had commit- ted a capital crime by reviling his father."3 The father was acquitted.

Had the Ministry of Punishments not intervened, the father could have avoided punishment nonetheless. After trial and sentencing, a great many punishments could be commuted for cash, depending on the severity of the offense: Vi tael of silver for twenty blows with the bamboo, 3 taels for sixty blows, 10 taels for one-and-a-half year's exile, 720 taels for perpetual ban- ishment, and 1,200 taels and up for strangulation or beheading. Although such commutations were based on sliding scales according to an individual's official rank or assumed ability to pay, the system clearly benefited the wealthy, to whom such sums were comparatively trivial. For a poor peasant or urban worker they might constitute several weeks or even years of income. Furthermore, those scholars who had passed the lower-level Confucian examinations were exempt from corporal punishment and, hence, escaped the fearsome beatings that often forced confessions from terrified common- ers.

The Qing judicial structure received reinforcement from a community mutual-responsibility system known as the baojia. A bao, a group of 1,000 households, consisted of 10 jia, each of which contained 100 households. All Chinese households were supposed to be registered in jia and bao groups and supervised by a "headman" chosen from among their own number on a rotating system. These headmen were expected to check on the accuracy of each household's registration forms, which listed family members by gender, age, relationship, and occupation, and to ensure local law and order. The headmen also supervised community projects such as dike repairs, crop watching, or militia operations. In cases of serious crime or suspected rebel- lion, these men called in help from the magistrate's office. The headmen were also meant to enforce prompt tax payments from the members of their own baojia. Their job was difficult, frustrating, and sometimes dangerous; in many communities, the system grew moribund because no one wanted

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to serve as headman. But of most importance to foreigners was the overall concept represented by the baojia—namely, that members of a given com- munity were all responsible for the good order of that community and that neighbors or friends of guilty parties might be held equally liable for illegal acts and penalized for them.

Although China's penal system was harsh, its standard of law and order was probably comparable to that prevalent in Europe or the United States at the time. But there was really no room within the system for special treatment of foreigners. In all routine matters, foreigners fell within the jurisdiction either of the Lifan Yuan, the Ministry of Rituals, the Hoppos, or the imperial household. If they transgressed, the Chinese assumption, at least initially, was that they would be handled by the Chinese courts in the conventional way.

Several cases in which the crews of foreign ships accidentally killed Chinese show that the local Qing authorities were at first content to accept cash payments in restitution. In Kangxi's reign, Qing authorities demanded 5,000 taels after the crew of a British ship killed a Chinese near Canton harbor in 1689. When the British counteroffer of 2,000 taels was rejected, the ship abandoned its trading plans and sailed away. At the end of the reign, in 1722, the Chinese accepted 2,000 taels from the captain of the King George after his gunner's mate accidentally killed a Chinese boy while out hunting. In 1754, when an English sailor was killed by a Frenchman in Canton, Qing officials showed their determination to intervene in cases occurring within their jurisdiction even when no Chinese were involved. All trade with France was stopped until the French officers yielded up the killer. Ironically, the killer was shortly thereafter released because the emperor Qianlong, to celebrate the twentieth year of his reign and the Qing victories in the Zunghar wars, had ordered a general amnesty for all convicted crim- inals.

More ominous for Westerners were a number of legal cases that occurred in the later years of Qianlong's reign, after the cementing of the Cohong monopoly. In 1773 the Portuguese authorities in Macao tried an English- man who had allegedly killed a Chinese; they found him innocent and released him. But Qing officials, insisting on their right to intervene in homicide cases in which the victim was Chinese, retried the Englishman and had him executed. Seven years later, Qing authorities successfully reas- serted their right to intervene in cases in which foreigners killed foreigners on Chinese soil: a Frenchman who had killed a Portuguese sailor in a fight was forced out of his refuge with the French consul and publicly executed by strangulation.

The two cases that made the greatest impact on Western thinking and

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forced a serious reconsideration of how to deal with the Qing at the inter- national diplomatic level were those involving two trading vessels, the Lady Hughes and the Emily. The first of these occurred in 1784, nine years before Lord Macartney's embassy arrived in China. The Lady Hughes, one of the so-called "country ships"—that is, owned by private business interests but trading between India and China under license to the British East India Company—fired a salute near Canton, and the discharge from the shot killed two Chinese bystanders. When the captain of the Lady Hughes declared to the Chinese that he could not tell which gunner had fired the fatal shot, the Chinese, following their ideas concerning mutual responsibility, arrested the ship's business manager. They also threatened to cancel all trade with the West. In an attempt to cow the Chinese, the crews of most foreign ships then trading at Canton—British, French, Danish, Dutch, and the first Americans in Chinese waters, from the New York-registered Empress of China—took up arms and posted themselves around their warehouses on shore. But the Chinese stood firm. Facing disruption of all trade and the possible execution of the business manager, the Lady Hughes surrendered the gunner probably responsible. He was strangled in January 1785.

The case of the United States merchant ship Emily, which occurred in 1821, was the first to involve American interests in a central way. A crew member on the Emily (ironically, he was named Terranova, "New World" in English) dropped an earthenware pitcher onto the head of a Chinese fruit seller in a boat below; she fell overboard and drowned. When the Chinese demanded Terranova's surrender, the Americans at first held firm, insisting that the trial be held on the ship. But after the Qing ordered the cessation of all American trade in the Canton region, the captain of the Emily wavered, perhaps because his ship had a hold full of illegal opium, which he feared would be confiscated. Terranova was handed over to the Chinese authorities. At a trial at which no Westerners were allowed, he was found guilty, and executed the next day. This sentence and the rapidity of the execution violated Qing procedures in cases of accidental homicide.

Cumulatively these trials, clashes, and executions convinced Western nations that the Chinese must be compelled to yield up jurisdiction over cases involving foreign nationals. Yet this was the very point on which the Chinese sought to hold firm. Misunderstanding helped fuel the dispute, for the com- plexity of the Qing legal position could not be fully gauged from a quick perusal of their statutes; it demanded careful study, which few Westerners were then equipped to give. Moreover, the legal position of foreigners in China had evolved over time. Under Ming-dynasty law, for instance, it had been declared that "all aliens who commit offenses shall be sentenced according to the Chinese Penal Code," if such offenses took place on Chinese

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soil. The Qing, in 1646, amended this to read that "all aliens who come to submit themselves to the government of the empire shall, when they com- mit offenses, be sentenced according to the Chinese Penal Code," implying full obedience from all foreigners who sought to trade with China. In Emperor Yongzheng's reign, another change placed those aliens in areas supervised by the Lifan Yuan—Zunghars, Mongols, Russians—under that bureau's legal control, leaving all other aliens subject to the Chinese penal code on the grounds that since "they have attached themselves to the empire, when they commit offenses they should be punished just as ordinary Chinese subjects."4

Finally, in an attempt to streamline cases involving foreigners, the Min- istry of Punishments, while pledging itself to fairness under the law, added in 1743 that in alien cases the procedures "concerning detention and obtain- ing a confession" need not "conform to the pattern followed in the inte- rior."5 Chinese officials believed that by making these changes they were "deferring to barbarian wishes," and such might indeed have been the case in the 1740s and 1750s. By the 1820s, however, the law as amended was perceived by Westerners as depriving them of the appellate review, and the mitigations and commutations that ordinary Chinese defendants could expect as a right under the conventional code.

It was not only foreigners who began to protest that Chinese law was inadequate. From a diametrically opposite point of view, Chinese gentry and commoners grew exasperated by Qing officials' weakness in the face of foreign demands for certain exemptions and special treatment. When in 1807 brawling sailors from the British ship Neptune killed two Chinese, Qing officials and the British taipan (trade supervisor) worked out a com- promise by which a scapegoat was produced. They subsequently charged him with accidental homicide and permitted him to redeem his sentence for 12.42 taels in accordance with the commutation table of the Qing code. In what seems to have been a concerted campaign, placards were posted all over Canton accusing the Qing of selling out to the "foreign devils." The initiators of that campaign are unknown, but they were sounding a theme that was to become a central one in the gradual emergence of a new force in Chinese history: antiforeign nationalism.

O P I U M

The captain of the Emily, in offering up the sailor Terranova to Chinese justice so that the ship's cargo of opium could be safeguarded, was very much a figure of his times. Over the previous century, the growing demand

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in Europe and America for Chinese teas, porcelain, silks, and decorative goods had not been matched by any growth in Chinese demand for West- ern exports such as cotton and woolen goods, furs, clocks and other mechanical curiosities, tin, and lead. The result was a serious balance-of-payments problem for the West. Westerners had to pay for Chinese goods mainly in silver, and this steady flow of silver into China—one of the causes of the general prosperity in Qianlong's reign—became a source of alarm to the British government. In the decade of the 1760s, for example, silver flow into Qing China exceeded 3.0 million taels; in the 1770s, the total grew to 7.5 million, and by the 1780s, 16.0 million taels. By the late eighteenth century, however, the British had developed an alternative product to exchange in China for Chinese goods: opium. Although the trade was subject to severe fluctua- tions, figures for sales of opium to China show the overall trend with bleak clarity. Each chest contained between 130 and 160 pounds of opium, depending on the area of origin, so that by the 1820s enough opium was coming into China to sustain the habits of around 1 million addicts. When one adds to this supply a certain amount of domestically grown opium (although this was still on a very small scale), one can begin to sense the extent of China's opium problem.

For opium to sell steadily in China, several factors were necessary: the narcotic had to be available in large quantities; there had to be a developed means of consuming it; enough people had to want to smoke it to make the trade viable, and government attempts at prohibitions had to be inef- fectual. It was the conjunction of all these elements that brought China into this particularly agonizing cycle of its modern history.

BRITISH SALES OF O P I U M

TO CHINA6

Year

1729 1750 1773 1790 1800 1810 1816 1823 1828 1832

Number

200 600

1,000 4,054 4,570 4,968 5,106 7,082 13,131 23,570

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The British conquest of large areas of India first spurred the organized production and sale of opium. At the instigation of the East India Compa- ny's directors, and speeded by the brilliant generalship of Robert Clive and the administrative skills of Governor-General Warren Hastings, between 1750 and 1800 the British had gained control of much of northern India, from Bombay in the west to Calcutta in the east, and with additional bases in the south at Madras (where Lord Macartney had once served as gover- nor). Eager to find a cash crop that would earn revenue through export sales, the British discovered that the opium poppy grew especially luxu- riantly in certain areas of India. Moreover, there was an abundant supply of labor to collect the sap from the incised poppy pods and to process it (by boiling) into the thick paste that was best for smoking.

The East India Company established a monopoly for the purchase of Indian opium and then sold licenses to trade in opium to selected Western merchants known as the "country traders," preferring this indirect means of profit making to getting directly involved in the shipment of the narcotic. Having sold their opium in China, the country traders deposited the silver they received in payment with company agents in Canton in exchange for letters of credit; the company, in turn, used the silver to buy tea, porcelain, and other Chinese goods for sale in Britain. Thus a triangular trade of goods from Britain to India, India to China, and China to Britain devel- oped, at each step of which high profits could be made.

The consumption of opium was perhaps a simpler aspect of the process. History offers examples of many ways of taking opium derivatives—from steeping them in potions or smoking them mixed with other herbs, to the concentrated morphine tablets of the late nineteenth century and the heroin injections of our own day. The style of opium smoking favored in China— heating a tiny globule of refined opium paste over a flame and then smok- ing it from the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe—may have been initially popular because tobacco smoking had become a craze in the early Qing. Tobacco plants had been introduced into Fujian province from Latin America and had spread swiftly from there to Shandong and other parts of China. In scrolls from Kangxi's reign, scores of Chinese smoking tobacco pipes can be seen strolling down city streets; and the brand names of popular varieties were displayed in front of stores. The practice of smoking opium mixed with tobacco probably came to China in the 1720s, brought there by troops returning home from Taiwan after having suppressed Zhu Yigui's rebel- lion of 1721. By the middle of Qianlong's reign, detailed accounts of the drug and how to prepare it for consumption were available to anyone who could read. Small public rooms where, for a few coppers, people could get a pipeful of opium and smoke it as they reclined in comfort brought the drug in reach of urban dwellers and the poor.

C H I N A A N D T H E E I G H T E E N T H-C E N T U R Y W O R L D 1 3 1

Why did the Chinese of the mid- and late Qing begin to smoke so much opium? Since there is no contemporary Chinese literature on this, we can only speculate; but we know that the taking of opium derivatives has the effect of slowing down and blurring the world around one, of making time stretch and fade, of shifting complex or painful realities to an apparently infinite distance. Chinese documents of the time suggest that opium appealed initially to groups confronting boredom or stress. Eunuchs caught in the ritualized web of court protocol smoked opium, as did some of the Manchu court officials, who often had sinecures or virtually pointless jobs in the palace bureaucracy. Women in wealthy households, deprived of opportu- nities for education and forbidden to travel outside the walls of their homes, smoked opium. Secretaries in the harried magistrates' offices smoked, as did merchants preparing for business deals and students preparing for— and even taking—the state examinations. Soldiers on their way into combat against groups of rural rebels smoked.

Later on in the nineteenth century the practice spread, especially among the leisured classes seeking a means of social relaxation. Coolie laborers also began to take opium, either by smoking it or by licking tiny pellets of the drug, to overcome the drudgery and pain of hauling huge loads day after day. (Shrewd yet ruthless employers, observing that the coolies could carry heavier loads if they were under the influence of opium, even made the drug available to their workers.) By the end of the nineteenth century, many peasants also became addicts, particularly those who themselves had begun to grow the poppies as a cash crop to supplement their tiny incomes.

The Qing government was not sure how to handle the problem. As we saw above, Yongzheng, the first emperor to pronounce on the narcotic, was aware that there was a legitimate need for opium as a medicinal drug—it could be particularly valuable in stemming the effects of diarrhea or dys- entery—but that nonmedicinal uses of opium seemed to be harmful. His compromise was an uneasy one in which "pushing" the drug to potential users and running public opium dens were strictly punished, while "medic- inal" sales continued openly.

During the eighteenth century, most of the wholesale opium purchases were handled by the Cohong merchants. But the trade became more indi- rect after 1800, when an edict forbade both opium imports and domestic opium production in China, and especially after 1813, when further edicts banned opium smoking altogether. Chinese smokers could be punished with 100 blows of the bamboo and with the public wearing of the "cangue," a heavy wooden collar, for a month or more. The Cohong merchants no longer dared deal in opium, but foreign traders found that if they anchored at selected spots off the China coast, there were plenty of Chinese adven- turers willing to come out and purchase their opium stocks. Large fortified

1 3 2 C O N Q U E S T A N D C O N S O L I D A T I O N

hulks anchored off Lintin Island in the bay below Canton also formed a convenient distribution point for the drug. Sailing or rowing in swift, shallow- draft boats, Chinese dealers could elude all attempts by the sparse provincial Qing naval forces to intercept them. Thereafter they distributed the opium through the network of local trade routes, by road, river, and track.

As the Qing government tried to enforce its ban by punishing pushers severely and rigorously questioning smokers as to their sources of supply, those involved in opium deals grew more circumspect, covering their trail through numerous intermediaries. The 1831 transcript of an arrested court eunuch's testimony to officials in the imperial household succinctly illus- trates this:

At first we bought the opium we smoked in small quantities directly from the Muslim Zhu Da. Then I learned that when the sea vessels came into Tianjin the opium pills got cheaper, so I asked Kekesibuku for a loan of 100 strings of local cash, and I also sold my mule cart for money. I took my servant Qin Baoquan with me to Tianjin, and got Qin's old friend Yang Huiyuan to act as my agent. Yang bought 160 ounces of opium from Zhang for 240 strings of cash. I gave Yang a commission of 3.8 strings of cash.7

If the Qing authorities ever did pursue this case with vigor, they might have gotten past the two intermediaries and reached the local pusher, Zhang. But Zhang himself was probably only a small dealer, and by the time he was arrested the larger distributors and the foreign vessels that supplied them would long since have gone on their way.

W E S T E R N I M A G E S O F C H I N A

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, China generally received favor- able attention in the West. In large part this stemmed from the wide dis- semination of books and published correspondence by Catholics, especially the Jesuits, who saw in the huge population of China a potential harvest of souls for the Christian faith. Although mindful of some of China's prob- lems, most Catholic observers followed the example of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who had lived in China from 1583 to 1610 and admired the industry of China's population, the sophistication of the country's bureau- cracy, the philosophical richness of its cultural traditions, and the strength of its rulers.

The French Jesuits, who dominated the China missions late in Kangxi's reign, presented an even more laudatory picture of the early Qing state, one deliberately designed to appeal to the "Sun King," Louis XIV, and to per-