Restless Empire (30 page)

The most remarkable advances in learning in modern China took place in physics, chemistry, and biology. The preconditions for these were a combination of translations of Western texts, foreign teachers, good basic training programs, and the opportunity to study abroad. Some historians of science also argue that China was well placed to benefit from the latest advances in science because it had no traditional approaches that stood in the way of new ideas. As soon as Western science was adopted, it was all fresh and new. The acceptance of relativity in physics is a good example of this: When Albert Einstein visited China in 1922 at Cai Yuanpei’s invitation, his principles were already accepted
by most Chinese. The leading Chinese physicist of the next generation, Wu Dayou, who was also at PKU, trained a whole string of Chinese scientists who would go on to global recognition, including Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 for their discoveries regarding elementary particles. In less than fifty years, Chinese science had gone through a remarkable transformation.

Advances in learning were in no way limited to science. During the early twentieth century the Chinese language itself went through a fundamental change, inspired by foreign models. Classical Chinese, a written language for the elite with no spoken equivalent, was gradually replaced by
baihua,
plain speech, a vernacular based on Beijing dialect. Although there had been some vernacular writing around for at least two centuries, it was the Bible translations of the late nineteenth century that popularized the practice. In many ways the defeat of classical Chinese was the last great clash between opponents and supporters of foreign influence. The opponents of the reform argued that China would lose its culture by adopting a new type of language. The proponents, who gradually won in the 1920s, based their positions on a new form of Chinese nationalism, as set forth by Hu Shi during his studies at Cornell in 1916:

What we need today is a readable, audible, singable, speakable, dictatable language which we can read aloud without the need to translate into the spoken language, with the help of which we can take notes without the need to translate into the literary language, which we can use at the speaker’s desk as well as on the stage, and which even village grannies, women and children can understand if we read it to them. Any language that does not meet these requirements is not a living language and can under no circumstances become the national language of our country.
³⁰

The debate over language is characteristic of the debates that surrounded Chinese learning in the early part of the twentieth century.
Different groups wanted to move in very different directions, often under the influence of different foreign ideas. Some scholars suggested abolishing Chinese altogether and replacing it with English as a national language. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Qu Qiubai was making a phonetic alphabet, based on Soviet inventions for its Asian republics, which eventually became today’s romanized version of Chinese. Of course, China was not unique in having to deal with a classical heritage under modern circumstances—Greece and the Arab world also come to mind. But the solution imposed in China was typical of its approach to modernity: replacing its written language with the transcribed speech of the capital, thereby making learning both more difficult and more accessible at the same time.

Contact with the rest of the world also changed forever the roles of Chinese women and the family. Though their relative position had differed from region to region and between different social groups, women in Qing China were subservient within a patriarchal system that favored fathers, husbands, and first-born sons. Usually denied education outside the household, they were limited to reproduction and housekeeping, often under the supervision of a depreciating mother-in-law or a husband they had not chosen. Even if China was ruled by a woman for forty years—the Empress Dowager Cixi—there was no recognition during her time that the overall position of women should be changed. The conservative Cixi, it was said, willingly took on the role of everyone’s least favorite mother-in-law. By the late nineteenth century, however, Chinese were learning about women’s emancipation in the West. Young elite female nationalists, often educated in missionary schools, began insisting on new roles for themselves in society and politics. For many traditionally minded Chinese, female emancipation was the most disastrous part of foreign influence; it destroyed the family, and would, they believed, therefore also destroy China.

Much of the early agitation in China for women’s rights was connected to
political
rights. Both male and female activists believed that
the position of women would improve if they were given an opportunity to participate in creating a new state based on the nationalist agenda. Qiu Jin, an anti-Qing cross-dressing, sword-wielding revolutionary who was executed in 1907, symbolized this trend. She thought that after the Qing was overthrown, women would gain their rightful role in society. Later feminists—female or male—were not so optimistic. In the May Fourth era, Chinese
society
was seen as the root of the problem, irrespective of the state that ruled it. Institutions such as arranged marriages and patriarchal control came under attack, inspired by foreign ideas. In a famous essay on Henrik Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House,
Lu Xun pondered where Nora went after she left home and concluded that the economic independence of women was the key to change in society. Mao Zedong, who himself had been in an unhappy arranged marriage, attacked all such pacts. In 1919, he wrote about a young girl who had killed herself before her wedding: “In the Western family organization, father and mother recognize the free will of their sons and daughters. Not so in China. . . . The parents of Miss Zhao very clearly forced her to love someone she did not want to love. . . ; that is a form of rape. . . .Chinese parents all indirectly rape their sons and daughters.”
³¹

Relationships between Chinese and foreigners also put pressure on the family system. In the nineteenth century, some Chinese women in the cities became the lovers of foreign men, only to be left by them when the men returned home. Typical of colonial presences, these relationships were profoundly unequal, but still in many cases provided women with knowledge and wealth that they otherwise would not have had access to. In the twentieth century, many more such affairs became lasting marriages, even though negative Western attitudes toward interracial marriage persisted. In 1927 the British Commissioner of Police in Shanghai declared that “mixed marriages are not in the interest of the force.”
³²
But still such unions took place, and both Chinese and foreigners were forced to accept them. Some Chinese wives of foreign citizens became cultural interlocutors. Anna Chennault, who was born
Chen Xiangmei in 1925 and married US General Claire Chennault, has influenced Sino-American relations for fifty years. Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo married a Soviet citizen during his long exile in Russia: Faina Vakhreva, known as Jiang Fangliang, became the first lady of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

For more ordinary Chinese and Westerners, love across national and cultural borders was difficult, but increasingly common. Foreign soldiers in China married Chinese girls: 9,000 Chinese wives went with their American husbands back to the United States after World War II. A number had married at a time when US immigration laws still forbade them from ever living in their husband’s country. Some foreign wives lived with Chinese husbands in China, not only in the cities, but also in the countryside, especially in villages in Guangdong and Fujian. Mary Yue, née Ferguson, a Scottish-born New Zealander, in 1890 traveled with her children to her husband’s village in Taishan, where the children grew up. Her family was essentially transnational, part of the global China that we will discuss in the next chapter. But it was also local: The presence of foreign wives changed the villages in which they lived more than many locals would admit.
³³
Sometimes the cross-cultural strains became too much. Esther Cheo Ying, the daughter of a Chinese student at the London School of Economics and his Cockney wife, sympathized with both her parents:

It could not have been easy for my working-class mother to understand what marrying a Chinese Mandarin’s son entailed. She was too young to understand and too ignorant of the different cultures of East and West to try to conform even a little to the customs of Chinese life. My father’s family ostracized him for marrying a “foreign devil.” The odds were too great for either of these two young people to try to make the marriage work.
³⁴

In spite of the cross-cultural tensions, love between Chinese and foreigners influenced the international history of the region and the
world. Equally important was the debate in China about new forms of relationships between men and women and between generations. For some people the foreign was a threat, for others it was about freedom and opportunity. In China, these perceptions fluctuated throughout the century and up to today. Mao Zedong, whose hatred for arranged marriages helped transform the role of women in China, also attempted to cut off much of China’s interaction with the rest of the world, leaving many transnational Chinese families stranded or divided. But even Mao’s regime was unable to completely cut China’s international family ties, or reduce the worth of Chinese families. In the end family love was more important than concepts of nation, nationalism, or ideology.

T
HERE ARE MANY
, often contradictory, ways of interpreting the role of foreigners in China before 1949. Some observers focus on the exploitive colonial aspect of the relationship, which did so much to undo China’s first period of interaction with capitalist modernity. In this negative version China often is seen as regaining its autonomy and its nationhood only through the expulsion of foreigners after 1949. Others find in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950 more that is positive than negative in Chinese interaction with foreigners, and tend to emphasize that foreign interactions helped produce modern China. The discussion is not helped by the Chinese Communist government having written most foreigners (except their favorite few) out of Chinese history; my students today often do not know the degree to which China was an open country before 1949 or the key role foreigners played in China’s development. On the other hand, though, foreigners often do not understand the sense of humiliation today’s Chinese feel when they look back on the past, at least in the version they get presented: The concessions, the extraterritoriality, the financial reparations, and the haughty behavior of foreigners in China would be a bad example of international interaction for any country, but they particularly rile a generation grown up on spoonfuls of government-sanctioned nationalism.

In reality, foreigners in China played as many roles as the Chinese did. Some came there out of enthusiasm for China and its people. Some came to win souls for Christ or for commercial advantage. Some became Chinese (as some Chinese became foreign). Some came for love and some came for the need to punish and destroy. Their lives bear witness to these roles, and to how they were often combined in one person. Think, for instance, of Silas Hardoon, a Baghdadi Jew who lived in Shanghai for six decades, made his fortune in real estate development and cotton, and died the richest man in the city. A British subject (though he had never been to Britain), married to a Chinese woman (though he barely spoke her language), he was buried according to Jewish
and
Buddhist rites. Hardoon stood for everything that made empires suspicious and nationalists mad. Neither Iraqi nor Chinese nor British, he had a massive impact on China. Any nationalist attempt at writing him or other “foreigners” out of Chinese history will diminish its complex reality.

The relationship between the “Chinese” and the “foreign” in the twentieth century is also about understanding historical change, in politics as well as terminology. China did not retrieve its full sovereignty only in 1949, as is often claimed, but step by faltering step between 1925 and 1946, under a Guomindang government. It was during this period—well before the Communists took over—that customs autonomy and foreign concessions reverted to China. Its new government wanted to plan the country’s future according to nationalist principles, and resented the “chaos” that allowed foreigners and Chinese to regulate their own lives. The war against Japan and the Communist victory only put the final nails in the coffin of China’s “foreign century.”

I
N SPITE OF OFFICIAL DISAPPROVAL
, Chinese traveled, sojourned, and settled abroad in increasing numbers at the end of the Qing era. An eighteenth-century trickle turned into a nineteenth-century flood, with Southeast Asia being the main destination. Of the twenty million or so Chinese who went overseas to stay before 1949, around half in the mid-nineteenth century and more than ninety percent in the 1920s went to the countries to China’s south. The British-ruled states on the Malayan peninsula received 6 to 7 million, the Dutch East Indies 4 to 5 million, and French Indochina 2 to 4 million. Three and a half million went to Thailand and a million to the Philippines. The rest of the world, including the Americas, saw a Chinese immigration of two and a half million.

The numbers for Chinese emigration are significant, but small compared to the scale of European outward migration. While the Europeans took over and settled three continents, mostly exterminating the local population in the process, Chinese migration was limited to following commercial advantages as they arose, mostly along the trade routes set up by European empires. As a result, more than 350 million people of European origin live outside Europe today, while only 40 million people of Chinese descent live outside China. Even if one counts Chinese settlement of China’s border zones (Manchuria, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, and Tibet) the number of migrants and their offspring
is substantially lower than that for Europeans abroad. The significance of what became the Chinese diaspora is therefore not in numbers, except in parts of Southeast Asia, but in the impact these Chinese had on the countries where they came to live and, especially, in the impact they were to have on China itself.