Restless Empire (5 page)

The overall economic pattern in nineteenth-century China was what economists call uneven growth. Some parts of the economy grew quite rapidly, while others stagnated or even disappeared. Geography
became destiny as the rich coastal zones tended to get richer, even when they were temporarily held back by the effects of war, while poor areas and the periphery tended to get poorer, at least relatively speaking, and were especially vulnerable to armed conflict and the social dislocation that followed.

Uneven growth was a major factor in development of the Chinese economy during the nineteenth century, but more crucial still were Western incursions into the country, which divide the century in two halves. The establishment in the 1840s and 1850s of foreign-run capitalist nuclei inside China was key to the country’s economic development. While it would take yet another century for foreign products and methods of production to reach the majority of Chinese, and while the country’s economy would remain predominantly agricultural almost up to today, the contact with foreign lands and peoples began a profound transformation not just of products, workplaces, and consumption but of the way the Chinese thought about their economy.

This profound change was not just to take place within China; it would happen among Chinese abroad as well. Since the beginning of China’s history, its people have been leaving in search of trade, adventure, or a better life for themselves and their families. Just as with people elsewhere, a mixture of human curiosity and the search for gain have driven some to take extraordinary risks in exploring and settling unknown countries. For the Chinese, the first major wave of emigration began in the late fifteenth century, as trade with Southeast Asia expanded. The original Chinese settlements in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Java, Malaya, and Thailand were all commercial and followed the trade routes that linked China with the countries to its south. In spite of the Chinese state’s various attempts at discouraging both foreign trade and emigration—attempts at unofficial travel abroad was punishable with beheading during the early Qing dynasty—there were enough of both push and pull factors to make people want to go abroad in increasing numbers. After the Qing relaxed travel restrictions in the
mid-eighteenth century, a second wave of emigration created large Chinese towns all over Southeast Asia.

During the hundred years that followed, up to the mid-nineteenth century, at least a million people left southern China and attempted to settle in areas outside the immediate reach of the empire. This number is not large compared to the massive outward emigration of Europeans, but it had significant effects both for China and for the recipient countries. In most cases the new emigrants went to places that already had small Chinese populations and often—as in the case of emigrants elsewhere—they tried to find kinsmen from their home region, village, or clan. In some regions of Thailand and Java, new immigrants outnumbered the local people. While intermarriage with locals started almost immediately, many Chinese families have kept their distinctly Chinese identity up to our own time. They have formed strong social and trade networks, linking their home regions in China with the areas where they settled.

Patterns of emigration changed after 1850, as the Qing state became increasingly weak. Because of new contacts with foreigners and the disappearance of emigration control, Chinese began leaving for new regions and for new purposes. In addition to the large numbers leaving for Southeast Asia, the new destinations between 1850 and 1875 included Hawaii, the United States, and Canada (seventeen percent of all Chinese emigrants combined), Cuba (eleven percent), and Peru (nine percent). Those who left were often contracted to foreign companies and went to work in plantation agriculture or mining. In most cases it was a tougher life than earlier emigrants had experienced. But then life at home was tougher still, making for large numbers of people who were willing to take the risk of moving, at least temporarily, to foreign parts.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of China’s emigrants came from the south, especially the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Emigration from these parts created a kind of pendant to the establishment of Western strongholds inside these
regions of China, through which people from the coastal areas of the south were doubly linked to the expanding world economy. The emigrants served that economy at home, as traders, workers, and consumers. They also manned the new trade routes, using their local knowledge to carve out an often precarious role for themselves among foreign traders and colonists. By the late nineteenth century, all over the eastern parts of Asia and in some parts of the Americas as well, it was Chinese labor and Chinese tradesmen who provided the glue that kept both the local and the trade economies together. These diasporic communities were to play decisive roles in China’s foreign affairs and sometimes in China’s own history. They established a global China—often frowned upon by Westerners and Chinese alike—and served in key roles as middlemen, transmitting practices and ideas between alien worlds.

C
HINESE GOING ABROAD ENTERED
into a complex world of competing ethnic and social groups, rival cultures, and chaotic forms of governance, but the situation they left behind in China was also complicated in terms of identifications and representations. We now know that the populations in and around the Chinese core area have defined themselves ethnically in many different ways over the past 5,000 years. The group that today increasingly sees itself as “Han” Chinese, and which the present Chinese government believes includes up to ninety-two percent of the people who live in their country (and almost twenty percent of the global population), originated in the central northern areas of today’s China, mostly along the Yellow river, and became the culturally dominant group for a much larger area in the Han Dynasty from around 200 BC. During and after that dynasty its culture spread to other parts of what is currently China, especially the south and the west. Some of this dissemination occurred through conquest, some by assimilation, and some—especially after the breakdown of the Han empire—by involuntary migration from the core areas. The Sinification of south China was to a large degree a product of refugees from the north
who fled the collapse of the northern states in the post-Han era. By 1800 this process of cultural and ethnic unification was well advanced (although in some parts of the country it is still continuing today).
¹

For the Qing state, ethnicity was a troublesome issue. The imperial family had its own origins in a non-Chinese population, termed the Manchu, and liked (at least when it served its purposes) to flaunt its “otherness.” The cohesion of the inner group within the Qing project to some extent depended on its setting itself apart from the ocean of Chinese over which it ruled. But at the same time the Qing state was an empire, comprised of a myriad of different groups within its realm, and worked out a complicated set of rules for how to deal with each of them. Some of these defined groups were identified according to language and culture, such as the Manchus themselves, Mongols, or Tibetans, or the multifarious populations of the south, such as the Miao (called Hmong in Indochina), Bai, or Dai (Thai). Others were seen through the prism of religion: Muslims who were culturally Chinese, Kazakhs who happened to be Lamaist Buddhists, and the variety of religious practices among groups in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, or Taiwan. Most Qing emperors struggled bravely to extend their knowledge of all these groups, including their languages and religions, but even the hard-working Qianlong had to admit that he sometimes got his Kazakhs mixed up with his Turks and therefore could not treat them all according to the established protocol of the Qing.

Definitions were not easy. Even the elites among those who were defined as the numerically dominant population—those who possessed Chinese written culture, Confucian social organization, and ancestral links to the Chinese heartland—would in the early nineteenth century have found it difficult to define exactly what a “Chinese” person was. Since China had no concept of nation similar to what was slowly being developed in Europe, terms such as “us” and “our land” referred to one’s villages, region, or province and not to the country—to an even greater extent than what was common among peasants further west in Eurasia.

Core Chinese culture was not exclusive. The imperial examinations, the essential prerequisite for serving the empire, remained remarkably open up to the late nineteenth century. The elites of all groups could put their best sons forward, as long as they had embraced Chinese culture and were willing to keep their beliefs and ethnicity to themselves. The empire pretended to be universal and the key to all meaningful civilization. But for most people, as an ancient saying goes, “Heaven is high and the emperor far away”: While accepting the legitimacy of the imperial state, their primary identities were local or clan-oriented.

There is no simple answer to the question of what it meant to be Chinese during this period. Most people had multiple identities. Judging from written testimony, it was quite possible to be a little bit Chinese, a larger portion Sichuanese or Cantonese, and a servant of the empire (or its sworn enemy) all within the span of a day. Identities and loyalties were much like the eclectic religion practiced in country temples all over China. There were many deities and many forms of worship, but what was closest to you were your ancestors and your local heroes, symbolizing your land and your ancestral village. And if at the heart of the empire, identities were complex, they were transmuted at its edges. People could be very Chinese one day and much less so the next, depending on what opportunities or protection China gave them.

So, who were foreigners in the Chinese view? The answer depended of course on whom you asked. For most of those who lived in or originated from the Chinese core area, foreigners were people who were not culturally Chinese, even though the definition of “culturally Chinese” was itself highly contested. Lacking a modern nationalism—and living under a dynasty that at times prided itself on its foreignness, a narrow definition of what was
nei
(inside) or
wai
(outside) was not fruitful for people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. Yet the Qing inherited from earlier states a value system that the Chinese often called
Huayiguan
, meaning—in a cultural context—“Chinese superior, others
inferior.” Over centuries this worldview had influenced the Chinese eye in seeing other peoples and their behavior. As a form of cultural ethnocentrism, it was probably stronger at the time than any similar European phenomenon, not least because it had been shared for half a millennium or more by large parts of the elites of China’s immediate neighbors.

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Chinese view of foreigners was influenced by two main sources: Chinese travelers who returned from abroad and foreigners who settled in China. From the former came a number of written accounts of foreign lands. In most cases these books were stories retold several times over, and—like volumes published in Europe, especially in the eighteenth century—they often commented as much on China as on the ostensible subject of their investigations. In general they represented the empire as being at the center of three concentric circles. Immediately outside the center were the peoples and countries on the edges of China—those colonized and those influenced by Chinese civilization. The second circle contained those who were outside Chinese culture, but still, at least occasionally, paid tribute to the emperor. The third included those who had no relationship with China and its civilization, unknown peoples of whom only few accounts existed. Perhaps not surprisingly, those farthest away from the core were represented as the most strange and barbaric. Tales of madcap beliefs, sexual perversions, and cannibalism abounded. “Outer barbarians” smelled bad, dressed inappropriately, and were strange in appearance. In some cases these “wild men” were closer to animals than to humans. For such peoples, the Qing state believed in the ancient saying of “leaving them outside, not inviting them in, not governing or educating them, not recognizing their countries.”
²

China’s knowledge of the geographical world increased sharply in the eighteenth century. Although Asian geography had been mapped since the twelfth century and a succession of complete European world maps had been available at least since the late sixteenth century, it was during Qianlong’s reign that scholars began to incorporate a more accurate sense
of where Europe was and what it looked like into their publications. Whereas all imperial cartography up to the mid-1800s understandably centered on the world with which China interacted—the magnificent ten-volume
Huang Qing zhigongtu
(Chart of the Tribute-Bearing People of the Imperial Qing, from 1761) is a good case in point—newer atlases included more information on European countries, some of it quite accurate. In 1794 the geographer Zhuang Tingfu printed a scroll that not only gave an exact account of Europe’s geography but discussed the countries there and the relationships between them. A masterful cultural compromise, Zhuang’s work puts China at the center of the earth, while praising Western cartography as an instrument in the world-historical process of allowing all peoples to pay homage at the imperial court.
³
As in the West, mapmaking in imperial China was not just about accurate renditions but about centrality, culture, and power.

In the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, images of foreigners in China blended stereotypes of those well-known through Asian land-borders with those of the emerging sea-based periphery. In ways similar to the European encounter with peoples from the outer world, the definitions of what was civilized or barbaric behavior were seen through a prism of judgments already established in dealing with European “others.” It is remarkable to see the degree to which traits already assigned to Mongols or Kazakhs reappear in early Chinese descriptions of the Dutch or Swedes. Just as established stereotypes of the Irish often were transferred by English writers to Native Americans or Africans, Chinese stereotypes of the known world were transferred onto the newly emerging one. As China’s world was becoming bigger, its ethnographers tried to explain it by recognizable though slightly shopworn habits of mind. When more became known about them, Europeans were established as “wild men” of new kind. They were China’s “others”—faraway peoples who were the objects of Chinese “occidentalism,” fascinating because they were different, threatening because they were outside the realm of civilization.