The Immobile Empire
Peyrefitte, Alain
THE IMMOBILE EMPIRE Alain Peyrefitte Alfred A. Knopf/630 pages / $30 reviewed by WILLIAM McGURN A mong certain sinophiles it has the ill-fated embassy of George always been popular to...
...T his is the fuller story of the expedition, and Peyrefitte tells it well, without condescension, weaving the various accounts into a compelling (if at times contradictory) narrative...
...Another liberal nostrum deflated...
...for the Chinese, it was the defense of the old rituals, long ago established once and for all, that lay at the very foundations of civilization itself...
...The two countries lived in different mental universes," writes the author, "and the more contact there was between them, the less inclined either was to accept the other's point of view...
...But those who attribute the failure of the Macartney mission to British arrogance and insensitivity overlook one decisive factor: China herself...
...In so doing he also demonSir Percy Cradock, who are daily trooped strates that the dispute over the kowtow out by the press to urge the more subtle that came to a head in the wee hours of Chinese conceptions of the law upon the September 14, 1793, extended far beyond new governor of Hong Kong...
...And so history records the rest...
...superficial touchiness" to the collision of But now another Frenchman has final- two mutually exclusive civilizations: ly laid this old chestnut to rest...
...At the time of the Macartney expedition, however, he was but 11 years old, serving as Macartney's page, and where his elders were inclined to gild the diplomatic lily, young Thomas's boyish candor has been a boon to historians...
...Or does it...
...But for the observations of French and Portuguese this unforgivable breach of etiquette, the Jesuits resident in Peking, and 420 pages argument goes, China might have ultimate- from the imperial records—complete with ly been induced to look with favor upon Emperor Qianlong's vermilion responses British petitions...
...For the British, it was the refusal of a people who felt borne by the wings of history to humble themselves...
...Eventually the Chinese came to believe it themselves...
...But what gives the book its special twist is the author's liberal use of the diary kept by George Staunton's young son...
...Almost a half century later, Thomas Staunton, by then a member of Parliament and England's foremost China expert, would rise in support of the First Opium War...
...The maddening irony is that Macartney was not exaggerating the advantages to China itself from a more normal intercourse between the two great empires...
...The impasse of protocol masked a confrontation of two different worlds...
...In The Immobile Empire, former Gaullist diplo- Deep convictions were at issue—respect mat Alain Peyrefitte recounts the story of for cosmic order on one side, sense of honor on the other...
...misguided interference by junior of72 The American Spectator November 1993 ficials...
...All this is plausible enough...
...That each considered itself ("and not without good reason," says Peyrefitte) the apex of civilization only intensified the conflict and made it less likely that either would, or could, give way...
...Like it or not," says Peyrefitte, "to perform it was to be incorporated into the Celestial hierarchy...
...The occasional allusion to his own diplomatic experience with China as an envoy for Charles de Gaulle too lends a welcome tartness...
...The first Englishman to learn Chinese, Thomas could hardly have helped but notice the Chinese interpretation of their visit on the banners that greeted their arrival throughout the kingdom: "Envoy Paying Tribute to the Great Emperor...
...Sons of the Enlightenment both, the two men believed, along with their superiors, that a high-level delegation would bring the Chinese to their senses...
...To the contrary, he takes pains to demonstrate the cross-purposes at which the Chinese and British protagonists worked, how the underlying logic of their respective cultures propelled them toward a showdown...
...nor, as the Chinese believed, was it a matter of barbarian ignorance...
...The Chinese, alas, had no such understanding...
...Hence the impossibility of exchanging ambassadors (which implied equality) and theinevitable clash over the kowtow...
...Are we any wiser...
...Two centuries after Macartney, says Peyrefitte, "we know more about the motives of the two sides than they did themselves, for we are confidants of both, and of history itself...
...Europeans had been trading with China for some time, but they did so under onerous constraints: confined to Canton, restricted to certain seasons, forced to deal through extortionist middlemen...
...and Sir George Staunton, who had been Macartney's deputy on his last two postings...
...The disagreement William McGurn is senior editor of the was not due, as the British imagined, to Far Eastern Economic Review...
...Macartney was willing to go down on one knee, as he would to his own monarch, and he hoped this would suffice...
...And so George III dispatched two brilliant envoys to press the case for more open trade before the Celestial Court: George Macartney, former ambassador to Russia and onetime governor of colonies in Madras and the Caribbean...
...Qianlong had turned down every one of the British requests—for normalized trade, for access to more ports, for a permanent embassy in Peking, etc...
...Had his embassy achieved its relatively modest aims, the whole unhappy sequence of events that followed might have been avoided: no opium wars...
...On October 3 Macartney received the Emperor's response to the letter he had delivered from George III...
...As the banners implied, the Chinese lacked any concept of equal, sovereign nationhood...
...THE IMMOBILE EMPIRE Alain Peyrefitte Alfred A. Knopf/630 pages / $30 reviewed by WILLIAM McGURN A mong certain sinophiles it has the ill-fated embassy of George always been popular to date Macartney, commissioned by George III Britain's unhappy relations with to open China to Western (read: British) China to Lord Macartney's refusal, 200 trade and all its attendant benefits...
...Even when they were ultimately frustrated in their task, the British continued to rule out the possibility that the Chinese had reached their own conclusions, and insteadattributed their failure to the sabotage of malignant officials...
...In itself China's wholesale refusal is not remarkable...
...Not only did the Emperor's court rank commerce at the bottom of the social order, it perceived—quite correctly—that such commerce was inimical to the perpetuation of a status quo that had held for centuries...
...Save for some tired observations on colonialism—whose treatment as a solely Western phenomenon is especially odd in light of China's more virulent strainPeyrefitte tells his tale well...
...But there was no middle ground...
...According to the official 'version of events in China's imperial archives, "when the Ambassador entered His Majesty's presence, he was so overcome with awe and nervousness that his legs gave way under him so that he grovelled abjectly on the ground, to all intents and purposes performing an involuntary kowtow...
...N of that Peyrefitte takes the British line...
...In the end, however, The Immobile Empire owes its strength to an old-fashioned, never-fail formula: a rollicking good story told by a serious man of letters in a superb translation—with obvious and immediate parallels for today...
...7:1 The American Spectator November 1993 73...
...In their cosmos, China was the fabled kingdom mid-way between heaven and earth, to which all other states were by definition vassals...
...It was a view shared by in the margins—Peyrefitte paints a vivid Napoleon, and echoes might still be heard portrait of the Chinese and British actors today in the comments of impatient busi- involved and the issues that would ever nessmen and Foreign Office types such as divide them...
...But Peyrefitte discloses that the draft of Qianlong's reply had been ready a full week before Macartney's audience before the imperial court...
...years ago this past September, to perform Drawing on the first-hand recollections of the ritual kowtow in that first fateful diplo- fifteen eyewitnesses from the British side, matic encounter with the emperor...
...In a nation where custom and worldview constituted an inseparable whole, to agree to the ritual bow to the emperor was to concede inferiority, not offer a sign of respect...
...Unlike Britain, China was "quintessentially scornful of the merchant, suspicious of business and dismissive of foreign inventions...
...L ord Macartney set off from Portsmouth harbor on the morning tide of September 26, 1792, bound for the Middle Kingdom...
...indeed, no Hong Kong and no 1997, maybe even no Communist Party...
...With the noxious exception of opium, they remained militantly indifferent to British exports...
...The British understood, as Peyrefitte notes, "that trade benefited both seller and buyer, who were like two lovers, each depending on the other for satisfactions neither could provide singly...
...no humiliating British retreat from Shanghai...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
