China's Lost Opportunity
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing CHINA'S LOST OPPORTUNITY BY ROGER DRAPER V For centuries China has been the poorest and most isolated of all major nations. Yet that wasn't always so. In 1405, when the...
...This was the famous kowtow to the Emperor or to any memento of him, such as an imperial letter, requiring one to touch one's head to the ground nine times...
...In the chronicles of decline, it and China are the prime examples...
...a calamity that eventually would make it one of history's two great examples of national decline...
...Macartney sailed to China when his own country's power was approaching its zenith...
...Even so, there was a problem...
...In other words, how deeply rooted is Chinese xenophobia...
...Or was China weakened by a Manchu regime exploiting a tendency to cultural egoism that would otherwise have remained significantly less extreme and hurtful...
...The Chinese were mystified...
...The country's future may hang on the answer...
...By the time the visitors got to Jehol, on September 8, the same vanity that had led His Holy Majesty to encourage their arrival in the first place prevented his expelling them summarily and advertising their unwillingness to kowtow...
...To inhibit antiManchu forms of nationalism, these alien rulers pandered to the extremes of Chinese cultural egocentricity...
...he was perfectly well aware, for instance, that Macartney's ships and cannon were much better than his...
...Nonetheless, Peyrefitte's researches in the archives show conclusively, and rather surprisingly, that the imperial authorities were delighted to learn that a Western envoy wished to visit China...
...In the 1780s and '90s, the government of King George III embraced the doctrines of Adam Smith...
...Nomadic invaders then started pouring across the Great Wall, and a China that had always felt vastly superior to all other countries closed in upon itself...
...Unfortunately for China, the Emperor did not recognize the need to catch up with Britain and instead merely saw to it that its ambassador left promptly...
...An opportunity to transform the empire as Peter the Great transformed Russia and the Meiji reformers transformed Japan was lost...
...Moreover, again according to him, Indian cotton was the most important item John Bull sold to China...
...There is a great myth, repeated by the French diplomat and author Alain Peyrefitte in The Immobile Empire (Knopf, 630 pp., $30), that in return the British could sell "next to nothing...
...The Emperor told King George: "We have perused the text of your state message, and the wording expresses your earnestness...
...To the British, tea, available only from China, had become a necessity...
...Tobacco, carried to China by the Portuguese, was already a widespread vice, noticed by several of Macartney's companions...
...It took its share of British exports, a reality obscured by the unique British tea mania that upward of 3 million Chinese commercial farmers—an important modernizing force in the economy—labored to satisfy...
...In 1405, when the Celestial (or Middle) Empire was the world's richest society, it began sending out ships to investigate the eastern coastline of Africa—a generation before Portugal started exploring the continent's Atlantic coastline and the lands beyond it...
...Felonious merchants," willing to truck with barbarians independently of the guild, also were numerous, if Qianlong's frequent denunciations of them are anything to go by...
...the mandarins' frantic efforts to set him right were unavailing...
...Macartney met with the chief minister on several occasions and presented his request for regular diplomatic relations and freer trade...
...Yet it was in Canton that the expedition encountered the fiercest dislike of the "men of red hair...
...the Manchus, claiming that their realm produced everything of importance itself, confined them to Canton and to the nearby Portuguese enclave of Macao, where they could do business solely with the members of an authorized guild of Chinese firms...
...By the late 18th century the empire's overseas trade was mainly with the British...
...Qianlong eventually had to accept Macartney's proposal that he bend down on one knee, as he would to his own sovereign...
...Both sides knew all along that there would be trouble with imperial protocol, which required an act that British merchants in China had consistently declined to perform...
...In the south—the part of China, then as now, most directly exposed to white men—crops brought by them were widely cultivated and spectacles were common...
...On the British side, commerce with the empire was confined by law to the East India Company, hardly an exemplar of free trade principles, but Westminster decided to launch an attempt to open up China: In 1792 it sent an experienced and capable negotiator, Lord Macartney, to Beijing...
...The novel ceremony (subsequently denied by the Chinese) duly took place on September 14...
...in 1795 a Dutch ambassador who did so was still promptly sent on his way...
...As to the lower orders," he wrote, "they are all of a trafficking turn, and it seemed at the seaports where we stopped that nothing would be more agreeable to them than to see our ships often in their harbors...
...Macartney came bitterly to realize that the Celestial court would never agree to his proposals, for they were based on two utterly un-Celestial assumptions: that states are equal, and that governments should promote commerce...
...He was accompanied by almost 100 persons—including technicians, scholars, painters, and soldiers—and carried gifts of British ingenuity, notably a working model of the solar system and a steam engine...
...Although Qianlong wrote in a poem about the British presents (or, in his view, tribute), "Curios and the boasted ingenuity of their devices I prize not," he told a Korean envoy that they were the best ever brought from the "nations of the western ocean"—a judgment he was qualified to give, since he had a huge collection...
...From it, your sincere humility and obedience can clearly be seen...
...Britain was bound to lose its brief industrial and colonial supremacy to larger, better-endowed rivals...
...Qianlong and the mandarins were not so much indifferent to European products as fearful of the Chinese backwardness they implied...
...and the poor fellows dared not admit this in their communications to the Emperor...
...Following the mission's arrival in China, on June 19, 1793, the Celestial government paid its traveling expenses, providing food and vast numbers of men, boats, wagons, and horses to help transport the gifts...
...Macartney's chief immediate objective, however, was to persuade the Emperor Qianlong, nearing the end of a 60-year reign, to let him remain at court as a resident ambassador...
...Peyrefitte criticizes his failure "to recognize a more general Chinese immobility" behind that of the mandarins...
...In Canton, the British found English-speaking Chinese shopkeepers and native artisans producing cheap knockoffs of Western goods for local customers...
...The author doesn't seem to realize it, but that alone amounted to approximately 3.5 per cent of total British exports...
...A large outflow of precious metals was thus necessary...
...Did this make its culture fundamentally narcissistic, as Peyrefitte suggests...
...While Macartney and company journeyed to the summer capital of Jehol, the three mandarins who accompanied him received many imperial missives, through a postal system that reached speeds of up to 195 miles a day...
...Peyrefitte's book is the fascinating and eloquent story of this "planetary epic," an "encounter between those with the most developed civilization of free exchange and those most refractory to it...
...In 1644 one group of northern barbarians, the Manchus, seized Beijing and established a new dynasty...
...The empire, for example, had always kept foreign traders under strict control...
...An envoy's sole function, in this strange land, was to bring tribute—not gifts—betokening the giver's submission to the Son of Heaven...
...The envoy then went home...
...In these circles, it was thought that the willingness of so distant a country to dispatch emissaries would, in the words of Qianlong himself, "contribute to the emperor's glory...
...For they had the peculiar vulnerability bred by self-centeredness: They depended on others to behave in ways that sustained their delusions of grandeur...
...The Portuguese reached China in 1514...
...It is not likely that Macartney would have succeeded if he had kowtowed...
...Today, Britain too can neither forget nor live up to its memories of former greatness...
...They consumed huge amounts of it...
...it was to proclaim that China, to quote an edict to a later British diplomat, was "lord and sovereign of the world...
...Qianlong's edict responding to the proposals was "primarily," as Peyrefitte says, "an acknowledgment of his acceptance of British vassalage...
...To my mind, there is some evidence the empire was less immobile than the author imagines...
...The point was not to engage in diplomatic relations...
...China, on the other hand, was big enough to occupy the position of centrality it claimed for many centuries...
...apart from a few clocks and other minor manufactured goods...
...Elsewhere, though, he notes that the Chinese imported ?00,000 worth of British woolens annually...
...Britain's fundamental aim was to develop the Chinese market, and to that end Macartney was instructed to propose that the East India Company's representatives be permitted to trade beyond Canton and Macao...
...Macartney refused to kowtow to them...
...Western goods—including, at this point, opium—failed to generate a comparable degree of interest...
...As to what you have requested in your message, O King, namely, to be allowed to send one of your subjects to reside in the Celestial Empire to look after your country's trade, this does not conform to the Celestial Empire's ceremonial system and definitely cannot be done...
...By contrast, the last of the Chinese expeditions, departing in 1432, never got anywhere near Europe...
...Official attitudes were more consistently hostile to alien cultures, trade and change than those of the population at large, but there was clearly an element of pretense here...
...But the Chinese ultimately saw the mission through the lens of their own culture...
Vol. 76 • January 1993 • No. 1
