Restless Empire by Odd Westad Read Free Book Online Page B

whether self-strengthening saved China from new levels of imperialist onslaughts—it is as likely that Western satisfaction with aims already achieved caused its temporary satiety after the end of the great rebellions. But there is little doubt that the policies developed by Li Hongzhang and other reformers saved the Qing from its domestic enemies and gave it—for a while—a new lease on life. Some proud Manchus called the first part of this era the Tongzhi restoration, for the five-year-old boy who became emperor in 1861. They hoped he could be thought of in the same way that the Japanese did with their emperor Meiji, who oversaw the revolutionary epoch that bears his name.
    But the Tongzhi emperor was no Meiji, or, if he was, he did not get much of a chance to show it, since he died at nineteen in 1875. The empire was never to be ruled by an adult emperor again; Tongzhi’s successor Guangxu was four years old when he took the throne, and his successor, the Xuangtong emperor—the last emperor, Puyi—was only two. The power behind the throne was increasingly Tongzhi’s mother,the empress-dowager Cixi, a staunch conservative of no uncertain views. Like most of the imperial clan, Cixi detested Western influence—the more she knew about the West (and she came to know quite a bit) the less she liked it. Her, and the Court’s, preference was for minimizing the impact of foreign learning and methods. Cixi argued that adopting the ways of the West—even in self-defense—would mean surrendering the culture that constituted the very meaning and essence of China. And the result would be certain disaster.
    The predicament of the Qing is best understood in light of what was happening elsewhere in Asia in the late nineteenth century. While often following routes and practices established by Asians, Westerners were becoming central to the region’s commerce and trade: Their companies and currencies gained predominance. In the Malay world (today’s Malaysia and Indonesia), Britain and the Netherlands were expanding their influence, while France was taking over Indochina and the United States was occupying the Philippines. And only a generation after the West had forced it to open its borders to trade and Western influence, Japan became an imperialist power in its own right.
    Meanwhile, Britain remained the major foreign power in China. Its control of the key bases and depots for the developing trade—Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a large extent Shanghai—anchored its primacy. But while the British controlled the structure, the Chinese supplied the infrastructure—the depots for East Asian trade were all Chinese cities, run as much by Chinese networks as by British authorities.
    While the West inserted itself into China, the Chinese themselves, as travelers and emigrants, began reaching out to the rest of the world. The late nineteenth century saw not just the great encounter between China and the West in terms of war, diplomacy, science, and trade. It was also the decades in which China went global, with a sharp increase in emigration and travel. Increasingly, the world was seen through Chinese eyes in a direct sense, with travelers, sojourners, and emigrants covering the globe, with no area excepted. This Chinese diaspora posednew questions about what it meant to be Chinese, and about the distinctions between “Chinese” and “foreign.” Therefore, most of this chapter deals with various forms of fluidity and hybridity, and the creation of new networks, communities, and institutions that would moderate relations between people who defined themselves in various ways and for various purposes somewhere on the scale between Chinese and non-Chinese.
    T HE GREAT REBELLIONS AGAINST Q ING rule in the 1850s and 1860s provided opportunities for Western powers to push for further concessions from the Chinese government. But even when the fortunes of the Qing seemed at their lowest, in the late 1850s, their princes were not willing