费正清《Trade and diplomacy on the China coast

THE PROBLEM OF CHINA’S RESPONSE TO THE WEST

THE CENTURY OF THE TREATY PORTS IN CHINA, from 1842 to 1943, is now at an end, and historians may examine it for clues as to the future of Sino-Western relations. We can be sure that these three generations of steadily increasing contact have been more than a strange interlude in the long drama of China’s ethnocentric history. For better or worse, the treaty ports remade Chinese life. Through them flowed Western goods, people, and ideas. The result was to give the West a privileged position in China not unlike that of earlier barbarian conquerors.

Should we view the present rejection of the West as an anti-foreign resurgence among the Chinese people? It is, on the contrary, part of still another barbarian conquest? Or is it really an unstable mixture of the two? These are the imponderables of present day policy. They can as assessed only against the background of history.

The historical context of the period 1842-54. The modern invasion of China by the Western world really began in the middle of the nineteenth century, after the first Anglo-Chinese treaty was signed at Nanjing in 1842. Until that time relations with the West had been based upon the ancient Chinese tribute system; after that time they were based upon the “unequal” foreign treaties. Under the tribute system foreign trade had been restricted to the picturesque “factories” of old Canton. But 1842 began a new era-the opening of China to Western commercial exploitation. This was characterized by the treaty ports and the opium traffic, extraterritoriality, the treaty tariff, and the most-favored-nation clause. By the end of the nineteenth century China had been placed in a semi-colonial status, the after-effects of which have not yet passed away. In this context the years from 1842 to 1854 have significance as the transition between two unilateral, Chinese and Western, schemes of things.

These middles years of nineteenth century saw new developments in all the Far East. The first enunciation of American manifest destiny, the development of the clipper ship and the Shanghai trade in the 1840’s, were followed by the opening of Japan and the establishment of Russian on the Pacific between 1853 to 1860. The center of all this international development, however, was the British activity in China, where the treaty port consuls labored to break down the Chinese system of foreign relations and set up the Western treaty system in its place. Their initial achievement was the first treaty settlement of 1842-44; further efforts led to the invention of the Foreign Inspectorate of Customs in 1854; their final success, after the second war of 1856-60, was marked by the treaties of 1858 and 1860 which opened the interior to trade and established the Western legations at Peking.

The treaty system which had thus been created to serve as a vehicle for British and other Western trade, diplomacy, and evangelism in China, was also set up in Japan, Siam, Korea, and other Far Eastern states. It may justly be taken as the symbol of the recent century of Western superiority in the East. It forms a striking contrast with the preceding millennia of the tribute system, when the great empire of China dominated the Far Eastern scene. It contrasts perhaps less sharply with the new international order of communism of which China has become a part.

We should not forget that the treaty system represented chiefly a state of affairs in the treaty ports, a mode of Sino-foreign intercourse wich was an aspect or function of the larger situation within the Chinese boday politic. It must be viewed in the context of the great revolutionary process of disintegration and rebirth which has convulsed the Chinese people since 1842.

The fall of the Chinese empire is an epic still to be written. Seen from the Chinese side, on political collapse in history has been more cataclysmic-a decline from an age-old recognized supremacy over the known world to an abject partitioning into spheres of foreign domination, all in the space of one lifetime between 1842 and 1898. The causes of this fall were many and various. The decay of the Manchu dynasty after two centuries of power within China and the rise of the great Taiping Rebellion in 1851(an epic that would require another volume to tell) coincided with the invasion of Western arms. Western-inspired efforts at industrialization and the growth of nationalism followed hard upon this dynastic civil war. All these processes, native and foreign, have combined to produce the chaos and ferment of social change in modern China.

The resulting experience of the Chinese people in modern times has been overcast by a pall of frustration and uncertainty, owing to their inability to meet the West on equal terms. The inherited institutions of their society have played them false. More than any other mature non-Western state, China has seemed inadaptable to the conditions of modern life. Nationalism and