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In February 1840 the British government decided to launch a military expedition, and Elliot and his cousin, George Elliot, were appointed joint plenipotentiaries to China (though the latter, in poor health, resigned in November). In June, 16 British warships arrived in Hong Kong and sailed northward to the mouth of the Bei River to press China with their demands. Charles Elliot entered into negotiations with the Chinese, and, although an agreement was reached in January 1841, it was not acceptable to either government. In May 1841 the British attacked the walled city of Guangzhou (Canton) and received a ransom of $6 million, which provoked a counterattack on the part of the Cantonese. This was the beginning of a continuing conflict between the British and the Cantonese.
The Qing had no effective tactics against the powerful British navy. They retaliated merely by setting burning rafts on the enemy’s fleet and encouraging people to take the heads of the enemies, for which they offered a prize. The imperial banner troops, although they sometimes fought fiercely, were ill-equipped and lacked training for warfare against the more-modern British forces. The Green Standard battalions were similarly in decay and without much motivation or good leadership. To make up the weakness, local militias were urgently recruited, but they were useless. The British proclaimed that their aim was to fight the government officials and soldiers who abused the people, not to make war against the Chinese population. And indeed there was a deep rift between the government and the people that the British could easily exploit, a weakness in Qing society that became apparent during the crisis of the war.
Elliot’s successor, Henry Pottinger, arrived at Macau in August and campaigned northward, seizing Xiamen (Amoy), Dinghai, and Ningbo. Reinforced from India, he resumed action in May 1842 and took Wusong, Shanghai, and Zhenjiang. Nanjing yielded in August, and peace was restored with the Treaty of Nanjing. According to the main provisions of the treaty, China ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five ports to British trade, abolished the cohong system of trade, agreed to equal official recognition, and paid an indemnity of $21 million. This was the result of the first clash between China, which had regarded foreign trade as a favor given by the heavenly empire to the impoverished foreign powers, and the British, to whom trade and commerce had become “the true herald of civilization.”
The Treaty of Nanjing was followed by two supplementary arrangements with the British in 1843. In addition, in July 1844 China signed the Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia) with the United States and in October the Treaty of Whampoa (Huangpu) with France. These arrangements made up a complex of foreign privileges by virtue of the most-favored-nation clauses (guaranteeing trading equality) conceded to every signatory. All in all, they provided a basis for later inroads such as the loss of tariff autonomy, extraterritoriality (exemption from the application or jurisdiction of local law or tribunals), and the free movement of missionaries.
With the signing of the treaties—which began the so-called treaty-port system—the imperial commissioner Qiying, newly stationed at Guangzhou, was put in charge of foreign affairs. Following a policy of appeasement, his dealings with foreigners started fairly smoothly. But, contrary to the British expectation, the amount of trade dropped after 1846, and, to British dissatisfaction, the question of opium remained unsettled in the postwar arrangements. The core of the Sino-Western tension, however, rested in an anti-foreign movement in Guangdong.
The anti-foreign movement and the second Opium War (Arrow War)
At the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, China and Britain disagreed as to whether foreigners were allowed to enter the walled city of Guangzhou. Though Guangzhou was declared open in July 1843, the British faced Cantonese opposition. After 1847 trouble rapidly grew, and, as a result of an incident at nearby Foshan, a promise was given the British that they would be allowed to enter the city in 1849. Yet troubles continued. As a result of his inability to control the situation, Qiying was recalled in 1848 and replaced with the less-compliant Xu Guangjin. As the promised date neared, the Cantonese demonstrated against British entry. Finally, the British yielded, and the anti-foreigners won a victory despite the fact that the Beijing court conceded a “temporary entrance” into the city.
After the Cantonese resistance in 1841, the gentry in Guangdong began to build a more-organized anti-foreign movement, promoting the militarization of village society. The city of Guangzhou was also a center of diffusion of xenophobia, because the scholars at the city’s great academies were proclaiming the Confucian theory that uncultured foreign powers should be excluded. The inspired anti-foreign mood also contained a strong anti-government sentiment and perhaps a tendency toward provincialism; the Cantonese rose up against the foreign powers to protect their own homeland, without recourse to the government authorities.
In the strained atmosphere in Guangzhou, where the xenophobic governor-general, Ye Mingchen, was inciting the Cantonese to annihilate the British, the Arrow incident occurred in October 1856. Guangzhou police seized the Arrow, a Chinese-owned but British-registered ship flying a British flag, and charged its Chinese crew with piracy and smuggling. The British consul Harry Parkes sent a fleet to fight its way up to Guangzhou. French forces joined the venture on the plea that a French missionary had been officially executed in Guangxi. The British government sent an expedition under Lord Elgin as plenipotentiary. The Russians and the Americans abstained but sent their representatives for diplomatic maneuvering. At the end of 1857 an Anglo-French force occupied Guangzhou, and in May 1858 they took the Dagu forts and marched to Tianjin.
The Qing representatives had no choice but to comply with the demands of the British and French; the Russian and U.S. diplomats also gained the privileges their militant colleagues secured by force. During June four Tianjin treaties were concluded that provided for, among other measures, the residence of foreign diplomats in Beijing and the freedom of Christian missionaries to evangelize their faith.
In 1859, when the signatories arrived off the Dagu forts on their way to ratify the treaties in Beijing, they were told that they could not pass and to take a different route to Beijing. The British-led forces accompanying the signatories, however, decided to push forward past Dagu. They were repulsed, with heavy damage inflicted by the gunfire from the forts. In 1860 an allied force invaded Beijing, driving the Xianfeng emperor (reigned 1850–61) out of the capital to the summer palace at Chengde. A younger brother of the emperor, Gong Qinwang (Prince Gong), was appointed imperial commissioner in charge of negotiation. The famous summer palace was destroyed by the British in October. Following the advice of the Russian negotiator, Prince Gong exchanged ratification of the 1858 treaties; in addition, he signed new conventions with the British and the French. The U.S. and Russian negotiators had already exchanged the ratification in 1859, but the latter’s diplomatic performance in 1860 was remarkable.
Russian interests in the East had been activated in competition with the British effort to open China. A Russian spearhead, directed to Kuldja (Yining) by way of the Irtysh River, resulted in the Sino-Russian Treaty of Kuldja in 1851, which opened Kuldja and Chuguchak (Tacheng) to Russian trade. Another drive was directed to the Amur watershed under the initiative of Nikolay Muravyov, who had been appointed governor-general of eastern Siberia in 1847. By 1857 Muravyov had sponsored four expeditions down the Amur; during the third one, in 1856, the left bank and lower reaches of the river had actually been occupied by the Russians. In May 1858 Muravyov pressed the Qing general Yishan to sign a treaty at Aigun (Aihui), by which the territory on the northern bank of the Amur was ceded to Russia and the land between the Ussuri River and the sea was placed in joint possession by the two countries, pending further disposition. But Beijing refused to ratify the treaty. When the Anglo-French allies attacked northern China in 1860, the Russian negotiator Nikolay Ignatyev acted as China’s friend and mediator in securing the evacuation of the invaders from Beijing. Soon after the allies had left Beijing, Ignatyev secured, as a reward for his mediatory effort, the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, which confirmed the Treaty of Aigun and ceded to Russia the territory between the Ussuri and the sea.
The 1858–60 treaties extended the foreign privileges granted after the first Opium War and confirmed or legalized the developments in the treaty-port system. The worst effects for the Qing authorities were not the utilitarian rights, such as trade, commerce, and tariff, but the privileges that affected the moral and cultural values of China. The right to propagate Christianity threatened Confucian values, the backbone of the imperial system. The permanent residence of foreign representatives in Beijing signified an end to the long-established tributary relationship between China and other countries. The partial collapse of the tribute system meant a loss of the emperor’s virtue, a serious blow to dynastic rule in China.
During the turbulent years 1858–60, the Qing bureaucracy was divided between the war and peace parties. It was the peace party’s leaders—Prince Gong, Gui Liang, and Wen Xiang—who took charge of negotiating with the foreigners, though they did so not as a matter of principle but because the imminent crisis forced them to.
In 1861, in response to the settlement of the foreign representatives in the capital, the Zongli Yamen (office for General Management) was opened to deal with foreign affairs, its main staff filled by the peace party leaders. The Qing officials themselves, however, deemed this as still keeping a faint silhouette of the tribute system.
The delay and difficulty in the Qing adjustment to the Western presence may possibly be ascribed to both external and internal factors. The Chinese must have seen the Westerners who had appeared in China as purveyors of poisonous drugs and as “barbarians” in the full sense of the word, from whom they could learn nothing. But the Chinese staunchly held to their tradition, which also had two aspects—ideological and institutional. The core of the ideological aspect was the Confucian distinction between China and foreign countries. The institutional aspect had recently been much studied, however, and precedents in Chinese history had been found, for example, of treaty ports with foreign settlements, consular jurisdiction, and employment of Westerners as imperial personnel; thus, the Chinese regarded the Western impact as an extension of their tradition rather than a totally new situation that necessitated a new adjustment. And at least until 1860 the Qing leaders remained withdrawn in the shell of tradition, making no effort to cope with the new environment by breaking the yoke of the past.
Popular uprising
The third quarter of the 19th century was marked by a series of uprisings, again as a result of social discontent.
The Taiping Rebellion
In the first half of the 19th century, the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, the homeland of the Taiping people, had been beset with accelerating social unrest. After the first Opium War, government prestige declined, and officials lost their capacity to reconcile communal feudings. The greatest among such conflicts was that between the native settlers and the so-called guest settlers, or Hakka, who had migrated to Guangxi and western Guangdong, mainly from eastern Guangdong. The Baishangdi Hui (“God Worshippers’ Society”) was founded by Hong Xiuquan, a fanatic who believed himself a son of God, and his protégé, Feng Yunshan, an able organizer. Their followers included miners, charcoal workers, and poor farmers and laborers in central Guangxi, most of whom were Hakka. In January 1851 a new state named Taiping Tianguo (“Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”) was declared in the district of Guiping in Guangxi, with Hong Xiuquan assuming the title tianwang (“heavenly king”). That September the Taiping shifted their base to the city of Yong’an (present-day Mengshan, Guangxi), where they were besieged by the imperial army until April 1852. At that point they broke the siege and rushed into Hunan. Absorbing some secret-society members and outlaws, they dashed to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, and proceeded along the Yangtze to Nanjing, which they captured in March 1853, renamed Tianjing (“Heavenly Capital”), and made their capital.
The core of the Taiping religion was a monotheism tinged with fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, but it was mixed with a hatred of the Manchu and an intolerance of the Chinese cultural tradition. In the early years of the rebellion, this politico-religious faith sustained the fighting spirit of the Taiping. In the ideal Taiping vision the population was to give all of its belongings to a “general treasury,” which would be shared by all alike. While this extreme egalitarianism was rarely implemented outside the original Hakka core from Guangxi, it probably at times attracted the distressed and lured them to the Taiping cause. The origin of many Taiping religious ideas, morals, and institutions can be traced to China’s Confucian tradition, but the Taiping’s all-out anti-regime struggle, motivated by strong religious beliefs and a common sharing, also had precedents in earlier religious rebellions.
After the Taiping settled in Tianjing (Nanjing), village officials were appointed, and redistribution of farmland was planned in accordance with an idea of primitive communism. But in fact the land reform was impracticable. The village officials’ posts were filled mainly by the former landlords or the clerks of the local governments, and the old order in the countryside was not replaced by a new one that the oppressed people could dominate.
In May 1853 the Taiping sent an expedition to northern China, which reached the neighborhood of Tianjin but finally collapsed during the spring of 1855. After that the Yangtze valley provinces were the main theater of struggle. Of the government armies in those years, the Green Standards were too ill-disciplined, and not much could be expected of the bannermen. The Qing government had no choice but to rely on the local militia forces, such as the “Hunan Braves” (later called the Hunan Army), organized by Zeng Guofan in 1852, and the “Huai Braves” (later called the Huai Army), organized by Li Hongzhang in 1862. These armies were composed of the village farmers, inspired with a strong sense of mission for protecting the Confucian orthodoxy, and were used for wider operations than merely protecting their own villages. The necessary funds for maintaining them were provided initially by local gentry.
The Taiping were gradually beaten down; with the capture of Anqing, the capital of Anhui, in October 1861 by the Hunan Army, the revolutionary cause was doomed. But the fall of Nanjing was accelerated by the cooperation of Chinese mercenaries equipped with Western arms, commanded by an American, Frederick Townsend Ward; a Briton, Charles George Gordon; and others. Nanjing’s fall in July 1864 marked the end of one of the greatest civil wars in world history. The main cause of the Taiping failure was internal strife among the top leaders in Nanjing. Not only did they give themselves over to luxury, but also their energy was exhausted and their leadership lost by an internecine conflict that erupted in 1856. In addition, religious fanaticism, though it inspired the fighters, became a stumbling block that interfered with the rational and elastic attitude necessary to handle delicate military and administrative affairs. The intolerance toward traditional culture alienated the gentry and the people alike. Presumably, the failure of the land-redistribution policy also estranged the landless paupers from the Taiping cause.
The Nian Rebellion
Often in the first half of the 19th century, plundering gangs called nian ravaged northern Anhui, southern Shandong, and southern Henan. In mid-century, however, their activities were suddenly intensified, partly by the addition to their numbers of a great many starving people who had lost their livelihood from repeated floods of the Huang He in the early 1850s and partly because they had become emboldened by the Taiping advance north of the Yangtze. From 1856 to 1859 the Nian leaders consolidated their bases north of the Huai River by winning over the masters of the earth-wall communities, consolidated villages that had been fortified for self-defense against the Taiping. The Nian strategy was to use their powerful cavalry to plunder the outlying areas and carry the loot to their home bases.
Many influential clans, with all their members, joined the Nian cause, and the clan chiefs played an important role among the Nian leaders. Gentry of lower strata also joined the Nian. The greater part of the Nian force consisted of farmers and laborers, although deserters from the government-recruited militias and salt smugglers were important as military experts. The real cause of their strength was supposed to be the people’s support and sympathy for their leaders, but creating a power center proved to be difficult because the Nian’s basic social unit was the earth-wall community, where a powerful master exercised autonomy. In 1856 Zhang Luoxing received the title “lord of the alliance” of the Nian, but he was far too weak to form a center. Imperial pacification was launched by General Senggelinqin, who led a powerful cavalry into the affected area in 1862, but his pursuit was ineffective, and the general himself was killed in Shandong in May 1865. Thus, the last imperial crack unit disappeared. Zeng Guofan succeeded Senggelinqin as general and enforced a policy of detaching the earth-wall masters from their men and of employing the latter as his troops. Finally, Li Hongzhang succeeded Zeng in 1866 and set up encirclement lines along the Huang He and the Grand Canal, using that strategy to destroy the revolts in 1868.