© Giovanni Arrighi 1997.
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(Paper presented at the XXI Meeting of the Social Science History Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 10-13, 1996.)
Shortly after the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the consequent end of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington advanced the thesis that world politics had entered a new phase--a phase, in which the principal conflicts "occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.... The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future." This coming "clash of civilizations," he claimed, will constitute a fourth phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern interstate system with the Peace of Westphalia, "the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes." In their competing pursuits of territorial power, emperors, absolute and constitutional monarchs created nation-states, the protagonists of the second phase of conflict. This second phase began with the French Revolution and lasted until the end of the First World War when, "as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy" (1993, 22-23).
These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western Civil Wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was true of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center-piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as the movers and shapers of history. (Huntington 1993, 23)
Ironically, non-Western civilizations are said to join the West in moving and shaping history at a time when the West is "at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations." In Huntington's view, while military conflict among Western states is "unthinkable," their collective military power is "unrivaled." More surprisingly, the West is said to face "no economic challenge," apart from Japan. This superior power has materialized in, and is consolidated by, a nearly absolute Western dominance of international institutions.
Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France, world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries.... The West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values. That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view. (Huntington 1993, 39-40)
These differences in power are in themselves a source of conflict between the West and non-Western civilizations. Another source is differences in values and beliefs. In Huntington's scheme of things, Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state have permeated the rest of the world only superficially. At a deeper level, "Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations.... The very notion that there could be a `universal civilization' is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another." Western efforts to propagate its values and ideas, therefore, call forth a reaffirmation of indigenous values in non-Western civilizations, as witnessed by increasing references to "a turning inward and `Asianization' in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and the `Hinduization' of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism and nationalism and hence `re-Islamization' of the Middle East, and now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris Yeltsin's country" (1993, 40-1, 26).
For the most part, Huntington does not construe these tendencies as posing any immediate threat to Western supremacy. He nonetheless singles out one tendency as "[c]entrally important to the development of counter-West military capabilities." This is "the sustained expansion of China's military power and its means to create military power." Taken in conjunction with China's disposition to export arms and weapons technology to Middle Eastern states, this tendency is seen as creating a "Confucian-Islamic connection" that can pose a serious challenge to Western supremacy (1993, 47-8).
To meet this challenge, Huntington (1993, 48-9) advocates a strategy of short-term containment and long-term accommodation. Short-term containment involves: 1) the promotion of greater cooperation and unity within the West proper (Western Europe and North America) and between the West proper and the semi-West of Eastern Europe and Latin America, the quasi-Western Russia, and the "modern" but non-Western Japan; 2) the maintenance of Western military capabilities in general, and of Western military superiority in East and Southwest Asia in particular; 3) the exploitation of differences and conflicts among and within non- Western civilizations to break up connections that challenge Western interests and values, and to establish connections that support Western interests and values.
However effective these measures might be in preserving Western power in the short run, in the longer run they cannot prevent non-Western civilizations from acquiring "the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern." This modernization will decrease the economic and military strength of the West relative to the non-West but will not eliminate inter-civilizational differences in values and interests. The West will thus be forced to accommodate the values and interests of non-Western civilizations.
This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people of those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others. (Huntington 1993, 49)
Huntington does not say why a policy of containment based on the maintenance of Western military capabilities must precede a policy of accommodation based on efforts to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. But whatever the reasons of this order of priority, Huntington's prescription found instant application in US policy toward East Asia, as spelled out by Assistant Secretary of Defense, Joseph Nye, in a Department of Defense report which he supervised and in a supporting essay published in Foreign Affairs/i (Nye 1995).
Unlike Huntington, Nye focuses on the recurrence of periods of instability in interstate relations rather than on the evolution of interstate conflict in the modern world. But like Huntington, he singles out China's economic expansion as the most worrisome development of the post-Cold War era. "If China's recent growth rates continue, it will become the world's second- largest economy soon after the turn of the century.... Even if China does not increase its defense budget as a percentage of its GNP... the sheer magnitude of the rise in China's GNP means that impressive military capabilities will accompany its economic growth." And again like Huntington's, Nye's main policy prescription is to maintain US military capabilities in general, and their deployment in East Asia in particular, as if the Cold War had never ended (Nye 1995, 91-95).
Taking issue with Nye's and the Defense Department's implicit declaration that relations of a by-gone era in the Pacific should be frozen indefinitely, Chalmers Johnson and E.B. Keehn (1995, 103-4) have underscored the hollowness of US "superpower pretensions" in East Asia, and "the profound shifting around the world, particularly in East Asia, from military to economic power." US military power in the region was indeed paramount in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when a US military government of occupation could impose on a traumatized Japan a constitution that renounced war as a sovereign right of the nation, and turned the region's former greatest military power into a military protectorate of the United States. But after this initial victory, US military power in the region experienced rapidly decreasing returns.
The United States tends to forget that, at best, it fought to stalemate in the Korean War and lost the one in Vietnam, and that the closing... of its two largest overseas bases, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay [in the Philippines], produced not even a shiver of instability. The most odious regime in postwar Asia, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, was disposed of not by Americans but by Vietnamese communists. (Johnson and Keehn 1995, 111)
The present amnesia of the Department of Defense concerning the limits of US power in Asia is all the more surprising in view of the fact that those limits were evident to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as far back as 1973. To be sure, in the intervening twenty years the United States "won" the Cold war and put Saddam Hussein in his place in a televised show of high-tech warfare. But apart from the fact that these "victories" relied critically on East Asian money, they were accompanied and followed by a careful avoidance of the kind of military engagement that would have restored the credibility of US military power. As the former prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, remarked: "Nobody believes that an American government that could not sustain its mission in Somalia because of an ambush and one television snippet of a dead American pulled through the streets of Mogadishu could contemplate a strike on North Korean nuclear facilities like the Israeli strike on Iraq" (quoted in Johnson and Keehn 1995, 105).
Communist and nationalist militancy in the region has been overcome thanks to the economic successes of East Asia's "state- guided capitalism" rather than any military role played by the United States. As a result, Johnson and Keehn maintain, US hegemony has begun to crumble, not just economically, but ideologically as well.
The remaining communist countries of the region, particularly China and Vietnam, are not attracted by the [Department of Defense] report's "market democracies" but by what Eisuke Sakakibara of Japan's Ministry of Finance calls the "noncapitalist market economies." Despite American whistling in the dark that foreigners' taste for American movies, rock music, blue jeans, and McDonald's hamburgers means that the United States is still their model, this intellectual battle is over. Some version of Asian capitalism lies in most nations' future. Even the Russians, having tried Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs' brand of "pure" capitalism and found only chaos, now look to Asian models of "transitional authoritarianism." (Johnson and Keehn 1995, 112)
Johnson's and Keehn's representation of the waning of US military, economic, and ideological power in East Asia is probably overdrawn. Nevertheless, it is a more accurate representation of the actual relationships of forces in the region than Huntington's and Nye's delusion that world power still comes out of the barrel of the gun. The power of the gun has indeed been the primary source of Western dominance in the non-Western world. But this dominance has been countervailed by other kinds of power that have developed in response to Western military supremacy.
Western military supremacy originated in the continual power struggle that set the separate states of the Eurocentric world system against one another. The endless stream of organizational and technological innovations in warfare generated by this struggle upset the balance of power in Europe only temporarily. Globally, however, these advances enabled European states "to outstrip other peoples... more and more emphatically until the globe-girdling imperialism of the nineteenth century became as cheap and easy for Europeans as it was catastrophic to Asians, Africans, and the peoples of Oceania" (McNeill 1983, 143; and Chapter 1, above).
Far from being the bearer of rights and liberties, this Western globe-girdling imperialism brought to the non-Western world a despotism that combined traditional forms of despotic rule with the denial of traditional rights to a livelihood. The result was a curious inversion of roles between colonizers and colonized in upholding Western values and ideals--an inversion of roles best epitomized by the culture of British India.
While the colonial regime, which had itself introduced among its subjects the notion of rights and liberties, went on denying these in full or in part in the principles and practice of its government, the disenfranchised subjects went on pressing the rulers to match their administration to their own ideals. Ironically, therefore, a large part of the politics of protest under the raj, especially when initiated by the educated middle-class leadership, turned on the `un-British' character of British rule--a theme made famous by successive generations of Indian liberals from Naoroji to Gandhi. (Guha 1992a, 266)
Contrary to Huntington's claim that the development of modern democratic government in non-Western societies "has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition" (1993, 41), the single most important instance of parliamentary democracy in the non-Western world (independent India) was the product of the revolt of non-Western society against Western despotism. More generally, as noted in previous chapters and further argued below, whatever Western ideas of rights and liberties struck their roots in the non-Western world, they did so through indigenous struggles against the "un-Western" character of Western rule.
Neither these struggles, nor the fundamental changes in world politics that ensued from the successful unfolding of these struggles, have a place in Huntington's construction. As Hayward Alker (1995) has pointed out, there is much deja vu in Huntington's thesis that the conflict between "the West and the Rest" has become the central axis of world politics. Arnold Toynbee (1948), Geoffrey Barraclough (1967), Hedley Bull (1985) and Martin Wight (1992), among others, have all spoken of `the Revolt against the West' as a central conflict of a century that is almost past. As Barraclough put it,
When the twentieth century opened, European power in Asia and Africa stood at its zenith; no nation, it seemed, could withstand the superiority of European arms and commerce. Sixty years later only the vestiges of European domination remained. Between 1945 and 1960 no less than forty countries... revolted against colonialism and won their independence. Never before in the whole of human history had so revolutionary a reversal occurred with such rapidity. The change in the position of the peoples of Asia and Africa and in their relations with Europe was the surest sign of the advent of a new era, and when the history of the first half of the twentieth century--which, for most historians, is still dominated by European wars and European problems... comes to be written in a longer perspective, there is little doubt that no single theme will prove to be of greater importance than the revolt against the west. (1967, 153-4)
As argued in Chapter 3, US hegemony was thoroughly shaped by this first successful round of revolt against the West, so that non-Western peoples and governments actually ceased to be mere objects of Western history at least one century prior to the advent of Huntington's "politics of civilizations." In what follows, we shall trace the origins of this first round of revolt against the West to the clash of civilizations that has characterized Western intrusions in Asia from the very start. Like Huntington, we shall identify the primary source of Western power in the non-Western world in superior military capabilities. Unlike Huntington, however, we shall underscore the contradictions of a relationship of dominance based primarily on coercion.
Focusing on South and East Asia--the main loci of the violent underside of British and US hegemony, respectively--we shall first show how the transition from Dutch to British hegemony was closely associated with the formation of a British empire in India and the deployment of Indian resources to establish Western suzerainty over China. While coercion was central to both endeavors, "Westernization" was pursued only to the extent that it served Western interests, which for the most part it did not. Western power in the East thus came to depend on a combination of direct despotic rule and indirect rule through suitably weakened indigenous political structures and traditions.
We shall then turn to examine the contradictions of this precarious configuration of power as they materialized in the transition from British to US hegemony. Both in South and in East Asia these contradictions translated into a challenge to Western dominance that was primarily ideological rather than military. In East Asia, however, the superficiality of the region's incorporation within the structures of rule and accumulation of the West meant that the revolt against the West was mediated and partly deflected by Sino-Japanese commercial and military rivalries.
Finally, in the concluding section of the chapter, we shall return to the issues raised by Huntington's thesis of a coming clash of civilizations to argue that such a clash is as much behind us as it is in front of us, and that the main limit to Western power lies in the dependence of the West on a civilizational path of development based primarily on advances in military technology. Western advances along this path have entered a phase of rapidly decreasing returns in the face of countervailing powers that are primarily ideological and, increasingly, economic as well. Under the emerging circumstances, the idea that the West can use its military superiority to turn to its advantage the terms of a future intercivilizational accommodation is an illusion as dangerous for the West as it is for all other civilizations.
The original and most enduring source of Western power in Asia has been the capacity of Western states to disrupt the complex organization that linked Asian societies to one another within and across jurisdictional and civilizational divides. This capacity has been rooted in Western advances in military technology on the one side, and in the vulnerability of Asian societies to the military disruption of their mutual trade on the other side. Writing in 1688 during the war against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Sir Josiah Child, director of the East India Company and instigator of the war, captured the essence of this relationship. "The subjects of the Mogul," he noted, "cannot bear a war with the English for twelve months together, without starving and dying by the thousands for want of work to purchase rice; not singly for want of our trade, but because by our war, we obstruct their trade with all the Eastern nations which is ten times as much as ours and all the European nations put together" (quoted in Watson 197x, 348-5).
Two aspects of this early diagnosis of East-West relations stand out for comment. There is, first of all, the incomparably greater size and importance of intra-Asian trade relative to East-West trade. At this point in time (1688), and for at least another century, the rapidly expanding European world-economy had yet to "catch up" with the size and density of what Fernand Braudel (1984, 523) has called the "super-world-economy" of the Far East.
The Far East taken as a whole, consisted of three gigantic world-economies: Islam, overlooking the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and controlling the endless chain of deserts stretching across Asia from Arabia to China; India, whose influence extended throughout the Indian Ocean, both East and West of Cape Comorim; and China, at once a great territorial power--striking deep into the heart of Asia--and a maritime force, controlling the seas and countries bordering the Pacific. And so it had been for many hundreds of years. But between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, it is perhaps permissible to talk of a single/i world-economy broadly embracing all three. (Braudel 1984, 484; emphasis in the original)
This super-world-economy was "gigantic, fragile and intermittent." It was intermittent "since the relationship between these huge areas was the result of a series of pendulum movements of greater or lesser strength, either side of the centrally positioned Indian subcontinent." The ebb and flow of these movements redistributed functions, power and wealth, "favoring by turns the West, that is Islam; and the East, that is China." Sometimes, however, "the pendulum malfunctioned or stopped working altogether: at such times the loose garment of Asia was more than usually divided into autonomous fragments" (Braudel 1984, 484).
This intermittent formation was also fragile, because it was "structured enough to be penetrated with relative ease, but not sufficiently structured to defend itself." In a sense, it "was asking to be invaded." And so it was repeatedly, both from the north and from the west. The Europeans "were only following in the footsteps of other invaders" (Braudel 1984, 523).
Unlike their predecessors, however, the European invaders did not seek incorporation within the structures of the Asian super-world-economy. Rather, they sought to incorporate within their Eurocentered world-economy the disjointed components of those structures by deploying ever more destructive technologies of war. This brings us to the second aspect of the East-West relationship as diagnosed by Josiah Child: the power that accrued to the West in virtue of the ease with which Western states could disrupt Eastern trade by means of war.
Ever since Roman times Asia had been a purveyor of valued goods for the tribute-taking classes of Europe and had thereby exercised a powerful pull on Europe's precious metals. This structural imbalance of European trade with the East created strong incentives for European governments and businesses to seek ways and means, through trade or conquest, to retrieve the purchasing power that relentlessly drained from West to East. As Josiah Child's contemporary Charles Davenant observed, whoever controlled the Asian trade would be in a position to "give law to all the commercial world" (Wolf 1982: 125).
The centrality of Asian trade for the intra-European power struggle had been the driving force behind the Iberian discovery of the Americas and of a sea route to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope. American silver, in turn, had multiplied the means available to European states in their mutual struggle to appropriate the benefits of trade with the East. Initially, however, the expanded European presence in Asian trade had little impact on the integrity of the Asian super-world-economy.
Religious fervor and intolerance seriously hampered Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean. "In an area where Islam was the dominant religion and was spreading rapidly among both Hindu and pagan peoples, the Portuguese often found themselves committed beforehand to religious hostility, in places where their interests would have been better served by commercial treaties." Eventually, they found their place in the region, "not as a conquering empire, but as one of many competing and warring maritime powers in the shallow seas of the [Indonesian] archipelago" (Parry 1981, 244, 242). Their shipping remained "one more thread in the existing warp and woof of the Malay- Indonesian interport trade" (Boxer 1973, 49). Their inroads in the Asian super-world-economy, "built upon war, coercion and violence," had little effect on Asian trade (van Leur 1955, 118).
The Spaniards, for their part, concentrated on the development of a direct trade route from America to China via the Philippine Islands. Silver-laden galleons left Acapulco for Manila, where the cargo was transferred to junks for delivery in China, mostly by Chinese merchants. Although there are no reliable estimates of this traffic, the Manila galleons "seem to have carried as much silver to Asia as the Portuguese Estado do India and the Dutch and English Companies combined" (Flynn and Giraldez 1994, 72, 79-83). Whether larger or smaller, the silver trade via Manila had a more direct impact on the Chinese world-economy than the silver trade via Europe. Like the latter, it contributed to consolidate China's ongoing transition to a silver standard and to sustain the economic expansion of the late-Ming era. But its greater reliance on Chinese merchants meant that it probably played a greater role than the silver trade via Europe in reviving the fortunes of the Chinese merchant class, both at home and overseas--a revival that contributed to the instability of the Ming regime in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (cf. Hamashita 1994; Flynn and Giraldez 1994, 84-6).
By and large, the sixteenth-century, Iberian-led wave of European intrusion affected the functioning but not the structures of the Asian super-world-economy. The Dutch-led wave of the seventeenth century, in contrast, initiated the disarticulation of those structures. War, coercion, and violence were as critical to Dutch inroads in Asian trade as they had been to the Portuguese (Parry 1981, 250-4; Braudel 1984, 218). Nevertheless, in the century that separated the two intrusions Europe's art of war had experienced major advances, which the Dutch themselves had pioneered (McNeill 1984, 125-43). Moreover, in bringing a more advanced military technology to bear on the structures of Asian trade, the Dutch adhered more strictly than the Portuguese to a logic of expansion that gave priority to trade and profit. As a result, they managed to acquire, not just a near-exclusive control over the supply of a commodity (fine spices) that played a critical role in East-West and local trade, but also strategically significant territorial domains in the Indonesian archipelago (Arrighi 1994, 155; and Chapter 2, above).
The impact of this double acquisition on Asia was far less momentous than on Europe. In South Asia, the seventeenth-century arrival of the Dutch and of their English and French competitors simply added new merchant communities to the already diverse commercial population of the trading ports. In these ports, European merchants remained wholly dependent on local communities and networks to guide them "through the labyrinth of the `country trade'" (Braudel 1984, 496). In East Asia, the Company state created by the VOC in the Indonesian archipelago could be perceived as nothing but an addition to the outer fringes of the Sinocentric world-economy (Hamashita 1996, 192).
And yet, peripheral as they seemed from an Indocentric or Sinocentric perspective, the VOC's acquisitions drove a wedge at the fault lines between the South and East Asian world-economies. For the East Indies were at a major crossroads of trade, "a network of maritime traffic"--in Archibald Lewis's words-- "comparable in volume and variety to that of the Mediterranean or of the northern and Atlantic coast of Europe" (quoted in Braudel 1984, 486-7). This busy crossroads of trade had formed as a result of two developments: the expansion of the East and South Asian world-economies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the rise of Malacca and other ports of trade in the fifteenth century. These ports of trade--like the trading towns of medieval Europe--benefited "from not being strictly integrated into any very powerful political units. Despite all the kings and `sultans' who ruled them... these were virtually autonomous towns: wide open to the outside world, they could orient themselves to suit the currents of trade." But their strength was also their weakness, because openess and political fragmentation made them vulnerable to the disruption of their trade and conquest by a superior naval power. And when the Dutch first arrived in the region, they went straight for this vulnerable intersection of Far Eastern trade (Braudel 1984, 486, 524-30).
Dutch power in the seventeenth century thus grew interstitially at the intersection of the South and East Asian world-economies. The eighteenth-century, British-led wave of European intrusion shifted the epicentre of this interstitial growth to the very heart of the South Asian world-economy. The growth remained interstitial, because for most of the eighteenth century the East India Company had little control over the Indian subcontinent's gigantic productive apparatus, and at least until Plassey, it had little control also on the dynamic of the disintegrating Mughal empire. By the end of the century, however, the Company was well on its way to becoming the successor of the Mughal court as the redistributive centre of the South Asian world-economy and to incorporating Indian trade and production within the structures of the European world-economy.
The story of this double conquest of India, political and economic at the same time, has already been told in Chapter 2 and will not be retold here. Nevertheless, the story must now be recast in the wider context of the clash of civilizations that the British conquest of India entailed. The clash had already begun with the European intrusions of the preceding centuries. But until Plassey, by choice or by necessity, the intrusions had been primarily commercial. In the decades following Plassey, and particularly in the nineteenth century, the intrusion became imperial in scope, and the clash of civilizations thereby moved to the center of the stage in East-West relations.
British imperial rule in the Indian subcontinent was established through an almost uninterrupted series of wars, which constitute the main manifestation of the coercive underside of Britain's world hegemony. From a strictly Eurocentric perspective, hegemonic Britain could present itself, and be perceived, as having little enthusiasm for wars. As it worked actively to establish and preserve Europe's "hundred years' peace," it cut to the bone its already modest military. According to one estimate the number of British military personnel shrunk from 255,000 in 1816 to 140,000 in 1830; and even by 1880, when the number climbed to 248,000, it was below the numbers at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (Kennedy 1987, 153- 4). According to another estimate the number of men under arms in Great Britain fell from 292,000 in 1700 to 201,000 in 1850; and troops as percentage of national population fell from 5.4 in 1700 to 1.7 in 1850 (Tilly 1990, 79).
This downsizing of the British military occurred in the context of what Polanyi (1957, 5) has called "the triumph of a pragmatic pacifism" in Europe. The reverse side of this pragmatic pacifism in Europe was a voracious appetite for military prowess and conquest in the non-Western world. In the Indian subcontinent alone, Britain fought ten wars. These included: two Anglo-Maratha wars (1803 and 1818), which brought under British control much of Central and parts of Northwestern India; one Anglo-Gurkha war (1814-1816), which established British presence in Nepal; two Anglo-Burmese wars (1824 and 1852), which brought parts of Burmese territories under British control; two Anglo-Sikh wars, which extended British control to the borders of Afghanistan; and the infamous Anglo-Afghan wars of 1839-42 and 1878. If we take Asia and Africa together, there were as many as seventy-two separate British military campaigns between 1837 and 1900 (Bond, 1967, 309-11). By a different count, between 1803 and 1901 Britain fought fifty major colonial wars (Giddens 1987, 223).
Britain could wage all these wars and yet reduce military expenditure and personnel at home because it had the control of the largest European-style army in Asia manned largely, and paid for entirely by Indians. By 1880, Indian tax-payers were supporting 130,000 Indian and 66,000 British troops. As Lord Salisbury put it, "India was an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them" (Tomlinson 1975, 341). This army was not only instrumental in the conquest and control of India and in defending the western frontiers against Russian advances in Central Asia. It also was used to advance British interests around the world. It was sent to China in 1839, 1856 and 1859; to Persia in 1856; to Ethiopia and Singapore in 1867; to Egypt in 1882; to Burma in 1885; to Nyasa in 1893; to Mombasa and Uganda in 1896; to Sudan in 1896 and 1897; to South Africa during the Boer War; and to various places during the First World War (Ambedker 1945, 27; Mason 1974).
The British conquest of the Indian subcontinent thus marked an entirely new stage in the escalation of Western power in Asia. On the one hand, it completed the disarticulation that had begun under Dutch hegemony of the Asian super-world-economy. On the other hand, it endowed Britain with the resources needed to subdue the last bastion of Asian power, the Chinese empire and with that the East Asian world-economy centered on the empire.
In comparing the different extent of Western dominance in India and China, Kavalam Panikkar (1970, 93-4) has pointed out that, "even in the days of her weakness [China] maintained a political unity," whereas "in India by 1740 the Imperial authority had completely broken down." As a result, European companies in India dealt with a fragmented political structure within which one of them (the East India Company) eventually became dominant. In China, in contrast, Europeans had to deal, not just with a unified political structure, but with a unified political structure whose size, wealth and power were still unmatched in Europe and continued to excite the admiration of most European visitors.
Partly real and partly imagined, the achievements of the Chinese empire in the rising phase of the Qing dynastic cycle were such as to be a source of inspiration for leading figures of the Enlightenment. In the first half of the eighteenth century, notes Michael Adas (1989, 79), "the rage for chinoiserie went far beyond latticed garden houses and themes for theatrical works. Some of the most prominent thinkers of the age, including Leibniz, Voltaire, and Quesnay, looked to China for moral instruction, guidance in institutional development, and supporting evidence for their advocacy of causes as varied as benevolent absolutism, meritocracy, and an agriculturally based national economy."
The most striking contrast with European states was the Chinese empire's size and population. In Francois Quesnay's characterization, the Chinese empire was "what all Europe would be if the latter were united under a single sovereign"--a characterization which was echoed in Adam Smith's remark that China's "home market" was as big as that of "all different countries of Europe put together" (Quesnay 1969, 115; Fairbank 1983, 170). Equally impressive was the extent to which these huge and populous domains appeared to be, and in comparison with Europe definitely were, ruled by moral persuasion rather than by force. European visitors and residents of China, Jesuit missionaries in particular, contrasted the peace and tranquillity of the Qing empire with Europe's social strife and incessant warfare. The view that European rulers had much to learn from the Chinese in matter of law, government and morality was greatly enhanced by Jesuit depictions of emperor Kang-xi "as a veritable philosopher-king, devoted to his subjects' welfare and deeply interested in the fine arts and sciences, both Chinese and Western" (Adas 1989, 80-1).
Kang-xi's so-called edict of toleration in 1692 particularly caught the attention of Bayle, Leibniz, and Voltaire, who like virtually all the philosophes deeply detested religious bigotry and persecution. Even though few dared to make the comparison explicit, the contrast between Kang-xi's religious policies and Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685--with the consequent revewal of religious strife in France and neighboring states--strengthened the arguments of those who sought to defend Chinese political wisdom and ethical probity. (Adas 1989, 81)
Even the most convinced proponents of China as a model for Europe qualified their enthusiasm by acknowledging the stagnation of scientific learning in China relative to European advances of the preceding century or two. Nevertheless, neither Leibniz and Voltaire, nor the Jesuit writers whose accounts inspired them, saw any contradiction between relative stagnation in the sciences and excellence in the art of government and in moral philosophy. After all, European advances in the sciences had occurred in the context of generalized warfare, state breakdowns and social strife, and had done little to produce stable government and tranquil lives (Adas 1989, 81-9).
What tarnished, and eventually completely destroyed, the image of China as a model of governance was not European primacy in the abstract sciences but European primacy in war and commerce. European merchants and adventurers had long emphasized the military vulnerability of an empire ruled by a scholar-gentry class, while complaining bitterly about the bureaucratic and cultural obstacles met by those who sought to trade with China. Fictionalized in Daniel Defoe's Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and given non-fictional respectability by a travel account attributed to Captain George Anson, A Voyage around the World (1748), these indictments and complaints gradually translated into a fundamentally negative view of China as a bureaucratically oppressive and militarily weak empire. This negative view found a receptive ear among such prominent French philosophes as Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau. More important, it contributed to transforming China in the political imagination of the West, from a model to be imitated, into the antithesis of the British model of the commercially-oriented, bourgeois-dominated, liberal state that was becoming hegemonic in Western culture (Adas 1989, 89-93, 124-5; and Chapter 4, above).
This reimaging of "China" from a model for to the antithesis of the forming European hegemonic state prepared the way for the rising clash of civilizations that culminated in the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and of 1856-58. The Opium Wars were fought primarily to decide whether the British or the Chinese view of law, government, and morality would prevail, not in the abstract, but within the domains of the Chinese empire itself. While the first of these wars was being fought, former US president John Quincy Adams asked whether China or Britain had "the righteous cause" and answered that Britain did. Anticipating some surprise in his audience, he felt "obliged to show that the opium question is not the cause of the war." The cause of the war, he maintained, "is the kowtow!--the arrogant and insupportable pretension of China that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind, not on terms of reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of lord and vassal" (quoted in Esherick 1972, 10). Adams' view that the Opium War was not really about opium but about a general interest in diplomatic equality and commercial opportunity, became standard in Western historiography. Thus, to quote a particularly authoritative source, it has been argued that
In demanding diplomatic equality and commercial opportunity, Britain represented all the Western states, which would sooner or later have demanded the same things if Britain had not. It was an accident of history that the dynamic British commercial interest in the China trade was centered not only on tea but also on opium. (Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig 1965, 318).
This characterization of the Anglo-Chinese conflict is accurate in underscoring the hegemonic function that Britain was exercising vis-a-vis the Western world. In coercing China to open up its domains to unregulated trade and proselitizing, Britain did indeed represent a general interest of Western states, as witnessed by John Qincy Adams' support. The characterization, however, misses entirely how central the opium trade was to the more fundamental clash of interest and values that underlay the conflict over trade and diplomacy.
Protocol, as symbolized by the kowtow, was hardly an issue. The famous refusal of George Lord Macartney, head of the 1793 British mission to Beijing, to kowtow to the emperor Qien-Long was promptly followed by an agreement that he would not kowtow but only kneel (Peyrefitte 1992, 203). The diplomatic and commercial aspects of the Anglo-Chinese confrontation were not so easily resolved. They were resolved more than half a century later through the forcible imposition on China of extremely unequal treaties in the name of diplomatic equality and commercial reciprocity. Even trade and diplomacy, however, were not all that was at issue. Underlying all others, there was the issue of whether the East Asian world-economy should continue to be centered on China or should instead become a subordinate and peripheral component of the increasingly global capitalist world- economy centered on Britain.
From this more fundamental point of view, opium was not just one of two commodities on which the dynamic British commercial interest "happened" to be focused. It was the one and only commercial means available to Britain in its struggle to oust China from the commanding heights of the East Asian world- economy. In this struggle, opium was no more "an accident of history" than iron, coal, railways and steamships were in Britain's successful bid for hegemony within the Western world.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century opium was, in Joseph Esherick's words, "the West's only feasible entree into the China market." As late as 1870, it still accounted for 43 percent of China's imports. By then, local production of opium, particularly in the southwestern provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan, had begun to cut into imports. And yet, import substitution notwithstanding, between 1870 and 1890 imports of opium, varying in value between L8 million and L12 million a year, remained China's largest single import (Esherick 1972, 10; Hsiao 1974, Tables 2 and 9a; Bagchi 1982, 101). The main significance of the opium trade for Britain, however, was not strictly commercial. Rather, it lay in the role that sales of Indian opium to China played in the transfer of Indian tribute to Britain. As Edward Thompson, head of the statistical department at the East India House in 1846-57, put it,
India, by exporting opium, assists in supplying England with tea. China by consuming opium, facilitates the revenue operations between India and England. England by consuming tea contributes to increase the demand for the opium of India. (Thornton 1835, 89)
The need to expand the India-China trade by any means in order to facilitate the revenue operations between India and England had been from the start the main stimulus behind the expansion of the opium trade. As early as 1786, Lord Cornwallis, then Governor General of India, saw the expansion of the India- China trade as essential to paying at least in part for Chinese exports to Britain and other European countries and, above all, as the only way in which the vast tribute of Bengal could be transferred to England without heavy losses through exchange depreciation. Such was the importance attributed to the expansion of the India-China trade, that Cornwallis pleaded the East India Company to disregard its monopolistic privileges and to extend special facilities to private merchants trading between India and China (Bagchi 1982, 96; Greenberg 1951, ch. 2).
Whether the Company would have followed Cornwallis' advice of its own accord is a question that was made moot by China's two imperial bans of the opium trade in 1796 and 1800 and by Britain's abrogation of the Company's India monopoly in 1813. Before the imperial bans, the opium trade was regulated by the so-called "Canton system," which authorized foreigners to trade with China only through the intermediation of the Co-hong, the guild of Hong merchants. The East India Company's monopoly of the China trade was thus matched by the Co-hong's monopoly of Chinese foreign trade--an arrangement that left little room for private merchants, British or otherwise, to trade in Chinese tea or Indian opium. The rapid increase in the consumption of the habit-forming drug under the Canton system led to the prohibition of further imports by the above mentioned bans. But the bans backfired. Once the Co-hong stopped dealing in opium, the East India Company started encouraging private merchants to smuggle the drug into China.
The East India Company kept up the polite fiction that its ships could not be used for exporting opium to China. But it did everything in its power to push the sale of the drug, by monopolizing its production in Bengal... regulating prices, and assisting the private European smugglers. (Bagchi 1982, 96)
The abrogation of the India monopoly in 1813 led the Company to redouble its efforts in the encouragement of opium smuggling into China--a redoubling of efforts which, as noted in Chapter 2, resulted in a more than threefold increase in shipments between 1803-13 and 1823-33.
The soundness of Cornwallis' advice was fully vindicated. As a contemporary account informs us, from the opium trade,
The Honourable Company has derived for years an immense revenue and through them the British Government and nation have also reaped an incalculable amount of political and financial advantage. The turn of the balance of trade between Great Britain and China in favour of the former has enabled India to increase tenfold her consumption of British manufacture; contributed directly to support the vast fabric of British dominion in the East, to defray the expenses of His Majesty's establishment in India, and by the operation of exchanges and remittances in teas, to pour an abundant revenue into the British Exchequer and benefit the nation to an extent of L6 million yearly. (Quoted in Greenberg 1951, 106-7)
The "Honourable Company" was soon squeezed out of this highly beneficial branch of British commerce by the abrogation of its China monopoly in 1833. But the abrogation further emboldened the forces of "free trade," which went on to agitate for "the strong arm of England" to bring down all the restrictions that the Chinese government imposed on their freedom of action.
This mounting pressure was accompanied by a further demeaning of the power and prestige of China in the Western imagination. As tensions increased, China's military vulnerability began to be construed as the sign of a more general civilizational backwardness. Thus, the author of an anonymous essay published in Canton in 1836 claimed that "there is, probably, at the present no more infallible a criterion of the civilization and advancement of societies than the proficiency which each has attained in `the murderous art,' the perfection and variety of their implements for mutual destruction, and the skill with which they have learned to use them." He then went on to dismiss the Chinese imperial navy as a "monstruous burlesque," to argue that antiquated cannon and unruly armies made China "powerless on land," and to view these weaknesses as symptoms of a fundamental deficiency of Chinese society as a whole (quoted in Adas 1989, 185).
In reporting these views, Michael Adas adds that the growing importance of military prowess "in shaping European assessments of the overall merit of non-Western peoples boded ill for the Chinese, who had fallen far behind the aggressive `barbarians' at their southern gates" (1989, 185-6). Worse still, the Chinese government could not just yield to the demands of this new breed of barbarians because the consequences of the opium trade were as baneful for China as they were beneficial for Britain. Beyond the deleterious impact on the fabric of Chinese society of a growing number of addicts, the opium trade had highly disruptive political and economic effects on the Chinese state.
The proceeds of opium smuggling trickled down to Chinese officials whose corruption thereby seriously impaired the execution of official policy in all spheres. At the same time, the trade caused a massive and growing drain of silver from China to India: 1.6 million taels a year in 1814-24; 2.1 million taels a year in 1824-37; and 5.6 million taels a year in the two years preceeding the first Opium War (Yen 1957, 34). As the imperial edict of 1838 emphasized in announcing the decision to destroy the trade, the effects of the drain on the financial and fiscal integrity of the Chinese empire were devastating.
Since opium has spread its baneful influence through China the quantity of silver exported has yearly been on the increase, till its price has become enhanced, the copper coin depressed, the land and capitation tax, the transport of grain and the [salt] gabelle all alike hampered. If steps not be taken for our defence... the useful wealth of China will be poured into the fathomless abyss of transmarine regions. (Quoted in Greenberg 1951, 143)
Soon after the edict was issued, the vigorous and incorruptible Viceroy for Hunan and Hupei, Lin Zexu, was put in charge of the supresssion of opium smuggling. Lin's commission was strictly limited to this task and, contrary to John Quincy Adams' opinion, it was not at all aimed at thwarting commercial opportunities in other branches of China's foreign trade, such as silk, tea and cotton goods, which the Chinese government continued to encourage. Lin himself was careful in drawing a distinction between the illegal opium trade--which he was determined to suppress with or without the British government's cooperation--and other, legal forms of trade, which he invited the British government to encourage as a substitute for the illegal traffic (Waley 1958, 18, 28-31, 46, 123; Hao, 113-15).
Having failed to persuade the British government to cooperate in the suppression of the traffic in the name of international law and common morality, Lin proceeded to confiscate and destroy smuggled opium and to incarcerate some smugglers. As soon as the news reached Britain, emotions ran high. With the exception of some members of the Tory opposition, Lin's actions were denounced in the British Parliament as "a grievious sin--a wicked offence--an atrocious violation of justice, for which England had the right, a strict and undeniable right," by "the law of God and man," "to demand reparation by force if refused peaceable applications" (quoted in Semmel 1970, 153; see also Owen 1934).
Evidently, two quite different views of international law and common morality held sway in Britain and China. But while the Chinese view claimed a right to lay down and enforce the law only at home, the British view claimed a right to lay down and enforce the law not just at home but in China as well. What's more, superior proficiency in "the murderous art" provided Britain with the firepower needed to make its view of right and wrong prevail over the Chinese. As K.N. Chauduri put it, "When after a disastrous war (1839-42) the Chinese government agreed to open its ports to British opium traders, it did not do so choosing between right and wrong: the choice was between survival and destruction" (1990, 99).
The Nanjing Treaty of 1842, signed at the end of the first Opium War, is widely held as a watershed event in East-West relations. In comparing this treaty with an earlier treaty, also held as a watershed event in East-West relations--the Balta Limani Treaty of 1838 between Britain and the Ottoman empire-- Resat Kasaba has noted significant differences, as well as similarities, in the premises and outcomes of the two treaties. Both treaties "were `free trade treaties' in the sense that they sought to provide protection for the activities of foreign merchants, reduced the authority of the Chinese and Ottoman governments to impose unilateral tariffs on the articles of trade, and stipulated the abolition of all kinds of monopolies and other kinds of control that could inhibit the circulation of goods in the two empires" (Kasaba 1993, 216-18).
Underneath these similarities, however, there were some important differences. The Nanjing Treaty was more punitive in thrust, reflecting China's defeat in the war with Britain. It involved the cession of territory to the British (Hong Kong), the payment of an indemnity of $21 million, amnesty to Chinese subjects imprisoned for illegal dealings with the British, and the presence of the British fleet in Nanjing to enforce the treaty. But the Balta Limani Treaty was far more comprehensive in scope, involving equal treatment of foreign and Ottoman merchants, the prohibition of all government monopolies and locally imposed surcharges, and the specification of the rate and manner of all duties. The Chinese in the Nanjing Treaty made no such concessions. Moreover, while Western diplomatic and consular representatives had existed in the Ottoman empire for centuries, it took another war to force China to authorize the appointment of a British ambassador to Beijing or consuls in places other than the five ports opened up to trade by the Nanjing Treaty (Kasaba 1993, 218).
As Kasaba (1993, 218-22) underscores, the British obtained a far more comprehensive treaty from the Ottoman than from the Qing, without having to fight the equivalent of the Opium War, primarily because under external and internal pressures of all sorts the Ottomans had already been liberalizing their trade and economy long before 1838. In fact, the Balta Limani Treaty should be seen as a turning point, not so much in Ottoman policies towards free trade, as in British policies towards the Ottoman empire.
With this convention, Britain took a firm stand against the expansionist ambitions of France and Russia and declared the preservation of the integrity of the Ottoman empire as the centerpiece of its policy in the Near East.... For the Ottomans, being recognized as part of the European state system was a significant step in securing the long-term viability of their empire. From the point of view of the British government, an Ottoman administration that was rationalized, centralized, and secularized was likely to be more effective in maintaining the territorial integrity of the empire and hence in providing unified and friendly access to India. Accordingly, while the Sublime Porte was forthcoming in commercial matters, Britain became the main supporter of Ottoman reforms in the nineteenth century. (Kasaba 1993, 220-21)
No such convergence of interests existed in Anglo-Chinese relations. At the time of the Nanjing Treaty, no Western state posed a challenge to British dominance in the Far East comparable to that posed by France and Russia in the Near East. Nor did China have any of the strategic significance for Britain that a unified and friendly Ottoman empire commanded in virtue of its geographical position as a link between Continental Europe and British India. The main strategic value of China for Britain was and remained the role its purchases of Indian opium played in facilitating the revenue operations between India and Britain. For China to play that role no strong central government was needed, nay, the weaker, the better. Under these circumstances, the Qing government had far more to lose than to gain from its incorporation in the Eurocentric interstate system, and for that very reason it was far less forthcoming in commercial and diplomatic matters than the Ottoman government. If the problem with the Ottoman empire on the eve of the Balta Limani Treaty was that it had become "too weak" to serve British interests in the Near East, the problem with the Chinese empire in the wake of the first Opium War was that it remained "too strong" to serve British interests in the Far East.
To be sure, by aggravating the disruptions that the opium trade had been inflicting upon China, the provisions of the Nanjing Treaty sped up the decline of the the Qing dynasty. Moreover, once China's capacity to resist Western demands had been tested and found wanting, a breach was opened for more demands to come. Thus, the Treaty of Nanjing was immediately followed by a Supplementary Treaty with Britain, a treaty with the US and one with France. Since the privileges obtained by one foreign power were also claimed by other foreign powers under the so-called "most favored nation clause," these treaties reinforced one another. And yet the Western powers, later joined by Japan, kept coming back asking for more.
Through the 1850s and 1860s, however, the progressive weakening of Qing China did not proceed fast enough to satisfy the increasingly unbound imperial will of its British foes. "Just as the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus Sum"--declared Palmerston in 1850--"so also a British subject in whatever land he may be shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong" (quoted in Bourne 1970, 302). Coming at a time of growing tensions between the Chinese and Western governments over issues of residence and travel of foreigners and over duties on domestic trade, this extraordinary claim of a territorially unrestricted right for all British citizens to be judged by their own code of legality and morality boded ill for China. The following year, a new declaration by Palmerston made it clear that China was indeed in trouble: "I clearly see that the Time is fast coming when we should be obliged to strike another blow in China.... These half civilized governments, such as those of China, Portugal, Spain, America require a Dressing every eight or ten years to keep them in order" (quoted in Lowe 1981, 34).
Two years later, the destruction of the Turkish navy by Russia forced Britain to intervene along with France to protect the integrity of the Ottoman empire. But as soon as the Crimean War (1854-56) was over, Britain proceeded without hesitation to give China its long overdue "Dressing." Under the pettiest of excuses--redressing "an insult to a British flag lowered by Chinese police from a Chinese-owned vessel registered at Hong Kong" (Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig 1969, 169)--the Anglo- French alliance of the Crimean War was renewed in the second Opium War (1856-58) and in the subsequent military occupation of Beijing in 1860.
As we shall see presently, at the time of the second Opium War the Qing dynasty was in the middle of the most serious upsurge of popular rebellions of its history. Its capacity to resist Western aggression and the imposition of new radical restrictions on its sovereignty was thus even less than in the first Opium War. The Treaty of Tianjin (1858) and the Convention of Beijing (1860) expanded the so-called treaty-port system by adding nine additional ports to the five already opened to trade by the Nanjing Treaty. They abolished China's tariff autonomy by reducing custom tariffs to a maximum of about five percent ad valorem and by handing over Chinese customs to the supervision of foreign powers, represented by a British official. They imposed the payment of a new indemnity of 16 million taels and granted Western merchants, missionaries, and politicians immunity from Chinese law and freedom of movement throughout China upon the acquisition of passports from their consuls in the ports. And they legalized trade in opium, taxing it at the same rate as other articles of commerce (Zhou 1986, 15-16; Guo 1980, 136; Moulder 1979, 108-10; Rozman 1981, 101).
Having led the way in imposing upon China yet another unequal treaty in the name of diplomatic equality, Britain turned around to give a helping hand to the newly humiliated Qing government in the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion. This turnaround established a pattern that became characteristic of Western relations with the Qing dynasty until its downfall in 1911. In Owen Lattimore's words,
From time to time one country or another thought it necessary to chasten a too obdurate China. Once chastened, however, China's incompetent Manchu government had to be put back in business again, for it could not be expected that future demands would be carried out if the government was too weak to carry them out. Thus there emerged an interesting principle: for international purposes, the ideal government of China was a government strong enough to carry out orders, but not strong enough to defy orders. (Quoted in Bagchi 1982, 99)
This "interesting principle" is the same that had inspired Britain's differential treatment of the Ottoman and Qing empires at the time of the Balta Limani Treaty of 1838 and the Nanjing Treaty of 1842. As we have seen, all their similarities notwithstanding, the two treaties performed altogether different functions in the consolidation of British dominance in Asia. The first performed the function of strengthening the central government of the Ottoman empire, while the second performed the function of weakening the central government of the Chinese empire. Twenty years later, the central government of the Chinese empire had weakened sufficiently to qualify for the kind of support that Britain had long accorded to the Ottoman empire.
In this combination in space, and alternation in time, of policies aimed at weakening or strengthening the structures of Asian empires to suit Britain's pursuit of world power, "Westernization" as such never was an objective. Suffice it to say that the change in British policy from hostility to friendship towards the central governments of the Ottoman empire in the late 1830s and of the Chinese empire in the early 1860s, occurred while these governments were being seriously challenged by rebellions--the revolt of the Egyptian governor Muhammad Ali and the Taiping Rebellion, respectively--that were more strongly oriented towards one form or another of "Westernization" than the central governments with which the British sided. Muhammad Ali had provided the Ottoman government with decisive military assistance in suppressing the Wahhabis Islamic Revival movement in Arabia. When he subsequently turned against the Ottomans, his revolt was part of an attempt to transform Egypt into a modern nation-state in the European image. In the pursuit of regional hegemony, Britain found nothing appealing in this endeavor and had no qualms in siding with the Ottomans in quelling the revolt.
The Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 was a far more complex, powerful and radical movement than the revolts that had shaken the Ottoman empire twenty years earlier. Coming at the end of a long series of religious/political rebellions, which had marred Qing rule since the apogee of the dynasty's power and prestige under Qien-Long (1736-95), the Taiping movement presented features that made it more akin to a social revolution than a mere "rebellion."
Had it been directed only against the Manchus, like earlier Ming restoration movements or like Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary party, the gentry might have rallied to it and it might have succeeded. But then it would only have been another of China's many dynastic changes. The Taipings were determined instead to eradicate the most basic elements of traditional Chinese society: the gentry-officials, scholars, landlords--and the Confucian ethos on which their authority rested. (Schurmann and Schell 1967, 178-9)
Founded by the charismatic leader Hong Xiuquan, and organized miliarily by lieutenants drawn from the same ethnic group as Hong, the Hakka--that is, "guest settlers," people who had migrated from northern to southern China centuries earlier but had retained a separate ethnic identity--this social- revolutionary movement originated in the Guangzhou region and its hinterland. In 1851 the leadership of the movement gave it the dynastic title Taiping Tianguo ("The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace") and launched a great northern expedition into the Yangzi valley. By 1853, the Taipings had taken over Nanjing and made it their capital; they had occupied much of central and south China; and they got within 30 miles of Tianjin. Although they failed to oust the Qing from Beijing, the symbol of dynastic authority, they held their own against the imperial forces for another ten years until they were defeated in 1864.
The political and military organization of the Taipings was mostly taken from the ancient classic the Rites of Zhou. The primitive communism called for by these and other pre- Confucian texts informed also the Taipings' socialist utopian doctrines. But the most distinctive feature of Taiping ideology was the tying of these doctrines to Christianity, an alien religion with only a short and dubious history in China. In Hong Xinquan's messianic imagination, Christian beliefs derived mainly from the Old Testament--the uniqueness and omnipotence of God the creator, his spiritual fatherhood of all men, the efficacy of prayer, the Ten Commandments, and so on--were combined with, or replaced by, traditional Chinese beliefs, as in the replacement of the Christian belief in original sin by the more optimistic Chinese belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature, or in the substitution of the traditional Chinese gloss "The whole world is one family, and all men are brothers" as the Sixth Commandment for the starker "Thou shalt not kill or injure men" (Franke 1967, 181, 185-6; Fairbank 1983, 183-5; 1992, 211).
The result was, in John Fairbank's words, "a unique East- West amalgam of ideas and practices geared to militant action, the like of which was not seen again until China borrowed and sinified Marxism-Leninism a century later." In retrospect, this early amalgam strikes Fairbank "as undoubtedly the best chance Christianity ever had of actually becoming part of the old Chinese culture" (1992, 209, 211). And yet the Western powers did nothing to seize this chance. The only chance they were quick to seize was to squeeze more concessions out of the Qing regime, taking advantage of the straits in which the regime had been put by the Taiping and other contemporaneous rebellions--the Nian rebellion in the east (1853-68), and the Miao rebellion (1850-72) and various Muslim rebellions (1855-74) in the west. But once they had secured what they wanted in the second Opium War, they threw their lot behind the Qing Restoration for fear of losing what they had just obtained (Franke 1967, 185).
The logic was not just that, in Johnathan Spence's words, "if the Qing beat back the Taiping, the foreigners would keep their new gains; if the Taipings defeated the Qing... then the West would have to start the tiresome process of negotiations-- and perhaps wage fresh wars--all over again" (199x, 182). Equally important, adherence to a faith of Western derivation made the Taipings even less accommodating than the Qing towards Western encroachments upon Chinese sovereignty. For their puritanical ardor did not stop at prohibiting gambling, idolatry, adultery, prostitution and footbinding. It turned also against opium far more firmly than the Qing had ever done, thereby clashing head on with Britain's preeminent interest in the region. Nor did their belief in the equality of all people stop at a general friendliness towards all "foreign brothers" (wai quo xiongdi) in sharp contrast with traditional beliefs in the superiority of the Chinese as a chosen people. It translated also into a strong opposition to the restrictions on Chinese sovereignty that the Western powers were forcibly imposing on the debilitated Qing dynasty (Franke 1967, 187-8).
In short, in the early 1860s in China, as in the late 1830s in the Ottoman empire, the Western powers under British hegemony showed a distinct preference for dealing and siding with the disintegrating structures of Asia's ancien regimes rather than with the nascent forces of nationalism and "Westernism." Contrary to Western rationalizations, the purpose of the British wars with China, and of most nineteenth-century British wars with the governments and peoples of the non-Western world, was not the establishment of conditions of commercial intercourse on terms of reciprocity and of respect for one another's sovereignty. Rather, it was to impose upon China and the non-Western world a condition of political vassalage that utterly contradicted Western ideas of international equality and national sovereignty. In the pursuit of this objective, a partnership with the declining ancien regimes was a much safer bet than a partnership with the forces of nationalism and "Westernism."
A contradiction between Western practices in the non-Western world and Western ideas of rights and liberties characterized, not just interstate relations, but also intrastate relations between rulers and subjects and between dominant and subaltern groups and classes. Nowhere were these social aspects of the contradiction more evident than in India, the main foundation of Britain's own imperial power. Here, implacable champions of democratic reforms and representative government at home turned into staunch advocates of coercive rule. Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism and known for his desire to prepare a constitutional code for India, believed in an "enlightened despotism" for India and pictured himself as that country's uncrowned philosopher-King (Stokes 1959, 68). His ardent disciple, James Mill, member of the executive government of the East India Company since 1819 and elevated to the chief executive office of Examiner in 1830, declared during the debate on the Charter Act of 1833 that anything even approaching representative government in India was wholly inconceivable (Coupland 1942, 20). Mill's more illustrious son, John Stuart Mill, who joined the Company's service in 1823 and eventually replaced his father as the Examiner, argued in his famous treatise Representative Government that in backward areas like India a "vigorous despotism" by a civilized nation, like England, was the only possibility (Bearce 1961, 289).
Neither during the much lauded "Age of Reform," associated with the administration of the Benthamite friend of James Mill, Lord William Bentick (1828-1835), nor during Britain's "high" hegemony, were any of the democratic institutions characteristic of British hegemony in the West ever applied to India. Some halting, half-way and emasculated measures of representative government were introduced only in the declining phase of British hegemony. The Government of India Act of 1909 was the first small step towards representative government. Under mounting nationalist pressure, the principle of representation was considerably expanded in 1919; but it was not till 1935 that direct general elections were allowed. Even then, the electorate remained restricted by various qualifications. On the eve of independence in 1947 under 15 percent of the population was entitled to vote. Universal suffrage was introduced only after independence (on the provisions of the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, and other constitutional developments prior to independence, see Coupland 1942).
British India was thus governed primarily by coercive and bureaucratic institutions--the civil service, the army and the police. Even these institutions had special characteristics.
Unlike civilian bureaucracies in Britain, the Indian Civil Service, proudly known as the "steel frame of India," was not merely executor of policy but also its maker. Similarly, the army was instrumental in putting down frequent uprisings and coercing recalcitrant landlords. Military men were usually members of ruling institutions, such as the Governor-General's Council, and were often also senior bureaucrats and officials in the civil service and the police. Military ethos thus informed the administration of India and the liberal distinction between the civil and the military was non-existent (for an extensive bibliography on the Indian army, see Dodwell 1932, 616-18).
Finally, the role of the police was not confined to maintaining law and order, to ensuring the "rule of law," as preached by liberal democracy. "Police power was often used to circumvent or supplement the legal process because the latter was too dilatory or too scrupulous to satisfy the colonial need for prompt retribution and collective punishment." The specially coercive character of the police was strengthened by the lack of distinction between political and crime-control functions: "[C]rime and politics were almost inseparable: serious crime was an implicit defiance of state authority and a possible prelude to rebellion; political resistance was either a `crime' or the likely occasion for it" (Arnold, 1986, 3). Thus, campaigns against highway robbers led, not only to laws and institutions for collective and arbitrary punishments, but also to criminalizing all sorts of groups and communities. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, replaced by a more sweeping Criminal Tribes Act in 1911 consigned 1,500,000 people, in North India alone, to `criminal tribes' and hence subject to confinement (Nigam 1990a, 131; see also Radhakrishna 1989; Yang 1985; Ahmad 1992).
The centrality of coercive and autocratic institutions in the governance of British India reflected the fact that the British did not rule India for the benefit of the Indians. As argued in Chapter 2, initially it was ruled primarily for the benefit of the East India Company. Then, increasingly, in the British national interest.
As Disraeli pointed out in 1881, the key to India lay in London: British rule was not maintained for the benefit of the Indian, nor simply for the sake of direct British interests in India; the Raj was there to keep firm the foundation on which much of the structure of formal and informal empire rested. For London the twin imperatives of Indian policy were that the Indian empire should pay for itself and that Indian resources should be available in the imperial cause. (Tomlinson 1975, 338)
The fact that Western ideas of representative government could not be applied to India because India was not ruled for the benefit of the Indian, does not mean that coercive rule could dispense completely with an element of persuasion, not just to win consent at home for coercion overseas, but especially to facilitate the orderly exploitation of the newly acquired empire. Thus, coercive rule was rationalized through the construction of a body of "knowledge" about the Indian past and heritage, aimed at demonstrating both the unfitness of India for the institutions of representative government and the fitness of Britain to rule India by means of a "vigorous" despotism--a process now familiar to us as Orientalism (on Orientalist representrations of India, see among others Inden 1986; Guha 1992a; Prakash 1990).
Central to this construction was the portrayal of India as a society composed of implacably hostile communities, castes, cultures, and religions--a portrayal which was used over and over again to deny liberal democratic reforms. In 1861 when the Indian Council Act was being debated in the House of Commons Sir Charles Wood, Secretary of State for India, insisted that "you cannot possibly assemble at any one place in India who shall be real representatives of the various classes of the Native population of that Empire" (quoted in Coupland 1942, 21). In 1892 electoral reforms were restricted because, in the words of the then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, "representative government was `not an Eastern idea,' that its introduction in India would be the gravest possible `parting of the ways,' that it only works well when `all those represented desire the same thing,' and that it puts `an intolerable strain' on a society divided into hostile sections." And even in 1909 only very modest measures were introduced because in the words of A.J. Balfour,
representative government... is only suitable...when you are dealing with a population in the main homogeneous, in the main equal in every substantial and essential sense, in a community where the minority are prepared to accept the decisions of the majority, where they are all alike in the traditions in which they are brought up, in their general outlook upon the world and in their broad view of national aspiration. (Quoted in Coupland 1942, 26).
British coercive rule was thus commonly presented in Indian and imperial historiography as a continuation of indigenous political traditions. The claim was lent credence by the British adoption of some of the symbols, rituals and pomp of the Mughal court. But the claim conveniently ignored that, behind the glitter of these symbols, rituals and pomp, the actual power of previous rulers of the Indian subcontinent had been far less centralized and despotic than imagined and practiced by their British successors.
Since at least the tenth century, governance in South Asia had rested on the recognition and accommodation of competing and autonomous centers of power, peoples and cultures. The durability and strength of central power depended on the extent to which the various strains in indigenous civilization were accommodated, not eliminated. Even the Mughals, who like the British were alien conquerors, and whom the British sought to emulate, soon recognized this fundamental principle of governance and ignored it only at their peril. Thus, in the crucial sphere of taxation, the sources of revenue on which the central authority depended were largely controlled by a myriad of groups and personal networks around local and regional markets and the surrounding agrarian tracts. In order to get to these,
[the ruler] had to involve himself all the time in local influence and to stake his power in the ever changing alignments of factions jostling for local and regional predominance. By the same token local influence was free to encroach on the imperial center. The integrity of the whole was therefore in the intertwining and overlapping of interests competing for the distribution of power rather than the spectacular use of superior force, which moreover could too easily lead to overextension. The system then was one of a 'balancing of relative weakness,' managed by conflict in which the Mughal could at best be a superior arbiter arranging and rearranging the distribution of power by a judicious and sparing use of resources (Heesterman 1978, 42)
More generally, the rulers' absolute power to make laws was in practice limited both by religious laws, which was not in the rulers' power to abrogate or modify, and by customs, which in virtue of their antiquity had the force of law (Rashid 1979, 139). Indeed, due to practical considerations, much of the time the so-called "priestly tyranny" of divine kingship was more tolerant and secular than many of the modern colonial and post- colonial states. For example, Abul Fazl, the highly influential Wazir and counsellor of the Mughal King Akbar (1556-1605) declared, that kingship "is a gift of God" and that a king who "does not inaugurate universal peace (toleration) and... does not regard all conditions of humanity, and all sects of religion with the single eye of favour--and not bemother some and bestepmother others--he will not become fit for the exalted dignity" (quoted in Rashid 1979, 146).
A fundamental distinction between power and authority was in fact a central aspect of the South Asian political tradition. Different spheres of action had different authority systems, each "divided by counter-weighing authorities." Under these circumstances, an individual had considerable freedom "to choose his authority and follow his own beliefs.... The idea of an indigenous, central, public authority exercising political power could not be linked to the traditional ethos" (Nandy 1972, 119- 120).
This highly diffused system of domination did not imply disorganization or fragmentation, as colonial historiography maintained. Economy and culture united the polity. Multiple cultures, communities and territories were tied in an integrated civilization through extensive and dense networks of trade, which linked innumerable markets to one another and were essential to the conversion of the surplus extracted from land and labor into money and commodities (Heesterman 1978; Chaudhuri 1990).
Culturally, numerous popular idioms and codes of ethic provided the moral foundations of the system. Thus, the notion of moral duty embedded in the idiom of Dharma was a double-edged concept justifying subordination in the caste hierarchy but also imposing obligation to promote and support the subordinated. Similarly, the idiom of Danda, representing the idea of punishment and authority served as a source of power but also of responsibility to provide protection. Indeed, protection was the most important duty of the ruler. For example, the revered epic Mahabharata, states:
That king who tells his people that he is their protector but who does not or is unable to protect them, should be killed by his subjects in a body like a dog that is affected with the rabies and has become mad. (Quoted in Guha 1992a, 268)
To be sure, pre-colonial systems of rule were highly exploitative and oppressive. But oppression and exploitation were embedded in a civilizational order which rendered their logic flexible, comprehensible, even acceptable. Governance was not defined politically as a monopoly of the state and the idea that the state created order out of chaos was alien. Order existed prior to the state which had only the subsidiary role of maintaining it (on pre-colonial state-society relations in contrast to the dynamics of the modern state, see Sheth 1989 and Nandy 1984). For the peasant, as for other subaltern groups and classes of Indian society,
Exploitation as such was not unjust. It was inevitable that some ruled and some conducted prayers and some owned the land and some labored, and all lived off the fruits of that labour. But it was important that everyone in the society made a living out of the resources that were available. (Pandey 1988, 261)
This was precisely the principle that British rule in India could not accommodate. For British rule in India was not just alien. It was an alien rule that, unlike any alien rule previously experienced by India, continually disrupted established ways of life and, moreover, did so in the pursuit of objectives that ran counter all moral principles of the subcontinent's civilization. As argued in previous chapters, the superexploitation followed by the destruction of the Indian "traditional" productive apparatus and by its subsequent reconstruction on "modern" foundations, made perfect sense in terms of the British national interest. But it made no sense at all from the standpoint of the reproductive needs of India's subaltern classes. The alternating attraction and repulsion of their labor by the British system of capital accumulation on a world scale continually disorganized their social life making them prey to misery and degradation. To them, this new alien ruler, who claimed to be the bearer of a superior social order, and delivered instead unprecedented social chaos, must indeed have appeared--to paraphrase the Mahabharata--"like a dog that is affected with the rabies and has become mad."
Here lay the fundamental clash of civilizations that fed popular insurgency in British India and, in due course, inspired Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's utopia of a nonmodern India. As Guha (1992b, 1-2, 13) notes, "agrarian disturbances in many forms and on scales ranging from local riots to war-like campaigns spread over many districts were endemic throughout the first three quarters of British rule until the very end of the nineteenth century. At a simple count there are no fewer than 110 known instances of these even for the somewhat shorter period of 117 years.... between the revolt against Deby Sinha in 1783 and the end of the Birsaite rising in 1900." Often led by "traditional" elites, these popular revolts reached their apogee in the famous Great Rebellion of 1857 (for a comprehensive treatment of elite and subaltern resistance to British rule see, among many others, Chaudhuri 1955 and Guha 1992b).
The 1857 Rebellion induced Britain to abandon the policy of introducing new social and political institutions, and to rely instead on the restoration of indigenous ones. Just as the contemporaneous Taiping Rebellion prompted Britain to throw its weight behind the ongoing restoration of the power of the Qing dynasty and of the landlord class in China, so the Great Rebellion of 1857 prompted Britain to restore some of the power and autonomy of landed magnates and petty rulers of "native states" within its own Indian empire (on the latter restoration, see, Metcalf 1964 and Bayly 1988, 11-15). Taken jointly, these parallel shifts in British policy show that British dominance in Asia clashed far more fundamentally with the interests of the lower than with those of the upper social strata. Once the ruling groups of Asia's ancien regimes had been tamed, as in China, or subdued, as in India, they could be turned into useful allies in the reproduction of British dominance over the subaltern strata. But that dominance won little or no allegiance among the subaltern strata themselves.
This fundamental lack of legitimacy of British/Western dominance among the lower strata of Asian societies enabled the nationalist movements that developed in the wake of the "traditional" revolts of the early and mid-nineteenth century, to mobilize massive popular support in the revolt against the West. Among the "modernized" indigenous elites which led these movements, the central objective was national self-determination- -that is, a sovereign nation-state within the modern Eurocentric interstate system. As previously noted, the ideology of this component of national liberation movements underscored the "un- Western" character of Western colonialism and imperialism and requested full national sovereignty as the condition of attaining, domestically and internationally, the rights and liberties that the West had proclaimed at home and trampled on in the non-Western world. This is the component that in India came to be indentified with "the Nehru legacy."
Western ideas of rights and liberties, however, played only a secondary role in the nationalist mobilization of subaltern strata. "Traditional" beliefs about power, protection, fairness and protest, inherited from the indigenous civilization and continually violated by "modern" Western civilization as practiced in the East, played a far more important role. This is the component that in India came to be identified with what we may call "the Gandhi legacy." Gandhi became Mahatama (literally Great Soul) not merely because he opposed and sought to end British rule, like many other figures of the Indian National Congress. The main reason why he rose to prominence is that he linked the nationalist struggle to a fundamental critique and rejection of modern civilization as a whole and affirmed the continuing validity of a reconstructed indigenous civilization (Amin 1988; Chatterjee 1986, ch.4). As Partha Chatterjee (1993, 201) observes, "the very political strategy of building up a mass movement against colonial rule... required the Congress to espouse Gandhi's idea of machinery, commercialization, and centralised state power as the curses of modern civilization, thrust upon the Indian people by European colonialism."
After Independence, Gandhi's idea that industrialism itself, rather than the inability to industrialize, was the root cause of Indian poverty, was dismissed as "visionary" and "unscientific," in favor of Nehru's idea that modern industrialism was necessary for India to "catch up" with Western countries (Chatterhee 1993, 201-2). Today, after half a century of strict adherence to Western principles of historical progress without any catching up with the standards of wealth set by Western countries (Arrighi 1991), fewer and fewer Indians are sure whose ideas were more "visionary" and "unscientific," and we should not be surprised if the Gandhi legacy were to revive. But whether it will or not, the future of South Asia is bound to be strongly influenced by developments further east, where the demise of British dominance followed a very different route.
In East Asia the demise of British dominance was influenced far more directly and decisively than in South Asia by the escalation of interstate conflicts and competition. As previously noted, geographical distance sheltered the Chinese empire from the kind of exposure to European rivalries that had shaped British policies towards the Ottoman empire even at the height of British hegemony. At the time of the first Opium War, no Western state posed a challenge to British dominance in the Far East comparable to that posed by France and Russia in the Near East. The situation began to change once the mid-nineteenth century transport revolution and the industrialization of war brought the Far East within the reach of a growing number of Western states. As we have seen, France joined Britain in the second Opium War. And in 1857, right after the Anglo-French fleet had attacked, burned, and cuptured Canton, Tokugawa Japan-- a prominent member of the Sinocentric world system, as we shall see--finally yielded to US pressures to sign a treaty, soon followed by similar treaties with Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands. Patterned after the treaties of Nanjing and Tianjin with China, these treaties included the opening of ports to Western trade and residence, extraterritoriality, most-favored- nation clauses, and tariffs fixed at 5 percent ad valorem (So and Chiu 1995, 63-5; Gibney 1992, 119-122; Moulder 1977, 132-3).
Notwithstanding the increasing number of Western powers present in the region, for another twenty years after the second Opium War and the opening up of Japan to Western trade and influence, relationships among Western states in the Far East remained far more cooperative than they had ever been in the Near East. It was as if Western States had to join forces to make significant inroads in the last remaining bastion of the now dismembered Asian super-world-economy. In the 1880s rivalries among European states in East Asia did seem to be gaining momentum. The transformation of Annam (Vietnam)--another important member of the Sinocentric world system--into a French protectorate following the Sino-French War of 1884-85 led Britain to annex Burma--also a member of the Sinocentric world system--to balance French influence in the Indo-China peninsula. Soon afterwards, Russian advances in Central Asia were countered by the British annexation of Sikkim and the signing of a treaty with Tibet. Nevertheless, the main factor that eventually upset the precarious balance of power on which Qing rule and China's territorial integrity had come to rest were not rivalries among Western states. Rather, it was a conflict internal to the Sinocentric world system, namely, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Treaty of Shimonoseki that followed in 1895.
The war and its aftermath--the emergence of Japan as a regional power, the further weakening of Qing rule in China, the threat of the partition of China by the Western powers and Japan, and the nationalist response that this threat provoked in China-- constitutes as significant a watershed in East-West relations as did the Opium Wars. From then on, a process of indigenous modernization in the East Asian region posed ever more serious challenges to Western supremacy--the chalenge of Japanese military power from 1905 to 1945; the ideological and political challenge of Communist China from 1949 to 1973; and the economic challenge of the East Asian region as a whole from the late 1970s through the present. As Takeshi Hamashita has suggested, the process of modernization that underlies these challenges was no mere response to the subordinate incorporation of the region within the Eurocentric interstate system. In his view, this incorporation was partial at best, and the legacy of what he calls the Sinocentric tribute-trade system has continued to shape developments in East Asia.
In Hamashita's conceptualization, the regions, countries, and cities located along the perimeter of the several sea zones that stretch from Northeast to Southeast Asia "are close enough to influence one another, but are too far apart to assimilate or be assimilated." The Sinocentric tribute-trade system provided these territorial entities with a political-economic framework of mutual integration that nonetheless endowed its peripheral components with considerable autonomy vis-a-vis the Chinese center (Hamashita 1995, 5-8). Within this system, tribute missions performed an "imperial title-awarding" function that was both hierarchical and competitive. Thus, Korea, Japan, the Ryukyus, Vietnam and Laos, among others, all sent tribute missions to China. But the Ryukyus and Korea sent missions also to Japan; and Vietnam required tribute missions from Laos. Japan and Vietnam, therefore, were both peripheral members of the Sinocentric system and competitors with China in the exercise of the imperial title-awarding function (Hamashita 1994: 92).
The system of tribute missions was intertwined and grew in symbiosis with extensive trading networks. In fact, the rela- tionship between trade and tribute was so close that "it is quite legitimate to view tribute exchange as a commercial transaction."
Even the Chinese court... acted as a party to business transactions. The mode of payment was often Chinese curren- cy, whether paper money or silver. Seen from an economic perspective, tribute was managed as an exchange between seller and buyer, with the `price' of commodities fixed. Indeed, `price' standards were determined, albeit loosely, by market prices in Peking. Given the nature of this trans- action, it can be shown that the foundation of the whole complex tribute-trade formation was determined by the price structure of China and that the tribute-trade zone formed an integrated `silver zone' in which silver was used as the medium of trade settlement. The key to the functioning of the tribute trade as a system was the huge [foreign] `dema- nd' for [Chinese] commodities... and the difference between prices inside and outside China." (Hamashita 1994: 96-7)
European expansion in Asia eventually led to the formal dissolution of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system through the subordinate incorporation of its members into the Eurocentric interstate system as colonies, semi-sovereign and peripheral or semiperipheral sovereign states. Substantively, however, the structures and norms of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system continued to shape and influence interstate relations within East Asia. Thus, the formation of national identities among East Asian countries long preceded the European impact and was based on their own understanding of Sinocentrism (Hamashita 1994, 94; 1995, 6, 8-9, 13). Through its seclusion policy in the Edo period (1603-1867), for example, "Japan was trying to become a mini-China both ideologically and materially." And even after the Meiji Restoration, Japanese industrialization "was not so much a process of catching up with the West, but more a result of centuries-long competition within Asia" (Kawakatsu 1995, 6-7; see also Hamashita 1988).
Whether formal or substantive, the subordinate incorporation of East Asia within the structures of the Eurocentric world system transformed the Sinocentric world system. Three changes were of particular importance for subsequent developments. One was the expansion of what had long been an interstitial formation of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system, the Chinese capitalist diaspora. The second was the adoption of Western military technologies by both China and Japan. And the third was the adoption of a sinified version of Marxism-Leninism by China.
In sketching the first change, let us begin by noticing that even after British gunboats had battered down the wall of governmental regulations that enclosed the Chinese domestic economy, the leading branches of the so-called First Industrial Revolution had a hard time in outcompeting Chinese products. In 1850, cotton goods accounted for a mere 6 percent of British exports to China and in 1875 for just 8 percent (Woodruff 1966, 309). As late as 1894, China's indigenous handicraft industry still supplied 86 percent of the Chinese market for cotton cloth (Wu 1987, 148). By then, foreign imports were rapidly displacing handicraft spinning of cotton yarn, which suffered an estimated 50 percent contraction between 1871-80 and 1901-1. But the use of cheaper, machine-produced foreign yarn gave new impetus to the domestic weaving industry, which managed to hold its own and even expand (Feuerwerker 1970, 371-5; 1969, 18-19).
The competitiveness of Western firms that set up production in China was even less impressive. Thus, in the silk industry foreign ventures incurred major losses, while local business prospered--the number, workers employed and exports of modern, Chinese-owned filatures increasing by a factor of 10 between the 1880s and 1890s. "Foreigners"--lamented a British consul in Canton--"had little left to them other than the export trade" (So 1986, 103-116; So and Chiu 1995, 47). Western products and businesses did triumph in a few industries. But the triumph was limited to such products as cigarettes, which did not compete with any indigenous product, and kerosene, which replaced local vegetable oil. Generally speaking, however, it is hard to dispute Andrew Nathan's observation that "the China market spelled frustration for foreign merchants. Foreign goods made but a superficial mark in Chinese markets" (1972, 5).
Opium, of course, was the great exception, leaving as it did a deep and long-lasting mark. But while the predominance of opium among Chinese imports throughout the nineteenth century may be taken as a measure of the continuing lack of competitiveness of most other foreign goods in the Chinese market, even the opium trade spelled frustration for foreign merchants. Access to the final consumers of the drug could be gained only through Chinese intermediaries organized in groups and networks on the basis of language, residence, kinship and political patronage. The "squeeze" that these intermediaries exercized on foreign merchants was the subject of recurrent complaints. Self-serving as these complaints undoubtedly were, it was nonetheless the case that Chinese middlemen in all trades, even when formally employed by foreign merchants, often made more money than their Western principals; that they were quick to learn what there was to be learned of Western business techniques; and that in competing with foreign firms they had the great advantage of much lower overheads and of not being "squeezed" by a middleman (Hui 1995, 91, 96-8; Hao 1970, 110-11; Murphey 1977, 192-3).
The result was an unprecedented expansion of the Chinese merchant networks and communities that over the centuries had developed in the coastal regions of China and in the interstices of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system (Hamashita 1994, 97-103; 1995, 12, 15-16). Chinese merchants had always figured prominently among these interstitial communities (Chang 1991, 23- 4). But at no time had the conditions of their expansion been more favorable than in the nineteenth century, as a direct result of the Western onslaught on the organizational structures of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system. As the capacity of the Qing government to control channels between the Chinese domestic economy and the outer world declined, opportunities increased for Chinese merchants operating around the perimeter of the empire.
Many of these merchants made their "first tank of gold" in the opium trade. But the greatest expansion of the Chinese trading diaspora that connected China to the rest of the region occurred in the "coolie trade," the procurement and transshipment of indentured labor for service overseas. First promoted by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the Chinese coolie trade experienced a phase of explosive growth in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1851 and 1900, more than two million "contract laborers" were shipped off from China, two-thirds of them to Southeast Asia. The transformation of much of the "periphery" of the Sinocentric system into a major source of raw materials for the metropolitan centers of the Eurocentric system created a sudden expansion in the demand for cheap labor in the region. At the same time, the ongoing disintegration of the imperial political-economy inflated the surplus population in China and undermined the capacity of the Qing regime to interfere with the resettlement of the surplus overseas (Hui 1995, 108-9, 115, 138-41).
The ensuing boom in the coolie trade boosted the expansion of the Overseas Chinese trading diaspora in several related ways. Although transportation was in the hands of European shipping companies, most other branches of the trade were controlled by Chinese secret societies in the major ports of China and Southeast Asia. Profits were high and became the foundation of many new fortunes among Chinese merchants. Besides making the fortunes of individual merchants, the coolie trade also made the fortunes of the port-cities of Singapore, Hong Kong, Penang and Macau, all of which became to varying extents major seats and "containers" of the wealth and power of the Chinese business diaspora. Equally important, the coolie trade left a legacy of Chinese settlement throughout Southeast Asia. It is this legacy that, right up to the present, has provided the Overseas Chinese with a highly prolific source of opportunities to profit from one form or another of commercial and financial intermediation within and across jurisdictions in the East Asian region (Hui 1995, 127- 38, 142-5, 149-53).
The consolidation and expansion of a Chinese capitalist diaspora as the main intermediary and beneficiary of trade between Mainland China and the outer world left a deep and long- lasting mark on the political economy of East Asia. Neither Japanese modernization, nor the Chinese Revolution of 1911, nor indeed the present dynamism of the Chinese economy can be fully understood except in the light of this nineteenth-century development. Focusing on Japanese modernization, Hamashita goes as far as maintaining that Japan's industrialization after the opening of its ports was as much a response to Chinese commercial supremacy in the East Asian region as it was a response to Western military supremacy. Specifically, the production for export to China of textiles--a major component of the process of Japanese industrialization in its early stages--was primarily aimed at breaking the hold of Overseas Chinese merchants on Japan's foreign trade (Hamashita n.d., 18-19). But Sino-Japanese commercial rivalries and the launching of modernization both in Japan and China must be put in the context of a competition that was not just commercial but political as well.
This brings us to the second major change that occurred in the Sinocentric world system as a result of its subordinate incorporation in the Eurocentric world system--the adoption of Western military technologies by both China and Japan. As previously noted, the first Opium War revealed brutally the full implications of Western military superiority. By so doing, it awoke the Chinese to the imperatives of modernization much faster and more effectively than cheap Western commodities could have ever done.
During the war, Lin Zexu himself had promptly realized that the military equipment at his disposal was no match for that of the British. While trying his best to buy foreign equipment, he also commissioned the translation of foreign texts, and later passed on the material he had collected to the scholar-official Wei Yuan. Wei used the material to compile An Illustrated Gazetteer of the Maritime Countries, which developed the old idea of using the barbarians to control the barbarians into the new idea of using barbarian armaments to control the barbarians. The importance of the new idea was not lost on Japanese scholars, who later translated the book to push forward their own reform movement (Tsiang 1967, 144).
In China itself the idea became central to the Self- Strengthening Movement that took off after the second Opium War and the defeat of the Taiping Rebellion. In justifying to Beijing the establishment of arsenals to make guns and gunboats and of a machine factory, a provincial leader of the movement argued that the foreigners' domination of China was based on the superiority of their weapons and China could strengthen itself only by learning to use Western machinery (Fairbank 1983, 197-8; So and Chiu 1995, 49-50). A few years later the Meiji Restoration (1868) propelled Japan along the same path of rapid modernization aimed at using barbarian armaments (and machines) to control the barbarians. The armaments's race that had long been a feature of the Eurocentric system was thus "internalized" by the Sinocentric system.
Launched under the same slogan taken from the ancient text the Rites of Zhou, "Enrich the country, strengthen the army" (Lin 1959), the parallel modernization efforts of China and Japan in military-related industries gave priority to the establishment of modern industrial enterprises in mining, heavy industries, transport and communications. In both countries, these modern industries were governmental undertakings. In China, government supervision was combined from the start with the capital and management of Chinese merchants with experience in foreign business. In Japan, government enterprises recruited technicians of various nationalities (Dutch, French, English, among others) as managers, assistants and instructors, and once the enterprises had been put on a sound footing, they were turned over to Japanese merchants at bargain prices. But in both countries, foreign investment and control in the new industries was actively discouraged (Moulder 1979, 184-7; Thomas 1984, 17, 64, 81; Norman 1975, 233-4; Hsu 1983, 278-82; So and Chiu 1995, 49-53, 74-5).
For about twenty-five years after they were launched, these industrialization efforts yielded similar economic results. On the eve of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, in Albert Feuerwerker's assessment, "the disparity between the degree of modern economic development in the two countries was not yet flagrant" (1958, 53). Nevertheless, Japan's victory in the war was symptomatic of a fundamental difference in the impact of the modernization drive on the social and political cohesiveness of the two countries and on their respective capabilities to wage war. In China, the main agency of the modernization drive were provincial authorities, whose power vis-a-vis the central government had increased considerably in the course of the repression of the rebellions of the 1850s, and who used modernization to consolidate their autonomy in competition with one another. In Japan, in contrast, the modernization drive was an integral aspect of the Meiji Restoration that centralized power in the hands of the national government and disempowered provincial authorities (So and Chiu 1995, 53, 68-72).
The advantages that Japan came to enjoy vis-a-vis China as a result of these opposite domestic thrusts of their respective modernization efforts were compounded by the geopolitics of the situation, most notably, by Japan's smaller size, insularity, and poverty of resources, all of which oriented Japan's modernization toward overseas expansion at the expense of China and its tributaries. From the start, control over Korea--"a dagger to the heart of Japan" and a "tributary" state of China--was the main goal of this outward thrust of Japanese modernization. By 1876, Japan had already succeeded in opening up Korea to its trade through an unequal treaty, which was immediately followed by similar treaties obtained by the Western powers by virtue of the most-favored-nation clause. Within a few years, Japanese purchases of rice raised prices beyond what ordinary Koreans could afford, precipitating a major rebellion aimed not just at stopping the export of rice but at reconstituting power in Korea on new social foundations. Unable to quell the rebellion, in 1894 the Korean government turned to China for help. And as China stepped in, Japanese warships intercepted and destroyed the Chinese fleet (Borthwick 1992, 145-9; Kim 1980).
The Japanese victory in the short war that followed turned the underlying divergence in the trajectories of Japanese and Chinese modernization into an unbridgeable chasm. On the one hand, defeat in the war weakened further national cohesion in China, leading to half a century of political chaos marked by further restrictions on sovereignty, the final collapse of the Qing regime, the transformation of provincial governors into semi-sovereign warlords, Japanese invasion, and recurrent civil wars between the forces of Nationalism and Communism. On the other hand, victory in the war strengthened further national cohesion in Japan, leading over the same half century to the renegotiation and eventual supersession of the unequal treaties with Western powers and Japan's emergence as the paramount economic power and leading imperialist power in East Asia until its defeat in the Second World War.
Japan's victory over China in 1894, followed by its victory over Russia in the war of 1904-5, established Japan--to paraphrase Akira Iriye (1970, 552)--as "a respectable participant in the game of imperialist politics." Economically, victory over China gave a major boost to the resources that Japan could mobilize in the expansion of its military-industrial apparatus. The acquisition of Chinese territory, most notably, Taiwan, as well as China's recognition of Japanese suzerainty over Korea, endowed Japan with valuable outposts from which to launch future attacks on China, as well as with more secure overseas supplies of cheap food. At the same time, Chinese indemnities amounting to more than one-third of Japan's GNP helped Japan to finance the further expansion of heavy industries and to put the currency on the gold standard. This, in turn, improved Japan's credit rating in London and, therefore, its capacity to tap additional funds for industrial expansion at home and imperialist expansion overseas (Duus 1984, 143, 161-2; Feis 1965, 422-23).
Politically, victory over China turned Japan into a respectable participant in the imperialist game but only after a minor setback. Shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, France, Germany and Russia demanded that Japan return to China Port Arthur and the Liandong Peninsula, which the treaty had assigned to Japan along with Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands. Japan complied only to see the Western powers reap the fruits of its victory through the scramble for exclusive spheres of influence over Chinese territory--Russia leasing Port Arthur and establishing control over the Liandong Peninsula; Germany leasing Kiachow Bay and establishing control over the Shandong Peninsula; France leasing Guangzhou Bay and extending control from northern Indochina to Henan; and Britain leasing Weihaiwei and establishing control over the Yangzi Valley. Worse still, China's recognition of Japanese suzerainty over Korea brought Japan face to face with an increasingly active and influential Russia (Borthwick 1992, 149-50; Thomas 1984).
Russia's growing activism and influence was as upsetting for Britain's balance-of-power policy, however, as it was for Japan's imperialist ambitions. What is more, Britain perceived Japan as being strong enough to be a useful ally in countering Russian advances in the Far East but not strong enough to challenge British dominance in the region. It was thus easy for Japan to persuade Britain to renegotiate their unequal commercial treaty-- thereby opening the way to analogous renegotiations with the other Western powers--and to agree to a formal Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902). Emboldened by Britain's commitment to discourage any other power from siding with Russia, in February 1904 Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, sank the entire squadron at anchor, and went on to win the war that ensued.
As Geoffrey Barraclough (1967, 108) observes, in forging an alliance with Japan, Britain seemed to have "pulled off a clever manoeuvre against Russia, but in reality it had called in a force it could not control." The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) brokered by US President Theodore Roosevelt gave Japan control over Liandong, Port Arthur, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, the southern part of the railway built by the Russians in Manchuria and, most important of all, a free hand in Korea, which Japan formally annexed as a colony five years later. The "dagger to the heart of Japan" was thus transformed into a springboard to further expansion in China and into a major source of cheap food with which to support Japan's rapidly increasing industrial population (So and Chiu 1995, 91, 94; Ho 1984, 348-50).
These gains were increased further during the First World War. Having joined the war on Britain's side, it seized German concessions in China and German possessions in the Northern Pacific. It then took advantage of the fact that Britain and Russia were tied down in Europe to seek a sort of Japanese protectorate over China with the aggressive 21 Demands of 1915. The attempt was not successful, but "the effects of the war on the power situation in the Far East--particularly when the Russian revolution in 1917 gave Japan further possibilities of building up its ascendancy--were no less revolutionary than those in Europe. By 1918, even before the end of the European War, Wilson was already girding himself to challenge in earnest the expansion of Japan" (Barraclough 1967, 108-9, 116-17).
By and large, from Versailles through the Washington Conference of 1920-1 and right up to the Crash of 1929, Japan yielded to US pressure to accept a war fleet significantly smaller than those of Britain and the US and to restrain its expansionist ambitions in China. This enabled Japan to place a growing share of its exports in the US and the British empire and to raise money both in London and New York for its own commercial and financial ventures overseas, from loans to Chinese warlord governments to the establishment of the Manchuria Railway Company and the Oriental Development Corporation (Iriye 1974, 24x-x; Duus 1984, 161-2). But when the Crash of 1929 unplugged Japan from core financial and commodity markets, Japan's imperialist tendencies reemerged with a vengeance. In 1930, Japan demanded parity in warships with the US and Britain, and when parity was denied, it abrogated all previous agreements controlling the size of fleet. In 1931-2, it took over the whole of Manchuria under the guise of the puppet state "Manchukuo." In 1934-5, it enlarged its sphere of influence in northern China. In 1937, the Japanese initiated the Second Sino-Japanese War, leading by late 1938 to their occupation of a vast swath along China's coast from north to south. In 1940, as Germany advanced into France, Japan advanced into French Indochina and signed a treaty of alliance with Germany and Italy (Borthwick 1992, 203-5, 209-10; So and Chiu 1995, 105-8).
That was the signal for the US to intervene to end Japan's bid for regional supremacy by tightening US trade restrictions against Japan, by freezing Japanese assets in the US, and by imposing a total embargo on petroleum products to Japan. And when Japan responded by doing to the US fleet at Pearl Harbor what it had done to the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, its career as a respectable military power would soon draw to a close. In the interveneing 36 years, Japan's advances in "the murderous art" had been truly spectacular. But they had not been sufficient to keep up with the further advances of the hegemonic power of the West, as the massive destruction inflicted on Japan by the US strategic bombing campaign demonstrated even before the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And yet, precisely at the time when Japan's military challenge to Western dominance in East Asia went up in smoke, a new and more formidable challenge was emerging in the region in the form of the reconstitution of China as a modern state by a sinified version of Marxism-Leninism. Once Japan's military challenge was defeated, the challenge posed by this reconstitution became the single most important determinant of Western policies in the Far East.
The proximate origins of this new challenge can be traced to the same bifurcation in the trajectories of Chinese and Japanese modernization that occurred in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and propelled Japan on the road to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Besides imposing a crushing indemnity of 230 million taels on Chinese finances, the Treaty of Shimonoseki forced China to open up several more ports not just to trade but also to "industries and manufactures"--a concession to Japan, which by virtue of the most-favored-nation clause was extended ipso facto to thirteen Western powers. Moreover, as previously noted, Chinese recognition of Japanese suzerainty over Korea and the cession of Chinese territories to Japan triggered a scramble among the Western powers for exclusive spheres of influence over large chunks of Chinese territories. The centrifugal forces that had already characterized Chinese modernization before the war were thus given a tremendous impulse by the war and its aftermath.
Attempts by opposite factions at the Qing court to counter the tendency towards the territorial disintegration of the empire only made things worse. The humiliation of defeat by a former tributary state and the scramble for exclusive spheres of influence that ensued, prompted the young and nominal Emperor Guangxu to issue in the Summer of 1898 no less than forty decrees aimed at a radical and comprehensive modernization of the Chinese state. The result, however, was a military coup staged by Empress Dowager Cixi, who wielded power behind the scenes. The recovery of Qing fortunes, which Guangxu had sought through a speed-up of modernization, Cixi sought through patronage of the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion, in which China fought and lost against all the Western powers combined (Fairbank 1992, 228-32).
The new indemnity of a staggering 450 million taels and the new restrictions on Chinese sovereignty imposed by the Boxer Protocol of 1901 set the stage for the final downfall of dynastic rule in the Revolution of 1911 and the subsequent breakdown of all semblance of centralized government in the warlord era from 1916 to 1927. Economically, the Boxer protocol compounded the effects of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in compromising China's modernization efforts for decades to come. Loans contracted to pay the Boxer indemnity more than doubled the annual payments owed on loans contracted to pay the Japanese indemnity of 1895. By 1902, these payments absorbed over 40 percent of the central government revenue (Thomas 1984, 113).
Between 1895 and 1911, the combined costs of the two indemnities were more than twice the total initial capitalization of all manufacturing enterprises established in China by nationals or foreigners between 1895 and 1913. Foreign investment more than doubled between 1902 and 1914, and again between 1914 and 1931. But over the entire period 1902-30, 75 percent more capital left China as repatriated profit than was invested in China from abroad (Esherick 1972, 13). As a result of this drain of profit and tribute, China's modern industrial and transport infrastructure on the eve of the Second World War was smaller, more lopsided and more fragmented than that of India, a colonial country with a smaller population (Bagchi 1982, 103-7).
Politically, the Qing government--in Joseph Esherick's words--"was reduced to little more than a despised tax-collecting agency for the foreign powers" (1972, 14). Prevented by the unequal treaties from raising tariffs, the Qing government was forced to raise internal taxes and cut down support for the "self-strengthening enterprises." Worse still, constitutional reforms aimed at introducing some measure of representative government and at winning the support of the landed upper classes for the tottering regime through the establishment of provincial assemblies backfired. Provincial interests and authorities quickly turned the assemblies into instruments of consolidation and legitimation of their autonomy from Beijing. And as soon as the occasion arose, the assemblies declared their independence from the central government precipitating the Revolution of 1911 (So and Chiu 1995, 115, 117-18; Skocpol 1979, 79-80).
In sum, the Sino-Japanese war had opposite legacies for China and Japan. Victory in the war propelled Japan onto the path to full sovereignty and respectability in the Western game of imperialist politics. Defeat plunged China further along the path to imperial disintegration and deepening foreign domination. Just before the Boxer movement collapsed Henri Borel, a well informed Western observer, ventured a prediction that still haunts the West.
The revolutionary party is likely to do just what the Japanese have done: rid the country of all foreign influences and turn it into an independent power in the East. If the movement succeeds, the West is as good as finished and the future belongs to China and Japan, to the East. (Quoted in Romein 1978, 50)
The movement did not succeed, and the future has belonged to the West for another century. But as Jan Romein remarks after quoting Borel, merely fifty years after hitting the bottom of national humiliation, China reemerged as a power in its own right. "Behind the rebellious Boxers with their primitive swords, there loomed as in a Chinese shadow play, the gigantic figure of Sun Yat-sen, behind him that of Marshal Ciang Kai-shek, and behind the Marshal that of Mao Tse-tung" (1978, 50).
To this we should add that behind the two main transitions of this Chinese shadow play--from the Boxers to Sun Zhongshan and from Jiang Jieshi to Mao Zedong--the shadow of Japan loomed much larger than that of any Western power. Behind the rise of Sun there loomed the shadow of Japan's victory against Russia in 1905--the same year in which Sun became the head of the Revolutionary Alliance at a meeting of Chinese students in Tokyo. Behind the rise of Mao there loomed the shadow of Japan's takeover of Manchuria in 1931-2, the expansion of its sphere of influence in northern China in 1934, and its takeover of the coastal regions of China in 1937-8. In the period intervening between the rise of Sun and the rise of Mao, there lie the warlord era in China (1916-27) and the transformation of Japan from the main foreign supporter of Chinese nationalism--as it still was on the eve of the Revolution of 1911--into its main foe.
The changing relationship between China and Japan under the impact of their incorporation into the Eurocentric interstate system thus set the stage for the evolution of China's national liberation movement. But the evolution itself--that is, the nature of the movement's responses to the challenges posed by the rise of Japanese imperialism and the effectiveness of those responses in attaining the movement's goals--was determined primarily by the relationship of the movement to Chinese society on the one side, and to world politics on the other side. For as concerns the movement's relationship to world politics, the most important influence by far was exercised by Marxism-Leninism as instituted by the Russian Revolution of 1917.
In its original, Soviet form, Marxism-Leninism was probably more important in reviving the fortunes of Sun's Guomindang (GMD) in the 1920s than in assisting the subsequent rise to power of Mao's Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When in 1922 Sun joined forces with the Comintern and began to reorganize the GMD on Soviet lines, he had demonstrated his preeminence as China's nationalist leader but also his incompetence to complete the Revolution.
The GMD ideology, so necessary to inspire student activists, was nominally Sun Yatsen's Three People's Principles [Nationalism, People's Rights or Democracy, and People's Livelihood], but these were really a party platform (a set of goals) rather than an ideology (a theory of history). The GMD had got no farther than regional warlordism at Guangzhou until in 1923 it allied with the Soviet Union, reorganized itself on Soviet lines, created an indoctrinated Party army, and formed a United Front with the CCP. The four years of Soviet aid and CCP collaboration together with the patriotic Marxist-Leninist animus against the warlords' domestic "feudalism" and the foreign powers' "imperialism" helped the GMD to power. (Fairbank 1992, 285)
Sun did not live to reap the fruits of the reorganization of the GMD on Leninist lines and of the United Front policy with the CCP. On his death in 1925, leadership of the GMD passed to the military commander Jiang Jieshi. Under Jiang, the GMD never fully shed the Leninist form of organization but, as soon as it had seized control of the Shangai-Nanjing region, it reversed Sun's United Front policy with the CCP. In April 1927, he attacked and decimated in a bloody betrayal the Communist-led labor unions that had seized control of Shangai, and then proceeded to expel the Chinese Communists from his newly formed Nanjing government and to institute a nationwide terror against the Communists. This reversal of Sun's United Front policy led to the imperialist powers' recognition of Jiang's Nanjing government in 1928, but "tended to dissipate the GMD's revolutionary spirit. Soon it found itself on the defensive against both the CCP and Japan" (Fairbank 1992, 284-6).
Japan's offensive came soon enough. But before the CCP could effectively displace the GMD at the head of the movement of national liberation, its ideology and organization had to become an organic expression of revolutionary forces within Chinese society itself. This is the transformation that produced a distinct Chinese brand of Marxism-Leninism and eventually led the CCP to power. It began with the formation of the Red Army shortly after Jiang's break with the CCP. But it came to fruition only after Japan took over China's coastal regions.
The transformation had two closely related aspects. First, while the Leninist principle of the vanguard party was retained, the insurrectional thrust of Leninist theory was abandoned. In the deeply fragmented statal structure of warlord-GMD China, there was no "Winter Palace" to be stormed or, rather, there were too many such palaces for any insurrectionary strategy to have any chance of success. The insurrectional aspects of Leninist theory were thus replaced by what Mao later theorized as the "mass line"--the idea that the vanguard party ought to be not just the teacher but also the pupil of the masses. "This from- the-masses-to-the-masses concept"--notes Fairbank (1992, 319)-- "was indeed a sort of democracy suited to Chinese tradition, where the upper-class official had governed best when he had the true interests of the local people at heart and so governed on their behalf."
Second, and most important, in seeking a social base the CCP gave priority to the peasantry rather than to Marx's and Lenin's revolutionary class, the urban proletariat. As the 1927 massacre of Communist-led workers at Shangai had demonstrated, the coastal regions where the bulk of the urban proletariat was concentrated were far too treacherous a ground from which to challenge foreign domination and the GMD's hegemony over the rapidly expanding Chinese bourgeoisie. The foreign powers' recognition of the GMD government the following year made the situation in these regions even more hopeless for the CCP than it had been. Driven ever farther from the seats of capitalist expansion by the Western trained and equipped GMD armies, the CCP and the Red Army were left little choice but to thrust their roots among the peasantry of poor and remote areas. The result was, in Mark Selden's characterization, "a two-way socialization process," whereby the party-army molded the subaltern strata of Chinese rural society into a powerful revolutionary force, and was in turn shaped by the aspirations and values of these strata (1995, 37-8).
The war with Japan gave a powerful impulse to this two-way socialization process, turning it from a force of merely local significance into a force of world significance. By the time of Japan's surrender in 1945, Mao's party-army held sway over almost 100 million people and was poised to win the subsequent civil war that ended with the defeat of the GMD. The challenge to Western dominance that emerged from the double victory of the CCP against Japan and the GMD was fundamentally different from the Japanese military challenge that had just been terminated by US strategic and nuclear bombing. The Japanese challenge was based on Wei Yuan's idea of using Western military technology to control the West. As previously noted, it failed primarily because Japanese advances in Western military technology could not keep up with the West's own further advances. But it failed also because it called forth in the East Asian region countervailing forces as firmly opposed to Japanese as to Western military supremacy. Once the Japanese challenge collapsed, these countervailing forces remained in place to check the restoration of Western dominance under US hegemony.
This new challenge was not based primarily on Wei Yuan's idea of using Western military technology to control the West. Although minimal proficiency in the use of such technologies was essential to its success, the new challenge was based primarily on Hong Xinquan's idea of using Western ideology to control the West. Hong had tried with a sinified version of Christianity and had failed. Mao, following in the footsteps of Sun, tried with a sinified version of Marxism-Leninism and succeeded. In between Hong's failure and Mao's success there lies a century in the course of which the West laid siege to the old center of the East Asian world system, forced upon it a major reorganization, but never succeeded in becoming hegemonic, except in the limited and contradictory sense of drawing Japan onto the path of industrialized warfare and China onto the path of socialist revolution.
This kind of leadership is what we have called leadership against the leader's will because, over time, it tends to intensify competition for power instead of augmenting the power of the hegemon (see Introduction). In the intensification of competition that ensued from Japan's strides in the acquisition of Western military technology, the declining Western hegemon was the first to go under. By the 1930s Japan had for all practical purposes eclipsed Britain as the dominant power in the East Asian region. In the intensification of competition that ensued from China's strides in the acquisition of Western revolutionary ideology, it was Japan itself that went under. That left the rising Western hegemon and a new China facing one another in a struggle for centrality in East Asia that has shaped trends and events in the region ever since.
If we now return to Huntington's clash of civilizations, the clash appears to lie as much behind us as in front of us. A clash between a conquering Western civilization and the civilizations that were being successively conquered characterized each and every one of Huntington's phases of conflict in the modern world. Intercivilizational conflicts and conflicts within the West were obverse sides of the same process of Western expansion and evolved in step with one another.
Leaving aside the annihilation of the indigenous civilizations of the Americas--which preceded the establishment of the Westphalia system and falls beyond the scope of our own investigations--the transition from the phase of conflicts among princes to that among nation-states in Huntington's scheme corresponds to our transition from Dutch to British hegemony within the Western world. Both hegemonies were based, among other things, on a privileged access to Asian trade. And in both hegemonies, this privileged access was based on the coercive incorporation of Asian territories within the jurisdiction of the hegemonic state--the Indonesian archipelago by the Dutch, and the entire Indian subcontinent by the British. The increase in the scale and scope of the hegemonic state within the West--from the Dutch proto-nation-state to the British nation-state--was thus associated with an increase in the scale and scope of the hegemonic state's territorial domains in Asia.
This increase in the scale and scope of Western territorial domains in Asia added an entirely new dimension to the clash of civilizations already entailed by Western intrusions under Dutch hegemony. Western intrusions under Dutch hegemony were and remained interstitial vis-a-vis Asia's world-empires and civilizations. They did not need, nor did they attempt, to transform the systems of belief and authority on which these civilizations and empires rested. Western intrusions under British hegemony, in contrast, were imperial in scope and, as such, inevitably clashed with indigenous practices of rule and systems of belief and authority.
In this clash, Western systems of belief and authority won at best a partial victory. They did force their way into Asian societies on the basis of a fundamental, and growing, Western superiority in the art of war and related industrial-scientific activities. But Western attempts to persuade the dominant and subordinate strata of Asian societies that this Western superiority was the expression of a more general civilizational superiority never reached very deeply.
In South Asia, claims of this kind were made implausible by the establishment of direct British rule--a rule, which brought havoc to the everyday lives of subordinate strata, diverted resources on an unprecedented scale from the reproduction of indigenous societies to the expansion of the wealth and power of a distant and alien nation (metropolitan Britain), and denied to its Indian subjects the most elementary rights of self determination. Under these circumstances, claims that British despotism in India was congruent with indigenous political traditions and justified by an alledged civilizational superiority of Britain were readily seen for what they really were: mere rationalizations of the fact that India was ruled for the benefit not of the Indian peoples but of the British nation and that this, in turn, required autocratic rather than representative forms of government. More important, the complete lack of concern on the part of imperial Britain for the reproductive needs of the sub-continent's subordinate strata made British despotism appear morally inferior to whatever despotism had actually characterized indigenous political traditions. Hence, the popular appeal of Gandhi's doctrines, which did not just call for representative government and national self- determination, but strongly rejected the idea that industrial- scientific achievements could in any sense be taken as the measure of a civilizational and moral superiority.
Western claims of a general civilizational superiority were even less plausible in East Asia. Absence of direct colonial rule was not in itself an unmixed blessing, as Sun Zhongshan noted in his famous remark that "China was not the slave of one country, but of all." Hence, it was worse off than a colony because "there was no one paternalistic power to whom she could turn for mercy" (quoted in Thomas 1984, 112). But whether a curse or a blessing, the very limited scope of direct Western rule there meant that the clash between Western and indigenous civilizations concerned primarily relations among formally sovereign nations, rather than relations between an alien sovereign and indigenous subjects as it did in South Asia.
This difference notwithstanding, a fundamental discrepancy between the ideals and values of Western civilization as professed and largely practiced in the West on the one side, and actual Western practices in the non-Western world on the other, was as typical of the clash of civilizations in East Asia as it was in South Asia. In East Asia, this fundamental discrepancy took the form of appeals to principles of diplomatic equality and commercial opportunity to mobilize support for the establishment of lord-vassal relations between Western and non-Western states far more insulting and degrading than East Asian nations had ever experienced under the indigenous Sinocentric tribute-trade system. Worse still, the establishment of these lord-vassal relations was pursued through the use of morally aberrant means, like opium smuggling and armed intervention against any serious attempt to suppress the illegal trade.
In the light of this record, it is not surprising that East Asians, like South Asians, saw Western superiority as being strictly limited to the art of war and related industrial- scientific activities and involving no general civilizational, let alone moral, superiority. Nevertheless, the more limited and mostly indirect political control that Western powers wielded in the region provided East Asians with greater opportunities than South Asians to challenge Western superiority not just morally but materially as well. Economically, the main beneficiary of the dissolution of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system was not Western business but the Chinese business diaspora. Politically, at least for a time, the main beneficiary was Japan. Partial or temporary as these challenges to Western supremacy were, they relied as much on the region's civilizational heritage as they did on borrowing from the West.
In sum, Huntington's claim that Western civilization is the bearer of a heritage of liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, and other similarly attractive ideals--all of which are said to have permeated other civilizations only superficially-- rings false to anyone familiar with the Western record in Asia in the so-called age of nation-states. In this long list of ideals, it is hard to find a single one that was not denied in part or full by the leading Western powers of the epoch in their dealings either with the peoples they subjected to direct colonial rule or with the governments over which they sought to establish suzerainty. And conversely, it is just as hard to find a single one of those ideals that was not upheld by movements of national liberation in their struggle against the Western powers. In upholding these ideals, however, non-Western peoples and governments invariably combined them with ideals derived from their own civilizations in those spheres in which they had little to learn from the West.
The revolt against the West that ensued from the mass nationalism forged by this combination of Western and non-Western ideals thoroughly shaped the transition from Huntington's phase of conflict among nation-states to his phase of conflict among ideologies--a transition which broadly corresponds to our transition from British to US hegemony. In the previous transition, the expansionary thrust of the West was still the active element in the clash of civilizations that marked the entire British age. In this new transition, in contrast, the expansionary thrust of the West was held in check as much by internal divisions and contradictions as by the ability of mass nationalism in the non-Western world to exploit these divisions and contradictions to advance the cause of emancipation from Western dominance. The two ideologies that eventually emerged victorious to confront one another in the Cold War world order-- Americanism and Soviet communism--were first and foremost projects of accommodation of the forces of mass nationalism engendered by the revolt against the West of the preceding half century. The Cold War was indeed yet another "Western Civil War," as Huntington maintains. But the main purpose of this Civil War was to win the allegiance of the non-Western world to one of the two ideological camps into which the Western world had come to be divided.
In Huntington's assessment, the Cold War has ended with the West at "an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations." On closer scrutiny, this assessment appears fundamentally flawed. For one thing, Huntington conflates the West as a civilization defined by the territorial expansion of peoples of European descent--an ensemble, which includes the lands settled by the European subjects of the former Russian empire--with the smaller capitalist "West" that was born out of the ideological conflict of the Cold War era and excluded the communist "East" centered on the USSR. There can be little doubt that the victory of Americanism over Soviet communism has involved an unprecedented concentration and centralization of Western power in the hands of the US and its closest allies of the smaller "West" of the Cold War era. But whether it has also involved an espansion of the power of the larger West in relation to other civilizations is an altogether different matter. It all depends on whether we reckon that the joint power of the former capitalist "West" and communist "East" has increased or decreased with the end of the ideological conflict that set them against one another and their consequent reunification as different components of Western civilization broadly understood.
In any such reckoning, we must avoid a second fallacy inherent in Huntington's evaluation of Western power, namely, the very narrow conception of power on which that evaluation is based. Nothing illustrates better this narrow conception than Huntington's response to Ezra Vogel at a Harvard seminar on Japan held in 1979. As Bruce Cumings (1987, 64) reports, when Vogel opened the seminar by saying: "I am very troubled when I think through the consequences of the rise of Japanese power," Huntington replied that Japan was "an extraordinarily weak country." Its most fundamental weaknesses were "energy, food, and military security."
Underlying this assessment, we can detect a conception of world power that gives primacy to the relative size, self- sufficiency and military capabilities of the states into which the world is jurisdictionally divided. It is the same conception that underlies Huntington's assessment of Western power as now being at an extraordinary peak. Widespread as it is, this conception flies in the face of the most basic facts of world politics of the last quarter of a century.
Two such facts stand out for comment. First, in spite of the large size and self-sufficiency of their territorial domains and the unprecedented and unparalleled destructive power of their military-industrial apparatuses, both superpowers of the Cold War era underwent humiliating defeats in the wars they waged on non- Western peoples--the US in Vietnam in the 1970s and the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Given the disproportionate military superiority of the two superpowers, the reasons for their respective defeats must be sought on grounds other than strictly military ones.
These other grounds were primarily ideological-political, the most important of which was the fundamental lack of legitimacy of the superpowers' objectives in the two wars, not just among the peoples in whose countries the wars were waged, but also among the superpowers' citizens and allies and in the world community at large. This lack of legitimacy seriously constrained the capacity of the superpowers to mobilize the resources needed to win the confrontations--first and foremost the blood that had to be spilled on the battlefields--and led to a major erosion of their prestige and power. The fact that each superpower took turns in benefiting from the troubles of the other--the USSR from the troubles of the US in the 1970s and the US from the troubles of the USSR in the 1980s--should not conceal the fact that their joint power and influence diminished with each confrontation. Initially, the ideological conflict between the capitalist "West" and the Communist "East" might well have increased the power of the US and the USSR within their respective spheres of influence. But from the mid-1960s onwards it simply increased the capacity of non-Western states and peoples to play, to their own respective, advantage the two superpowers against one another.
The other basic fact of world politics of the last quarter of a century is the tightening of economic constraints on both superpowers' freedom of action. To be sure, these constraints have had far more devastating effects on the power of the USSR than on that of the US. Indeed, it is primarily on the terrain of high finance that the US in the 1980s "won" the Cold War. Nevertheless, this "victory" should not make us forget that in the fiscal-financial sphere, as in the military-ideological sphere, the crisis of US world power preceded that of the USSR and, in ever-changing forms, has outlasted the end of the Cold War (Arrighi 1994, ch. 4 and Epilogue).
Economically, even more than politically, what one superpower gained from the troubles of the other superpower fell far short of their joint losses in relation to the non- Western world. The most conspicuous manifestation of this tendency is the rise of East Asia as the most dynamic center of processes of capital accumulation on a world scale. This rise, rather than the demise of Soviet power, may well turn out to have been the most significant event of our age.
The proximate origins of this development can be traced to the peculiar difficulties encountered by the US in enforcing the Cold War world order in East Asia. As previously noted, the defeat of Japan in the Second World War and the subsequent victory of the CCP over the GMD in Mainland China left the rising Western hegemon, the US, and the PRC facing one another in a struggle for centrality in the region. At least initially, there was very little that the PRC could do to prevent the US from gaining the upper hand. The unilateral military occupation of Japan by the United States in 1945 and the division of the region in the aftermath of the Korean War into two antagonistic blocs created, in Bruce Cumings' words, a US "vertical regime solidified through bilateral defense treaties (with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines) and conducted by a State Department that towered over the foreign ministries of these four countries" (1994, 23).
All became semi-sovereign states, deeply penetrated by American military structures (operational control of the South Korean armed forces, Seventh Fleet patrolling of the Taiwan strait, defense dependencies for all four countries, bases on all their territories) and incapable of independent foreign policy or defense initiatives. All were in a sense contemporary "Hermit Kingdoms" vis-a-vis each other, if not in relation to the U.S..... There were minor demarches through the military curtain beginning in the mid-1950s, like low levels of trade betwen Japan and China, or Japan and North Korea. But the dominant tendency was a unilateral American regime heavily biased toward military forms of communication. (Cumings 1994, 23-4)
The interpenetration of tribute and trade relations between an imperial center whose domestic economy was of incomparably greater size than those of its vassal states made this "unilateral American regime" resemble the old Sinocentric tribute-trade system. In this respect, we may well say that US hegemony in East Asia was realized through the transformation of the periphery of the former Sinocentric tribute-trade system into the periphery of a US-centric tribute-trade system. The US- centric system, however, was far more militaristic in structure and orientation than its Sinocentric predecessor. Not only was it based on a military-industrial apparatus of incomparably greater size and technological sophistication. More important, the US-centric system also fostered a functional specialization between the imperial and the vassal states that had no parallel in the old Sinocentric system. While the US specialized in the provision of protection and in the pursuit of power regionally and globally, its East Asian vassal states specialized in trade and in the pursuit of profit. This kind of division of labor has been particularly important in shaping US-Japanese relations throughout the Cold War era right up to the present.
Freed from the burden of defense spending, Japanese govern- ments have funneled all their resources and energies into an economic expansionism that has brought affluence to Japan and taken its business to the farthest reaches of the globe. War has been an issue only in that the people and the con- servative government have resisted involvement in foreign wars like Korea and Vietnam. Making what concessions were necessary under the Security Treaty with the Americans, the government has sought only involvement that would bring economic profit to Japanese enterprise. (Schurmann 1974, 143)
Its militaristic structure notwithstanding, it was precisely in the military sphere that the the US-centric East Asian system began to crack. For the Vietnam War destroyed what the Korean War had created. The Korean War had instituted the US-centric East Asian regime by excluding Mainland China from normal commercial and diplomatic intercourse with the non-communist part of the region, through blockade and war threats backed by "an archipelago of American military installations" (Cumings 1994, 23). The Vietnam War, in contrast, forced the United States to readmit Mainland China to normal commercial and diplomatic intercourse with the rest of East Asia, while initiating a reversal of the economic fortunes of the United States and Japan (Arrighi 1996).
This outcome tranformed without eliminating the previous imbalance of the distribution of power resources in the region. The rise of Japan as an industrial and financial powerhouse of global significance transformed the previous relationship of Japanese political and economic vassalage vis-a-vis the United States into a relationship of mutual vassalage. Japan continued to depend on the United States for military protection; but the United States came to depend ever more critically on Japanese finance and industry for the reproduction of its protection- producing apparatus. At the same time, the reincorporation of Mainland China in regional and global markets brought back into play a state whose demographic size, abundance of labor resources, and growth potential surpassed by a good margin that of all other states operating in the region, the United States included. Within less than twenty years after Richard Nixon's mission to Beijing, and less than fifteen after the formal reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC, this giant "container" of labor power already seemed poised to become again the powerful attractor of means of payments it had been before its subordinate incorporation in the Eurocentric world system.
If the main attraction of the PRC for foreign capital has been its huge and highly competitive reserves of labor, the "matchmaker" that has facilitated the encounter of foreign capital and Chinese labor is the Overseas Chinese capitalist diaspora.
Drawn by China's capable pool of low-cost labor and its growing potential as a market that contains one-fifth of the world's population, foreign investors continue to pour money into the PRC. Some 80% of that capital comes from the Overseas Chinese, refugees from poverty, disorder, and communism, who in one of the era's most piquant ironies are now Beijing's favorite financiers and models for moderniza- tion. Even the Japanese often rely on the Overseas Chinese to grease their way into China. (Kraar 1994, 40)
In fact, there is nothing ironic in Beijing's reliance on the Overseas Chinese to ease Mainland China's reincorporation in regional and world markets. As Alvin So and Stephen Chiu (1995, ch. 11) have shown, the close political alliance that was established in the 1980s between the Chinese Communist Party and Overseas Chinese capitalists made perfect sense in terms of their respective pursuits. For the alliance provided the Overseas Chinese with great opportunities to profit from commercial and financial intermediation, while providing the Chinese Communist Party with highly effective means of killing two birds with one stone: to upgrade the domestic economy of Mainland China and at the same time to promote national unification in accordance with the "One Nation, Two Systems" model. The true irony of the situation is that one of the most conspicuous legacies of Western encroachments on Chinese sovereignty is emerging one century later as a powerful instrument of Chinese and East Asian emancipation from Western dominance. As previously noted, an Overseas Chinese diaspora had long been a feature of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system. But the greatest opportunities for its expansion came with the subordinate incorporation of that system within the structures of the Eurocentric world system. Although the diaspora tried to translate its growing economic power into political control over Mainland China by supporting the 1911 Revolution and the GMD in the Warlord era, the attempt failed in the face of escalating political chaos, the takeover of China's coastal regions by Japan, and the eventual defeat of the GMD by the CCP.
Under the US Cold War regime, the diaspora's traditional role of commercial intermediation between Mainland China and the surrounding region was stifled as much by the US embargo on trade with the PRC as by the PRC's own restrictions on domestic and foreign trade. Nevertheless, the expansion of US power networks and Japanese business networks in the maritime regions of East Asia, provided the diaspora with plenty of opportunities to exercise new forms of commercial intermediation between these networks and the local networks it controlled. And as restrictions on trade with and within China were relaxed, the diaspora quickly emerged as the single most powerful agency of the economic reunification and integration of the East Asian regional economy (Hui 1995).
It is too early to tell what kind of political-economic formation will eventually emerge out of this reunification and how far the rapid economic expansion of the East Asian region can go. Whatever its eventual outcome, the present rise of East Asia as the most dynamic center of processes of capital accumulation on a world scale can nonetheless be taken as a sign that the long process of Western intrusion and conquest in Asia has come, or is about to come, full circle. The expansion of the Western frontier to embrace the trade potentialities of Asia appears indeed to have resulted--as General Douglas MacArthur had predicted in 1951--in "the gradual rotation of the epicenter of world trade back to the Far East whence it started many centuries ago" (quoted in Cumings 1993, 36).
It is not clear what the West can do to hold in check, let alone reverse, this rotation of the epicenter of world trade back to the Far East. Imitation of East Asian governmental and business practices is unlikely to help, because the real advantage of East Asian governments and businesses in world trade lies in gifts of geography and history that cannot be replicated easily outside the region. Huntington's prescription to maintain US military capabilities in Asia, and to exploit differences and conflicts among and within non-Western civilizations to the advantage of the West, not only is not likely to help, but may well turn the prediction of a coming clash of civilizations into a self-fulfilling prophesy to no one's advantage.
It is not likely to help, because the prescription has already been tested and found wanting. The deployment of massive US military capabilities in the East Asian region and the ideological division of the region into friends and foes was the very essence of the US-centric East Asian regime of the Cold War era. And yet, this regime proved wholly ineffectual in curbing the political will of its designated foes, while unwittingly promoting their integration in a rapidly expanding regional economy.
At best, to paraphrase Johnson and Keehn (1995, 105), the US military presence in the region will be perceived by East Asian countries, "as a convenience that allows them to continue building their regional capabilities in preparation for the day when the United States can no longer support--financially, politically, or both--its flawed regional vision." At worst, it will be perceived, not as a convenience, but as an obtrusive presence aimed at keeping alive the very tensions that enable the US to obtain "protection payments" in the open form of subsidies for the maintenance of US troops and in the disguised form of commercial and other privileges. If this perception becomes stronger and more widespread than it already is, US military presence in the region may well turn into the cause of the very clash of civilization that it is supposed to hold in check.
Under these circumstances, the wisest course of action for the US and the West is to learn to live with the fact that, after several centuries of Western hegemony, leadership in the global economy is reverting from Western to non-Western hands. Whether this is too much to ask, only time can tell. After all, Huntington himself presents his confrontational prescription as a short-term measure in preparation for the day when the world's different civilizations will have to learn to coexist in mutual respect of their values, interests, and moralities. The idea that the West has something to gain by using its military superiority to postpone or influence the terms of this eventual coexistence with other civilizations is based on a fundamentally flawed assessment of the actual power of the West. The time to work for a commonwealth of civilizations is now, not after an intended or unintendended clash of civilizations, which would exacerbate systemic chaos and human suffering without bringing any lasting benefit to anyone.
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