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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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X

The industrial development of Europe and its ex-
pansion overseas in the mid-nineteenth century had the
general result of forcing an end to the seclusion of both
China and Japan. China was opened to Western pene-
tration by the wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, and by
the treaties which followed. Japan was opened by the
“black ships” of the Americans in 1853-54 and there-
after by a series of treaties with the Western powers.
It was this train of events, observed and commented
upon by Marx and Engels, which transformed quickly
the belief in China's stagnation into a positive assertion
of Europe's superiority. In his essay “On Liberty”
(1859), John Stuart Mill envisaged China as a nation
victimized by despotic custom. China's failure to im-
prove over the millennia he attributed to the success
of the Chinese in repressing individuality and mental
liberty, and in impressing uniformity of thought and
conduct through education and state control. The yoke
of conformity to maxims and rules weighs so heavily
upon society that, in Mill's view, if China is “ever to
be farther improved, it must be by foreigners.”

The Protestant missionaries were initially scornful
of Chinese society, thought, science, and religion. Un-
like the scholarly Jesuits, the conservative Protestants
of the Victorian age saw little but vice and deprivation
in China. The work of the missionary, they thought,
was to bring the light of Christ to the heathen Chinese
in order to save them from eternal damnation. But
preoccupation with Chinese language and literature
gradually brought a more enlightened generation of
missionary scholars into being in Europe and America,
a generation which took a more tolerant view of
Chinese civilization. For example, James Legge, the
missionary linguist, concluded in 1867 after long study


370

of Confucius that he was unable to regard the sage
as a great man; but by 1893 he admitted: “The more
I have studied his character and opinions, the more
highly have I come to regard him” (Mason, p. 204,
n. 33).

In the mid-nineteenth century the vast majority of
Europeans held widely divergent and contradictory
views on Chinese society. Both missionary and secular
writers praised the Chinese for mildness, docility, and
adaptability. They were also thought of as industrious,
shrewd, and practical, but with a penchant for lying
and deceit without conscience. Chinese of all social
levels were considered to be extremely polite, urbane,
and courageous in facing personal adversities; but they
were also thought to be cruel, sensual, and licentious.
“Of the earth earthy,” in Legge's words, “China was
sure to go to pieces when it came into collision with
a Christianly-civilized power” (Dawson, p. 139).

The “scientific” historians of the nineteenth century,
in their preoccupation with national and European
history, rejected China even for comparative purposes.
Leopold von Ranke in his Lectures on World History
(ca. 1830-48) pronounced as “unhistorical” Hegel's
postulation of the eternal stagnation of the Orient, and
classified the Hindus and Chinese as living eternally
in a state of Naturgeschichte of a completely secular
and unreligious character. Ranke then went on to
exclude China from history proper by asserting that
the Chinese sources are mythical, unreliable, second-
ary, or unavailable to one who does not read Chinese.
Jakob Burckhardt prized the Western heritage so
highly that he completely excluded China from his
lectures in the fear that alien infiltrations might muddy
the limpid stream. Ernest Lavisse, who shared Burck-
hardt's high regard for the West and his fears for the
future, grimly prophesied in 1890: “All strength gives
out; the ability to maintain the lead in history is not
a permanent attribute. Europe, which inherited it from
Asia three thousand years ago, will perhaps not always
keep it” (Vue générale de l'histoire politique de
l'Europe,
p. 239).

The potential wealth of China in natural resources
was spelled out for the West in three large volumes
and an atlas published between 1877 and 1885 by
Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. In his China,
Richthofen gave for the first time a geographer's sys-
tematic estimate of China's economic resources. He
called attention to the rich oil fields of Shantung and
Manchuria and to the huge reservoirs of capable labor
available in China. The prospect envisaged by
Richthofen of an industrialized and modernized China
was shortly transmuted in the West into the specter
known as the “Yellow Peril.”

The threat of China to white, Christian supremacy
was raised repeatedly in the last third of the nineteenth
century by missionaries, racists, and military theorists.
Count Arthur de Gobineau who theorized on the supe-
riority of the white over the yellow and black races,
warned of the dangers to white dominance from exces-
sive intermingling with inferior breeds. Blood pollution
was identified by Houston Stuart Chamberlain as a
threat to the superiority of the Teutonic supermen.
Kaiser William II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II
of Russia corresponded after 1895 about “the Defense
of the Cross and the old Christian European culture
against the inroads of the Mongols and Buddhism...”
(Levine, Letters from the Kaiser..., p. 10). The British
publicist, C. H. Pearson, prophesied in 1893: “We shall
wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled and per-
haps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked
down upon as servile and thought of as bound always
to minister to our needs” (National Life and Character,
p. 85). In the United States, the Hearst press warned
at the end of the century that more adequate defenses
were needed to protect the American way of life
against the floodtide of Oriental emigration. The ghosts
of the theorists were given flesh and bones by the
startling military victory of Japan over Russia in 1905
and by the swift rise thereafter of strong nationalist
and anticolonial sentiment throughout the Far East.