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
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.
