Account for the British wars with China of 1839-42 and 1858-60.

Meanwhile in England, commercial interests were pushing for war with China to compensate the losses in opium trade.  William Jardine of the major opium trading firm sailed to London to lobby for war.  Once decision went his way, he supplied assistance, leasing vessels to the British fleet and lending pilots and translator.  In 1840 a British expeditionary force left India with sixteen warships and thirty-one other ships.  Hyam wrote, ‘the merchants were at least able to persuade the British government that stronger action were required on their behalf’.  Lin bought new cannons for the forts and laid great chain across the estuary leading into Guangzhou.  This made no problem for the British expeditionary force, since they simply bypassed Guangzhou and made for the major ports of Ningbo and Tianjin, which they shut down in short order.  This made the Chinese no longer able to refuse to negotiate.  The agreement worked out in Guangzhou called for ceding Hong Kong, repaying the British the cost of their expedition (an indemnity of six million Mexican silver dollars), and allowing direct intercourse between officials and each country.

The public in both China and Britain was outraged upon learning the terms of settlement.  Lin was already exiled for letting the war to start and the official who negotiated the terms was brought to the capital in chains.  In England a new expeditionary force was ordered.  This time with 10,000 men, more than twice the previous number, and in 1841 Britain occupied several strategic coastal cities, including Shanghai, which means foreign powers are getting closer to the capital than ever.  Dozens of Qing officials committed suicide when defeated.  Finally Britain took up positions outside the walls of Nanjing, and the Chinese were forced to sue for peace.  The Treaty of Nanjing was concluded at gunpoint.  It increased the indemnity up to twenty-one million ounces of silver and abolished the Co-hong completely.  It opened five treaty ports—Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, and fixed tariff at five percent.  It further ensured that British subjects in China were only answerable to British law, even when disputes with the Chinese.

Although widely known as the Opium War, issue developed from the British point of view into one of opening up a total field of commercial operations and breaking out of the restrictions of trading at Canton alone.  Prime Minister Palmerston believed that the Chinese objections to opium stemmed from a desire to protect home-grown opium and perhaps stronger moral anxiety was the fact that payment for opium contributed to Chinese currency in which taxes had to be paid – which in turn had the effect of forcing prices and taxes up alarmingly.

During the course of the nineteenth century China signed many more ‘unequal’ treaties with imperialist powers.  China could not set her own tariffs and eventually even had to appoint European officers to collect them.  When the Chinese did not buy European products in the hope-for numbers, European merchants did not fault their own expectations but the obstructionism of Chinese officials.  They demanded more treaty ports and fewer restrictions on trade.  In 1860 an Anglo-French expedition occupied Beijing for a month to force the acceptance of new treaties, brought treaty ports up to a number of fourteen.  By the end of the century some ports were leased in perpetuity to foreign powers.

The fact that foreigners did not have to obey Chinese laws came to resemble international cities attached to the Chinese mainland.  Foreign countries won the right to establish legations and consulates in China, with their diplomats treated according to European definitions of international protocol.  Further, Christian missionaries obtained the rights to preach throughout China.  By the end of the century foreign businessmen had even gained the right to open factories on Chinese soil.

Another consequence of the Opium War was an increased addiction of opium.  Trade was legalized by treaty in 1860.  Opium remained a major item of trade until the end of the century though proportion imported declined after 1880 with an expansion of domestic production.  By the end of the century westerner observers estimated there were ten percent of the Chinese population being smokers of opium, with a-third to half of them addicted to it.  This meant a fifteenth million opium addicts and another thirty million occasional users.  The highest rates of addictions was probably found among imperial clansmen and bannermen, living on meager stipends without much to do.  This enormous demand of the drug led to a serious outflow of cash out of China which became an increasingly heavy burden to the weak and backward Qing dynasty.

The second Anglo-Chinese war broke out in 1858 as a counterattack to the Taiping rebels who attempted to seize Shanghai which would threaten western powers in China.  The Taiping rebels were religious crusades and were anti-Manchu.  In terms of size, duration and destructiveness the rebellion was probably the biggest single event in the history of the world know to Europeans in the nineteenth century, ‘the great revolt and most disastrous civil war in world history’.  The event was, however, not isolated, there were other rebels in China at the same time, such in the Nien, the Muslims in Yunnan and the Miao in Kweichow.  Ebrey wrote, ‘seven million peasants were in revolt in the period of 1856-1860’.

The Taiping Rebellion had its roots in dynastic crisis, misgovernment and disillusionment as well as in ethic feuding caused by the sufferings of the immigrant Hakka people of Guangdong and Guangxi.  ‘It is, however, almost impossible to deny some connection extremely important if only indirect, between western influences and the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion’.  It originated in the hinterland of Canton, where reaction to the foreigner was strongest during the Opium war, and the main foothold of European influence.  Further, its ideology randomly included attenuated pseudo-Christian elements, although it has been claimed to be heretical.

British general Charles Gordon assisted the Chinese government in the suppression of the Taipings but there is reason to suppose that his contribution was more than marginal.  It was preceded by an attempt to poison the European community in Hong Kong, which was touched off by an incident involving the lorcha, the Arrow, which in a Chinese official had arrested in October 1856.  The Arrow, which was on suspicion of piracy, was flying the British flag and was registered in the British territory of Hong Kong.  Prime Minister Palmerston’s was furious and thought ‘the Chinese must be taught a lesson’.  He famous remark wrote: ‘in insolent barbarian, wielding authority at Canton, has violated the British flag, broken the engagement of treaties, offered rewards for the heads of British subjects… and planned their destruction by murder, assassination and poisons’.

Hyam saw the second Anglo-Chinese war once again arose from the clash between Chinese exclusiveness and British economic expansion.  The Prime Minister Palmerston reckoned that ‘these Orientals needed “a drubbing” once every decade to keep them in order’.

During the second Anglo-Chinese war the Chinese witnessed the burning of their splendid Summer Palace of Yuan-ming Yuan.  A military recommendation by Sir Hope Grant, it was a spectacular public retribution for the treacherous behaviour of their opponents and for the atrocities which had taken place in it.  Palmerston was said to be pleased with this ‘demonstration of British indignation’.

The second Anglo-Chinese treaty was concluded in Tientsin in 1860 by Elgin, who recalled British treatment to the Chinese ‘a periodic use of force’.  The treaty, with the Convention of Peking, opened more treaty ports, gave freedom for Christian missionaries to preach in China.  It furthermore permitted a permanent British embassy in Peking and secured navigation of the Yangtse.  Nevertheless, by the mid-1860s the British government was firmly convinced that the China trade would never worth the expense of war and territorial control.  Hyam suggested if Britain had established territorial rule in China, there would have been a risk that other powers would follow suit; and struggle for supremacy in China could embroil all Europe.  It was widely assumed that British interests in China would remain temporary and limited, that commercial interest would always remain particular, even speculative interests, but never territorial ones.

Bibliography

Porter, A.        The Oxford History of the British Empire: the Nineteenth Century                        (Oxford 1999)

La Feber, W.        The Clash: US-Japanese Relations throughout history  (USA 1997)

Hyam, R.        Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815-1914: a study of empire and expansion        (London 1976)

Chamberlain, M       ‘Pax Britannica’?: British Foreign Policy 1789-1914   (USA 1988)

Ebrey, P.                 The Cambridge Illustrated History of China        (London 1996)

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