The Wounds That Made Modern China
On the long century between Lin Zexu and the fall of the Qing
When a Chinese diplomat at a press conference bristles at any foreign suggestion that Taiwan is a separate state, or denounces an American naval transit of the Taiwan Strait as an infringement of sovereignty, or warns a European foreign minister against "interference in the internal affairs of other states," there is a particular tone in the rebuke — wounded, moralizing, faintly nineteenth-century. What the diplomat is invoking, usually without naming it, is a memory of about seventy years, from Lin Zexu's destruction of foreign opium at Humen, near Canton, in 1839 to the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1912 — the opening seven decades of what Chinese textbooks and Party speeches still call bainian guochi, the Century of Humiliation. Every Chinese schoolchild learns its episodes the way American children learn the Revolution. Many Foreign Ministry briefings and white papers from Beijing — on Taiwan or the South China Sea, for example — are in some sense arguments with the ghosts of those seventy years.
Other nations, of course, carry unfinished pasts: Russians the Great Patriotic War, Americans the Civil War, Serbs the field of Kosovo. What sets the Chinese case apart is its reach: not a single historical event but a seventy-year arc, a named wound, threaded through the working vocabulary of a great power's diplomacy. The Party today carries that arc from 1839 forward through Manchuria and Nanjing to 1949 and the founding of the People's Republic; this essay considers only the first seven decades, the ones in which the wound was made.
Those seventy years, in Chinese telling, made the wound in four blows. The first was the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1860, which broke open the coast to foreign trade and foreign law. The second was the Taiping civil war of the 1850s and 1860s, an internal hemorrhage so vast it remains, by most counts, the deadliest conflict of the nineteenth century anywhere on earth. The third was the scramble of the 1890s, when the major powers raced to slice the staggering empire into commercial fiefs. The fourth was the Boxer Uprising of 1900, a millenarian peasant rising whose suppression by an eight-nation army finished off what little remained of Qing legitimacy. Four blows, across seven decades. Each made the next possible — and made everything after, down to 1949 and beyond, legible as continuation. Together they explain, more than any single treaty, why modern China responds the way it does whenever a foreign power presumes to instruct, sanction, or judge it.
What follows traces the four blows in turn, across five further pieces, which will appear here as they are finished. The Unequal Treaties takes up the British wars on the coast that opened the empire to foreign trade and foreign law. The Heavenly Kingdom recovers the Taiping uprising, the apocalyptic civil war that nearly tore China apart from within. Slicing the Melon follows the European scramble of the 1890s, when the powers descended on a staggering empire and parceled it into commercial fiefs. The Fists of Righteous Harmony ends with the millenarian Boxer rising and the eight-nation army whose march on Beijing extinguished what credit the dynasty had left. A closing piece, The Long Memory, returns to the diplomat at the press conference and asks how the wound made in those seventy years became, and remains, the working vocabulary of Chinese statecraft.
Links to each piece will be added below as each is published.
