European Imperialism in China: Forgetting History and Recalibrating the World

Erik Ringmar

It is easy for a European visitor to the “Old Summer Palace,” just north-west of

Beijing, to feel shame.1 Before 1860 an enormous palace and garden complex was

located here — the famous Yuanmingyuan, the main residence of the emperor of

China. The imperial compound was filled with villas, pavilions, pagodas, temples,

libraries, audience halls and tea-houses, and there were lakes, small mountains,

grottoes, meandering waterways, places to admire the distant mountains or the

autumn moon. In addition there were precious objects and works of art, the most

costly items in the imperial collections, including a copy of all Chinese works on

literature, arts, science and history. Then, in 1860, the Europeans destroyed it all.

On October 7, 8 and 9, a French army thoroughly looted the compound and on

October 18 and 19, a British army burned all the buildings to the ground.

Hence the shame. A famous early statement was provided by in a letter by the

French author Victor Hugo. The palace, he said, was “the thousand and one

dreams of the thousand and one nights”; “ a “tremendous unknown masterpiece,

glimpsed from the distance in a kind of twilight, like a silhouette of the civilization

of Asia on the horizon of the civilization of Europe.” And then the Europeans

entered, the French plundered, the British burned.

1 I am grateful to Frauke Austermann, Peter Baehr, Deng Zhenglai, Enrico Fardella, Viktor Friedmann, Gao Rui, Jin Guangyao, Li Tiangang, Vera Schwarcz, Greg Thomas, Filip Viskupic, Wong Yiu-chung, Zena Wu and audiences at Fudan University, Shanghai, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and ThinkInChina, Beijing, for comments on an earlier version of this article.

1

One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. ... We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.

For Hugo the superiority of European civilization is never in doubt, yet this is surely

no way for civilized people to act. A twenty-first-century European visitor to Old

Summer Palace is likely to echo Hugo's sentiments and, without questioning the

universal applicability of European models and values, feel ashamed of what the

Europeans once did in this place.

Yet Chinese visitors are likely to feel shame too. They are ashamed that they

were not strong and well organized enough to save their national heritage and their

country. Or this, at least, is what the Chinese government encourages its citizens

to feel and the emotional reaction that is officially sanctioned. China was weak,

despised by the leading powers of the day, and inferior to them in next to all

respects. To escape their humiliation, and their inferiority, China's citizens are

called upon to make their country strong again — that is, in practice, to rally behind

the government and to loyally support its reforms.

In this way Yuanmingyuan elicits a shared emotional reaction coming from two

different sources: the Europeans feel ashamed at what they did; the Chinese feel

ashamed at what they did not do. There are, however, good reasons to be

skeptical of these reactions. Indeed, as we will argue, both Europeans and Chinese

are mistaken. In both cases their reactions have been manipulated, and in both

cases the manipulation should be resisted. The feelings of shame, and the

positions of European superiority and Chinese inferiority which they have sustained,

have done tremendous damage not only to Europe, to China, but also to the

relations between the two. It is only by forgetting history that we finally can

recalibrate relations between Europe and China and make it possible for the two

parts of the world to encounter each other as equals.

2

China’s humiliation at Yuanmingyuan

The humiliation which first comes to mind is the humiliation of China and the

Chinese. In China, the history of the country is often told as a story of

bainianguochi, the “hundred years of humiliations.” This story started with the two

Opium Wars and the unequal treaties which concluded them, the defeat against

Japan in 1895, the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the degrading treatment at Versailles in

1919, the war against Japan between 1937 and 1945, and the one hundred years

concluded only once the Communists restored peace and unity to the country. The

Chinese people, Chairman Mao famously declared in September 1949, has “stood

up!” The destruction of Yuanmingyuan is the pivotal event in this story. Before

Yuanmingyuan was destroyed, the emperor and the court still had their self-

confidence and their pretensions; they were at the center of a world organized

according to their own specifications. After the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, this

fiction could no longer be maintained. China, it turned out, was far behind the

European powers in a number of crucial respects.

Europeans never doubted that China was inferior to themselves. Late

nineteenth-century treaties defined the country as “barbarian,” or possibly as

“semi-barbarian,” and thus not as a subject of international law nor as an automatic

participant in international conferences. The reformers among Chinese officials

acknowledged this inferiority and embarked on a process of self-reform which one

day, it was hoped, would force the Europeans to recognize them as an equal. The

reformers set up a foreign ministry in 1862, trained diplomats, translated treaties

on international law and, starting in 1868, began sending missions abroad. More

generally, the reformers sought to “catch up” by “modernizing” everything from

China's political institutions and legal system to its social customs and the way

people talked and dressed. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the May 4th Movement

of 1919, and the Communist revolution in 1949, were all undertaken not only with

3

institutional reform in mind but also in order to change people's way of thinking.

“Ours,” as Mao insisted in 1949, “will no longer be a nation subject to insult and

humiliation.”

The theme concerning national humiliation — and the associated agenda of

reform — forms an important part of the national curriculum of contemporary

Chinese schools. Indeed the topic has been heavily promoted by the government

since the early 1990s. According to the “Outline on Implementing Patriotic

Education,” 1994:

The objectives of conducting patriotic education campaign are to boost the nation’s spirit, enhance cohesion, foster national self esteem and pride, consolidate and develop a patriotic united front to the broadest extent possible, and direct and rally the masses’ patriotic passions to the great cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The humiliation discourse thus becomes a way for the Communist Party to gain

legitimacy. One-party rule by the CCP is legitimate since, as the catalog of the

Museum of Chinese Revolutionary History in Beijing reminds its visitors: “the CCP

lead the whole country and the masses of all the nationalities from the ruins of war

to stand up.”

Yet the task of avenging the injustices of the past was not completed in 1949.

China may have stood up, but it was still not universally respected. The reforms, as a

result, had to continue. Although it is difficult to imagine today, in the 1950s central

planning could still be considered as a more rational way to organize the economy

than the market, and hence as a quicker path to development. It was as such that it

was embraced by the Chinese leaders, and it was with the same rationale that Maoist

China embarked on campaigns like the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Great Cultural

Revolution.” Yet central planning and the campaigns failed, above all, in the eyes of

the leaders, since they failed to restore China's pride. It was only in the early 1980s,

once the Party embraced capitalism, that the country made real progress. The

irony of a Communist regime policing its cheap and non-unionized work-force on

4

behalf of international capitalism was completely lost on the Chinese leaders.

Communism and capitalism are perfectly compatible as long as they are

subordinate to the real goal which is to modernize China and to bring the country

respect.

Europe’s humiliation at Yuanmingyuan

But there is another history of humiliation associated with Yuanmingyuan, which

helps explain its destruction. Yuanmingyuan, we said, constituted the de facto

center of the Sino-centric world. Most Qing dynasty emperors spent most of their

time here and the audience hall in the imperial compound was where foreign

delegations were received. It was here that they presented their tributes and

where they koutou-ed before the imperial throne. To Europeans the koutou was a

profoundly humiliating ritual. Full head-long prostration signified complete

subjugation and a total renunciation of all claims to status and standing. In

Europe, calisthenics of this kind was what a slave performed before a master, or a

worshiper before a god. Most European visitors — the Dutch, Portuguese, the

Jesuits, some Russians — did it anyway, considering it to be the price they had to

pay for the emperor’s benevolence. Only British diplomats persistently refused,

arguing that the koutou degraded both themselves and their country.

During the military campaign of 1860, this history of humiliation made

Yuanmingyuan vulnerable. On September 18, the Chinese seized some 39

Europeans, soldiers as well as civilians, while they carried out peaceful duties away

from their camp. Several of the prisoners, the British claimed, had been taken to

Yuanmingyuan where they had been tortured and repeatedly forced to koutou

before Chinese officials. These were arguments used when Yuanmingyuan was

destroyed. To the British, the palace compound symbolized the extraordinary

pretensions of the Chinese emperor and the repeated humiliation of the Europeans.

It was at Yuanmingyuan, Lord Elgin explained, that emperor “brought our hapless

5

countrymen in order that they might undergo their severest tortures within its

precincts.” To destroy the palace was consequently the best way to bring the

emperor down and to wipe out the shame. “[T]he army would go there,” said

Elgin, “not to pillage, but to mark by a solemn act of retribution the horror and

indignation with which we were inspired by the perpetration of a great crime." “The

destruction of the emperor's palace was the strongest proof of our superior

strength,” as Garnet Wolseley, a leading British officers, put it, “it served to

undeceive all Chinamen in their absurd conviction of their monarch's universal

sovereignty.”

creative destruction

The relative rise of Europe and relative decline of China is a complex and drawn out

process, but this is the symbolic turning-point. It was here — at Yuanmingyuan in

1860 — that the world finally became European. Before the destruction of the

imperial palace, China had rejected European claims to supremacy and insisted on

their own, radically different, interpretation of the world. Before 1860, China still

constituted a self-confident, if arguably deluded, alternative to Europe. After 1860

there were no such alternatives. The Europeans had wiped out their own

humiliation, as it were, and passed it on to the Chinese, and before long the

Europeans were joined in their claim to world hegemony by their cousins in the

former European colonies in North America. The subsequent history of the world,

the past 150 years, has been profoundly shaped by these two identities — by the

claim of Europe and North America to superiority and by China's acceptance of its

inferiority. The establishment and perpetuation of these two identities have had

far-reaching and devastating consequences.

Take the case of European imperialism which reached its self-confident apogee

only in the decades after 1860. As self-designated custodians of the world, the

6

Europeans took direct control over vast territories in Africa and Asia and indirect

control over vast territories elsewhere. Market principles were introduced and local

markets were hooked up to the global market; natural resources were extracted,

labor employed and exploited. The Europeans exported their political and social

institutions too, their religion, values and ideas — and everywhere they went

“things,” in Chinua Achebe's phrase, begun to “fall apart.” And when they met

resistance the Europeans often acted aggressively, occasionally in a genocidal

fashion, or they carried out spectacular acts of barbarism of which the destruction

of Yuanmingyuan provides an example. The story, arguably, is ongoing. For some

150 years now people around the world have been “civilized” and “modernized” and

“saved for democracy” and the consequences have often been devastating.

But perhaps this is unfair. Not everything the Europeans did had destructive

consequences. They also improved the lives of the people they colonized and

controlled — raising living standards, improving health care and educational levels,

extending life-spans. Instead of having purely negative consequences, European,

post-1860, world-domination is best characterized as a process of “creative

destruction” — the destruction, that is, was a way of clearing a space for the

construction of the new. Indeed creative destruction is often said to be the essence

of capitalism, and it was in these terms that Marx and Engels celebrated its

progress across the world. Writing in the wake of the First Opium War, they

welcomed the way “[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and

venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away,” and how “[a]ll that is solid

melts into air.”

Consider the implications for China and the Chinese. By the Europeans, we

said, China was regarded as a marginal, barbarian, and slightly ridiculous country.

The Chinese resented these descriptions and from the 1860s onwards they

expended great efforts in trying to convince the Europeans that they were wrong

about them. This is how the Chinese came to continue the same process of

7

creative destruction which the Europeans had initiated. Since 1860, China has

been a country at war with itself; a war undertaken in the name of “modernization”

and in order to “catch up.” All aspects of Chinese society have come under scrutiny

and most features have been found wanting; in the eyes of its domestic reformers

China was never good enough and its people always “reactionary” and “feudal.” In

one wave of revolutionary frenzy after another traditional political, social and

cultural institutions have been destroyed, and long-accepted gods, philosophers and

authorities have been pulled down from their pedestals. The Cultural Revolution,

1966-76, was from this perspective nothing but a consequence of the May 4th

Movement of 1919, and so was the creative destruction unleashed on the country

by the Deng-era market reforms.

How we assess the relative consequences of the forces of creation and

destruction will vary, and so will the verdict on whether European overlordship

ultimately was worth it. Some will conclude that the destruction was too high a

price to pay; others will join Marx and Engels in celebrating the progress of history.

There should be less discussion, however, regarding the role which the discourse of

humiliation has played in providing legitimacy for the Chinese government. During

the past 150 years the race to catch up and to modernize has served to justify

some very harsh measures carried out by the state — including the forced

appropriation of property, denial of civil and human rights, starvation, murder and

dictatorship. Here too the story is ongoing: the CCP is still not elected and they still

deny the Chinese people basic civil rights. These policies, and their associated

abuses, were all necessary, the argument has been, since only a strong

government which brooks no dissent and is supported by the whole people, can

make China strong. Since 1949 the CCP has constituted such a government, and to

question the party's role is for that reason not an expression of political

disagreement as much as an act of treason.

8

relieving the Europeans of their superiority

Lets briefly summarize. Before 1860, we said, Europe and China occupied different

worlds and within those worlds they both maintained their respective claims to

supremacy. After 1860 there was only one world, the Euro-centric world, and here

Europe — together with its cousins in North America — established itself as superior

while China became inferior. Europe's hegemonic pretensions initiated a process of

creative destruction which the Chinese in their quest for respect, recognition and

revenge, soon mimicked. Whether what was created was worth the price of the

destruction can be debated, but it is surely worth considering whether there are

ways for both Europeans and Chinese to escape their entrenched positions. The

Europeans need to be relieved of their superiority, and the Chinese of their

inferiority, before they can encounter each other as equals.

The Europeans may indeed be the more difficult case. It is difficult to convince

those who consider themselves superior that they are mistaken about themselves.

The problem is compounded by the way a sense of superiority sometimes hides

behind professions of admiration for foreign cultures. A prime example is provided

by the contrition expressed by Victor Hugo in the wake of the destruction of

Yuanmingyuan. His description of the imperial palace was next to pure fantasy, an

Oriental dream, which fit perfectly with similar dreams indulged in by a large

number of his contemporaries. The East, in this popular rendition, is endlessly

seductive — filled with alluring women, mystical religions and opium fumes — and

Hugo and his fellow Orientalists were all ready to be seduced. Or at least they

pretended to. In the end, however, this was always a game, a fantasy of

submission, which titillated them but which never was intended to be realized. This

is why Hugo's shame is a bad starting-point for a reconsideration of Europe's

relationship to China. Orientalism of this kind is necessarily condescending.

9

Regretting the destruction of Yuanmingyuan on Hugo's terms, the Europeans will

never be able to meet the Chinese as equals.

A better starting-point is provided by critics of European imperialism. There

were always such critics; indeed the history of anti-imperialism is coterminous with

imperialism itself. An early group of dissenters were conservative thinkers who,

while they looked down on their own lower classes, often had considerable respect

for foreign cultures and their elites. In the eighteenth-century Edmund Burke —

the famous critic of the French Revolution — provided an example of such a

conservative in his long fight to have Warren Hastings impeached for atrocities

committed in India. When the Second Opium War broke out, Lord Derby, a

conservative former Prime Minister, voiced a similar critique of money-grubbing

British merchants and their aggressive supporters both in government and in the

East. Another group of critics consisted of liberals who, while generally supportive

of Europe's universalizing ambitions, were scathing regarding the aggressive ways

in which these projects were advanced. In 1860, one such liberal was Richard

Cobden who was active in the peace movement and a supporter of disarmament

and negotiated settlements of international conflicts. Cobden insisted that liberal

values could not be spread by force and he too spoke out strongly against

aggressive action in China.

Inspired by these nineteenth-century voices, we can formulate a critique of

European pretensions. Behind Lord Derby's position we find a deep skepticism

regarding the very idea of “civilization.” To the members of the British

government, and its officials in China, “civilized” was what Europeans were and

everyone else was by definition either a “savage” or a “barbarian.” Yet to

conservatives these distinctions were both facile and illegitimate. To Derby it was

obvious that Britain possessed a venerable set of traditions and an admirable way

of life, but this was a matter of culture not of civilization, and British culture could

not be imposed on others. After all, China too had its own culture and traditions

10

which it was the duty of the British to respect. With Derby we would consequently

refuse to draw a distinction between civilization and its others, and instead insist

that there are many alternative ways to live and to organize a society. Each way of

life has its own standard of excellence and while lives can be better or worse when

judged by their own standards, there is no universal standard by which all ways of

life can be assessed.

If we instead follow Cobden, we would go on believing in the idea of a

European civilization, and we would presume that it represents values and norms

which have a universal relevance, but we would refuse to defend any such

standards or distinctions by military means. We would insist that free trade cannot

be spread by force and that civilization cannot be advanced through acts of

barbarism. In contemporary terms, Cobden's position constitutes a critique of

liberal interventionism and of all attempts at a violent remaking of the world.

relieving the Chinese of their sense of inferiority

The next question is how to relieve the Chinese of their sense of inferiority. A first

thing to notice here is that the feeling of humiliation arises only to the extent that

the history of the past 150 years is claimed as “Chinese history,” the “history of the

Chinese nation,” etc. That is, to the extent that the Chinese nation is taken as the

subject of the story told about the past. To take the nation as the subject of

history is a relatively recent phenomenon. As we would expect, it goes with the

rise of the nation itself; that is, it happened only after the French Revolution, and it

was only in the course of the nineteenth-century that these “national histories”

became prominent. This is the kind of history that students were taught in the

newly created public schools. Indeed, the telling of the story of the nation was one

of the main ways in which the nation came into being.

The best way to avoid the humiliation and the shame would thus be to avoid

nationalizing Chinese history. And this should be easy to do. Qing-dynasty China

11

was an empire ruled by a Manchu elite which was intensely proud of its Manchu

heritage, language and culture, and their country consisted of a multitude of

peoples speaking different languages and embracing different cultures. In fact, the

national history of China is a product only of the last decades of their rule, the

events leading up to the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. In 1860 there was no Chinese

nation. Rather, much like nationalists in Europe, the new generation of nationalist

Chinese leaders began by seizing power and only later did they create the nation in

whose name they had acted. There is a direct connection here to the events which

transpired at Yuanmingyuan. It was only once China was subjected to the superior

might of the Europeans that the nation came to exist as a political subject.

The history of the Chinese nation could thus have been told quite differently.

If the new nationalist leaders would have rejected the imperial heritage rather than

to claim it, the shame of Yuanmingyuan would not have been attached to them and

the imperial compound would have been forgotten. And this is in fact exactly what

happened. The new Communist leaders did reject the legacy of the empire and

Yuanmingyuan was forgotten. And this is not surprising. Marxism, after all, is an

explicitly anti-nationalist doctrine. Marx and Engels wrote the Communist

Manifesto in 1848, just as a wave of nationalist revolutions were sweeping

across Europe, and as they emphatically made clear, history is the story of

“class struggles,” not of the nation. Once in power, the CCP embraced this

historiography. The ones who had “stood up” were ordinary Chinese people, the

working classes, not capitalists, landowners or members of the KMT.

It is consequently not surprising that Yuanmingyuan initially played no role

whatsoever in the official propaganda. Instead the location north-west of Beijing

where the imperial compound had stood was entirely neglected. After 1860, what

little that remained of the original structures was carted off as building material by

local peasants, and in subsequent decades the compound was taken over by

squatters, farmers, doufu-makers and assorted cottage industries; pigs roamed the

12

grounds and much of the land seems to have been used as a garbage heap. During

the hunger that followed the Great Leap Forward, locals planted rice and during the

Cultural Revolution university professors were sent here to level the hills and to fill

in the lakes with stones. In the 1980s, when private businesses once again were

permitted, an amusement park was constructed together with a paintball gallery, a

pigeon aviary, a go-cart track and a “Primitive Totem Exhibition.”

The 1980s was also when Yuanmingyuan eventually was rediscovered by the

political authorities. The site was gradually cleared and cleaned up, and it was first

opened as a public park in 1985. At this time, however, only the outlying areas

were accessible and only after excavations were undertaken in 2004 has it been

possible to visit the core of the original Yuanmingyuan. Still, much of the original

gardens remain inaccessible, largely it seems since they have been destroyed

beyond recognition; in fact much of the area immediately surrounding the

compound is still occupied by cottage industries, squatters, assorted animals and

garbage. Work to get the imperial compound into a presentable state —

construction work on the ruins — is ongoing. It would thus not be incorrect to say

that the “Old Summer Palace,” as we see it today, is a recent creation, barely 30

years old.

The real story told by this place does not concern China's humiliation, or

even its past, as much as the attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to gain

legitimacy for itself. The Old Summer Palace tells the story of CCP, not of the

Chinese nation. All political regimes need legitimacy, and in the twenty-first-

century democratic elections provide the most common form of such legitimation —

a form of support unavailable to the Chinese leaders. Yet history too can operate

as a legitimating device. Once Marx had discovered the “scientific laws” which

govern all historical processes, the leaders who engaged in revolutionary struggles

were legitimate by definition. After the end of the Soviet Union, however, and after

what amounted to the intellectual demise of the few remaining Communist regimes,

13

this rationale too became unavailable. And in China, after the events on Tiananmen

Square in June 1989, the crisis of legitimacy became acute.

It was only now that history became the story of the nation, not of class

struggle, and that the Chinese nation came to include all social classes, not just

workers and peasants. In this historiographical transformation Yuanmingyuan

played a crucial role. Once the legitimacy of the leaders in Beijing was threatened,

Yuanmingyuan was elevated to a position as a monument of national humiliation.

“We must never forget,” became the constantly repeated message; that is, in

practice, “we must never forget that the CCP are the only viable leaders of our

nation.” By remembering the humiliation that took place here, the Chinese people

are prepared for future sacrifices.

To say that the nation is a creation is not to say that it does not exist;

likewise, to say that feelings of humiliation are created is not to say that they are

not real. Yet the obviousness of the manipulation makes a difference. Humiliation

is clearly not something that Chinese people always have felt, but instead

something they have been made to feel. Surely, to be taken seriously, humiliation

should be defined by the humiliated themselves, not by someone else claiming to

represent them. Yet who represents whom is necessarily difficult to say in a

political system where there is not full freedom of speech. The insistence with

which Chinese students have to be told that they are humiliated gives the game

away — even in the many cases where the students' nationalistic fervor is sincere.

a post-modern history

In 1874, in a famous essay, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that history should not

dictate to us who we are and how we should live; that the dead should stop

interfering with the living. To Nietzsche, history — or better yet, History — was

another of those external authorities, like God or the State, to which only slaves

14

submit themselves. In order to live free lives, and to claim our full status as human

beings, these authorities must be rejected. There can consequently be no History

understood as a grand narrative of the inevitable progress of mankind; the kind of

history that takes social classes or the nation as its subject. Instead there are only

histories, stories about different things that once upon a time happened. If

modernity is defined in terms of progress, and if progress is described through a

grand narrative, Nietzsche's view is profoundly post-modern. Given how little most

people in highly developed, highly commercialized, societies care about the past —

and given how bleak their views often are of the future — it would seem we all are

about to enter a post-modern age. What role a modernizing Communist Party can

play in a post-modern age is any one’s guess, and no one is more keen to find out

than the Chinese leaders.

Following Nietzsche's suggestion, it might now be a good time to let go of the

past. Not all of the past to be sure, but the past that is used to justify destruction

and dictatorship; the past that makes it impossible for Europe and China to meet as

equals. Rather than apologizing or seeking revenge, we should insist that the

people involved in the 1860 destruction have nothing to do with us. The Manchu

emperors who lived here were not Chinese, and the Anglo-French commanders are

not the kinds of people contemporary Europeans should identify with. Europeans

should refuse to take responsibility for what they did, and today's Chinese people

should refuse to take responsibility for what the Manchus did not do. It is only by

forgetting the past that we can become liberated from it; from the impulse to

impose our will on others and to seek revenge, from the desire to rectify imaginary

injustices. Orientalizing China is necessarily condescending; only once it stops

nurturing its inferiority can China truly take its place in the world.

We should “use the past to serve the present,” Chairman Mao is quoted as

saying, and “use foreigners to serve China.” To make someone serve you is to

subject someone to your will and to your designs, yet such an instrumental

15

relationship necessarily places oneself in opposition both to time and space. This

stance comes naturally to people who are supremely confidence in themselves and

in their goals, but in today's world such confidence is rare. The time of great world-

transforming projects is surely over. Today the task before us is not to change the

world as much as to learn how to live in it — with dignity and with respect for

others. We need to accept our location in time and in space, but for this to happen

we must first make peace both with the past and with foreigners. That is, we can

no longer ask them to serve us, but we must learn how to let both be.

16