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Borders of Chinese Civilization

Geography and History at Empire's End

Duke University Press

Civilization from the Center

The Geomoral Context of Tributary Expectations

Our Illustrious Ancestor taught us
To bring the people near, and cast them not aside;
For the people are the root of the kingdom:
With the root firm, the kingdom is tranquil.
Classic of Documents

And, as it is with this, so too with all things.
The pages of our lives are blurred palimpsest:
New lines are wreathed on old lines half-erased,
And those on older still; and so forever.
The old shines through the new, and colors it.
Conrad Aiken, "Palimpsest"

During most of the long and expansive rule of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), Japan remained a largely inaccessable island kingdom on the eastern reaches of the Chinese world—the land of Riben, where the sun took root. Within the extensive array of tributary domains offering obeisance to the celestial Qing emperors, Japan was silent—physically absent from the imperial court, yet persistingly present within All-under-Heaven. This ongoing abstention from official communication with the Qing court was one major consequence of Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu's policy of "locking up" Japan in the 1630s, and putting Riben—what the Japanese themselves called "Nihon"—out of reach of Qing military might and administrative influence. To most Chinese, Japan endured as an inaccessible silence for over two hundred years.

Accordingly, in the most comprehensive and most widely read geographic anthology of the nineteenth century, Wei Yuan's Illustrated Treatise on the Sea Kingdoms, Japan was simply appended to the section on the Nan Yang, or "Southern Sea"—that is, the island kingdoms of maritime Asia, which included the Philippines, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. Japan was appended—and not featured in the formal enumeration—because it was not among the official tributary kingdoms. Nevertheless, Japan retained its place on Chinese maps, because it still lay there, as it had for centuries, just off the coast of Civilization. In the nineteenth century, it took on added significance to Wei and other Chinese who saw Japan as a potential target of Western encroachment.

Incidents of Western aggression and the violent events sparked in their wake ensued with alarming speed by the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1839 Great Britain provoked the first of the Opium Wars in south China. In 1851 the Taiping rebels began their fourteen-year rampage that devastated much of China south of the Yangzi River. In 1853 Commodore Perry and his "Black Ships" demanded forcibly that Japan open its ports to American traders. By 1858 the second series of Opium Wars were under way in China, and calls for administrative reform and study of Western science and armaments were thereafter officially supported by the "Foreign Affairs Clique" at court; so began the Tongzhi Restoration. In 1868 the Meiji Restoration was proclaimed in Japan—a curious "revival of ancient ways" that overthrew the ruling Tokugawa shogunate, restored the emperor, and quickly turned into a wide-ranging program of "civilization and enlightenment" according to Western models. With the world of East Asia thus forced into the "international community," China and Japan were brought closer to reestablishing official contact. The conduct of this relationship, however, was to be hotly contested from the start.

Because Chinese policies had begun to change by 1870, when Japan requested a treaty of trade and friendship, consensus was lacking among Chinese officials advising the court on its dealings with Japan. A number of officials—certainly the most irate—continued to consider Japan in the terms of the long-standing diplomacy of tributary relations, "Civilization" and "proximity." But others were willing to consider Japan in light of the newer practice of international treaties, to which the Chinese court had committed itself in its relations with the Westerners. The problem faced by both positions, I will demonstrate in this chapter, is that they were informed by the legacy of Chinese writings on Japan, which remained quite inadequate during the first two centuries of Qing rule. The question thus arises: What was the state of Chinese knowledge of Japan by 1870, and how did it inform Chinese diplomacy both in that year, when Japan requested a treaty, and in 1874, when a conflict over Taiwan delayed the projected exchange of ambassadors between China and Japan?

Civilization and Proximity

Civilization, or wenming to the educated Chinese class in the nineteenth century, ultimately signified the expansive process of Chinese imperial lordship. In part, "wenming" meant "clarifying-" or "enlightening-through-patterning." One patterned the world and thus ruled it, with the assistance of a largely civil bureaucracy staffed by literati ideally entrusted to spread enlightened virtue throughout the realm. In explicit contrast to the rule of military subjugation (wugong), this active administering, termed "wenhua" ("transforming by patterning" or "civilizing"), was accomplished in the name of the emperor, or "Son of Heaven," whose direct access to the clarity of the heavenly bodies made him the exemplar of illustrious virtue and guaranteed that the regularity of Heaven might be manifested in an analogous regularity of human life on earth. Because the basis for such virtuous example was provided by the set of histories and classics—the latter the putative writings of the ancient sages—writing was thus understood to be the quintessential patterning of Civilization, and we may further understand wenming as "enlightening through writing." In other words, wenming described quite literally a superior state of human society made luminous (ming) through writing or civilization (wen); when all was at peace in the world, the world was wenming. A mans knowledge of the received texts and their language, which was demonstrated as virtuous behavior in accordance with the very recommendations of the texts, meant that he too was wenming, or "civilizing."

Implicit in the bookishness of this Chinese conception of Civilization was an encouragement of historical analogy as a primary method of reasoning about man in the world. To the degree that one understood how the world was to be patterned after the writing of the classics, one could proceed to regulate human agency in the world. Analogical knowledge of the human world concentrated on human behavior, which was marked in terms of "lordship" (jun) and specified analogically as the reciprocal positions of the Confucian "Three Bonds": the ruler-servant, father-son, and husband-wife relations. To pattern one's behavior after the models provided by the classics, specifically indicated by properly submitting to one's rightful lord, was to be among the "civilizing." Those who did not display such behavior comprised the various ranks of the uncivilized; if the "black-haired masses" of Chinese subjects at least benefited from the example of local officials and scholars, the outsiders, the rudest of whom made no ritual attempt to acknowledge the universal sovereignty of the Chinese emperor, lived in a wilderness beyond the border of recognition.

Civilization was, accordingly, a spatially expansive and ideologically infinite project. From the point of view of the emperor at the center, the realm was instantiated by the establishment of regional and local bureaucratic offices, by the voyages of imperial envoys to and from the emperor's capital, and by the foreign envoys who came to call. In time, and assuming that imperial virtue shone forth, distant outsiders too would understand the Chinese classics and take a place within the civilizing realm. When outsiders did participate in Civilization, as when they sent tribute missions to the imperial court, they wrote in the literary Chinese language, expressing the decorous and submissive sentiments proper to their station. Literati in Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and other kingdoms became fluent in literary Chinese, and Chinese officials thus included those peoples within Civilization.

In this context of diplomacy, and in reference to these nearby east Asian nations, Chinese officials had recourse to the ancient concept of "proximity" (jin). More a correlative than a causal concept, proximity proposed a connection between space and morality: humankind would approximate moral behavior in proportion to their proximity to the moral rule of the Chinese emperor. This understanding of the world was fostered by the texts of Confucianism, and it assumed the expressly hierarchical world noted above. In the ancient Classic of Documents, the legendary founder of Chinese Civilization, the Great Yu (or Illustrious Ancestor), is lauded first for his paternal manner of rule: bringing the people close, or cherishing them (3.3). Other early formulations underline this conflation between nearness in space and appropriateness in moral behavior; most explicit perhaps is the statement attributed to Confucius in the Analects (6.28): "To be able to take one s example from what is close at hand can be called the direction of reciprocity." That is, if one treats others as one treats "oneself" (what is close at hand), one "follows the form" of reciprocity.

Diplomacy, in terms of traditional tributary relations, pursued the same ideal. The emperor brought close the outside peoples, who, insofar as they appeared in the Chinese court and thereby participated in the moral action of reciprocity, acknowledged a minimal acceptance of Chinese Civilization—the nominal lordship of the Son of Heaven and his calendar. In return, the foreign lord was confirmed as ruler of his domain. Nevertheless, this was but one area within an all-encompassing system of rites, or propriety (li), which extended to dress, language, food, and so on, and constituted the cultural substance of Civilization. To the degree a foreign people participated in the totality of Civilization—above and beyond their participation in tributary protocol—they could be considered "Chinese." The kingdom of Korea, for example, was so closely integrated into Chinese Civilization that its nominal status during much of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods was more akin to "adopted son" than outsider. Japan, by contrast, had not been a consistent participant since the eighth century, and accordingly, when Japan requested a formal treaty with China in 1870, an intense debate arose among Chinese advisors as to the position of Japan within the order of Civilization.

But this view of an expanding realm embracing other peoples did not guarantee that outsiders would in fact participate in Civilization; Chinese texts promised an ideal scenario to which actual practice did not necessarily conform. The issue at hand, however, is not whether or not the ideological bookishness of the model discredits it as an adequate description of historical reality; rather, the present issue is how this textual model operated in the worldviews of historical agents in the 1870s and 1880s.

The Bounds of Diplomatic Protocol

Models, after all, are but guides to reality; and the assumption is patently false that an ideal scenario (or ideology) will fully comprehend social interactions, whether they are as elemental as two individuals sharing a language and culture or as complex as ruling classes of two distinct societies. Although Chinese Civilization provided an explanation for actual relations diverging from the text (in its worst form, conflict)—namely, that one or both of the parties was morally lacking in adherence to reciprocity— there was always the possibility that peoples at the borders of social configurations—be they subcultural groups, rural and urban communities, provinces, regions, or states—would be in a position to interact, simply because they strayed into contact with one another. In other words, when Chinese chose to describe relations with foreign peoples in terms of proximity, they were intending to ritualize, and thereby regularize before the act of encounter, the random contacts among people(s) who moved into the vicinity of each other. As Pierre Bourdieu has observed, ritual practice "always aims to facilitate passages and/or to authorize encounters between opposed orders." In the interests of regulating contact, Chinese interpreted the commonplace "nearness" between peoples in terms of proximity, an act that formally designated and officially sanctioned a relationship between those peoples.

This comprehensive (if compulsive) concern for ritual is one well-documented aspect of Chinese Civilization. On the ancient precedent of the three classics of ritual (the Liji, Yi li, and Zhou li), it was the business of Chinese authorities—both heads of clans and emperors—to issue ritual precedents and regulations for members of the group subject to their respective authority. Although weddings, funerals, and ancestral sacrifices were of greatest general importance, ritual manuals presumed to cover the gamut of human behavior. Emperors, moreover, had rituals appropriate to their universal sphere—the Great Sacrifices to Heaven and Earth and the reception of foreign envoys. Yet as Angela Zito reminds us, ritual was not simply its textual representation, but a performance that enacted or represented the knowledge of past organizations described in texts, coupled with those objects or people needed to demonstrate power in present reality.

Given this dual orientation of ritual as written precedent and enacted performance, the interest among Chinese rulers to ritualize diplomacy, and thereby manage the power of foreign states, could be easily and injuriously frustrated, precisely because such encounters were most difficult to prescribe. Chinese demonstration of universal lordship in diplomatic ritual was a precarious undertaking, because a ritual performance, in spite of its express intention to contain the power of a foreign state, did not necessarily do so. Chinese were dependent upon foreigners to come to the imperial court, yet Chinese claims could appear quite preposterous to the foreign party (as with the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). During the "medieval" age in Japan (roughly 1200–1600), warlord leaders dismissed Chinese claims of universal lordship (especially after Mongolian attempts to invade Japan in 1275 and 1281), and as Japanese political order disintegrated in the sixteenth century, would-be Japanese rulers cynically took advantage of Chinese ritual protocol in attempts to garner their respective claims to lordship in Japan. This development was recorded with repugnance in the Ming History, especially because these Japanese supplicants were unable (or unwilling) to control the allegedly Japanese "Dwarf pirates" ravaging the Chinese coast, and later advisors to the Qing emperors inferred the lesson that Japan might best be left alone. The imperial "decision" to ignore a foreign power was, after all, a legitimate choice.

Unofficial Contacts in the Early Qing

This willingness of the early Qing emperors and their advisors to forgo official relations with Japan presents a striking contrast to Qing diplomacy with the southeastern kingdoms of Vietnam, Thailand, Java, Sumatra, and especially the Liuqiu (Ry?ky?) Islands. Relations between the Qing court and the king of the Liuqiu Islands were maintained regularly; as the Qing emperors welcomed ambassadors and tribute missions from the Liuqius, Chinese coastal trade with the Liuqiu Islands flourished. But in the case of Japan, the early Manchu emperors were satisfied with occasional, unofficial diplomacy when mutual interests coincided—typically over trade issues. Evidence has been found in the Yongzheng emperor's Imperial Comments in Vermilion (Zhupiyuzhi) to demonstrate that both the Kangxi and the Yongzheng emperors carried on secret diplomacy with Japan. Hoping to forestall all potential problems with piracy, the Kangxi emperor banned sea travel in 1684; nonetheless, trade with Japan quickly increased eightfold. Consequently, when the offical Li Xu memorialized the throne in 1700 to express concern for the safety of the seacoast, the Kangxi emperor ordered that Li arrange for the envoy Mai Ersen to visit Nagasaki in order to observe the Chinese trade with Japan. In 1715, the Japanese sho-gunate instituted a system of "official passes" (C: xinpai J: shinpai) in an effort to reduce the quantity of unauthorized trade; this action caused problems in south China when disgruntled merchants complained that those merchants receiving the passes were guilty of sedition. In response, the Kangxi emperor confiscated all passes, effectively prohibiting all trade until he relented two years later. Problems with illicit trade and smuggling grew during the 1720s, until the governor of Zhejiang province, Li Wei, with the personal approval of the Yongzheng emperor, sent emissaries to explore the possibility of a more mutual supervision of ships. In 1729, Japanese officials returned a letter outlining their policies, which was forwarded to the emperor and received his approval. Apparently, the problems were thereby solved.

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Excerpted from Borders of Chinese Civilization by D. R. Howland. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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