4.2 His Role in the Self-Strengthening Movement and Military Modernization
4.2.2 Patriotism: Li Hong Zhang and the Foreign Threat
In 1862, three of China‟s most important and effective officials, Zeng Guo Fan, Li Hong Zhang, and Zuo Zong Tang, were locked in a mortal battle against the last hold outs of Hong Xiu Quan‟s Taiping Rebellion. Even as the armies of Zeng and Li used Western designed weapons and troops (The Ever Victorious Army led first by the American Frederick Townshend Ward and later by Charles “Chinese” Gordon), Li Hong Zhang has started to worry about the motives of foreign intervention in this internal conflict and at the growing power of the foreigners in China‟s major port cities.
271 Quoted with the permission of Madeleine Zelin, Informal Law and the Firm in Early Modern China, Paper prepared for the First IERC Conference: The Economic Performance of Civilizations: Roles of Culture, Religion, and the Law, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, February 23–24, 2007, pp. 1–39. Madeleine Zelin is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor of History and East Asian Languages at Columbia University.
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In early August 1862, he wrote to Zuo Zong Tang:
“Although Shanghai is on our population register and on our map, the hearts of the officials and the people have long since gone over to the foreigners, as if unaware that the Chinese [themselves]
can still manage affairs and that the Chinese troops can still fight”272
Li Hong Zhang has strongly suspected that the British and French had territorial designs on China in the areas adjacent to Shanghai and Ningpo. By mid-August, Li wrote Zeng Guo Fan that local Western-language newspapers (which were translated for him regularly) had published a proposal that all of Shanghai, not just the foreign settlement, should be placed under Western control until the Taiping threat receded.
“In my official communication to the Zongli Yamen,” Li reported to Zeng, “I had said earlier that it was difficult to guarantee that someday the foreigners would not occupy [Shanghai]…We are treading on frost over ice; there is indeed a hidden danger.273
In the midst of the Taiping rebellion, it is telling that Li, who would go on to be the Qing‟s most important and celebrated diplomat and statesman, would feel such
272 Qing Dynasty History web site, Jottings from the Granite Studio, Jottings from the Granite Studio provides commentary, analysis, and opinion on China and Chinese history. It is written by Jeremiah Jenne, a PhD Candidate at a large public research university in Northern California. Currently, Jeremiah is in Beijing teaching history, doing archival research, and working on his dissertation. This part quoted from: http://granitestudio.org/2006/10/28/patriotism-li-hongzhang-and-the-foreign-threat/
273 K.C. Liu and Samuel C. Chu, Li Hung-chang and China’s Early Modernization, New York: Very Good Publisher, Armonk, 1994, p. 25.
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trepidation at the growing foreign influence on China‟s coast. Li is writing in 1862.
Two years earlier, an Anglo-French allied force had marched on Beijing and razed the Summer Palace to the ground. Even as they provided arms and troops for the Qing against the Taiping, Britain and France forced the Qing to renegotiate the earlier Opium War treaties on terms even more favorable to the foreign powers including (for the first time) outright legalization of the opium trade and the right for foreigners to buy land to build churches and missions anywhere in the Qing Empire.
Even early in his career, Li could see that despite the danger of the Taiping armies, in the long term, it was the Europeans who posed the real threat to the future of the Qing Empire.
But that begs the question: Did officials such as Li and Zeng Guo Fan want to preserve the Qing dynasty and the Manchu court or were they trying to save something else? Some might argue that they were culturalists, trying to preserve the
“Ancient Confucian traditions.” The late and eminent Qing historian, K.C. Liu, disagreed and saw in Li the prototype of the modern patriot.
Li‟s letters of 1862–1863 show that a new patriotism was growing in him, one distinguished from the traditional Chinese pride in the celestial dynasty and in the inherited culture. He had to deal constantly with European consuls and naval and military men; he could not but be aware that the world was made up of contenders of varying strength and that the West was superior to the China in power and technology.
Li continued, of course, to identify with the Qing dynasty, as he would do throughout his life. But when he used the phrase Zhong Guo (中國) or Zhong Tu (中土), which he frequently did, he was undoubtedly thinking not just of the dynasty, but also of China‟s land and people…
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Li Hong Zhang wrote repeatedly in his letters that the future role of the Europeans in China “Depends on the strength of China‟s armies,” and that if China should fail to strengthen herself, “The calamity for the future is unthinkable”. “The quest to be a strong and independent nation capable of standing up to the world has been a quest for Chinese patriots for a long time”.274
The fears of Li Hong Zhang would only partially come true275: China never became a full colony. However, the restrictions placed on China‟s development by the foreign treaties would make modernization difficult and the Qing court‟s continued resistance to the ideas and plans of men such as Li and Zeng Guo Fan impeded the importation and dissemination of Western military and industrial technology.
Moreover Li, more than Zeng Guo Fan, understood that there was more behind the military power and industrial capability of the west than simple technology. Li was no blind culturalist, but he was nevertheless in a box of his own making: tied to the dynasty by circumstance and title, he was loathe to change the system that made him the man he was.
It would have meant to have had a leader like Li Hong Zhang or Zeng Guo Fan? What did they think as imperial negligence and official corruption wasted or distorted their best plans and ideas?
The questions Li asked resonate down to the present day: How can China be a strong and independent nation? How to stand against other nations? Li Hong Zhang
274 Quoted from Qing Dynasty History web site, Jottings from the Granite Studio:
http://granitestudio.org/2006/10/28/patriotism-li-hongzhang-and-the-foreign-threat/
275 Liu, Kwang-ching. The Confucian as Patriot and Pragmatist: Li Hung-Chang’s Formative Years, 1823-1866, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 30, 1970, pp. 5-45.
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asked that question in 1862. Yan Fu, Liang Qi Chao (梁啟超), Sun Yat Sen (孫中山), and Mao Ze Dong (毛澤東) among many others, would take up the call276.