Social Status in Shanghai

 

The International Legations

"The British residents in Shanghai are the spoilt children of the Empire. They pay no taxes to China, except that landowners pay a very small land tax and no taxes to England. Judges and consuls are provided for them; they are protected by the British fleet, and for several years they have had, in addition, a British army to defend them; and for all this expenditure the British taxpayer pays."

-L. A. Lyall

It hardly needs to be pointed out but the foreigners in China at this time felt themselves to be vastly superior to the Chinese. While it would be simple to assume that this attitude came from the relative positions that the various parties adopt where one is the victor and the other the loser, there were finer distinctions within this arrangement which informed matters. Firstly, the foreigners’ religious representatives deemed the Chinese way of life as ‘heathen’ and ‘uncivilised’; as the victors, the foreign occupants were happy to accept this as a given, despite the fact that many of them chose to freely sample the Chinese way of life and – privately – adopt many of their practises. Secondly, the technology available to the Chinese, while notable, had not been used in defense of the country and many foreigners chose to interpret this as a mark of technological inferiority.

 

The Chinese were indeed too slow to make retaliatory moves (although one could argue that the Taiping Rebellion was one of the first attempts by the Celestials to make a stand for their own nationhood). The Ch’ing Dynasty had deliberately kept the populace blinkered and under-technologised, fearing just the kind of trouble that the Taipings represented. Many Chinese thought that China was the entire world and had never heard of ‘other countries’ or ‘other peoples’: there were only themselves and some outer darkness, populated by ‘barbarians’. Indeed all government correpondence naively referred to British and other foreign delegates as ‘barbarians’, a habit that took an act of government to eradicate. Consequently, when the victors of the First Opium War swaggered into the country, the Chinese were at a loss as to what to do.

For the British and French especially, the foreigners were strolling along well-trod paths: they were the conquerors and the Chinese, the conquered. As had happened in Africa, America, Australia and India, the indigenous peoples were relegated immediately to a subordinate position. 1842 was hailed as the year a new addition was made to the jewels in the crown of the British Empire and the British were quick to mint medals celebrating the event. China was a great big pie ready for carving and the rest of the West was eager to follow in British footsteps. However, all of this flag waving was a lie designed to veil the truth.

 

Britain had discovered a taste for tea and for drinking it out of fine Chinese porcelain. The only place they could get these commodities from was China and China wanted nothing that the British had to offer. As a result, British wealth flowed into China and an economic crisis followed after it. William Jardine and James Matheson decided that the Chinese would take the opium that they were growing in fields in India and that they would like it: in defiance of strict Imperial bans, they ran the drug into the country and forced the populace to buy it. Soon, 1 in 10 Chinese was ready to defy Imperial edicts to get another fix and the rest is history. A side-effect of all this was that the West received an indelible image of the Chinese as drug fiends.

But there were arguments against this. Marco Polo and his father travelled to China in the 11^th Century and spent many years there under the aegis of Kublai Khan. Marco wrote a book extolling the wonders of China, the palaces, the luxury, the technological advances: the picture he painted was of a civilisation far in advance of Europe at the time. Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, extolled his friends to visit China and to see the Great Wall as a mark of accomplishment in their lives. These contrasting images caused an interest in Europe and was the impetus to energise the field of Sinology; most Europeans however, had no knowledge of Marco Polo (other than that he introduced pasta to Italy, a ‘fact’ which may well be erroneous) and chose to view China as a nation of uncivilised reprobates.

The Unequal Treaties gave the Westerners a wide range of freedoms in the wake of their victory: they were free from local laws and allowed to live as they liked with no repercussions to their reputations or dignity back in their home countries. In fact they were enjoying the hermetically-sealed life of diplomats all over the world – diplomatic immunity and a detachment from local issues. As the above quote reveals, they were largely not even answerable to their own countries.

All of this led foreigners in Shanghai (and the other treaty ports) to firmly believe that they were superior beings whose one purpose was to treat China as a cash cow that they could milk without hindrance or let. It’s hardly surprising to learn that the Chinese privately referred to the invaders as ‘barbarians’ regardless of government policy.

The Celestials

 

Image depicting the Chinese notion of the Fan Kuei (“Foreign Devils”)

The bottom line is: the Chinese did not know how to respond to the West.

For most Chinese, the abiding nemesis was the Manchu Dynasty that had taken hold of the Dragon Throne. These ‘foreigners’ from the north had slipped in at the opportune time and had laid their yoke across the world: families who had previously enjoyed high rank and wide esteem were outcast and sent to the far southern provinces (the lucky ones, that is) and were now struggling to make ends meet; every man in the world had been forced to shave his head and wear the queue; marriage was forbidden between those of Manchu descent and everyone else. There had even been questions in high places about the validity of foot-binding.

Suddenly, in the mix, there were these ‘barbarians’ whom many Chinese sincerely regarded as animals taught to walk on their hind legs: the English, with their extravagant whiskers and their irritating voices were thought of as goats, walking on their hind feet and burdened with a lack of tact, manners and political fine feeling. For the majority of Chinese, while their enmity was focussed on the occupants of the Dragon Throne, the foreigners caught them broadside and they never saw it coming.

One thing that the Chinese found very peculiar about the foreigners was their veneration of pigs (this did nothing to reduce their feeling that the fan kuei were actually animals). The first missionaries, with very little sense of the Chinese dialects, attempted to translate the words ‘Jesus Christ’ into Chinese; the result was a phrase which was understood to mean ‘the Squeal of the Pig’ to the ears of many potential converts. The staunch resistance that many missionaries encountered in their dealings with the Chinese had less to do with refusing to accept the Word of God and more to do with an unwillingness to kow-tow to a screaming pig, nailed to a piece of wood.

ANTI-CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA:

A mandarin presides over the execution of a crucified pig (identified in the marginal text as Christ) while goat-headed foreigners are decapitated.

Linguistic misunderstandings aside, the very notion of Christianity and its notion of an afterlife flew in the face of thousands of years of ancestor-veneration and Confucian ideals. Most Chinese accepted the fact that, upon death, they would be re-united with their forebears and then would be able to monitor the actions of the succeeding generations. Christian thought taught that all of a Chinese person’s ancestors were heathens and therefore in Hell; further, any action on the part of the convert to aspire to the Christian Heaven, meant that they would be forever cut off from their families in the next life, something that did not appeal to most Celestials.

The country quickly divided along curious lines. First, there were those who despised the Ch’ing Dynasty, the original foreigners from Manchuria who had taken control of the Dragon Throne: most of these people rallied to the catch-cry, “Defeat the Ch’ing, restore the Ming” (despite the fact that the cruelties and excesses of the Ming Dynasty made the worst efforts of the Ch’ing look sophomoric). Ranged against these extremists were those who, whilst acknowledging the ‘foreign-ness’ of the Manchus, felt that much had been gained by their governance that had brought benefits to the country. The Queue Law for example had imposed uniformity across the country and had exposed troublesome elements which had been swiftly dealt with; the Manchus had revived and codified the bureaucratic examination system and had restored the Hanlin Library; many had benefited from the steady rule of the Manchu Emperors. This is the pragmatic Chinese worldview at its finest: the ability to take a bucketful of lemons and make lemonade.

With the arrival of the Westerners this division split into even more interesting patterns – the anti-foreign elements lumped the ‘gweilos’ in with the Manchus as just another group of barbarians to be fought off; the moderates (if we can coin such a term for them) chose to sit back and see what the newcomers had to offer.

What they had to offer was technology. The Manchus had deliberately avoided investing in new technologies in order to keep the populace subordinated; with the coming of the West, the technology was in open view and it made many people think of its possibilities. The reactionaries, groups like the Boxers, rejected the use of any foreign weaponry, with the obvious results; more farsighted individuals – such as Li Hung-chang and Yuan Shi-kai – saw this technology as a means of garnering China a place on the world stage of international politics.

The big problem was ‘face’. The lack of technological nous was a hindrance for the Chinese: they wanted to know about new technologies but they couldn’t go begging, cap in hand, to ask to be shown, otherwise they would look small in the eyes of their opponents. They had to let the information filter through, by allowing contact without control. This is a passive-aggressive pattern that informed China’s dealings with the West all though the Victorian era and right up to the present day. The Chinese people were poised to become the most frustrating people the West ever had to deal with...

The Missionaries

Most travellers to China had very little good to say about the missionaries. George Morrison, Alicia Little and Peter Fleming all acknowledged their assistance during their own respective journeys but had little to say about the work that they were doing, or the lasting effects that it would have upon China. All of them recognised differing factions within the Christian missionary crowd and a general consensus of opinion can be outlined.

Firstly, there were a huge number of missionary societies. The largest was arguably the Inland Mission Society but other organisations were present from England, Scandinavia, southern Europe, Russia and the US. It looked as though any Christian community with the cash and the wherewithal to spread the Good Word sent people to China in droves. Unfortunately, these societies were often run by old men and women with little or no idea how the world worked or how to outfit their representatives to live and work in a foreign – and inhospitable – country. Funds and incomes were withheld or miscalculated, often with a view to ‘curbing temptation’ in young missionaries, and church elders wilfully assumed that the ways of doing business in Shanghai were the same as everywhere else. The Shanghai missionary – sometimes the only representative of their organisation in the area – became an ill-fed, anxious and poorly-dressed haunt of banks, insurance companies, and custom houses, awaiting Letters of Credit or financial handouts that rarely, and only grudgingly, appeared.

The Chinese were largely touted by the missionaries as ‘God’s lost children’; they were difficult to convert, recidivism was high and the business of explaining the business of Christianity to them was fraught with linguistic, cultural and contextual potholes. Explaining to a potential Chinese convert, that their ancestors were in Hell and that, in Heaven, the convert would be forever separated from them, was flying in the face of thousands of years of Confucian thinking. Nevertheless, many missionaries set their shoulders to this most onerous of wheels with a will.

Although not the first Christians to make it into China (the Nestorians were invited in temporarily by Kublai Khan) the Jesuits were the first Christians to gain a toehold and consolidate their presence. As early as the 16^th Century, they entered China by way of Canton and began to study the Celestials with a view to bringing them over to Christ. Of all the Christian sects and organisations which followed, the Jesuits were the most concerned about keeping a low profile and not making waves.

The Jesuits dedicated themselves to study and wrote copious volumes of their observations. They also dedicated themselves to tending for the health of their congregations, the bettering of crop yields and the creation of urban infrastructure. More than any other Christian faction they took a ‘hands on’ approach to spreading the Word and were well received by the peasants. Unfortunately, they also became heavily involved in the politics of the country and occasionally faced purges by various Emperors when they thought that the Jesuits had nurtured vested interests.

On balance, the Catholics were relatively inoffensive; it was the Protestant faiths, especially the Baptists, that really caused a problem. Undeniably, Westerners were prey to a sense of superiority whenever they dealt with China; the Protestant Christians had this trait also, along with a Bible to back them up in their belief. Many Baptist societies in America sent missionaries who felt that it was ‘beneath them’ to leave the cities to preach in the country – they trained Chinese converts to do this ‘dirty work’ for them. In the next century with Charles Soong, this attitude would prove to be a very bad move indeed.

The missionaries vented a huge amount of vitriol declaiming that the Chinese were morally bankrupt; they were suspicious of all Westerners who professed to enjoy the Chinese way of life and energetically turned over stones in the foreign enclaves trying to weed out those who had ‘gone native’. In this way they made themselves as annoying to the foreign representatives as they did to the Chinese. Worse still, missionaries from one organisation were suspicious of the methods and outcomes of other groups: their converts were ‘simply recidivists, rice Christians who were seeking handouts’ and their Christian motives were ‘corrupted by worldly, ulterior aims’. They took relish in undermining other groups’ efforts and, in this way, shot themselves in the foot.

 

The Yellow Peril (1895) by Knackfuss, presented to the Tsar

Most commentators talk fondly about missionaries encountered far away from the cities and lost in remote wilderness areas. These missionaries tried to work closely with their potential converts, tending the sick and working the land with them. These worthies were ready to provide a hot meal and an overview of the region’s politics, along with a carefully nurtured bottle of wine laid by for a special occasion. Oftentimes, they had been so long away from other white people that they had forgotten their own language. These missionaries tended to dress in Chinese fashion, grow the queue and to eat Chinese food, something that most other foreigners found incomprehensible. To many travel writers of the day, these Christians were the ones doing the most to earn the respect and trust of the Chinese.

“We were told that when the missionaries went down to do flood relief work a year or so ago, they were so busy that they didn’t have time to preach, and they did so much good that when they were through they had to put up the bars to keep the Chinese from joining the churches en masse. We haven’t heard, however, that they took the hint as to the best way of doing business...”

-John Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, 1920

On the other hand, they disparaged the hard-nosed Baptists who stomped around the country with complete, shocked disdain of the local culture and insisted on being treated like dignitaries wherever they went. These zealots withheld food from all and sundry, indulged in ‘squeeze’ scams while deprecating those who practised it against them and promoted scabrous gossip amongst their white parishioners. These Church workers were found most often in the diplomatic communities exchanging gossip, rather than in the villages toiling for the souls of the Chinese.

All in all the writers of the day seemed to indicate that a humanist approach to solving China’s social evils would have been preferable to bludgeoning the heathens with the Crucifix. The Chinese were told by unscrupulous rabble-rousers that all missionaries killed babies and used pieces of their intestines and their eyes to work black magic: such obvious ‘gutter press’ added to the acrimony with which the Chinese regarded the Christian workers but was hardly necessary to ignite the riots that later created thousands of Christian martyrs...