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China's introduction to Europe was a bewildering experience. R.G. Tiedemann, a lecturer at "S.O.A.S. University of London" ➚ describes how it was not just the gunboats which shook Chinese civilisation. First published in China Now magazine 1992.

First impressions

The intellectual discovery of Europe was a traumatic event for imperial China. It shattered entrenched notions of a centrality and superiority which had intensified after China's retreat into isolation in the fifteenth century, since the self-contained Chinese world order denied the existence of a civilisation other than their own there had been little inclination to find out about the outside world. Unwilling to concede that the Western barbarians were different from the peoples living on China's periphery, its scholar elite saw no need to study distant Europe. This lack of intellectual curiosity in things foreign remained a dominant theme in the history of late imperial China.

Thus, when the powerful Westerners first appeared in force, they were ill prepared to cope with this disturbing intrusion. Because their knowledge about these 'outer barbarians' was so limited and outdated, China's ruling class had no idea of the power or extent of the new forces which were threatening the empire. The prevailing view was limited and simplistic: since the European did not understand the Chinese values and norms, it was proof that they were not civilised but only motivated by crude instinctive desires.

The forceful intrusion of the West into the Chinese world at the time of the opium wars challenged this notion. It now emerged that the foreigners were also found to be cunning, intelligent and 'unpredictable' in their negotiations. Yet only a few enlightened men, such as the much maligned Lin Zexu, began to consider the West more seriously. Lin's subordinate, Wei Yuan, observed in his famous 'Illustrated gazetteer of Maritime Countries' (1844):

Do we honestly know that among the visitors from afar there are people who understand propriety and practice righteousness, who possess knowledge of astronomy and geography, who are well versed in things material and events of past and present? They are extraordinarily talented and should be considered as our good friends. How can they be called 'barbarians'?

But even this grudging concession that China was not the only civilisation had to be explained in traditional terms. Thus Wei Yuan, a reformist spirit with some admiration for Western technology, asserted that European power derived from the translation of the Confucian classics into Latin, which he claimed had helped Jesus to found the Christian religion. This seems to have been the beginning of a school of thought which believed that Chinese civilisation was the origin of all other civilisations.

The Foreign Devil or yang guizi

In some Chinese eyes Westerners were seen as hairy, foul breathed monsters rather than members of the same species.

Chinese officials travel abroad

After 1860, when China was weakened by massive internal rebellions as well as further Western aggression, a relatively small group of influential officials - the so-called 'Western Affairs group'- began to advocate policies to discover the secrets of Western wealth and power. They wanted to adopt superior technology in order to defend and preserve the traditional Confucian values. As part of this 'self strengthening' policy, the West became more accessible to literate Chinese through a variety of translation projects. But more importantly, official missions and resident ministers were sent abroad to assemble first-hand knowledge of the West. The first envoys to the outer fringes of the known world were required to keep diaries while abroad. When these were published, they provided vivid images of alien societies to a larger literate audience.

The official travellers made observations on many strange aspects of European life. For mandarins accustomed to travelling in sedan chairs or cramped and slow houseboats, the voyage in a luxury ocean liner must have been a novel experience in itself. Jerome Ch'en summarises Binchun's first impressions in 1866:

'Exceedingly clean, the Westerner spat only into a spittoon and flushed the water closet each time he used it. At dinner, ladies took their seats before men; no one overate; and everyone talked right through the meal. Soup was never sucked in audibly; nor was food chewed noisily. Everyone treasured his privacy to such an extent that his door was always closed and no one could enter without knocking on it and obtaining his permission first.'

His youthful companion, Zhang Deyi, provides much detail on a busy schedule all over Europe, with a frivolous interest in trivia. Everything delighted and astonished him, from the railway at Suez to the lifts and hot-and-cold plumbing systems in hotels. Although garbled and only half-understood, these two journals must nevertheless have been of considerable importance as the first authentic accounts of a civilisation comparable to that of China.

The journals of Guo Songtao and Liu Xihong, the first two Chinese ministers sent to London in late 1876, provide more detailed and contrasting observations of the totally alien civilisation that was Europe. Liu was decidedly conservative in outlook and quite bewildered by Western ways:

'Everything in England is the opposite of China .... This is because their country is situated below the centre of the earth. Over them hangs the sky above the far side of the earth. That is why their customs and systems are all topsy-turvy. Even the day and the night are reversed.'

To his credit, he was rather more objective in his observations and less bigoted and intolerant than the great majority of European missionaries, merchants and officials in China. Thus, he described with passionate detachment the social customs that were at variance from the Confucian values and norms.

Since the two ministers soon 'became the lions of London society that season', Liu had frequent occasion to observe English behaviour at parties. 'In the homes of various Ministries of this country, there are always ballrooms for solemn gatherings, as if they consider dancing an essential part of their official business.' He noted that men danced in flesh coloured tights and the ladies 'displayed half their upper body, bosom and back, and rubbed shoulders and feet in the hall with the men, with whom they often shook hands.' His conservative readers back home must have been puzzled by these Western social customs.

In 1860, Lord Elgin is carried in state into Beijing after the defeat of China (in the 2nd Opium War).

Spiritual pollution

While acknowledging the technological achievements of the West, Liu insisted that they were not for the Chinese.

'The sage king and wise ministers of China's successive dynasties have not been inferior to those of the West in their talents and wisdoms, but they never had the presumption to use clever tricks to scrape the heavens and dissect the earth, competing with Nature in order to attain wealth and strength.'

There was however another, more fundamental issue here. Like other Chinese conservatives, and unlike the self-strengtheners, Liu realised that it was not possible for China to accept only what it wanted from the West and reject the rest, for one change would entail another and eventually destroy the Confucian order. Hence Western things and ideas had to be rejected in their entirety.

It is remarkable that Guo Songtao came to exactly the opposite conclusion. Progressive in outlook, he was more receptive to change and viewed a totally alien culture with considerable sympathy. He observed that 'the nations of Europe do have insight into what is essential and what is not and possess a Way of their own which assists them in the acquisition of wealth and power.' Guo was impressed by the fact that it was founded on first principles of justice, order, discipline, honour and integrity. His call to emulate the positive developments in the West obviously had revolutionary implications and was unpalatable to the Confucian zealots. To admire the technology of the West was dangerous enough, but to assert the existence of a civilisation morally equivalent to China undermined completely China's claim to superiority. His diary was, therefore, condemned as 'Western poison'. An irate memorialist claimed that Guo 'is deceitful about England and wishes China to be subject to her'. In the end his diary was banned and the printing plates destroyed.

As long as obscurantism and irrational bellicosity remained a dominant characteristic of the Chinese ruling class, the reports of progressive observers in foreign lands had little impact. Thus upon his return to China in 1878 Guo Songtao went into retirement and obscurity. Nor were Western-educated men such as Rong Hong [Yung Wing], Wang Tao or Wu Tingfang in a position to bridge the gap between Chinese and Western values. Their background and unorthodox education placed them on the margins of the existing order. Similarly, when the American-returned students arrived in Shanghai in 1882, they were treated with suspicion and kept under police surveillance for two weeks before being allowed to leave for home.

By the 1890s the Chinese had acquired some knowledge of Western science and industry, less of Western law and institutions, and virtually none of Western philosophy, art and literature. During the early phase of contact cultural conditioning made it impossible to accept the notion of a developed Europe. Later the fear of losing the 'Chinese essence' precluded the adoption of viable systems. Even enlightened reformers such as Zhang Zhidong continued to insist that the supremacy of Confucianism could not be conceded to any other ideology and the policy of the Confucian empire could not be changed. It was not until the humiliating crisis of 1895 that China was forced to open her mind to new philosophies that might provide the basis for a new policy. Yet the basic contradiction of 'open door' versus 'spiritual pollution' has remained an enduring feature of Chinese society.

Martin Lynn recounts the experiences of Robert Hart employed by the Chinese in the dying phases of the Qing Dynasty. This article first appeared in SACU's China Now magazine in 1988

Robert Hart was witness to many of the major events of late nineteenth century Chinese history, a period when the country was wrestling with the twin problems of foreign intervention and the need to modernise. He was to live through four foreign invasions of China, the Taiping Rebellion of 1852-64, the Boxer rising of 1900, the attempted partition of the country by the West and the eventual crumbling of power of the last of the great Chinese imperial dynasties, the Qing. An Ulsterman, born in Portadown in 1835, he arrived in China aged only 19 as an assistant and interpreter in the British consular service. After service in Hong Kong, Ningbo and Guangzhou (Canton) he resigned in 1859 and became Deputy Commissioner of Customs at Canton. For the rest of his career until his death at the age of 76 in 1911 he was to be an employee of the Chinese government. He received a Chinese peerage in 1889 and a British Knighthood in 1893.

In 1863 Hart became Inspector General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, a position he was to hold for the next 48 years. The Customs Service grew out of the 'treaty port' system, with its foreign privileges and extra-territorial rights, that were imposed on China by the Western powers during the mid-nineteenth century. Its function was to regulate trading relations between China and the Western powers and to collect customs revenue for the Chinese government. Although a department of the Chinese government, the Customs Service was almost entirely staffed with foreigners in its upper echelons. Its Inspector General was always a Westerner. In collecting revenue for Beijing however, the Customs Service provided the government with a regular income independent of interference by the provincial authorities, thereby strengthening the dynasty's position against its rivals. But by the end of the century, China fell more and more into debt due to the indemnities it was forced to pay following defeats by foreign powers, as well as loans raised abroad. Much of the Customs revenue came to be pledged to outsiders for many years in advance.

Custom-made post

The Customs Service, and Hart's role in it, illustrates the West's influence in China in the late nineteenth century, with China's independence slowly being eroded by outsiders. But it also illuminates China's first steps in modernisation: it was the first department run on western lines. By the turn of the century it employed nearly 18,000 Chinese and 1,500 foreigners. It was also responsible for China's western-style Postal Service, established in 1896. The revenues of the Customs Service were used to pay for the modernisation of China's military forces and for the building of railways, arsenals and factories in the reform and 'self-strengthening' movements of the 1880s and 1890s.

In many ways the Customs Service was Hart's own creation. Like it, he stood at the interface between China and the West, representing foreign influence in China, yet being used repeatedly by the Chinese government as its representative in dealing with foreign powers. He had, in the words of one historian, 'a profound sense of loyalty and obligation to the Chinese government'. Yet he was aware of his ambiguous position as both a foreign national and an employee of the Chinese government, helping to modernise China as he saw it, but representing an influence that was by no means beneficial to Chinese interests. He admitted to his diary: 'There have been a mixture of motives, self, the public and China have all been intermixed, perhaps with more weight given to No. 1 than was right'. This ambiguity also comes out in the tasks he set himself when appointed Inspector General in 1863, tasks that reveal a view that wished to benefit China, yet on western terms: 'I must whip the foreign Inspectorate (of Customs) into shape, the duties must be properly collected. I must learn more about the Chinese. I must try to induce among such Chinese as I can influence a friendlier feeling towards foreigners. I must endeavour to ascertain what products of our western civilisation would most benefit China and in what ways such changes could most appropriately be introduced'. This was to be modernisation, but on western terms and under western leadership.

Old footbridge in Sichuan

Supporting East and West

Yet Hart was clear in his loyalty to the Imperial dynasty, rejoicing, for example, in the defeat of the Taiping rebellion which swept much of southern and central China in the 1850s and which for a while even threatened Beijing itself. As the struggle unfolded, Hart found himself 'glorifying in the fall of Suzhou, delighted that ... the Imperialists should gain a point that would give them confidence, dispirit the Taipings and cause outsiders to believe in the possibility of the rebellion being effectually and speedily put down, without further foreign intervention, by the Chinese officials themselves'. He added that 'my desire for seeing the Imperialist [i.e. Qing] cause triumph is based on my honest conviction that Imperialism gives promises of better things for China than does Taipingism'. At the same time he was hardly sanguine about the possibilities of the Qing government reforming itself. 'this dynasty is so weak and the provinces are all so troubled ... What is to be done?'

Hart saw himself as a mediator between the West and China. Over time he came to respect Chinese culture deeply, praising Confucianism and what he termed 'Chinese reason, pragmatism and common sense'. He was more aware than many of his countrymen of the need for Chinese and foreigners to treat each other as equals as the basis of a lasting relationship. In this he was out of step with his times. He criticised his predecessor as Inspector General for feeling very badly treated because they don't say 'yes' when he says 'do this'. He recorded in his diary his outrage at a colleague in the British service in 'the way in which he treated the Chinese pitching their goods into the water and touching them with his cane because they would not row out from the quay when we entered an (adjacent) boat'. Similarly he objected to the Western powers' habit of fining a neighbourhood after an assault on a foreigner: 'I do not approve of these fines at all for they will cause the Chinese to look upon us as grasping and avaricious'.

It was in the Boxer Rising to purge China of foreigners and foreign influence that swept China in 1900 that the ambiguities of Hart's position stand out most starkly. Hart was one of the many foreigners and Chinese Christians besieged by the Boxers (more correctly, the Yihequan or Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists) in the foreign legations in Beijing in the summer of 1900. The Customs offices, his house and all of his property were destroyed in the rising. Hart had been aware of the approaching storm, noting in his diary early in the year, 'the Boxers are busy all around', and later, 'the children in the streets are practising the Boxers' drill',

Siege of Beijing

By mid-June, as the Boxers closed on the legations, he noted how fires were breaking, out all over the city, and Europeans and Christian converts were being assaulted in the streets. 'I wonder if this is my last entry? Friday 15 June 1900 6 pm', he wrote in his diary. It wasn't. Shortly after, on June 20th he added, 'Legation Siege begins ... Firing began down the street at 4 pm exactly'.

The siege was a gruelling experience, with the defenders desperately short of ammunition. It was not until August 14 that he could write: 'Relief force appeared at 3 pm ... Siege ends'.

Despite what he himself had suffered in the Rising, Hart refused to share in the West's demands for revenge. He criticised the behaviour of the relief forces: all except the Japanese indulged in pillage and rape, 'relief has little improved our condition'. Instead of revenge, he saw a role for himself in the ensuing confusion: 'happily I have been able to find some Chinese ministers and shall meet them this evening: I hope to arrange a basis or pave the way to an understanding'.

Remarkably, he took a not unsympathetic view of the Boxer Rising. He refused to dismiss the Boxers as mindless 'bandits' bent on destruction, as most Europeans assumed. They were 'a movement of a political nature and not simply a raid for plunder ... Their first object was mutual defence and that defence was mainly directed against what was considered to be foreign aggression: such a purpose and such an organisation in any other country would be styled patriotic'. He felt that the West had called the rising on itself: 'we cannot say we had no warning', adding that 'the rising had a fixed object, the checking or destruction of aggressive foreigners, and with a simple enemy, foreign aggression of various kinds, which carried with it justification in the eyes of the government and won for it sympathy among the people'.

Aftermath of Boxer rebellion

Hart saw the Boxer Rising within the context of the previous half century of foreign encroachment in China. 'For 50 years or so we had been lecturing the government, telling it that it must prove strong, must create an army and navy, must introduce foreign drill, must adopt foreign weapons, must prepare to hold its own against all sides, and certain firms did a very profitable trade in arms and ships ... Missionaries were at work in the interior and converts offended their countrymen, first by entering foreign religious societies, second by refusing as Christians to take part in village festivals and third by getting missionaries to support them against local officials in matters of litigation'.

Although in his sixties, Hart chose to stay on in Beijing after the Rising, 'hoping that I might be of use to the Customs Service, to China and to general interests'. In the ensuing months he reflected on the Rising and revealed a perceptive understanding of its significance, an understanding that few Westerners shared. 'Is China to be reformed from within or must reform come from without? ... that has been the Far Eastern question of the last half century and will continue to interest thinkers through most of the one we now enter on'. After nearly 50 years in the country it was clear where his sympathies now lay. The Chinese people was 'looking forward to live its own life without foreign interference or intrusion - that race is at last awake and its every member is tingling with Chinese feeling - "China for the Chinese and out with the foreigner!" The Boxer movement began as, and is, a purely patriotic volunteer movement: it has taken hold of the popular imagination and will spread all over the country'. Its aim, he added, was 'to destroy Christian converts and stamp out Christianity and to free China from a foreign cult, and on the whole not to hurt or kill but to terrify foreigners, frighten them out of the country and thus free China from the intrusion of aliens - and this is the object which will be kept in view, worked up to and in all probability accomplished during the new century'.

Alice Roberts describes the fascinating life of a committed American friend of China : Agnes Smedley, the article first appeared in SACU's China Now magazine 1972.

It is difficult to convey in a few brief words how a working-class woman, born in northern Missouri ➚ of an itinerant miner and a boarding house cook and raised in the Rockefeller 'mining camps' where the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company owned 'everything but the air,' and who never even finished grade school came to write: 'I have but one loyalty, one faith, and that was to the liberation of the poor and oppressed; and within that framework, to the Chinese Revolution as it has now materialised.'. However it is possible to indicate something of the experiences which led her to this declaration.

After working for several years at all sorts of unskilled labour, from tobacco stripper, stenographer, waitress, book agent or 'just plain starveling', married and quickly divorced, she left the Southwest in her early twenties for New York City. There her arrest and solitary confinement in the Tombs in 1918 (she had worked as a 'sort of communications centre' for Indian Nationalists in New York) as an alleged 'German agent' merely served to cement her early hatred for the capitalist system.

Late in 1919, the charges finally dismissed, she boarded a freighter bound for Europe. In Berlin, looking for the newspaper of the Indian exiles on whose behalf she had been imprisoned, she met the revolutionary leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. She lived with him eight years, studying Indian history and Chinese nationalism. In Berlin, she and a group of progressive physicians with some financial aid from Margaret Sanger set up the first state birth-control clinic. The German republican government took the clinic over and established several others which flourished until the Nazis came to power and women were 'ordered back to the bedroom'. With Hitler threatening, Viren left Germany for the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, and Agnes obtained a position with the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1928 as a special correspondent in China.

Agnes Smedley and a young
Zhou Enlai in the 1930s

Entering China from the Soviet-Chinese frontier at Manchouli, Agnes felt she had just entered the Middle Ages. She decided at that time that: 'Live apart from the Chinese people I would not. The road to an understanding of them and their country led only into their ranks; nor did there seem any other way for me to justify my existence among them.'

In Manchuria she soon realised 'the extent of Japanese economic control and political power over railways, government machinery, investments in factories and land'. Her first series of articles on Japan's Mailed Fist in Manchuria were not published until Japan actually invaded Manchuria September 18, 1931.

The foreign press as well as the Chinese press had been either bought off or silenced. Agnes learned of contracts between Reuters, official British News Agency, and the KMT whereby the Agency received 10,000 dollars a month in exchange for 'favourable publicity' to the KMT government. Similar contracts with American agencies were common knowledge. While the foreign press reported on the 'progress' made by the KMT government between the Great Revolution of 1929 up to the China-Japanese War of 1937-45, Agnes reported about places where prisoners, even anti-communists and nationalists, were publicly beheaded for being trade unionists, coolie league organisers or intellectuals. Because of her work the British Secret Service claimed that she was a British subject married to an Indian seditionist and travelling with a 'false' passport. It was only with great effort that the American Consul was reminded that they owed duty to their citizens somewhat higher than that to the British Foreign Office.

Making Shanghai her headquarters, Agnes exposed the corrupt, collusive, treasonous activities of the KMT officials who openly collaborated with the Japanese in Manchuria. She found that the KMT had only 39,000 members out of a population of 450 million, and that it 'had become, in other words, a small closed corporation of government officials and their subordinates.' Trade union fees were merely tributes to the KMT used to ensure that no organising occurred; agrarian reforms were non-existent.

Agnes Smedley with Song Qingling ➚; George Bernard Shaw ➚; Lu Xun ➚; Cai Yuanpei ➚; Harold Isaacs ➚ and Lin Yudang ➚.
Song Qingling (widow of Sun Yatsen) gave a dinner in honour of George Bernard Shaw at her home. 17th February 1933.

In 1930 Agnes met Lu Xun, the great Chinese writer, 'the man who became one of the most influential factors in my life during all my years in China.' Together with other intellectuals in mid-1932 they formed the first 'League of Civil Rights' in China to urge democratic rights and an end to the torturing and massacre of political prisoners.

In 1932 the Frankfurter Zeitung, now dominated by the Nazis, fired Agnes. With no money or job her health began to fail and in 1933 she went to Russia to recuperate for eleven months and there finished her book 'China's Red Army Marches'. However, she 'could not imagine spending [her] life outside China,' and made plans to return to China via the US where she hoped to establish herself as correspondent for some publication. No paper dared hire her and she yearned to leave that 'strange planet' America, as soon as possible.

By spring 1936 she was in Shangand, far from well Agnes was advised to go to Xian to recuperate. Thus she was afforded first hand experience of the capture of Chiang Kaishek, by soldiers infuriated by Nanjing's 'surrender policy'. (Japan, up to that point, had occupied Manchuria and a large area of north China and his armies were being ordered to fight 'communists' rather than the Japanese invaders.) Shortly afterwards, Agnes left for the Red Army headquarters in Yan'an where she met for the first time Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and later Lin Biao. After meeting Zhu De, Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, she undertook to write his biography but was interrupted when the Japanese launched a full scale invasion into China immediately after the Luguoqiao Incident, 7 July 1937.

Agnes joined the Red Army (renamed the Eighth Route Army after Chiang was finally forced to enter into the United Front with the Communists). By September, 1937 Agnes was on her way to Suiyuan and Chahar provinces where the Red Army was fighting. Although in constant pain from back injury, she reported about the condition of the wounded, about the starvation and rampant disease; and appealed for medical aid seeing the absolute necessity for 'travelling dispensaries and public health workers'. She soon became a sort of 'wandering first aid worker' herself, often treating soldiers from her stretcher when she could no longer sit or stand. Impressed by marching with that Workers' and Peasants' Army, seeing its success in mobilising the peasants into 'partisan warfare' and witnessing the moral conviction of its soldiers who bravely resisted the Japanese, Agnes became: '. . . irrevocably convinced that the principles embodied in the heart of the Eighth Route Army are the principles that will guide and save China, that will give the greatest of impulses to the liberation of all subjected Asiatic nations and bring to life a new human society.' While at the front Agnes finished a new book 'China Fights Back' before leaving for Hanzhou in 1938.

Main street in Baoshan, Shanghai after Japanese air-raid. 1942

After meeting Dr K S Lim, director and founder of the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps in Hanzhou. Agnes immediately joined the corps as a publicity worker. Because most of China's 10,000 doctors remained in private practice in the littoral cities or in the Japanese occupied regions, her first duty was to help recruit foreign medical volunteers. Dr Norman Bethune was among those she enlisted.

In mid-1938 Agnes became a special wartime correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. During her travels with the New Fourth Army (formed from Red guerrillas left behind when the, main body of the Red Army left for the Long March in 1934 and who were re-assembled for operation in the Japanese rear), she lectured and inspected hospitals and reported on the extent of American aid to the Japanese war machine. The activities of the American war merchants were summed up by the General Li Chungren (acting President in the last days of KMT rule after Chiang fled to Taiwan 1949-50): 'The Japanese murderers were without a sword. America gave them the sword.'

In ill health and unable to stay with the guerrillas Agnes decided to leave China in 1941 and go back to the US. There she completed her new book 'Battle Hymn of China' in 1943. She spent many years lecturing and writing about China's plight and desperate need for medical aid and publicised to the American people the corruption of the KMT and western imperialism in China.

It was part of an effort to silence such objective reporting on China that General MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo released a fifty-four page spy report on a Soviet spy ring in Japan, naming Agnes as 'a Soviet spy ... still at large.' The source of this charge was the twenty year old files of the Imperial Japanese secret police! Agnes insisted that MacArthur was making an issue of the spy ring at that particular time because of the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek, and that his aim was to 'condition the American people into allowing him' more troops and money to build Japan into a mighty military base. (New York Times, February 1949)

Eight days later Washington was forced to retract the 'faux pas' but the damage was more than done to Agnes. Due to the smear Agnes could no longer lecture nor sell articles nor even find a place to live. She tried to sue MacArthur for libel but he remained protected by diplomatic 'immunity'. Her health broken, Agnes finally obtained a passport to England where she died on 8 May, 1950, without completing her last book 'The Great Road, the Life and Times of Zhu De'. Although she longed to return to China, it was a year after her death before she was accorded her last wish: 'As my heart and spirit have found no rest in any other land on earth except China, I wish my ashes to lie with the Chinese Revolutionary dead.' She was buried in Beijing.

Tony Simpson is the editor of ‘The Spokesman’, the quarterly journal of The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. In September 2015, he visited The Commercial Press, Bertrand Russell’s publisher in China for almost a century. He also visited Beijing and the Western Lake at Hangzhou, which so impressed Russell on arrival in China in 1920. This article was arranged by Jenny Clegg with Tony Simpson.

‘I should love to go to China,’ Bertrand Russell wrote to Lucy Donnelly, an American friend, in July 1915. Five years later, in autumn 1920, Russell arrived in Shanghai with Dora Black, a young companion from England. The intervening years marked a turning point in Russell’s long and eventful life, from the personal to the public, as Nicholas Griffin has characterised it ¹.

In November 1918, the long and terrible First World War, which Russell had opposed from the outset, had ended rather suddenly. The high hopes of the Bolshevik Revolution of the previous year, which Russell initially shared, had given way to civil war and famine in Russia. Russell saw this cruel suffering at first hand when he joined a Labour Party delegation to Russia in May 1920. During six weeks, they travelled extensively in the vast country, visiting Petrograd (St Petersburg), Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and sailing down the River Volga as far as Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Russell met Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky. A committed socialist himself, Russell was profoundly sceptical that Bolshevism would endure and that ‘by this method a stable or desirable form of Socialism can be established’.²

Out of the blue, on 30 June 1920 on return to London, Russell found an invitation to lecture in China. In a matter of weeks, he had decided to accept. How was it that Russell was invited to China at this time?

For several decades, some intellectuals in China had been studying abroad and looking outwards for guidance about their country’s political and economic development. This process gathered pace with the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. It was accelerated by the First World War and what followed. The old order was passing.

On 4 May 1919 in Beijing, demonstrations were triggered by developments far away at the Paris Peace Conference. It became clear that, following the Allies’ victory, China would not recover sovereignty over the parts of Shandong Province that had been previously colonised by defeated Germany. Instead, they would be handed to Japan. On that day, some 3,000 students gathered in central Beijing and marched to the house of a government minister closely associated with Japan. The demonstrators broke in, destroyed the house, and some of them beat badly a visiting official. As Rana Mitter³ points out, the student demonstration of 4 May 1919 came to symbolise a much wider shift in Chinese society and politics.

‘The new republic had been declared less than eight years earlier, yet already the country seemed to be falling apart because of imperialist pressure from outside and warlord government within China that had destroyed its fragile parliamentary democracy. The May Fourth Movement, as it became known, was associated closely with the ‘New Culture’ which intellectuals and radical thinkers proposed for China, to be underpinned by the twin panaceas of “Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy”.’

It was in the wake of such events that Mr Liang Qichao, the distinguished journalist, political activist and founder of the Chinese Lecture Association, had suggested that Russell be invited to China. In this he was strongly supported by Mr Zhang Yuanji, who was in charge of The Commercial Press Printing House, based in Shanghai. Commercial Press put up a considerable sum of money, some 5,000 yuan or £2,000, to pay for the trip. Russell’s invitation was handwritten by Fu Tong, Professor of Philosophy, on letterhead of The Government University, Peking, and sent care of Fu’s old Professor in England, J H Muirhead:

‘Will you kindly ask Mr Bertrand Russell for me whether he can accept such an invitation as to come to China for a year to give us some lectures.’

Russell and Dora duly arrived in China whilst this huge country was in the midst of great changes and seeking direction. Science and democracy were high on Russell’s list of personal priorities; democracy in the workplace figured centrally in Russell’s quest for creative impulses as described in Principles of Social Reconstruction, written in 1915 in response to the unfolding horrors of the First World War, delivered early in 1916, and first published that year under the same title. Had this work been noticed by Chinese scholars? Apparently, it was first translated into Chinese only in 1959.

In his invitation, Professor Fu wrote:

‘Mr John Dewey has promised to lecture here for another year, and Mr Henri Bergson will come in two years’ time. The former has been lecturing on the three great philosophers of our day, “James, Bergson and Russell”.’

Fu added that there was an ‘earnest desire among the young’ to know the ‘tendencies’ of philosophy and science in the West, and that, as far as he knew, Russell’s political views would be ‘greatly welcome to us’. Fu felt the need to write care of Muirhead because, although he had seen Russell at a conference the previous year, Russell had left before Fu had a chance to introduce himself.

William James’ inclusion in this trio of ‘great philosophers’ may surprise. It suggests the significance of the recent war as Russell’s invitation to China was prepared in 1920. Russell had cited James’ ‘admirable’ address on “The Moral Equivalent of War” in Principles of Social Reconstruction:

‘His statement of the problem could not be bettered; and so far as I know, he is the only writer who has faced the problem adequately. But his solution is not adequate; perhaps no adequate solution is possible.’

Russell himself was seeking more adequate solutions in avoiding recourse to war. In this connection, his visit to China was to shift significantly his outlook from a Eurocentric to a global perspective, which he retained for the rest of his long life. His nine months in the country, from October 1920 to July 1921, proved to be a transformative experience.

Russell’s first impressions of China and its people were favourable. As he wrote later in his Autobiography, he and Dora

‘were somewhat surprised by their wit and fluency. I had not realised until then that a civilised Chinese is the most civilised person in the world ... Our Chinese friends took us for two days to Hangchow [Hangzhou] to see the Western Lake. The first day we went round it by boat, and the second day in chairs. It was marvellously beautiful, with the beauty of ancient civilisation, surpassing even that of Italy.’

With the passage of decades, Russell clearly had good memories of his extended stay in China, as reflected in another passage from his Autobiography (p363):

‘Many Chinese have that refinement of humour which consists in enjoying a joke more when the other person cannot see it. As I was leaving Peking a Chinese friend gave me a long classical passage microscopically engraved by hand on a very small surface; he also gave me the same passage written out in exquisite calligraphy. When I asked what it said, he replied: “Ask Professor Giles when you get home”. I took his advice, and found that it was “The Consultation of the Wizard”, in which the wizard merely advises his clients to do whatever they like. He was poking fun at me because I always refused to give advice to the Chinese as to their immediate political difficulties.’

Many Chinese desperately wanted clear advice. And the import of Russell’s intervention in China continues to be debated to this day, as I found on a visit to Zhejiang University where historians and classicists probed the legacy. Notwithstanding ‘The Consultation of the Wizard’, in his farewell address Russell did venture some broad opinions about what he had learnt during his stay in China:

‘Two things of a very general nature seem to me evident: the first that it is not to be desired that China should adopt the civilisation of Europe in its entirety; the second, that the traditional civilisation of China is inadequate to present needs and must give way to something radically new.’

Russell affirmed:

‘I am convinced that China, in the future as in the past, has a distinctive contribution to make to civilisation, and something more than mere quantity to add to the world’s mental possessions.’

He emphasised that:

‘... a radical and permanent solution must depend upon education ... It must be universal and it must be scientific and the science must not be merely theoretical, but in close touch with modern industry and economics.’

Russell recognised that it would take a generation or more for China to develop an effective system of mass education. By contrast, he anticipated that China’s ‘industrial resources will lead in the near future to the great development of industrialism’, warning that:

‘All the Great Powers are anxious to secure a share in the exploitation of your resources, and unless you develop more national strength than you have hitherto shown, you will be unable to withstand aggressions fomented by foreign industrialists.’

Somewhat surprisingly to modern readers, Russell urged the development of ‘active patriotism’ in China. He added:

‘If your independence is to be preserved, it is necessary to transfer to the nation the kind of devotion which has hitherto been given to the family.’

Russell posed one question which he found ‘on the lips of almost all the thoughtful Chinese whom I have met’:

‘How can we develop industry without at the same time developing capitalism and all its evils?’

Russell urged that the political problem be addressed before the economic one:

‘Political reform in China cannot for many years to come take the form of democracy after the Western model. Democracy presupposes a population that can read and write and that has some degree of knowledge as to political affairs. These conditions cannot be satisfied in China until at least a generation after the establishment of a government devoted to the public welfare. You will have to pass through a stage analogous to that of the dictatorship of the communist party in Russia, because it is only by some such means that the necessary education of the people can be carried through, and the non-capitalistic development of industry effected.

The Russian Bolsheviks, as is natural to pioneers, have made many mistakes, more especially in the measures which antagonised the peasants. They are now, very wisely, repealing these measures, and those who follow them on the same road will be able to profit by their experience.’

In this issue we reprint in full Russell’s farewell address as it sums up his experiences in China and Russia in 1920-21. These were controversial topics. Amongst many people who heard Russell speak during his time in China was Mao Tse-tung who, like others hungry for change, could also read Russell’s lectures and speeches in a new journal, Russell Monthly, published by Commercial Press. In October 1920 whilst visiting Changsha in Hunan Province, Russell had given four lectures on Bolshevism, Communism, and Russia. Mao was not at all persuaded by Russell’s view. He wrote:

‘In his lecture in Changsha, Russell ... took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and blood revolution ... My objections to Russell’s viewpoint can be stated in a few words: “This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice”.’

By the time Russell gave his farewell address in July 1921, Russell was indeed speaking of China passing through ‘a stage analogous to that of the dictatorship of the communist party in Russia’ for the purposes of education and non-capitalistic industrialisation.

China’s population is now generally well educated, and it has industrialised extensively whilst maintaining broad public ownership and an agriculture sufficient to feed its 1.4 billion people. The Chinese Communist Party has some 86 million members, but many feel frustrated at the ‘cage’ in which they have to live, that their government doesn’t trust them, and that they are inhibited from organising in civil society. The Party is jealous of its power, in a way that Russell anticipated for the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Nine months in China saw some significant milestones passed in Russell’s personal life. Initially, his Chinese hosts were somewhat bemused by Dora Black’s presence, but evidently accommodated the couple happily enough. During the early months of 1921, Dora became pregnant, which fulfilled Russell’s long-held wish to become a father. In September, they married in London, shortly before John was born, days after Russell’s divorce from his first wife, Alys Pearsall-Smith, came through.

Before he and Dora knew they were to be parents, Russell suffered a near-death experience. In March 1921, he contracted pneumonia after bathing in hot springs near Beijing and was close to death on several occasions during the weeks that followed. His life was saved by the great efforts of a young doctor at the German Hospital, Franz Esser, with Dora’s help and the administration of some Chinese medication. Dr Esser renewed contact with Russell in 1956, by which time he had also been teaching philosophy in China, using Russell’s A HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY as a textbook, though not in Chinese translation, it seems.

Commercial Press recently reprinted tens of thousands of copies of A History of Western Philosophy. It is recommended reading for high school and university students in China. They may not read all of it, but Russell has a growing following among the new generation of young adults, just as he has amongst their parents. ‘What I have live for’ was the spontaneous response, when suggestions of memorable and accessible Russell texts were sought from young publishers. It is to be published in The World of English, Commercial Press’s monthly magazine for young people who want to improve their English. Written in longhand in July 1956, this was the prologue to Russell’s Autobiography.

References

1. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1, The Private Years, 1884-1914, Volume 2, The Public Years, 1914-1970, edited by Nicholas Griffin, Routledge, 2001

2. The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Spokesman, 1995

3. Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, Rana Mitter, Oxford University Press, 2008

Walter Fung tells the story of Britain's Chinese community.
A version of this article (BBCs-Who we are, where we came from, where are we going?) first appeared in ‘Brushstrokes Magazine’ Issue No 19 in October 2001. An attempt has been made to update it because the Chinese population has changed quite significantly in the last 13 years or so when it was first written. Even in 2001, when it was first written, some parts were becoming dated - indicative of the speed with which the composition of the British Chinese community, like China itself, is changing.

A more appropriate title is ‘senior generation BBCs’; the author and some of the editorial board of Brushstrokes were from this age group! The majority of current BBCs are descended from Hong Kong Chinese and the youngest generation, a fast growing number, will include those born from mainland Chinese. Their stories will be very different.

For convenience it can be said that the Chinese came to Britain in very roughly three waves. Those that came between 1900 to about 1950 were mainly from the mainland and numbered only a couple of thousands in total by the 1940s. It is from this group that I and most of my contemporary BBCs come into. Many of our parents operated hand laundries and later they opened some of the first Chinese restaurants. This article is mainly about them; however the sections on Chinese names will apply to all groups.

Those who came from about 1960 onwards were mainly from Hong Kong and came in thousands per year; many of them went into the catering industry, opening take-away food shops. Mandarin speaking mainlanders and students began to come to Britain in significant numbers in the 1990s onwards. Now you hear Mandarin spoken perhaps as much as Cantonese - more so when considering younger people and especially students.

BBC of course means ‘British Born Chinese’ but we are not a homogeneous group, in fact very diverse. Our parents came at different times over the last hundred years or so from different backgrounds and from different regions of mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and more recently from Taiwan. History however focuses on the earliest arrivals, especially in Liverpool, which is believed to be the first Chinatown in Europe. At the turn of the 19th century the Chinese were mainly in Liverpool and London but the total numbers were very low. Census figures indicate a total of 387 persons in 1901, which grew to 1,319 by 1911. In 1931 there were still only 1,934, but this grew quite spectacularly to 38,750 in 1961 and 96,030 by 1971. Today there are believed to be over 400,000, not including BBCs.

Who we are

Most of us older BBCs are descended from Cantonese Chinese who came to the UK from Guangdong Province in south China and who were themselves descended from more northern Chinese who migrated south, notably during the Song Dynasty. They presumably eventually intermarried with the people already living there.

Nearly all accounts of the early Chinese who came to England state that they were all sailors, many of whom ‘jumped ship’ and married local British women. Whilst this is generally true, a significant number were not sailors such as my grandfather and father and many of their associates. A significant number did marry Chinese women. Both my parents were Chinese and many of my contemporaries had two Chinese parents. There seemed to have been two parallel communities - an Anglo-Chinese and a fully Chinese, but they did interact; I have cousins of mixed race. The fathers in both communities were Chinese who liked to socialise and speak Chinese with other Chinese men.

Chinese names

Our surname is important in Chinese culture but some BBC surnames may be difficult to establish because of the complication of dialect and how we or our forefathers (or possibly a customs officer or immigration official) decided how to write our Chinese surname in English. For example some of my cousins are surnamed Fong, because that is how their fathers decided how to write their Chinese name in English. My father wrote it Fung, which is why I am Walter Fung.

Compared to many western countries, there are relatively few Chinese surnames and in fact 70% of the entire mainstream Chinese population (about 850 million people) have just 45 surnames between them. Surnames in this article are expressed in English using pin yin Mandarin Romanisation. The Cantonese pronunciation is given in brackets. There may be several Cantonese pronunciations because there are numerous sub-dialects in Guangdong province.

Top of the Chinese surname league is Zhang (Chang, Cheong); 张, followed by Li (Lee) 李; Chen (Chan) 陈; Wang (Wong) 王; Huang (Wong) 黄 amongst others. Note that there are two surnames that can be written Wong in English, which accounts for the very large number of ‘Wongs’. The Huangs are commonly called the ‘big belly’ Wongs! If you look at the Chinese Character you will see why! The other Wong, Wang in pin yin, means ‘king’; huang means yellow. The distribution of surnames however is by no means geographically evenly spread throughout China. Chan is especially common in Guangdong Province, but Zhang, the most common name of all is not even in the top ten in Guangdong. Amongst the early Chinese arrivals in the UK, there seem to be much fewer ‘king’ Wongs compared to the ‘big belly’ Wongs.

Chinese history books can also tell us the particular part of China where the families originally come from, or reputed to have come from. The Fungs originated in Shaanxi Province, the Chans and Lis came from Henan Province and the Wangs came from Shandong Province.

The Chinese language is non-phonetic and the Chinese written character, which represents the meaning, provides no indication of how it sounds in spoken Chinese. In addition, the pronunciation is likely to be different in the various dialects such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokien (Fujian province) etc. However all Chinese people, irrespective of dialect, all use the same Chinese characters and the meaning is the same even though the spoken sound may be different. Thus the character conveys the meaning. The concept can be illustrated with numbers; for example the Arabic symbol for the number 5 is spoken as ‘five’ in English, ‘cinq’ in French, ‘’funf’ in German, ‘ ng’ in Cantonese and ‘wu’ in Mandarin.

However, if words can sound so different, names can sound different as well. Seeing the name character 伍, a Cantonese man will say, ‘Hello Mr Ng’. A Mandarin speaker will hold out his hand and say, ‘Hello Mr Wu’. Mr Chan, 陈 in Cantonese is Mr Tan in Hokkien, Mr San in Hainanese (Hainan Island) and Mr Chen to Mandarin speakers. Miss Wu Man Mei, a Cantonese lady would be Miss Aw Boon Bea in next-door Fujian Province.

Even within the Cantonese dialect there are marked differences in speech. The See Yep (four counties) area and Toishan in particular, has its own sub-dialect of Cantonese which is believed to be the reason why the region has retained its own specific identity within Guangdong province.

To add to the confusion a particular sound can be written in English (using Roman letters) in different ways, for example the name Zhou may be written in English as Chou or even Chow. China, known as Zhong Guo in Mandarin pin yin, may be written as Chung Kuo, Jung Gok or even Jung Gwok. In the US, where the Chinese population has always been much larger than the UK and the earliest Chinese community about three generations older, there is an incredible variety of Romanised Chinese names!

The Chinese Government in 1958 introduced an official standard method of writing Mandarin Chinese in Roman letters called ‘pin yin’ using four voice tones ( steady, rising, falling and rising and falling). My Chinese name is Fung Hing Cheng (in Cantonese) but Feng Qing Xiang in Mandarin pin yin. Note that in Chinese, the surname is written before the given names. However sometimes the Chinese person will follow the western way and put his or her surname last. It can be very confusing!

A further complication in the identification of Chinese names written in Chinese is the introduction of simplified characters by the Chinese government in the 1950s. The number of strokes in the most used Chinese characters was reduced so they could be learnt faster and so help increase the literacy rate of the population faster. Thus Fung 馮 became 冯 (simplified) and Chan, 陳 became 陈 (simplified). Full characters are still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan and by many overseas Chinese. Different Chinese surnames can not only sound the same in English but can also be written the same in ‘pin yin’. Examples are the following six characters (all simplified), which are all pronounced Feng in pin yin (Fung). The fifth character is my surname.

封 丰 风 鄷 冯 凤

The first four even have the same pin yin first tone, and so the spoken sound is identical, even in Chinese. The last two are second and fourth tone pin yin respectively. It is the Chinese character representing a particular surname that is unique-it is the Chinese Character that tells you to which Chinese family you belong. Occasionally SACU receives enquiries from people of Chinese descent keen to trace their roots. This is generally only possible if they know the Chinese character for their forebear’s surname.

Chinese women, in accordance with Chinese tradition, do not change their surname on marriage. However some Chinese women in England and western countries do choose to take their husband’s surname, especially for official documents. Sometimes both surnames are used in the person’s full name and it may be difficult to establish which her maiden surname and which is the husband’s surname. Sometimes the women may use both, for example, Miss Wong Xiaomei might marry a Chen and refer to herself on an official document in England as Mrs Wong Xiaomei Chen.

This situation does not generally arise with BBCs or local born Chinese in other counties, because Chinese couples seem to name their children with first names that are common in the country in which they are living. So be prepared to meet Marcel Fung, Carlos Lopez Fung and Karl-Heinz Fung as well as Walter Fung. In actual fact, these other Fungs do exist: whilst in France, Spain and Germany I looked up Fungs in the local telephone directory. Of course many foreign born Chinese have a Chinese name in addition to their ‘local’ name. British born Chinese sometimes use both their Chinese name and English name depending on whom they are with. It is very confusing to third parties, especially English people who may be present.

Some Chinese with names, which are embarrassing in English such as Fook, may choose to take another Chinese surname as their English surname. In some case, Chinese parents have used the father’s first name as the surname of their children. Thus Mr Huang Ying for some reason chose to use Ying as the surname for his children. And finally if there are not enough complications and sources of confusion, I could also add that in old China, it was common for a man to have two or more names or change his name at different stages of his life, such as marriage or moving to another area or country. But this, the choice of names-perhaps to express parental expectation of their offspring, and the meaning of names are another long story! Suffice it to say that to know who you are, it is important to know what your Chinese surname is and more important how it is written in Chinese characters.

Where we came from

A high proportion of the early Chinese pioneers in England, especially Liverpool and Cardiff emigrated from the four counties, (See Yep in Cantonese or sometimes written See or Sze Yup or Yip) of Toisan, Sunwei, Yanping, and Hoiping all in Guangdong province. In Mandarin these counties are Taishan, Xinhui, Enping and Kaiping and four counties is Siyi (四邑). They are situated about 40 miles or so south-west of Canton City (now called Guangzhou). The majority were from a single county, Toisan-which is about the size of the county of Cheshire. In fact, around the mid1800s to 1900 a high proportion of all the Chinese in the USA, South America, Australia and the UK were from the same four counties.

Some articles and textbooks record that all the early Chinese in the UK and USA came from a handful of village just south of Canton City. This is incorrect because they should be referring to counties. Most of the Chinese who operated laundries in the UK came from these four counties. There is a See Yep (Four Counties) Association office in Liverpool, which is just one of many all over the world.

The early Chinese population of London was more mixed than that of Liverpool. There were some four counties Chinese and some from other parts of Guangdong. There were also some from the Shanghai area and smaller numbers from Fujian province and even Guangxi province.

The present population of Toisan County is just under a million people but there are more than a million people of Toisan descent living in about 78 different countries all over the world. Toisan County has an area of 3,200 square kilometres, more than half of which is mountainous and hilly. It has a coastline to the South China Sea of 588 kilometres and the county also includes about 85 islands.

This map (from MY Hsu, ‘Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home’, Stanford 2000) shows the location of the See Yep (Four counties) in south-west China. In China today, the four counties have been grouped together with Heshan county to the north to produce the Five counties region (Wuyi) with Jiangmen as the regional capital.

The population of Guangdong Province (100+ million) exceeds that of the UK and is divided up into about 80 counties, of which Toisan is just one. Within Toisan, there are maybe 22 cities or towns. One of these is Guang Hai, (Kwong Hoi in Cantonese on old documents) a coastal city of about 50,000 people. Within greater Guang Hai are about 30 separate villages, each with perhaps 100 to 500 people. Many of the early Chinese settlers in Liverpool were from villages centred around Guang Hai. The Liverpool Fungs came from three villages, Song Mun, Lum Hing and Shek Lan. They were originally single surname villages, i.e. the entire village population had the surname Fung, and were related to each other and could all trace descent from a single common ancestor. Single surname villages were quite common in old China and especially in Guangdong and Fujian Provinces where the tradition of loyalty to the clan and keeping family records is believed to have been strongest.

In old China, each person from the same generation of the same clan would have a common middle name, the generation rank name. This tradition is believed to be still practised in a few Chinese families. Generation names were sometimes decided in advance by a prominent person, who became the ‘founding father’ of the lineage. He might use the words of a poem, verse or motto as the individual words for the sequence order of names. The words would usually relate to high aspirations, always be optimistic and probably connected to Confucian virtues such as loyalty or integrity. If persons with the same surname but different generation names meeting for the first time, anywhere in the world, they would know their positions in the hierarchy and whether they uncles or nephews of each other. If they had the same generation name, they knew they were cousins. Family records were kept and maintained in the ancestral temple in the family village.

Where are we going?

The simple answer for most of us is that we are here to stay - or have stayed- as permanent residents, unlike many Chinese of earlier periods whose ultimate aim was to eventually return, hopefully rich, to their ancestral village in China.

Even some BBCs are well known for not assimilating into the society in which they live and at times this may lead to problems of divided loyalties and of identity. This subject is an area of much debate and discussion and this article only touches on the surface of a very wide subject. Researchers and archivists are keen to record ‘oral histories’ of our experiences and views on life in the host society of Britain.

Mention must also be made of the Anglo-Chinese who may or may not refer to themselves as BBCs. Many of the earliest settlers in Liverpool, Cardiff and London married English women. How ‘Chinese’ they became, or are, must depend on a number of factors. Their story and experiences will again be different. If the Chinese father was a sailor and spent much of his time away, the English mother must have played a more significant role in the person’s upbringing and outlook on life.

We are an ethnic minority in multicultural, multiracial Britain. How quickly we or our descendants are absorbed into British society depends on each one of us individually and how British society reacts and receives us. It is however the wish of most of us that we remember our Chinese roots and retain something of our Chinese Heritage. However this should not stop us from contributing to the success and wealth of Britain, identifying Britain as our home and regarding ourselves as British. Lee Quan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore who set up the island republic during the 1960s using traditional Chinese values, once said, ‘I am no more Chinese than President Kennedy is an Irishman’.

Further reading (a very short selection)

1. Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, ‘The Chinese in Britain, 1800 to the present’ Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
2. Maria Lin Wong, ‘Chinese Liverpudlians’, Liver Press, 1989.
3. Yvonne Foley, Chinese seamen in World War 2, China Eye, Issue 13, Spring 2007.
4. Also see www.halfandfhalf.org.uk ➚ website.
5. Walter Fung, ‘The UK Chinese Community’, China Eye, Issue 18, Summer 2008.

Toisan (Taishan) Community Association in Victoria, Canada (photo by M Fawcett)

A plaque in Melbourne’s Chinatown commemorating the early pioneers of Australia’s Chinese community who came from the See Yep (four counties) of Guangdong province, China.

This article from SACU's China Now magazine in 1988 surveys how the English viewed China one hundred years ago.

'Solicitously avoiding reality'

Victorian and Edwardian images of China and the Chinese supply a rich storehouse for students of cultural relativism. Not many English knew the country or had encountered its people. There were few experts to guide, and some of those who did guide were not expert.

G E ('Chinese') Morrison, The Times' influential Peking correspondent, was an Australian adventurer without reading or spoken knowledge of Chinese. English scholarship in Chinese artefacts was so sketchy as to license frauds to flourish, like Edmund Backhouse. The "School of Oriental Studies" ➚ was founded only in 1916; simultaneously, a new generation of classical Chinese scholars was emerging, led by an Assistant Keeper of the British Museum, Arthur Waley.

Waley it was who during and after the Great War was largely responsible for popularizing the range and achievements of classical Chinese poetry. Privately, he was contemptuous of the supposed Sinologists who had preceded him and who pontificated about this or that aspect of Chinese life, literature and politics; but he would not supplant them himself, preferring to cling to Bloomsbury. One of his friends, Peter Quennell, recalled that Waley refused all invitations to visit China because he was reluctant to destroy visionary images of its past which he had constructed. In this abstention at least, Waley shared the attitudes of most English towards China: reality was something they sought solicitously to avoid.

Ignorance and bliss

Those who indeed visited China were a predictable set - servicemen, diplomats, merchants and missionaries. There were never enough of the last two to advance the Victorian belief that through the evangel of commerce and Christianity, darkness would be dispelled from modern China. The Times' special correspondent in Hong Kong during the second Anglo-China war (1856-8) George Wingrove Cooke, described 'our great ignorance of China' as 'humiliating':

'Even of that great conglomerate of cities on the Yangtse we know little more than that it is the commercial emporium of central China, and that its population is variously estimated at from five to eight millions of souls. We know that it exists, and that is nearly all we know. No one has been there except native Chinamen and Jesuit missionaries'. He appealed to British merchants to break through 'the brigand bureaucracy' which enclosed China and retarded free trade; but the next half-century was to confirm that no substantial revolution occurred.

God and mammon

Aside from a number of specialist carriers, and the late-nineteenth century surge of banking, mineral and railway concessions - the first Chinese railway was not opened before 1888 - China remained basically unexploited by British businessmen and investors. Only 3 percent of British overseas investments in 1914 were located in China. Certainly, Britain enjoyed an overall surplus in the Anglo-China balance of trade but most of the high expectations were never realised since all trade with China was subject to violent fluctuations of an almost Malthusian kind, from wars, plagues and famines as well as from exchange rate disturbances in gold-silver ratios. The trade moreover was concentrated at the treaty ports; interior China was still virtually unpenetrated by westerners in 1900, and the legendary inscrutability of the Chinese survived sufficiently to warrant the joke current during the Boxer rising, that England was in conflict against another lot of Boers, with the addition of 'x', the unknown quantity.

The missionaries made even less impact than the merchants. Buddhism prevailed among Chinese religions, Confucianism and Daoism among philosophies. Even among the minority religions, Christianity scarcely made a showing: there were probably twenty times more Muslims than Christians in China in 1900. Christians never comprised more than one percent of Chinese, which the Boxer rising reduced by the subtraction of some 30,000 martyrs. Moreover, the majority of Chinese Christians were Catholic, amounting to perhaps one-and-a-half million by 1914. Protestants, by contrast, numbered 190,000 though the figure is nominal and may include mere attenders at missionary schools.

'What can you say for your friends now, Richard?'
UK Prime Minister Palmerston is addressing
the Sinophile Richard Cobden with the atrocities
of the Taiping Rebellion depicted behind.

Opium and the masses

The ambition of converting China to Protestant Christianity was thus vain, though still more effort was put into it by (largely) American missionaries, who grew from 800 in 1890 to 3,000 in 1919, by which time Canterbury had sanctioned the evolution of the Chinese dioceses into an autonomous Anglican Communion (1912) and allowed the consecration of the first Chinese-born assistant bishop who spoke no English (1918). Fantasies about mass conversions had, however, in the past placed English Protestants in moral confusion. The campaign against the opium trade (not formally abolished until 1913) was spearheaded by Quakers who did not generally receive the backing of the chief Nonconformist sects because they feared to undermine a commercial and political involvement with China which might expedite missionary work.

In the absence, then, of any extensive contacts with China, the educated English constructed their own images of the country and its people from a hazy knowledge of history, from cultural impressions, and from philosophical preconceptions. The favourable was represented mostly by the fashions for Chinese landscapes and architecture, for Chinese horticulture (clematis and rhododendron), for China tea (though overtaken by India and Ceylon), and for Chinese porcelain, silks and furniture. That China had once led in science and technology, inventing paper, printing, gunpowder, cannons, compasses, and so forth, was well known to Macaulay's schoolboy who might also allow that China's production of humanistic scholarship was astonishing, having, until the mid-eighteenth century, more books than the entire rest of the world. But there the wholehearted appreciation ended.

Bound head and foot

The mass of Chinese were illiterate and study and writing were apparently confined to a mandarin civil service, entry to which was judged by the same examination set for over a millennium until 1905. Here, surely, was a society which had somehow got stuck, indeed perhaps deliberately maimed itself. The symbol of the Chinese lady's compressed foot exercised a powerful hold upon western intellectuals as they wrestled with the riddle of China's arrested development. That, and the long, uncut talons of fingernails worn by the nobility, clearly indicating their unfitness and contempt for manual labour, inspired Thorstein Veblen to expound 'The Theory of the Leisure Class' (1899). But he noted provocatively, as he coined the phrase 'conspicuous consumption', that the wasp waist which had such vogue among well-bred western women was an equivalent deformity, an unnatural ideal of beauty sanctioned only by the requirements of pecuniary hubris.

This was why western intellectuals paid such attention to China. They were oppressed by the knowledge that once great empires, Greek, Roman, Persian, Indian, Ottoman and Chinese, had collapsed and decayed. Unlike Africa, presumed always to be savage, China was known to have been a superior civilization, conspicuous for its achievements in art and science; now it was at best a stationary state and probably regressing to barbarism. England, of course, was also a conservative society which valued its aristocracy and its continuity with the past. The trick was, how to prevent conservatism from fossilizing so that industrial and commercial dynamism might still flourish within a framework of constitutional and social stability. China, therefore, was a warning mirror for British philosophers and politicians, a standing example of what to avoid.

Punch cartoon 1860

Parasitic stagnation

The empirical reasons for China's stagnation seemed not hard to find. The absurdly archaic language impeded communication and condemned the mass to social immobility; the degenerate religions licensed superstition and prohibited rigorous philosophical inquiry; the effete central government provoked wasteful civil wars; the parasitic nobility enthroned punctiliousness and lethargy; and the corrupt bureaucracy institutionalized evasiveness and torpor. The people themselves were sunk in the stupidity of sterile ancestor-worship and unremitting manual toil or else prone to orgies of cruelty, fits of gambling and drug-induced reveries.

This prejudicial account became systemized from mid-Victorian times as recent biological science apparently supplied the explanatory key. The social Darwinists from Herbert Spencer onwards adumbrated 'laws' of natural selection which satisfactorily explained why only western societies maintained spontaneous progress, individual initiative, civil liberties, social diversity, and wealth creation, while most oriental states became stupefied by custom. The late-nineteenth century imperialism of the western powers, therefore, according to this supposition, was but an expression and release of productive energies which might stir from their sleep and move to improvement vassal societies like China. Thus Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, used a Darwinian vocabulary in reference to the prospective partition of China in 1898 when he divided the world into 'living' and 'dying' nations.

Democratic flogging

This orthodoxy did not go unchallenged, although curiously Darwin and Spencer exercised the most pervasive influence upon Chinese intellectuals and radical politicians in the period before 1917 and the Russian Revolution, inspiring them with the prospect of directing a national cultural evolution. Perhaps George Bernard Shaw was not paying much of a compliment when he praised the Chinese for being 'inveterately democratic' because, in their navy, they flogged their admirals as well as ordinary seamen.

But J A Hobson's indictment of Imperialism (1902) was marked by a refusal to accept Chinese 'inferiority'. Like many a Ruskinian affronted by the materialism of western industrialized societies, Hobson was attracted by China's arcadian aspect: the simple needs and quiet dignity of its peasantry, their religious tolerance, respect for learning, aesthetic craftsmanship, all untroubled by an inquisitorial central state 'China may be described properly as a huge nest of little free village communes, self-governing, and animated by a genuine spirit of equality'. Hobson drew this utopian picture for two reasons: one, to shame those western imperial nations which seemed set to rape and partition China; two, to warn that if ever this healthy, land-bred, low-paid Chinese labour was harnessed by capitalist organization the living standards of western industrial workers would suffer:

'The pressure of working-class movements in politics and industry in the West can be met by a flood of China goods, so as to keep wages down and compel industry, or, where the Power of the imperialist oligarchy is well set, by menaces of yellow workmen or of yellow mercenary troops...'

Migrants and labour

It was at this point that images of China held by both informed and ignorant Englishmen converged. China's largest domestic product and most sinister export was people: cheap, docile, even servile labour. Punch might joke that the real Yellow Peril which England faced was fog, but its humour was not shared by the trade union delegation which, having visited the Federation of American Labour (FAL), reported to the 1902 TUC that 'the menace of the Asiatic degraded labour is a very serious matter' and that the FAL 'has done splendid work for exclusion of Chinese'. The last was a reference to the 1882 Exclusion Act, the fruit of the California Workingmen's Party; likewise, they understood that the Federation of Australia in 1901 was based upon the White Australia dogma. By contrast, the TUC criticized the British Colonial Office for not guarding Canada in the same way and especially for the introduction of Chinese to work the Transvaal mines in the aftermath of the South African war, thus 'ruining the prospects of white labour'. The TUC alerted the workmen of Britain to realise what it would mean to have 'a horde of Chinamen introduced to take their place'.

In fact, the Chinese-born in England and Wales in 1901 - a mere 545 - was less than in 1881 (when they numbered 665), though they were to grow to 1,319 in 1911 and to 2,419 in 1921. But the threat the Chinese posed was not thereby circumscribed because in a number of trades and locations Chinese competition was highly visible. The straw plait industry suffered from cheap Chinese imports, and seamen's unions were concerned about the employment of Chinese crews in the Far Eastern trade. Many Chinese seamen, it was suspected, jumped ship in England, thus escaping detection by the census enumerators and magnifying their actual settlement in the 'Chinatowns' of London's Limehouse, and in Liverpool, Cardiff and Bristol. These communities were predominantly male and, as Bret Harte's jingle poetry complained, 'the heathen Chinese' possessed ways that were more peculiar than pleasant.

Wishy-washy prejudices

A vicious legend arose about the diseased, promiscuous, hypnotic oriental, who ate cats and rats, gambled inveterately and was addicted to opium. Their laundries - chief on-shore Chinese employment before catering superseded it after 1945 - were commonly assumed to be mere facades for unspeakable vices; in any event, they deprived poor white working-class women of an important source of supplementary income and, significantly, were targets for destruction by riotous seamen during the 1911 transport strikes. The Chinese were thus super-added to the anti-alien platform of those beleaguered domestic trades which had first mounted an agitation against the pauper East European Jewish immigration from the 1880s.

What gave the Chinese a special salience was the perversion of romantic fiction into a thriller literature, led by M. P. Shiel's The Yellow Danger (1898) and extended by 'Sax Rohmer' (pen-name of Arthur Henry Ward) in The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (1913). This elevated the issue to a hysterical level of world conspiracy, racial purity, and sorcery combined with science.

A low journalist, Ward informed his biographer that, though he knew something about Chinatown, he knew nothing about the Chinese. This, in its way, was fitting. It is proof of a general proposition about people, that they never let ignorance stand in the way of their expressing opinion. And it suggests, for those who want to unravel the psychopathology of English attitudes to the Chinese, that they will probably find more answers to their questions in England than in China.

Sophie Taylor explores the ambiguity in being labelled - 'half-Chinese'. This article was first published in SACU's China in Focus magazine 2002.

Imagine life as a human ink blot test. Whether physically, linguistically, or culturally, your existence usually confuses others in some way. Cursory glances deepen into befuddled inspection; kinship recognition provokes misplaced pride - and creative oddballs opt for making slanty-eyed, buck-toothed faces.

Being part Chinese can be an open invitation to reactions pleasant and perverse. First, though: what does it mean to be partly Chinese? And why should anybody care? Growing up in Hong Kong, I never questioned whether I was a banana (yellow outside, white inside) or an egg (white outside, yellow inside). I certainly never inquired whether I was more 'western' than 'Chinese'; 'both' or 'half'. Normally I am taken for a Westerner (gweinui - in Cantonese) and so have been spared the curious 'what are you?' questions my more obviously mixed friends have encountered. Maybe, like Mr. Prosser (a direct-line descendent of Genghis Khan) in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the 'racial mixing' has so 'juggled my genes' that the only vestiges of my 'Chinese-ness' are a pronounced talent at using chopsticks and a predilection for inscrutability.

Flippancy aside, there seems to be several ways to be Chinese. One obvious criterion concerns the uncomfortable subject of ethnicity and phenotype. Either one is born genetically Chinese, or not at all. But what does this mean? Genetic definitions of Chinese-ness can be extremely arbitrary, as they do not always correspond to conventional notions of fluency in Chinese (in all its vastly different dialects), understanding of Chinese traditions or loyalty to the PRC. Other than denoting a certain combination of DNA, being born Chinese, to whatever degree, is meaningless without taking the social environment into account. Worse, the pervasive and rather retchworthy sentimentality of phrases like 'Your mother is in your bones!' (Am Tan) merely fuels an indulgent exotification of an otherwise unremarkable human being.

Being Chinese is often, therefore, much more of a social construct than such essentialist arguments allow. It is tied to lived experience of Chinese culture, which I will not elaborate on here. Which means that depending on the context, one's genetic make-up sometimes does not even banish the internal flip-flopping between cultures and mindsets. Despite the pretensions of some mixed people to being simultaneously 100% 'Western' and 100% Chinese, I would argue that being mixed is never a zero-sum existence. Any one viewpoint is immediately matched up with its cultural opposite number - a typical example being the tussle between Chinese notions of filial piety and 'decadent' Western individualism. This, I suppose, is the so-called 'experience of ambiguity'. The ambiguity is often made worse by the reactions of others. More often than not, identity - a nationality; a particular ethnic origin is conferred or even imposed on the mixed person. Hence the ink blot allegory: mixed people are purportedly ambiguous entities, to be given a clear structure by the interpreter. They are at once self-defining and actively defined.

Amateur psychology aside, perceptions of mixed-Chinese people and mixed people in general have more serious consequences when taken in their historical context. There have been cases where mixed-race children have been ostracised as uncomfortable reminders of Western domination and national humiliation, especially in South East Asia. In Thailand, mixed people, or luk kreung, were not even allowed to become citizens until the early 1990s. And no matter what they say about the cute Eurasians who are all the rage in the Cantopop scene, their historical legacy lies in the Opium War - the beginning of '150 years of shame' for China.

Other factors belie the notion that being half-Chinese is an exotic 'bridge' between two cultures. For sure, being mixed can lend insight into cultural disagreements. But it does not necessarily equip one with the diplomacy skills needed to deal with the almighty Culture Clash. What's more, my double set of roots is not necessarily a 'passport' into two cultures either. Cultural belonging is definitely a two-way street. Unlike Amy Tan, (who is an American-Born Chinese 'A.B.C.'), I really can't presume that, as soon as my feet 'touch China', I will become 'Chinese'. In fact, the minute my feet touched Hong Kong last November, the more obviously gwei I felt. Compared to how society at large saw me, whatever I felt for my childhood hometown was mostly irrelevant. More often than not, mixed people feel compelled to align with one culture over another by default.

And so, the other side of claiming one's heritage is rejection by that same heritage. It is a game of cultural politics which can even culminate in ethnic nationalism. Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club' describes the characters' frantic attempts to break out of their Chinese-born parents' 'cultural gravity' by being more American. On the other hand, one prominent half-Chinese academic was once told: 'you cannot talk about yellow pride and sleep white'.

Rather than conforming to any one 'monocultural' bracket, is it possible to create a 'mixed-Chinese' category? My most recent brush with such an attempt was in April this year, when I attended the '6th Annual Pan-Collegiate Conference on the Mixed-Race Experience' at Comell University, Ithaca. The conference was the latest attempt to identify the 'experience of ambiguity': Hapa. 'Hapa' is originally a Hawaiian word denoting a person with one Asian or Asian-American parent and one non-Asian parent. Hapas claim to be part of a burgeoning social movement (found almost exclusively in America), and its aim is to give a 'national voice' for multiracials/biracials/multiethnic people/members of trans-racial families and trans-racial adoptees. According to the organisers of the conference, mixed race births are increasing 2500% faster than between same-race parents, and in the 2000 U.S. census, nearly 7 million people identified themselves as 'multiracial'. For sure, being in a room full of other mixed people made my 'ethnicity radar' go haywire.

There were some very angry Hapas at the conference. Matt Kelley, founder of MAVIN magazine (which means 'one who understands' in Hebrew), railed against the ridiculous remarks that have been flung his way since childhood ('You're black and you have purple eyes', which was Becky Bartholomew's way of saying I was different. If it's any consolation, Becky did the first grade twice.) There were attempts to foster a sense of community based on the 'mixed-race experience'. There was also much antipathy towards the evil 'What are you?' question produced by the 'failed instant (ethnic) analysis' imposed by observers. They were sick of being ethnic curiosities. And the overall message was: 'don't let anybody define you'. Kelley declared: 'it is not our faces, but the experience of those who perceive us - it is a confrontation to others when we do not fit into other people's categories and assessmen'.

But is there any point in trying to subsume being half-Chinese into a larger Hapa 'culture'? Terms such as 'ambiguity,' 'amorphous...... fluidity' and 'gumbo' were splashed around. There was even talk of 'Asian-American pan-ethnicity'. Perhaps the most striking part was the assertion that Hapa is a process of 'becoming, not being'. What does that mean? According to WeiMing Dariotis, it meant that Hapas can and should explore their ethnic background with a view to 'becoming' more like it. There were attempts at creating a common Hapa 'culture' to span vastly different ethnicities and experiences. But, although the Hapa community seems like an attractive support network for people of mixed background, there are several problems with this.

The obvious point is that Hapas have nothing in common other than they are of mixed race. This tenuous 'common factor' becomes increasingly diluted as the Hapa community increases, and so different methods of stratification come into play, like citizenship. The Hapa movement is a curiously American phenomenon. That said, their activism has yielded important achievements, such as successfully campaigning for the 2000 U.S. Census to allow individuals to self-identify with more than one race. But this raises another question: raising awareness of the problems and discrimination that Hapas face (for example, black/white Hapas who are discriminated against on the grounds that they look black) does not necessarily mean the problems of non-mixed racial minorities are not equally important. And, since the problems of each minority can be different, it is hard imagine a global community of Hapas sharing a common experience. I personally felt no 'instant connection' whatsoever at the conference; in fact, I felt more of a Brit than ever, especially when I opened my mouth. If 'race' is lived experience, then so is identity as a whole. In this way, the Hapa community is a new social category superimposed on existing social constructs.

So what does being partly Chinese mean in the context of Hapa ideas of flux and 'becoming'? Can one become more Chinese? I have already pointed out that cultural belonging is a two-way street. My own mother contends that one cannot be Chinese if one is not genetically Chinese, though I am not sure where to draw the line. Is an eighth too small a proportion? Does an ABC 'acting white' make him or her less Chinese? Perhaps the things that being half-Chinese, and 'Hapa culture', have in common is that they provoke an overwhelming tendency in humans to judge and classify others. I also don't know how I feel about being stereotyped as 'exotic but not threatening' - Dariotis actually said: “There's something chewy about the word 'Hapa'”.

Human experience is a constant internal and external process of definition against that which is considered 'foreign'. The need to assess others is a prelude to judgement, if not prejudice. There are infinitely more variables to a human being than ethnicity, and I would prefer to continue being myself. That is, 'everybody's bloody foreigner', even if that does sound terribly British. Even ink blots have feelings.