1
SECTION ONE
In an article on the role of skin colour and physical characteristics in non-Western countries published in the 1960s, Harold Isaacs argued that racial prejudice among non-Europeans existed long before their exposure to the ideas of the conquering white Europeans, and that the charge of Western responsibility for the racial attitudes of ex-colonies was only partly valid. ‘Where responses to Westerners took place in racial terms, they were superimposed upon strongly-rooted attitudes about race and skin color that long antedated this encounter.’1
The purpose of this introductory chapter is threefold. It attempts to show, first, how attitudes about skin colour and physical characteristics are of great antiquity in China; secondly, that significant parts of the Confucian tradition predisposed scholars in China to perceive the new world order created by Western expansion in terms of ‘race’; and, thirdly, that successive periods of contact with frontier peoples fostered protonationalist feelings. Foreign population groups that conquered and ruled China include the Jin (1115–1234), the Mongols (1280–1368) and the Manchus (1644–1911). It should be emphasised that in the absence of substantial studies concerning the social perception of physical features in traditional China, this introduction can only be tentative. It is by no means intended to discuss the traditional Chinese world view in a systematic way.2 For our purposes, it will suffice to point out that some form of racial categorisation, however unsystematic, existed well before the arrival of Europeans in the nineteenth century.
The barbarian in the classics
Social groups are in a constant process of redefinition and reorientation, thereby changing themselves and the symbolic universe to which they relate. But the symbolic universe sets the context and gives meaning to change. The symbolically constructed network of meanings, rules, conventions, signs and values form a structured system in which the group operates. In imperial China, the Confucian classics formed the core of this symbolic system. The Five Classics are the ancient books which comprised the syllabus for the disciples of Confucius, namely the Shujing (Book of History), the Shijing (Book of Odes), the Yijing (Book of Changes), the Liji (Book of Rites) and the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals).
The classics are generally believed to have been oriented towards the world, or tianxia, ‘all under heaven’. The world was perceived as one homogeneous unity named ‘great community’ (datong). The absence of any kind of cultural pluralism implicit in this symbolic universe has been called a ‘political solipsism’:3 the governing elite, dominated by the assumption of its cultural superiority, measured alien groups according to a yardstick by which those who did not follow the precepts of Confucianism were considered ‘barbarians’. It is assumed that this world view, originating mainly from the Gongyang school (commentaries on Confucius’ Chunqiu), generated at least one valuable tendency: it obliterated racial distinctions to emphasise cultural continuity. A theory of ‘using Chinese ways to transform the barbarians’ (yongxiabianyi) was strongly advocated. It was believed that the barbarian could be culturally absorbed: laihua, ‘come and be transformed’, or hanhua, ‘become Han’, Han in this case referring not to an ethnic group but to the Han dynasty. The Chunqiu, a chronological history of the Spring and Autumn period (722–481 BC), traditionally attributed to Confucius, hinged on the idea of cultural assimilation. In his commentary on the Gongyang, He Xiu (129–182 AD) later distinguished between the zhuxia, the ‘various people of Xia [the first Chinese empire]’, and the Yi and Di barbarians, living outside the scope of the empire. In the Age of Great Peace, an allegorical concept similar to the Golden Age in the West, the barbarians would flow in and be transformed: the world would be one.
The myth of a Chinese antiquity that abandoned racial standards in favour of a concept of cultural universalism in which all barbarians could ultimately participate has understandably attracted the attention of some modern scholars. Living in an unequal and often hostile world, it is tempting to project the utopian image of a racially harmonious community into a distant and obscure past. To counterbalance this highly idealised vision of the Chinese past, some researchers have drawn attention to passages from the classics which are apparently incompatible with the concept of cultural universalism. Most quoted is the Zuozhuan (fourth century BC), a feudal chronicle: ‘If he is not of our race, he is sure to have a different mind’ (fei wo zulei, qi xin bi yi).4 This sentence seems to support the allegation that at least some degree of ‘racial discrimination’ existed during the early stage of Chinese civilisation.
Both perspectives have in common the adoption of a modern conceptual framework that distinguishes sharply between ‘culture’ and ‘race’, corresponding respectively to ethnocentrism and racism when used as a yardstick to diminish other population groups. The dichotomy between culture and race, which has proved to be a viable conceptual tool in analysing modern attitudes towards outsiders, should be abandoned in our case. It introduces an opposition so far not supported by historical evidence, and tends to project a modern construct into a remote phase of history.
Physical features and cultural characteristics were thought to overlap in Chinese antiquity. The border between humans and animals was blurred. ‘The Rong are birds and beasts.’5 This was not simply a derogatory description: it was part of a worldview that integrated civilisation with the notion of humanity, picturing the alien groups living outside the pale of Confucian society as distant savages hovering on the edge of bestiality. The names of outgroups were written in characters with an animal radical, a habit that persisted until the 1930s: the Di, a northern tribe, were thus assimilated with the dog, whereas the Man and the Min, people from the south, shared the attributes of reptiles. The Qiang had a sheep radical.
The Liji, or Book of Rites (third century BC), underlined that ‘the Chinese, the Rong, the Yi and [the other] peoples of the five quarters all have [their own] nature, which cannot be moved or altered.’6 The ‘five quarters’ referred to a cosmographical plan which first appeared in the Tribute of Yu, a part of the Shujing, or Book of History (fifth century BC). This plan divided the world into five concentric configurations. Around the imperial centre (didu), the hub of civilisation, came the royal domain (dianfu) and the lands of the feudal princes (houfu). Beyond these two areas lay a zone of pacification (suifu) that separated civilisation from the last two zones, inhabited by steppe people and savages.7 As noted by Ruth Meserve, the very name of the last zone, called the ‘submissive wastes’ (huangfu), evoked a dreadful imagery of drought and famine, of barrenness and desolation.8
Throughout history, scholars and rulers viewed the people of the northern steppes with an almost traumatic apprehension. The sea, on the other hand, gave a feeling of natural protection. The spherical concept of the world inherent in most of China’s cosmological representations was conveniently completed by surrounding all habitable ground by four seas (sihai). China was placed at the centre of the world. Foreigners were relegated to the periphery: they were referred to as the ‘barbarians of the four quarters’ (siyi).
Some of these barbarians were associated with a particular colour. The ancient texts repeatedly mentioned the red or black Di, the white or black Man, the pitch-dark Lang.9 These colours were symbolic. They indicated either the dominant tint of the minorities’ clothes or the five directions of the compass: white for the West, black for the North, red for the East, blue-green for the South. Yellow represented the Centre.
Every civilisation has an ethnocentric world image in which outsiders are reduced to manageable spatial units. Ancient India opposed the pure land of the Aryans to the territories of the mleccha, or ‘barbarians’.10 The Europeans, from the Greeks onwards, viewed the world as composed of three continental parts: Asia, Europe and Africa. During the Middle Ages, Christians associated this tripartite division of the earth with the three sons of Noah. Europe, however, occupied only a quarter of this universe, as was noted by Isidore of Seville, a seventh-century bishop and author of a representative geographical compilation:
The ancients did not divide these three parts of the world equally, for Asia stretches right from the south, through the east to the north, but Europe stretches from the north to the west and thence Africa from the west to the south. From this it is quite evident that the two parts Europe and Africa occupy half the world and that Asia alone occupies the other half.11
The eurocentric vision of Europe was tempered by a threefold representation of the world. It was also marked by the fact that the centre of civilisation was outside Europe, in Jerusalem. As a result of a complex combination of factors, the discussion of which exceeds the framework of this chapter (one could mention geographical isolation and demographic superiority), China’s imagination was marked by a narrow dichotomy that opposed the civilised centre to a barbarian periphery.
The barbarian in mythology
The degree of remoteness from the imperial centre corresponded to levels of cultural savagery and physical coarseness. In the Shanhaijing (fourth century BC), a work of geographical mythology, spirits and monstrous beasts roamed the edges of the world beyond the Great Wilderness (dahuang): they were half-man, half-animal.12 Barbarians living beyond the realm of civilisation were systematically dehumanised. The mythological function of the Shanhaijing evidently supplanted its ethnographical purpose: there was a tribe of one-eyed people (Yimuguo), as well as a country of three-headed barbarians (Sanshouguo). One-armed barbarians with three eyes also appeared. Imagining the barbarian clearly implied a sense of radical otherness.
Skin colour was part of this imaginary, and it pointed at radical physical differences. A mythical country in the west was inhabited by white people whose long hair covered their shoulders. Barbarians from another tribe had a human face, ‘but their eyes, hands and feet are entirely black.’ Only the Chinese were described as ren, ‘man’, or ‘human being’.
The Huainanzi (a Daoist work of the second century BC) also associated cultural inferiority with an alien physical appearance. ‘In the West is the high land where streams and valleys come out, where the sun and moon enter. There its men have mean faces, are deformed, have long necks, walk upright, and have a hole going through the nose. The skin is like leather. The white color governs the lungs. They are intrepid, but not virtuous.’13 The north was ‘gloomy and dark, not bright and fresh. That [i.e. the light] is obstructed, and there is only wintry ice. Therefore even insects hibernate. Whosoever is there hides and its people contract the appearance of short necks, large shoulders, and a cavity going down to the end of the spine, cold bones. Black governs the kidneys. Its people are simple and stupid, like beasts, and are long-lived.’14
The link between cultural inferiority and physical alterity in the imaginary of ancient China has only a partial equivalent in Europe. When Ethiopians first appeared in Homeric poems as the most remote people on earth, their image was essentially favourable. Greek theories of the influence of the environment on people explained humanity’s diversity: black Ethiopians exemplified the broad scale of human potential. In the early Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder reported that the less-known regions of the distant north and south were inhabited by imaginary creatures. Skin colour, however, did not play a significant role in antiquity. Frank M. Snowden Jnr believed that concrete knowledge of Ethiopia as well as frequent encounters in antiquity between Europeans and Africans prevented skin colour from being interpreted as an outward manifestation of cultural inferiority.15
Environmental determinism
Yin and Yang Confucianism is perhaps the source of a belief in environmental determinism that contributed to the dehumanisation of outsiders. Yin and yang, the two primogenial forces of nature, produced all living organisms. Yin was the negative fluid, associated with the earth; it was female, dark, cold, moist and quiescent. Yang was the positive fluid, related to heaven; it was male, active, warm and light. The yin pole was situated in the north, where it produced cold and darkness. The yang pole was in the south and generated heat and light. Only humans were the result of a perfect harmony of both fluids. The furred and feathered creatures were dominated by the yang fluid, whereas the scaly and shell-covered ones owed their existence to the yin fluid.16
The five colours of the points of the compass also described the differences in the nature of China’s soils, which were supposed to exert a decisive influence on people: ‘It is yellow, red or black, of superior, average or inferior quality.’17 The Liji stressed how ‘the bodily capacities of the people are sure to be according to the sky and earthly influences’.18 In his commentaries on the Liji, Zheng Xuan (127–200 AD) explained that differences in the natural constitution of the barbarian were caused by the local ‘earth fluid’ (diqi).19
Such environmental theories were developed under the Tang (618–907). Du You (735–812) believed that the barbarians of his time were backward partly because they were less favoured in terms of climate and environment than the Chinese. They lacked the spiritual guidance of the sages whom China’s environment had produced, nurtured by the pure ethers of Heaven and Earth.20
‘Raw’ and ‘cooked’ barbarians
‘The people of those five regions […] had all their several natures, which they could not be made to alter. The tribes on the east were called Yi. They had their hair unbound, and tattooed their bodies. Some of them ate their food without its being cooked.’21 Food was a social signifier, symbolically marking differences between social groups and indicating cultural identity. In most civilisations, the main distinction was between raw and cooked food.22 The transforming power of fire was a symbol of culture.
Two categories of barbarians lived within the Middle Kingdom. The shengfan, literally ‘raw barbarians’, were considered savage and restive. The shufan, or ‘cooked barbarians’, were tame and submissive. The consumption of raw food was regarded as an infallible sign of savagery that affected the physiological state of the barbarian. Nature and nurture were closely associated in this imaginary. Official rhetoric often separated the Li of Hainan, an island in the south, into ‘raw’ and ‘cooked’ barbarians. The tame Li lived along the coastal fringes, enjoying all the benefits of civilisation. The wild Li populated the dark forests, far from the humanising influence of the imperial centre.
Slaves bought from Africa were treated similarly in elite culture. The Pingzhou ketan, written by Zhu Yu at the beginning of the twelfth century, noted that wealthy people in Canton used what they called ‘devil slaves’ (guinu) from Africa:
Their colour is black as ink, their lips are red and their teeth white, their hair is curly and yellow. There are males and females … They live in the mountains (or islands) beyond the seas. They eat raw things. If, in captivity, they are fed cooked food, after several days they get diarrhoea. This is called changing the ‘bowels’ [huanchang]. For this reason they sometimes fall ill and die; if they do not die one can keep them, and after having been kept a long time they begin to understand human speech [i.e. Chinese], although they themselves cannot speak it.23
Whereas popular Daoism held that a human had to change their bones (huangu) to become immortal, slaves had to change their bowels (huanchang) to become half-human. Physical change enhanced intellectual capacity, although foreign slaves would never reach the level of inter-human communication. While further research would be necessary to evaluate how representative this example is, it clearly corroborates the hypothesis of a strong link between physical appearance and cultural achievement in the Confucian imaginary.
Skin colour
It was not in mythology only that skin colour played a significant role. The Chinese elite developed a white-black polarity at a very early stage. Henri Maspero underlined that the Chinese called their own complexion ‘white’ from the most ancient times.24 A white complexion was highly valued, as Chinese poetry has shown in many instances. This is how the Shijing, the earliest collection of poems, extols the fairness of a famous princess:
Her fingers were like the blades of the young white grass;
Her skin was like congealed ointment;
Her neck was like the tree-grub;
Her teeth were like melon-seeds;
Her head cicada-like,
Her eyebrows the silkworm moth.25
White jade was used as a metaphor for a light complexion. Although it was mainly a canon of feminine beauty, it could also apply to men. Wang Yan, the last prime minister of the Western Jin dynasty (265–316 AD), was famed for his grace, in particular for the ‘jade-like’ whiteness of his hands.26 At court, male nobles even used powder to whiten their faces.27
As a result of an increase in maritime activities and contacts with foreigners, awareness of skin colour was heightened further during the Southern Song (1127–1279). The Buddhist pantheon was sinicised, including the transformation of the Bodhisattva image from a ‘swart half-naked Indian to a more decently clad divinity with a properly light complexion’, as one student of Buddhism notes.28 The importance of a fair complexion was sustained by encounters with people from neighbouring countries, who were generally seen to be darker. When Albuquerque first arrived in Malacca in 1511, the natives drew his attention to the existence of ‘white’ people in the region: he found Chinese emigrants.29 A geography of the early Ming corroborates this anecdote by reporting that ‘people in Malacca have a black skin, but some are white: these are Chinese’.30
Not everybody in the realm had the privilege of a light complexion. People in the countryside were called ‘black-headed people’: the label established a symbolic distance between the peasants and the landlords. Though this term changed in meaning as a result of an official decree issued in 221 BC, it was associated with a negatively valued dark complexion. According to the Shuowen (first century AD), commoners were called ‘black-headed’ because of their skin tone. The Chunqiu emphasised the dark appearance of peasants, burned swarthy by the sun. Under the Zhou, slaves were called renli. Li referred to a large cooking utensil stained by smoke and blackened by fire. It was a metaphor for the black faces of the slaves who tilled the fields under the burning sun and implied contempt and disdain.31
The polarity between white and black, based on social hierarchy and a particular set of aesthetic values, was projected upon the outside world when China came into contact with outsiders. Black symbolised the most remote part of the geographically known world. Chinese texts up to the Tang dynasty presented the distant peoples of the Nam-Viet Cham empire, corresponding roughly to Vietnam today, as black, wavy-haired barbarians of the mountains and the jungles. They were seen as ‘devils’ or ‘ghosts’ (gui).32 The Khmers were also called kunlun people, by reference to a mythical mountain appearing in the Shanhaijing. The Kunlun mountain marked the western edge of the known world. As geographical knowledge progressed, the location of the kunlun people shifted. In the eighth century, the term was applied to Malaysians. In 750, Jianzhen (688–765) noticed the presence of many ‘Brahmans, Persians and Kunluns [Malays]’33 in Canton. The Book of the Tang reported that ‘every year, Kunlun merchants come in [their] ships with valuable goods to trade with the Chinese.’34 Madagascar, discovered during the Song, was called Kunluncengqi, a term in which cengqi was a transliteration of the generic Arabic word for blacks, Zang. The island was believed to have ‘many savages with bodies as black as lacquer and with curly hair’.35
Between white, the centre of the civilised world, and black, the negative pole of humanity, relegated to the edge of the known world, lay a whole range of nuances. Shades of colour became more precise as China grew familiar with a whole variety of outsiders. Under the Tang, observes Jane Mahler, ‘the darker skin of India seems to have interested some of the Chinese imagemakers; one supposes at times that they were confused by the dark-skinned people, for they did not distinguish clearly between Hindus, Negroes and Malays.’36 During the Song, which saw an increase in the social significance of skin colour, distinctions become more common. Zhao Rugua’s work notes that people in Ceylon were ‘very black’ (jifu shenhei). In Malabar, people were of a ‘purple complexion’ (zise). The savages of the Andaman islands, feared to be cannibals, were described as having ‘bodies like black lacquer’ (shen ru heiqi).37
During the early Ming, several expeditions to distant countries were organised by Zheng He as part of the expansionist policy of the Yongle emperor (r. 1403–24). Ma Huan accompanied Zheng He on three expeditions and in 1451 published an account entitled Yingya shenglan. The bodies of the people in Malacca were ‘slightly black’ (shenti weihei), whereas the faces of Bengalis were ‘completely black’ (ren zhi rong jiehei). Natives of Ormuz had a ‘clear white’ complexion (qinghai); the inhabitants of Mecca had a ‘purple-chest colour’ (zitangse).38
White ash
Europeans were as weird as other distant foreigners. An early mention by Yan Shigu (eighth century AD), a commentator of the Qianhanshu, noted that they had ‘blue eyes and red beards; they look like macaques [mihou].’39 In China’s imaginary, Europeans were just another variety of physically defective creatures, provoking curiosity mingled with a feeling of repulsion and pity. Their complexion was not merely white, it was ‘ash-white’ (huibai), the exteriorisation of the demonological forces that drove them to undertake their expansion overseas. Zhang Xie, who also mentioned the presence of ‘white’ Chinese in Malacca, described the Portuguese as follows: ‘They are seven feet tall, have eyes like a cat, a mouth like an oriole, an ash-white face, thick and curly beards like black gauze, and almost red hair.’40 These hairy goblins were naturally associated with their black counterparts from beyond the Kunlun mountains, as the verses of a nineteenth-century poem on the British and Indian troops reveal: ‘The white ones are cold and dull as the ashes of frogs, the black ones are ugly and dirty as coal.’41
Black coal
As we have seen, ancient texts in imperial China repeatedly mentioned blackness when referring to people from Southeast Asia. Many population groups, in other words, became black, even if they had not previously been regarded as being so. It included any and all people with relatively darker skin tone, even peasants who tilled the fields. As Don Wyatt has argued, the ‘blacks of premodern China were neither African nor, in our conventionally modern interpretation of the term, black.’ Only from the Tang dynasty onwards was the ascription of blackness cast even more widely to include Africans—from all parts of the continent. As the historian Zhang Xinglang has argued, slaves from Africa imported into China during the Tang, although it is not always clear from which part of the continent they came.42 According to Duyvendak, the first definite reference to Africa appears in the Youyang zazu, written by Duan Chengshi (?—863) at the end of the Tang dynasty:
The country of Po-pa-li [Berbera] is in the south-western sea. [The people] do not eat any of the five grains but eat only meat. They often stick a needle into the veins of cattle and draw blood which they drink raw, mixed with milk. They wear no clothes except that they cover [the parts] below the loins with sheepskins. Their women are clean and of proper behaviour. The inhabitants themselves kidnap them, and if they sell them to foreign merchants, they fetch several times their price.43
Under the Song, as seafaring expanded, reports on the Arab slave trade became more common. Zhou Qufei wrote that Madagascar had many savages, who were ‘enticed by food and then caught and carried off; thousands are sold as slaves.’44 Zhao Rugua made the same remark and added that ‘they are used as gate-keepers [lit., to look after the gate-bolts]. It is said that they do not long for their kinsfolk.’45 Foreign slaves, carried to Asia by Persian and Arab merchants, could fetch three taels of gold or its equivalent in scented woods per head on the Chinese market.46 Zhu Yu called the door-keepers yeren, ‘wild men’, or guinu, ‘devil slaves’. He also mentioned ‘kunlun slaves’, a variety of black creatures ‘who can enter the water without blinking their eyes’: these slaves worked on ships and were forced to repair seams that had sprung leaks below the waterline.47 African stewards also served on Chinese ships during the Song.48 As late as the nineteenth century, crews on Chinese-owned ships were Filipinos and Africans.49
When the Portuguese settled in Macau during the second half of the sixteenth century, they imported many slaves from their colonies in Africa, India and Malacca. African women and numerous female Timorese slaves were brought to Macau after 1555.50 Antonio Bocarra, writing in 1635, reported that each Portuguese household in Macau had an average of six slaves, ‘amongst whom the majority and the best are negroes and such like.’51 These African slaves sometimes ran away into China, and eventually constituted a community of their own in a district of Canton. Chinese merchants who engaged in foreign trade occasionally used them as interpreters.52 Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) now and then intervened by returning runaway slaves to the Portuguese.53
SECTION TWO
The first part of this chapter focused on physical features in the social imaginary. This section will briefly examine the political theories that rejected the dominant rhetoric of cultural universalism. It should be remembered that even if the exclusionist approach examined here remained limited in effect, it did create theoretical precedents that may have inspired scholars during the late Qing.
The most salient aspect of the exclusionist approach was a belief in the incompatibility between the respective natures of the Chinese and the barbarian. The origin of this belief is usually traced back to the classics, particularly to a passage in the works of Mencius (372–289 BC?), in which he reproached Chen Xiang for having abandoned the learnings of China, saying: ‘I have heard of men using the doctrines of our great land to change barbarians, but I have never heard of any being changed by barbarians.’54 The nature of the Chinese was regarded as impermeable to outside influences; no retrogression was possible. Only the barbarian might eventually change by adopting Confucian ways.
Mencius’ views were first expounded during the Six Dynasties (221–589 AD), when the efflorescence of Buddhism threatened the sense of cultural superiority which had buttressed the social status of the elite since antiquity. Anti-Buddhist arguments were based mainly on the words of Mencius quoted above, but their meaning was expanded into a position of mutual exclusiveness.
Anti-Buddhism
Buddhism was a curiosity which was confined to the court under the Han dynasty. Only after the fall of the Han in 221 AD and the partition of the empire into rival kingdoms did it begin to expand rapidly. By the fifth century it had flourished to such an extent that it provoked Daoist opposition.
Gu Huan (390–453) was a prominent enemy of Buddhism. In a treatise entitled Yixialun (About Chinese and Barbarians), he argued that Buddhism was inferior to Chinese systems because of its foreign origin:
Buddhism originated in the land of the barbarians; is that not because the customs of the barbarians were originally evil? The Tao originated in China; is that not because the habits of the Chinese were originally good? … Buddhism is not the way for China, Taoism is not the teaching of the western barbarians. Fishes and birds are of different origins, and never have anything in common. How can we have Buddhism and Taoism intermingle to spread to the extremities of the empire?55
The comparison of Buddhism and Daoism to fishes and birds underlined a basic discontinuity between the two religions. The idea of a fundamental difference between the natures of Chinese and Indians had also been put forward by He Chengtian (370–447):
The inborn nature of the Chinese is pure and harmonious, in accordance with altruism and holding to righteousness—that is why the Duke of Chou and Confucius explained to them the doctrine of (original unity of) nature and (differentiation by) practice. Those people of foreign countries are endowed with a hard and obstinate nature, full of evil desires, hatred and violence—that is why Sakyamuni severely restrained them with the five prohibitive rules (for laymen).56
The Daoist work Sanpolun attacked Buddhism even more violently. It contained an unabashed appeal to the elimination of the barbarians:
The barbarians are without benevolence, unyielding, violent and without manners, and are not different from birds and beasts … They are also coarse and uncivilised. Desiring to exterminate their evil progeny, Lao-tzu ordered the males not to take wives, and the females not to take husbands. When the entire country submits to the teaching of Lao-tzu, they will be exterminated as a matter of course.57
These criticisms were formulated during a period of disunity marked by widespread violence and massacres between Chinese and foreign intruders following the conquest of the north of the country in the third century. Most anti-Buddhist arguments were articulated in the south, where a large number of people had taken refuge, escaping from the foreign invasions. Migrations beyond the Yangzi moved the cultural centre south to the newly-acquired territories.
Although this train of thought was limited in its appeal, it reappeared occasionally throughout Chinese history, particularly when the elite’s position was menaced by a foreign creed. The political threat posed by alien invasion or foreign religions challenged the traditional ideal of cultural universalism. Such a threat could generate a defensive reaction leading to the adoption of beliefs clustered around the negative pole of the dominant value-system, as was to reoccur during the Song dynasty.
Song loyalism
The Jurchen empire of the Jin, originally based in Manchuria, invaded the north of China in 1126. The Song were unable to resist the nomad cavalry and had to retreat south of the Yangzi: this was the second partition of the empire between an alien conqueror and the Chinese. The Song retained the Yangzi valley and everything south of it.
The philosophical controversies of the Southern Song (1127–1279) were concerned mainly with the self-preservation of the dynasty by means of adopting conciliatory policies towards the Jin. Discarding the traditional tribute system, officials from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries pursued a realistic and pragmatic foreign policy: neighbouring states were accepted as equals. The realistic appraisal of powerful states, however, did not prevent officials from continuing to despise foreigners as ‘barbarians’. According to Herbert Franke, ‘the principle of reciprocity in diplomatic relations with these states was nothing more than an enforced concession, which was but grudgingly granted because of the Sung’s military weakness.’58 Internal official records and private correspondence remained full of traditional imagery: foreigners were referred to as inferior people, ‘barbarians’, ‘caitiffs’ or simply ‘animals’.59 Although equality with neighbouring states was recognised, Tao Jing-shen has noticed the appearance of a nationalistic imagery which was critical, for instance, of intermarriage with the Khitan (a group from Manchuria), a practice normally favoured by the imperial court.60
Despite the official rhetoric of equality, some uncompromising scholars based their arguments in favour of recovering the lost territories on ‘anti-barbarian’ grounds. Chen Liang (1143–94), a utilitarian theorist who argued against the philosophical speculations of Neo-Confucianists, wanted to restore the north to the control of the Song by driving out the Jin. Chen, like other pragmatic scholars of the Southern Song, searched for practical elements in the literary heritage that could lead to a stronger state and a better society. According to Hoyt Tillman, Chen’s denigration of foreigners was closely related to anti-Buddhist literature.61 His call to expel the barbarian also rested on a belief in environmental determinism. Different environments had different spatial energies (qi), and only China possessed the central and most beneficial one in the cosmos. Foreigners had an inferior energy that perverted the spatial energy of the Central Plain. Chen Liang expounded his ideas to the emperor in a memorandum:
Your obedient servant ventures to suggest that only China (Zhongguo)—the standard energy (zhengqi) of heaven and earth—is that which the heavenly mandate to rule (tianming) endows, where the hearts of the people gather, where the rituals of civilisation cluster, and that which kings and emperors have inherited for a hundred generations. Is it at all conceivable that [such a country] could be violated by the perverse energy (xieqi) of the barbarians? … The pure air of heaven and earth has been restricted and enveloped by the offensive odor of sheep and goats [of nomadic barbarians] and for long has not attained release; it surely must and will vent itself. The hearts of the people and the mandate to rule are certainly not long confinable to a peripheral area of the world.62
Ye Shi (1150–1223), a friend of Chen Liang and author of several utilitarian studies, was even more outspoken about the Jin.63 Ye, like Chen, was attracted by a strand of learning called jingshi, ‘practical statecraft’. This was characterised by a focus on concrete results in statecraft and the practical application of Confucian scholarship. His ‘Postscript’, written shortly before his death, contained several programmes of action against the Jurchen. Ye urged the emperor to issue a proclamation inciting the Northerners to abandon the enemy armies. The Song government should also pay a bounty of five hundred strings of cash for each head of a dead ‘barbarian’ (huren). Decapitation of the enemy would force his withdrawal to the northern steppes. Ye Shi abandoned the traditional notion of barbarians versus Chinese and attempted to see Song-Jin relations in more realistic terms. ‘Within the microcosm of Ye Shih’s mind, Confucian cultural universalism had to be dethroned before militant nationalism could hold sway,’ writes his biographer Winston Wan Lo.64
China was finally united in 1279, but not quite in the way the Southern Song had anticipated. The Mongols, whose invasions had started in 1235, reunified the country by conquest and ruled it until 1368 as the Yuan dynasty. The Mongols divided the population of the empire into four official categories: the Mongols, the semu (‘coloured eyes’, Western and Central Asians), the Hanren (‘Han people’ or Northern Chinese, Khitans, Jurchens and Koreans), and the Nanren (‘Southerners’). Scholars have not been able to agree on the exact meaning of these terms. Whereas some believe that the Mongol hierarchy denotes ethnic differences, others describe it as a reflection of geopolitical divisions.65
Chinese officials were summoned to serve the Mongol administration. Many Confucian scholars participated actively in public service, but some Song loyalists (yimin) withdrew from public life. They sought refuge in Daoist monasteries in south China and refused to serve an alien conqueror. Deng Mu and Ye Lin died in 1305 after starving themselves for two months in response to an imperial edict to serve the government.66
Although Song loyalism was motivated largely by political and moral considerations, Frederick Mote has noticed that ‘an incipient racism made brief appearance, contradicting in its spirit the traditional patronising Chinese attitude toward “barbarian” neighbours.’67 Hu Han (1307–91), a scholar concerned with the reappraisal of the empire’s relations towards foreigners, invoked the traditional criteria of the Chunqiu, based on a strict dichotomy between Chinese and barbarian rule.68 Though he was far from renouncing the myth of the barbarian, his repudiation of the Mongols was close to that of Ye Shi. Hu also insisted on the institution of the lineage (zu) as a system of social regulation within the empire.69
Most remarkable was a bitter denunciation by Zheng Sixiao (1239–1316), whose work was found buried in an iron box near Suzhou during the late Ming period. It described the Mongols as being ‘of a non-human origin’ (fei renlei) and compared them to ‘dogs and goats’.70 The authenticity of this work has been disputed, but it should be remembered that most of the proponents of anti-foreign theories had to write in secret for fear of persecution. The works of these authors have often been lost, if not voluntarily destroyed, resulting in a certain imbalance in the available literary evidence.71
Fang Xiaoru wrote after the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the foundation of the Ming dynasty in 1368. Under the influence of Hu Han, he also made a categorical distinction between Chinese and barbarians: ‘To elevate them to a position above the Chinese people would be to lead the world to animaldom. If a dog or a horse were to occupy a human’s seat, even small boys would be angry and take a club to them… Why? Because the general order would be confused.’72 John Fincher believes that a ‘“racist” strain dominates Fang’s metaphors though culturalism retains a hold on his logic.’73
Fang Xiaoru insisted that the emperor could not be a barbarian. But he also considered Chinese usurpers, of which Wang Mang (first century AD) was a prototype, as ‘barbarians’. His anti-foreign sentiment was still much embedded in a cultural tradition. It was only under the Qing that physical features, real or imagined, became a significant factor in the delineation of the barbarian, bringing about a major departure from the cultural norms which traditionally prevailed.
Anti-Manchuism
In 1644, a Manchu emperor ascended the throne in Beijing and founded the Qing dynasty, which was to last until its collapse in 1911. The conquest of China by this frontier people was met with a wide range of responses. The north was occupied without marked opposition. Hard-pressed by popular revolts and banditry, officials were quick to surrender, some even welcoming the Manchus as the restorers of law and order. These officials were placed in leading positions in an administration that retained most of its Chinese characteristics. In the south, however, resistance against the invader was actively organised by a rebellious gentry. It took the new dynasty several decades to conquer the regions below the Yangzi. Yunnan was captured only in 1682. Thousands of scholars loyal to the previous dynasty were massacred, and many retired from official life after the failure of the rebellion. Among these retired scholars, some developed loyalist ideas characterised by deep hostility to the Manchus as a group of people. Gu Yanwu (1613–82), for instance, refused to serve the new dynasty. He refuted the idea that barbarians could be morally transformed and emphasised the sense of shame in serving a barbarian ruler.74 The strict separation of barbarians and Chinese into distinct spheres, where each could live in accordance with their innate character, was unavoidable.75 Lü Liuliang (1629–83), a scholar from Zhejiang province, entered the Buddhist monkhood after the Manchu conquest. Most of his anti-Manchu ideas were elaborated in commentaries on the Confucian classics. From 1728 to 1732 he became the focus of an official campaign which attempted to suppress literati who continued to insist on ethnic differences between the Manchus and the Chinese.76 Lü was accused of having distorted the classics in order to propagate anti-Manchu views.77 His corpse was disinterred and decapitated by imperial edict in 1733.
The most virulent critic of alien rule was Wang Fuzhi (1619–92). Wang withdrew into seclusion after the failure of an uprising against the Manchus which he had led in Hunan, and devoted most of his energy to writing. He recast traditional ideas concerning environmental determinism and the difference in nature of the barbarian in a theory about the isolated development of population groups. Most of his philosophical system was based on the concept of ether, the creative force of the universe, which agglomerated to assume different forms and images, strictly differentiated by the concept of category (lei):
They accept what is similar and oppose what is different, and thus all things flourish in profusion and form their various categories. Each of these categories has its own organisation. So it is that dew, thunder, frost, and snow all occur at their proper times, and animals, plants, birds, and fish all keep to their own species… Nor can there be between man and beast, plant and tree, any indiscriminate confusion of their respective principles.78
Universal order was based on clear distinctions between categories. This philosophical system had important political implications. If the Chinese did not mark themselves off from the barbarians, the principle of ether would be violated, since they and the barbarians both belonged to different types. Chinese were the ‘ether of Heaven’ (tianqi), whereas the barbarians were ‘impure ether’ (jianqi).79 The vital distinction between purity and impurity was implicit in the title of Wang’s central work, entitled the Yellow Book (Huangshu) (1656): the last chapter placed the colour yellow (huangse), one of the five pure colours, in opposition to mixed colours (jianse).80 China was named the ‘yellow centre’ (huangzhong). Distinctions between Chinese and barbarians could not be blurred. Everything distinguished them:
Chinese and barbarians are born in different places, which brings about the differences in their atmospheres, which in turn are responsible for the differences in their customs. When their customs are different, their understanding and behaviour are all different.81
The purity of categories (qinglei) had to be preserved by strict boundaries (juezhen) around a specific living space (dingwei). The territory of the Chinese was the ‘middle region’ (zhongqu) or ‘divine region’ (shenqu): ‘North of the deserts, west of the Yellow River, south of Annam, east of the sea, the ether is different, people have a different essence, nature produces different things.’82 The first duty of the emperor was to keep the boundaries between categories clear:
Now even the ants have rulers who preside over the territory of their nests and, when red ants or flying white ants penetrate their gates, the ruler organises all his own kind into troops to bite and kill the intruders, drive them far away from the anthill and prevent foreign interference.83
This famous metaphor seems to be unique and should not be viewed as distinct from the wider perspective of Wang’s work.84 The idea of purity, however, pervaded most of his political thought. Its logical consequence was the rejection of the notion of cultural universalism and the exclusion of other population groups from the divine soil of the Middle Kingdom.85
Wang claimed that the Manchus had exploited the emperorship in order to enforce artificially a proximity of foreign peoples with the Chinese. On this point, his historical analysis converged with the discussions of Song Lian and Fang Xiaoru. In fact, ethnological discourse about the barbarians was officially encouraged by the Ming at the dawn of the seventeenth century. In order to understand the moral character of contemporary tribal peoples, their ancestors were studied in the Zuozhuan and the Chunqiu. The repository for such knowledge was the siyiguan (four barbarians’ bureaux) and the dynastic histories.86 The majority of anti-Manchu works were banned by the siku quanshu (Four Treasuries) project under the Qing, but were revived by the reformers and the revolutionaries at the end of the dynasty. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ming loyalists came to be highly regarded by a growing number of young intellectuals. Mao Zedong, for instance, joined a Wang Fuzhi study society in Hunan, his home province.
The idea of group was expressed in categorical terms such as qun, ‘herd’, ‘group’ or ‘flock’, and lei, ‘type’, ‘sort’, ‘class’, and in terms of fictive ancestry like zu, ‘lineage’. Originally, zu had two distinct meanings: a small descent group tied by a blood relationship like the family or the clan; and a larger group of people inhabiting the same territory.87 Later, the term came to express the idea of lineage. Zu, with is strong connotation of horizontal continuity maintained by ancestor worship, was particularly emphasised by Wang. The term could be translated into English as ‘race’, a term similarly dominated by the idea of lineage in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, it continued to be dominated by a Church that regulated every aspect of life. The Bible was read regularly; Adam was considered the ancestor of humankind. John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs (1570), wrote that men were of ‘the race and stocke of Abraham’.88 In the context of the seventeenth century, ‘race’ and zu are etymologically and semantically similar enough to be compared with each other. While Adam’s lineage had spread and populated the three known continents of the world, the Chinese zu was confined to the Middle Kingdom.
Elite attitudes towards outsiders were fraught with ambivalence. On the one hand, a claim to cultural universalism led leading scholars to assert that the barbarian could be ‘sinicised’, or transformed by the beneficial influence of culture and climate. On the other hand, when their sense of cultural superiority was threatened, the elite appealed to categorical differences in nature to expel the barbarian and to seal the country off from the perverting influences of the outside world.
The defensive reaction remained exceptional. Scholars who wrote about categorical differences between the Mongols, the Manchus and the Chinese remained in the minority. And apart from Buddhism, which had spread through China during a period of disorder, no serious challenge had ever affected the elite’s faith in the Confucian classics. It was only in the nineteenth century that the Confucian universe would gradually disintegrate in the face of a complex combination of factors.