3
The late nineteenth century was a period of rapid change in China, characterised by the appearance of a new social structure. The compradors (maiban) were one of the more important social groups to emerge in response to new economic opportunities created through contacts with foreign traders.1 They acted as intermediaries between foreign firms and the domestic market, but they also invested as individual merchants in new sectors of the economy and sometimes managed official enterprises. The compradors performed an important function in the process of economic restructuring. During the decade following the Sino-French War of 1884–85, a number of them started writing on institutional and economic reform, the most notable being Zheng Guanying (1842–1922), He Qi (1859–1914) and Wang Tao (1828–97).2
Alongside the compradors, a new class of native merchants and financiers were building their fortunes through overseas trade; by the end of the nineteenth century they had become shareholders and administrators of foreign registered companies. They encouraged the pursuit of foreign studies and sponsored schools with modern curricula, which in turn supported the spread of liberal professions, as people started training as lawyers, physicians or journalists. Scholars began to participate in economic activities, investing in shares, launching enterprises and managing businesses. Sometimes they united with merchants in setting up capitalist enterprises, from which emerged a new social stratum, called the shenshang, or gentry-merchants.3
The rise to prominence of gentry-merchants was one of the characteristics of the fragmentation of the traditional elite. The growth in the number of scholar-officials after the Taiping war had exacerbated regional disparities, strained social cohesion, affected the exercise of power and diluted the legitimacy of the existing imperial order. New groups emerged from within the traditional elite. The cleavage between old and new social groups, between north and south, as well as between the rural hinterland and the urban centres took on dramatic proportions during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5.
Japan, still widely considered as a vassal of the empire, dealt a heavy blow to the elite’s self-confidence by its overwhelming victory in the war.4 The Japanese triumph was unexpected, even by those who had been aware of China’s shortcomings, and led to an outpouring of patriotic agitation. Memoranda advocating reforms reached the throne after the Shimonoseki peace settlement of 1895. Conservative sectors of the scholarly elite, shocked and angered by the course of events, advocated prolonged warfare and clamoured for the punishment of those responsible for the empire’s defeat.
In this atmosphere of intellectual ferment, study societies (xuehui) founded by the new elite burgeoned in the urban centres and in the southern provinces. Similar to the sociétés de pensée in pre-revolutionary France, study societies published journals and newspapers (bao or xuebao) to spread reformist ideas. Their main concern was national survival. Polemical essays, news translated from the foreign press and educational articles promoted institutional reform and intellectual renewal. Another task of these study societies was the education and mobilisation of the new urban classes. This urban orientation was reflected in the contents of the journals. Apart from politics, some papers focused on industry (Gongshang xuebao), general education (Tongxuebao), science (Gezhi xinhao), or general world news (Cuibao), but also on more popular topics such as literature for children (Qiuwohao), erotic fiction (Qingloubao) and demimondaine gossip (Youxibao). The discourse of race as lineage was closely linked to these reform-oriented journals, the rise of a commercial press, the appearance of reform societies and the spread of literacy.
By addressing a social stratum of readers much broader than the traditional scholarly elite, the reform press contributed to the growth of urban nationalism. Whereas traditional scholars had sought to maintain their monopolistic claim to power by restricting access to the esoteric body of Confucian knowledge, their rivals had to convince the reading public of the necessity of reform by spreading their ideas as widely as possible. Their journals reached a nationwide readership, due partly to the patronage of provincial and prefectural governments. The Shiwubao, for instance, had a circulation of 10,000 in April 1898.5 When the Empress Dowager seized control of the palace in Beijing that same year, many contributors fled abroad or sought safety in foreign concessions in the treaty ports. Thereafter the reform press continued to operate mainly from Japan. Liang Qichao’s Xinmin congbao, for instance, was circulated in China with minimal difficulties, in spite of an imperial ban. Reprints ran to over a dozen. The fact that the reformers were outlawed merely increased their popularity with the reading public.
The reformers drew on new knowledge from the West, but also on traditional ideas, even as they sought to undermine the legitimacy of Confucianism. Orthodox Confucianism existed largely in isolation from the shifts in the social structure described above, giving rise to a socio-political vacuum which competing groups like the reformers—who supported New Text Confucianism—wished to fill.6 New Text ideas, which reemerged in the late eighteenth century after centuries of neglect, were used to promote political reform, to attack imperial orthodoxy, and to construct an image of Confucius as a politically oriented sage-king.
The impact of New Text Confucianism in the late nineteenth century was heightened by the resurgence of a trend in scholarship that was highly pragmatic (shiyong). The so-called statecraft school (jingshi) represented a reaction against certain strains of Confucianism; it emphasised self-improvement and utilitarian statesmanship.
There was also a revival of interest in the classical non-canonical philosophies (zhuzixue) of Xunzi and Mozi. Interest in non-canonical ancient texts tended to be more practical than theoretical, and was yet another aspect of the growing moral and practical activism of late Qing scholars. Part of this trend was a revival of Mahayana Buddhism among lay intellectuals. Buddhist studies were characterised by a pragmatic orientation towards personal salvation that favoured syncretism with other indigenous traditions.
Thus it is important to remember that the reform movement was largely the product of complex interactions between different indigenous trends which had little to do with Western learning. However, the explosion of interest in alternative thought systems during this period made it harder to maintain a stable set of meanings for society as a whole. The fragility of the Confucian order thus facilitated the penetration of foreign ideas. Chaos intruded through the interstices of a symbolic universe in dislocation. People acquired a heightened consciousness of the frailty of meaning. The traditional universe which gave meaning to life was fading away. The deritualisation of Confucian society, like the secularisation of Europe, led to a feeling of alienation and loss of meaning which are so often intrinsic to the modern age.
New Text Confucianism, statecraft scholarship, Mahayana Buddhism and other trends interacted with foreign belief systems and incorporated elements from them. Cultural borrowings, then, should not be explained as passive exposure to ‘foreign influence’; rather, they can be viewed as the active creations of local scholars. There was a decision before the borrowing took place and a choice about what should be borrowed. Foreign ideas were assessed against, and integrated within, a pre-existing framework. From this perspective, any attempt at systematic differentiation between ‘native thought’ and ‘Western influence’ is in vain. More generally, it is undeniable that the rise of Western power and Western thought systems significantly impinged upon and altered the Confucian symbolic universe.
This chapter looks at the discourse of race as lineage in China from 1895 to 1903. It is confined mainly to the works of the reformers, with special emphasis on Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong and Kang Youwei. The year 1903 was a turning point marked by the gradual emergence of a virulent nationalism represented by Sun Yatsen and his revolutionary group. The nationalists will be considered separately in the next chapter, which focuses on the discourse of race as nation, along with the reformers’ contribution to nationalist discourse and social Darwinism.
Although this chapter is confined to the writings of a small number of reformers, it should be noted that this study does not subscribe to the determining influence of individual writers. Reformers like Yan Fu or Liang Qichao exerted more influence than others, but in essence they were the first to articulate the adaptive changes that were possible at the time: they were the shoots that sprang quicker from a common soil. There was, moreover, a relative homogeneity within the ideas proposed by the reformers. As one contemporary reader observed, ‘It was not just that Liang Qichao’s writing was good; it was also that what he said seemed to be just what we had stored in our hearts and wished to express ourselves.’7
Racial war
The racial typology discussed in the previous chapter only attained a more systematic level of theorisation with the reformers. Yan Fu (1853–1921) was the initiator of a discourse of race based on lineage. He came from a respectable scholar-gentry family from Fujian. The death of his father and a reversal of fortune blocked his path to office through the traditional examination system so he opted for a bleak alternative: Western studies. He joined the Fuzhou shipyard school and was sent to England for two years in the 1870s. Yan embarked on a series of translations of English works in the 1890s. He introduced Darwin and Spencer to a Chinese readership in four essays that appeared in 1895 in Zhibao, a new periodical published in Tianjin. In these essays, Yan rejected the traditional distinction between a civilised centre and a barbarian periphery. He disengaged humanity from imperial cosmology to present instead a world divided into a hierarchy of ‘races’:
There are four main races on the earth: the yellow, the white, the brown and the black. The yellow race’s territory is contiguous with Siberia in the north, extending to the South China Sea, bordered by the Pacific and up to the Kunlun mountains in the west. They have prominent cheek-bones, a shallow nose, long eyes and straight hair. The white race dwells west of the salt lakes of the Urals, on the ancient territory conquered by Daqin [Rome]. They have blue eyes and curly hair, a prominent forehead and deep-set eye sockets. On the many islands south of Vietnam, west of Luzon and east of India is the brown race. The black race is the lowest.8 They live in Africa and in the territories around the tropics. They are the so-called black slaves.9
The discourse of race as type was both static and unsystematic. It divided humanity into a vague number of permanent racial types, each of which was thought to have existed unaltered since their appearance on earth. Starting with Yan Fu, the reformers constructed a world which was engaged in a perennial process of evolution. Drawing on the vocabulary of Darwinism, Yan imagined that the ‘yellow race’ was in a perpetual state of war with other ‘races’. Slogans of the survival of the fittest (youshengliebai, ‘the superior win, the inferior lose’) underpinned a bleak vision of racial competition.
Liang Qichao (1873–1929) took Yan Fu’s ideas further. He was a precocious student from a farmer-scholar family in the southern coastal province of Guangdong and passed the provincial examinations at the age of sixteen. He later studied under Kang Youwei (1858–1927). In 1894, after failing to pass the metropolitan examination, he turned to foreign studies instead. In the wake of the defeat of 1895, Liang devoted his energies to study societies and to reform-oriented journals. Most of his articles first appeared in his own periodicals. Liang created a new style of writing, foreshadowing the literary revolution of 1917: he loosened the rigid sentence structure of classical Chinese to reshape it into an elegant yet flexible means of communication. He became a brilliant journalist and exerted a lasting influence on two generations of intellectuals.
For Liang Qichao, ‘races’ had developed side by side until they eventually engaged in struggle: ‘What is history? History is nothing but the account of the development and strife of human races.’10 Races could be divided into two categories: the historical races ( you lishi de zhongzu) and the ahistorical races (fei lishi de zhongzu). The latter were unable to expand and were subjugated by the former, which were more cohesive and united. The red, brown and black ‘races’ were eliminated from the stage, leaving the drama of history to the ‘yellows’ and the ‘whites’. The reformers became both prophets of doom and oracles of might and power. The future would be white or yellow.
The idea of a racial war (zhongzhan) was only partly specific to the reformers. It had a conceptual precedent in the notion of commercial war (shangzhan), which was first propounded in 1862 in the writings of the general and scholar Zeng Guofan (1811–72).11 It soon won the support of high officials and patriotic merchants in the treaty ports as an alternative to building up military strength, which focused on preparing for an armed confrontation (bingzhan). Trade, it was believed, could instead be used as a weapon to resist foreign encroachment. Zheng Guanying, for instance, proposed the fostering of talent, the modernisation of agriculture, the promotion of commerce and the improvement of the merchant’s status in society so as better to compete with foreign traders. This strategy echoed the legalist thinker Shang Yang (d. 338 BC), who had developed a program of gengzhan, or ‘agricultural war’. After Japan’s victory in 1895, however, these efforts to boost commerce and industry in order to compete with foreigners seemed unlikely to succeed. Instead the focus shifted from trade to ‘race’. Many reformers gradually came to adopt a vision of a world order dominated by the ‘white race’ against which the ‘yellow race’ had to fight in order to survive.
But the struggle for survival was nothing new. The nineteenth century was one of the most competitive periods in Chinese history. Demographic pressure and an increasing shortage of resources had led to a decline in social mobility. Intense competition was the norm and shared lineage as well regional bonds were increasingly used to achieve social advancement.
The lineage (zu), or descent group, came into being in its modern form under the Song.12 A type of social organisation generally confined to a village or a neighbourhood where it owned land, schools and an ancestral hall, it instilled a sense of solidarity among its members. Descent lines were recorded in genealogies (zupu), a task that might require the labour of many zu members. The last edition of the genealogy of the Zeng lineage in Hunan, which traced its descent from a prince of the Xia dynasty whose father had reigned in 2218–2168 BC, involved 106 participants. Attempts to establish a blood link with a mythical ancestor were based on the need for social prestige. Genealogies also proved that the lineage was pure and that there had been no intermarriage with any of the peoples that had invaded and ruled the empire.
Considerable friction could arise between zu, nurtured by feelings of rivalry, suspicion and envy. Open hostilities were often the consequence of strife and competition. Harry Lamley, who has analysed such lineage feuds, contends that they were widespread in late imperial China.13 They prevailed throughout the empire, but were more common in the southeast, where the institution of the lineage had grown more powerful than in the north. Armed battles between lineages could involve many thousands of combatants while zu leaders even subsidised paramilitary operations. Terror and wanton destruction of crops and villages were the usual outcome of such feuds, called xiedou, ‘armed battles’.
During the Qing ‘armed battles to separate types’ (fenlei xiedou) became common between Han and Muslims, Hakka (a minority group of southeast China) and Hoklo (Hokkien-speaking Chinese), and Hakka and Punti (native Cantonese). These lineage feuds strove to ‘clear the boundaries’ (qingjie) by ejecting those considered to be outsiders from their respective territories. Such clashes could be extremely violent: a major conflict between the Hakka and Punti in 1856–67 took a toll of 100,000 victims.
The reformers’ understanding of racial war was based on lineage feuds. Their vision was sustained by the semantic similarity between zu as lineage and zu as race. Yizu meant ‘exogenous lineage’ or ‘foreign race’. Reformers often combined zu with zhong as zhongzu, ‘breed of lineage’. Zhong was the central element of a complex terminology; it meant ‘seed’, ‘breed’, or ‘species’, and was used in association with lei, ‘type’, ‘category’, in zhonglei, used to describe ‘races’. Zhong could also be used in connection with a particular colour, like huangzhong or heizhong, ‘yellow race’ or ‘black race’.
‘Race’ was a symbol of fictive biological cohesion capable of overarching regional allegiances and linking lineage loyalties in the face of foreign aggression. As will be demonstrated in the following chapter, race would create nationhood. On the basis of strife between lineages, the reformers projected a vision of global conflict between races. Members of the yellow lineage had to fight against the members of the white lineage. The Yellow Emperor became the common ancestor of all Chinese. The ancestral territories, the divine soil of the Middle Kingdom traditionally associated with the colour yellow, in opposition to the ‘red’ and ‘black’ soils of the barbarians, needed to be defended against the white lineage.
Racial origins
Scholars in China tended to subscribe to polygenism, whereas most thinkers in Europe were absorbed by the Judeo-Christian thesis of monogenism. The Bible depicted Adam and Eve as the ancestors of all the peoples of the world: humanity descended from one (mono) kind (genus). In the nineteenth century, European scholars had to conceptually eliminate Adam in order to be able to reject the idea of a common origin for all of humanity.14
The monogenist thesis was introduced to China by missionaries like Adam Schall in the seventeenth century. The convert Li Zubai (d. 1665) published a history of the Christian church in 1663, in which he presented the Chinese as a branch of Judea that had migrated to the Middle Kingdom. It took Yang Guangxian (1597–1669), a prominent opponent of Christianity, only two years to publish a repudiation of Li’s views:
Schall’s book says that one man and one woman were [created] as the first ancestors of mankind. He was not so bold as to state contemptuously that all the people of the world are the descendants of his religion. According to Li’s book, however, our China is nothing but [an offshoot] of Judea; our ancient Chinese rulers, sages, and teachers were but the descendants of a heterodox sect; and our classics and sage teachings, propounded generation after generation, no more than the remnants of a heterodox religion. Are there no limits to foolishness?15
Within the context of race as culture, Yang Guangxian of course associated blood ties with a particular religion. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the reformers opened up a new debate on human origins with their notion of race. Liang Qichao mentioned the existence of both monogenist (yiyuan) and polygenist (duoyuan) theses in the West, but he never developed the monogenist version, upon which most European racial theories rested. Liang also typified the Hamites and the Semites as two branches of the ‘historical white race’ (as opposed to the ‘historical yellow race’).16 Such misapprehensions were common: the reformers were only just acquainting themselves with foreign systems of thought. But it also indicated an ambivalent tendency to believe in ‘bigenism’ (‘two kinds’, or the belief that humanity descends from two origins): the yellow race was of one origin, the white and black races were of the other.
Bigenism was developed in the Xinmin congbao by Jiang Zhiyou, a close collaborator of Liang Qichao. Jiang’s inquiry into the origins of the Chinese race was dominated by the influence of Terrien de Lacouperie.17 Jiang established a continuity between the Sumero-Akkadians, from whom the Yellow Emperor was descended, and the Finno-Tartar group, linguistically associated with the Mongolians, or the yellow race. The Semites, on the other hand, had overwhelmed the Sumero-Akkadians and engendered the Caucasians, or the white race. These speculations echoed Ernst Haeckel’s theory, presented at the beginning of Jiang’s study: Europeans and Africans descended from the African ape, whereas the Asians descended from the Asian apeman.18
The idea of bigenism was further elaborated in the early twentieth century. Hu Bingxiong, for instance, developed a theory on the different origins of East and West. The Eastern monkey was big and had no tail, whereas the Western monkey was small and more ‘animal-like’.19 At the level of popular culture, too, belief in bigenism may have been common. One missionary, for instance, reported at the end of the nineteenth century how some Chinese believed that foreigners were born entirely white or entirely black; like a litter of puppies, they all came from the same stock.20
Racial extinction
The emphasis on continuity led to fears of extinction. Miezu, the extinction of the lineage, became miezhong, the extinction of the race. Yan Fu was the first to raise the threat of racial extinction: ‘They will enslave us and hinder the development of our spirit and body… The brown and black races constantly waver between life and death, why not the 400 million yellows?’21 For Yan Fu, the ‘black race’ and the ‘brown race’ performed a prophetic function: darker breeds were harbingers of racial decline and exemplified the fate that was in store for China if the empire did not catch up with the white lords of mankind. In America, the reformers argued, the ruthless laws of evolution had already trapped and killed off the ‘red barbarians’ (hongyi).22 Liang Qichao pondered over the future of his country while touring the United States: was it not the destiny of the yellow race to follow the ‘red’ Indians, who would become museum pieces within thirty years?23 During a visit to Hawaii, he reported that the original inhabitants constituted only one-fifteenth of the total population. The aborigines, naive creatures sunk in ignorance, ‘were not even aware of their extinction’.24 The ‘blacks’ in Africa and the ‘browns’ in the Pacific were all enslaved and would ‘disappear from the face of the earth within several decades.’25 Even cultural assimilation was unable to delete the stigma of race. African-Americans, driven by a crude urge for sex, had reproduced themselves at a faster rate than European descendants, or so Liang argued. But industrialisation had outpaced them, leaving them on the fringes of society. Death was looming in the twilight of time: Liang quoted statistics that showed how the number of African-Americans would fall by a third within a century.26
The spectre of racial extinction conveyed a sense of urgency to the message of reform. Repetition further sustained the power of words: race was hammered down the reader’s throat. Appeals for the ‘preservation of the race’ (baozhong) were reiterated ad nauseam in the reformers’ writings. It was even announced as a main goal in the Hunan periodical Xiangxue xinbao.27 It is of course legitimate to question the extent to which the reformers genuinely believed in ‘extinction’; they could be portrayed as a rival coterie of experts who merely constructed a Western threat in order to further their political interests. To ease access to power, the reformers tried to intimidate their opponents with images of racial doom and to persuade their audience of the benefits of their knowledge. Yan Fu, for instance, went to great lengths to counter potential sceptics vis-à-vis the idea of ‘racial extinction’.28 ‘Western thought’, moreover, could be no more than a competing source of knowledge that derived its legitimacy independently from the traditional examination system. It is a common historical phenomenon that the choice of a particular ideology by a group is not based on a genuine interest in its theoretical elements, but stems rather from chance encounter. ‘Western thought’ could have been harnessed by political interests with minimal reference to its contents. The ‘West’ would then be no more than a prestige symbol manipulated by the reformers.
The ‘white peril’ could be an integral part of a rival definition of reality competing for power. Even in this case, reality for the reformers was to a large extent defined in terms of ‘race’. The pervasiveness of racial discourse, moreover, indicates that the ‘white peril’ was not merely a political weapon: racial extinction was a genuine concern shared by many Chinese who felt threatened by the West towards the end of the nineteenth century. Fear of extinction was deeply rooted in the social institution of the lineage.
Racial classification
An important function of racial discourse was categorisation. Liang Qichao added the native Americans to Yan Fu’s classification of four ‘races’. Like most reformers, he divided humanity into five main categories: yellow, white, red, brown and black. In Europe, Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840), a German anatomist considered to be one of the founders of modern anthropology, had also advanced a fivefold classification: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malayan. Most European thinkers, however, propounded a white, yellow and black race when invoking skin colour. This tripartite scheme corresponded to Christian iconography, according to which the descendants of the three sons of Noah—Shem, Japheth and Ham—had populated the three continents. The three continents elaborated by medieval geography were also correlated to the three orders, transformed into three estates in France during the later Middle Ages. Many scholars, however, were more interested in the search for biological continuities than in classifications. Samuel Stanhope Smith, an early American anthropologist, dismissed classifications as a ‘useless labour’ because it was impossible to draw a clear line between the various peoples of the world.29 Doubts over the divisibility of humans led to a multiplicity of classificatory schemes in the West.
The reformers tended to adhere to a division of humanity into five races. Tang Caichang (1867–1900), a well-known reformer who died in an abortive uprising in Hankou in 1900, juxtaposed five continents to five colours with almost poetic concision: ‘Asia, Europe, America, Africa, Australia; yellow, white, red, black, brown’ (Ya Ou Mei Fei Ao ye; huang bai hong hei zong).30 Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), a highly influential scholar and governor-general of Hunan and Hubei, also correlated five races to five continents.31 Tang Caichang’s detailed study, published between November 1897 and February 1898 in the Xiangxue xinbao, mentioned the Gezhi huibian (The Chinese scientific magazine). The Gezhi huibian was an illustrated periodical edited by John Fryer, a translator who cooperated with the missionaries. Here is how Tang presented racial classification in Europe: ‘Westerners divide humanity into five races: the Mongolian race, the Caucasian race, the African race, the Malaysian race and the American Indian race. Their skin colour separates them into yellow, white, black, brown and red peoples.’32 In fact, Fryer had described the Mongolian race as ‘reddish brown’ (zhe) and the American Indians as ‘bronze’ (tong).33 Liang Qichao also discarded foreign systems of classification; he was aware of various schemes which ranged from one to sixty-three ‘races’, but nonetheless adhered to a fivefold division.34
The reformers adopted a traditional pattern based on the symbolic number five. Such wide-ranging elements as colours (wucai), sense organs (wuguan), flavours (wuwei), spices (wuxiang), metals (wujin) and natural elements (wuxing) were integrated into this numerical framework. The Liji mentioned sixty-two different groups of fivefold categories. Most aspects of the physical universe were manipulated to fit into a numerological set. The four seasons were meshed with the five phases.35 During the period of Buddhist expansion in China, a system known as geyi, ‘matching concepts’, reconciled the Mahabhutas, or four elements, with the five Chinese elements.36 Although this system was abandoned during the fifth century, it created an historical precedent that would shape subsequent attempts to incorporate foreign ideas into indigenous patterns.
There were five directions: China was ‘the Middle’, surrounded by the barbarians of the four compass points. A cosmographic view of the world in the Tribute of Yu represented the Imperial Centre (difu) surrounded by five concentric configurations progressively approaching the wastelands (huangfu). Although it may not have directly influenced nineteenth-century intellectuals, the cosmological mapping which it expressed was an integral part of the Confucian symbolic universe. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the past influenced the reformers in a deterministic way. Tradition never affected the ideas of the reformers to the same extent as they determined what tradition should be. The past was manipulated in attempts to organise the present. The reformers subjectively made choices within their tradition; they located events of the past to create a cohesive unity with the present. Order and meaning were reconstructed by subtle alterations to collective memory.
Spatial representations were reformulated through the integration of fictive racial units with arbitrary geographical divisions: five races were correlated to five continents, just as in ancient China the barbarians of the four quarters (siyi) were associated with different symbolic colours.37 This vision was supported by the character zhou, ‘continent surrounded by water’. Its semantic content sanctioned the extension of the traditional world order beyond the four seas that customarily delineated the inhabited territories. China now assumed the central position in Asia, the ‘Middle Continent’. Asia was surrounded by four continents, each belonging to a different tribe. The one to the west, symbolised by the colour white, was expanding. The red, brown and black lineages had already been vanquished.
Racial hierarchy
In the imaginary of the reformers, the white and yellow races were opposed to three darker breeds, doomed to racial extinction by hereditary inadequacy. Liang continuously divided his five races into ‘noble’ (guizhong) and ‘ignoble’ (jianzhong), ‘superior’ (youzhong) and ‘inferior’ (liezhong), ‘historical’ and ‘ahistorical’. Tang Caichang opposed ‘fine’ (liangzhong) to ‘mean’ (jianzhong) races.38 Such binary constructions were part of the categorical thinking prevalent in China since antiquity. Yin and Yang Confucianism supported a dualistic view of the cosmos. Male and female, for instance, were theoretically equivalent, but inequality was built into the gender division: nan gui nü jian, ‘male is noble, female is mean’. Binary classifications were also extrapolated from the social hierarchy of the Qing. Subjects of the empire were divided into two categories: ‘common’, or ‘fine people’ (liangmin) and ‘mean people’ (jianmin). The latter comprised several groups: government servants and attendants; tenant-servants; entertainers (lehu), including prostitutes and actors; beggars, ‘fallen people’ (duomin), ‘boat people’ (jiuxing yuhu) and the Dan (fishers on the south-east coast); slave-servants.39 This line of demarcation was legally abolished by the emperor Yongzheng in 1723, but social discrimination against those classified as ‘mean people’ persisted until the twentieth century.40
The ‘fallen people’ of Shaoxing have been studied by James Cole. These hereditary outcasts were barred from taking part in examinations and registered separately from commoners until 1911. Intermarriage between duomin and liangmin was inconceivable. A native of Shaoxing wrote an essay on the ‘fallen people’ justifying their inferior social position: ‘Among all men there are the respected and the base, the noble and the mean, the great and the little, the gentleman and the small man.’41 His argument was supported by Han Yu’s (768–824) theory of three grades in human nature and by quotations from the Analects. Attempts to classify human beings into categories, similar to the theories on humours developed in medieval Europe, were widespread.42
The reformers projected this hierarchical model upon the rest of the world. Few distinctions were established between the ‘races’ who lingered at the bottom of the hierarchy: they were all ‘mean’. The writer Tang Caichang constructed antithetical couplets using the notion of four races introduced by Yan Fu: ‘Yellow and white are wise, red and black are stupid; yellow and white are rulers, red and black are slaves; yellow and white are united, red and black are scattered.’43 This example illustrates perfectly how categorical thinking was embedded in the very structure of the classical language, with evenly balanced clauses succeeding one another in a rhythmic progression.
While some of these racial categorisations were highly abstract, they were also suffused with vulgar stereotypes that could be found the world over. Australian aborigines, Tang opined, ‘are pitch-black, have emaciated limbs, resemble a macaque and are more repulsive than the orangutan one can see in Malaysia’.44 Other reformers were just as imbued with a sense of superiority. Liang Qichao persistently portrayed other peoples as unworthy: India did not flourish ‘because of the limitations of her race’. He went further: ‘All the black, red and brown races, by the microbes in their blood vessels and their cerebral angle, are inferior to the whites. Only the yellows are not very dissimilar to the whites.’45 Elsewhere he wrote that ‘blacks and browns are lazy and stupid.’46 Darker races were driven only by instinctive desires for food and sex. During his trip through the United States in 1903, Liang thus explained the American lynching phenomenon: ‘The blacks’ behaviour is despicable. They only die without regret if they have succeeded in touching a white woman’s skin. They often lurk in the darkness of woods to rape them. Thereafter these women are murdered so that they will not talk. Nine out of ten cases of lynching are due to this crime.’47 Racial prejudice was often extrapolated from regional stereotypes, which have always been rife in China. Liang Qichao, as Young Lung-chang has demonstrated, contributed several articles on regional differences within China, equally based on sweeping generalisations and absurd prejudices.48
Racial frontiers
In the imaginary of the reformers, China was being pulled apart by the conflicting forces of decline and renewal. It would either merge with the defeated hordes of degenerate breeds or join the ranks of the dominating races. A still loftier ideal beckoned: China could subjugate the white race and rule the world. Liang Qichao declared that the whites were arrogant and disliked hard work.49 The yellows, on the contrary, were humble and diligent; they were the initiators of civilisation, the descendants of the Yellow Emperor.50 The darker races had already been eliminated from the stage of history. China could conquer the globe, and Australia and America would become the colonies of the ruling yellow race.51 Liang took European fears of the ‘yellow peril’ as a promise of future strength: ‘Our Chinese race is the most expansive and vigorous race on the earth. Both England and France are alarmed because our race cannot be restrained and will spread all over the world. They even fear that we will one day overflow and invade Europe.’52 Articles on the ‘yellow peril’, taken from the foreign press, were translated and published in the reformers’ main journal.53
The ‘white race’, however, remained a rather ill-defined category. Throughout his voluminous writings, Liang Qichao endeavoured to categorise it further. In the first issue of his ‘New Citizen’, for instance, he divided Europe into Latin, Slavonic and Teutonic ‘races’. The Latins had reached their peak during the Middle Ages, but had perished under the Teutons, who had dominated Europe since the fall of Rome. The Teutons were further subdivided into Germans and Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons had proved to be the only ‘superior race’: they occupied a quarter of the globe and were present on all the five continents.54
Classifications and charts figured prominently in Liang’s work, lending an aura of scientific authenticity to his racial message. A more sophisticated analysis led him to distinguish between a Hamitic, a Semitic and an Aryan race. The Hamitic and Semitic races, assumed to be branches of the white race, had had their period of glory in ancient Europe, but only the Aryan race—comprising the Latin, Celtic, Teutonic and Slavonic branches—had contributed to modern European civilisation. Through an inexorable process of struggle for survival, Liang claimed, the Teutons had emerged in recent times as the dominant power.55
The primary function of these articles was to channel information about other peoples to Chinese readers, many of whom were discovering that the West encompassed many different life-styles, with values and norms widely at variance from those of their own country. But all these efforts to dissect the ‘white race’ also served to belittle the empire’s sole rival for supremacy. The notion of a ‘white race’ was narrowed down to the Anglo-Saxons; all other Westerners somehow receded into the background.
Racial frontiers could also be reassigned when it came to the ‘yellow race’. The Vietnamese were usually classified as ‘brown’, but during their struggle against the French they suddenly found themselves described as ‘real yellows’ who would ‘never allow themselves to become meat on the white race’s chopping block’. They would fight the French devils (fagui) until not one single ‘hirsute, ash-eyed white man’ remained in their country—or so Liang proclaimed.56 The Filipinos, normally described as ‘brown’, were greeted as the ‘spearhead of the yellow race’s fight against the white race’ during their struggle against the United States in 1898.57 Japan’s success in emulating the West was ascribed to the fact that its race had ‘originated from China’.58
The discourse of race found institutional support after Liang’s arrival in Japan in late 1898. After the coup d’état which abruptly ended the Hundred Days, the three months during which the emperor appointed reformers to official positions in an attempt to modernise the country, he escaped with the help of pan-Asianists Hirayama Shū and Yamada Ryōsei.59 Some of Liang’s closest friends in Japan were linked to pan-Asianist associations, for instance Miyasaki Torazō and Kashiwabara Bantarō. Pan-Asianism was based on the notion of a ‘common race’ (dōshu or tongzhong) and a shared cultural heritage (dōbun or tongwen), uniting Asia in its fight for independence from the West. Liang introduced pan-Asianism in the first issue of his Qingyibao (Upright discussions), which he started two months after his arrival in Japan. The aims of this journal included the ‘exchange of information between China and Japan and the establishment of friendship’. He also proposed to ‘expound the learning of East Asia in order to preserve Asia’s essence (yacui).’60 Japan was acclaimed as China’s ‘fraternal neighbour, as closely related as lips to teeth’, an old saying which became proverbial after it was used by the last Jin emperor in a warning to the Song emperor against the Mongols.61 Pan-Asianism was compatible with Liang’s longing for a new global world order, a notion typical of intellectuals emerging from a Confucian ideal of universal harmony. It did not, however, exert a lasting influence on him, as he soon realised that this utopian vision was subordinated to Japan’s military ambitions overseas. After little more than a year, on the occasion of the hundredth issue of the Qingyibao, the principles of pan-Asianism were quietly dropped.62 A subsequent analysis of Asia’s racial composition would only confer the title of ‘superior yellow race’ on China; other Asians were categorised as members of an ‘inferior yellow race’.63
Liang also rejected the Western notion of a ‘Mongolian race’ and excluded China’s minorities from the ‘genuine yellows’. He distinguished ten different ‘races’ in China, six of which he judged to be relatively important. The Miao were described as China’s aborigines, similar to America’s ‘reds’ or Australia’s ‘blacks’. The comparison was symbolic: the Miao were doomed to rapid extinction and deserved no further attention. In contrast to his dismissal of the Miao, there followed a passionate panegyric to the Han ‘race’. They were the initiators of a civilisation whose benign influence extended to the whole of Asia. They were the ones who could claim divine origin and were illustrious all over the world. The Tibetan ‘race’, found in Tibet and Burma, were the descendants of the Jiang (during the Yin and Zhou dynasties), the Yue (during the Qin and Han dynasties), the Tufan (during the Tang dynasty) and the Xixia (during the Song dynasty). The Mongols, living in inner and outer Mongolia, were renowned for their military prowess and had founded the Yuan dynasty. The Xiongnu lived in Middle Asia and in the Xinjiang area; they also included several ancient barbarian tribes. The Tungus—the founders of the Qing dynasty—had originated in north Korea and spread over the Heilongjiang region. Although Liang found it difficult to determine the precise origins of a race, he concluded that the ‘gigantic Han race’ was quite unique and by no means comparable to China’s minorities.64 He declared that the terms ‘Han race’ and ‘yellow race’ were synonymous.65 The racial frontiers of the ‘genuine yellows’ did not extend beyond the Han.
Racial assimilation
Intermarriage between select races was seen as a key to reform. In 1898 Yi Nai actively advocated racial fusion (hezhong) as a means of strengthening the Qing. Although he anticipated intermarriage with the white race, unions with the inferior ‘black’ and ‘red’ races were to be abjured.66 The diplomat Wu Tingfang also pronounced himself in favour of mixed unions: ‘There is no doubt that mixed marriages between the white and the yellow races will be productive of good on both sides.’67 Tang Caichang advocated blending the white and yellow races,68 for it was only through ‘racial communication’ (tongzhong) that China would flourish again. He advanced ten arguments in support of intermarriage:
(1)The exuberance of flowers and plants was the result of their original union. Giant prehistoric trees that had failed to merge with other varieties had disappeared after natural catastrophes.
(2)Bees and butterflies were the matchmakers of nature. They contributed to the blooming of flowers by transmitting pollen from one variety to the other.
(3)Zoologists had proved that the nature of animals could be enhanced by environmental and dietary change. In the Age of Great Peace, the world would be open to exchange, the mean would be ennobled, and the unruly would become tractable. In times of trouble, people lived in insularity, devoured by envy and hatred for different people, debased by an evil nature.
(4)In ancient times, marriage within the lineage had been prohibited. This principle was in accordance with the idea of racial exchange. Only people isolated by high mountains and deep valleys could not flourish and quickly disappeared.
(5)Between the five continents, there was a general flow of political, artistic, military and economic exchanges. Why would racial exchange not follow?
(6)The Japanese recognised the strength of the European race and the weakness of the Asian race: their government sanctioned the practice of intermarriage.
(7)In Hong Kong, Singapore and the Pacific islands, intermarriage between Chinese and foreigners had produced offspring of unparalleled intelligence and strength.
(8)Although England, Russia, France and Germany all maintained national borders and nurtured mutual distrust, their citizens were free to intermarry.
(9)Buddhism believed in a pervading spirit uniting all living creatures.
(10)Intermarriage was not confined to the treaty ports alone: even several high officials had taken Western wives.
Tang drew upon botany, zoology, history and even Buddhism in his defence of race contact. Thus far, however, his arguments lacked an essential element: an indigenous cultural trait on which the idea of racial exchange could be grafted. Tang continued his dissertation by opposing two foreign bodies of learning. On the one hand, proponents of evolution believed in the theory of natural selection and the elimination of the unfit. Exponents of physiology, on the other, considered that with the progress of medicine and science, the weak could be cured and the evil transformed. Evolution corresponded to Xunzi’s theory of man’s evil nature. Physiology was compared to Mencius’ teachings on the innate goodness of man. Whereas Xunzi upheld justice (yi), Mencius supported humanity (ren). Only the latter, however, suited the ‘One World’ (datong), an age of equality in which racial communication would inevitably follow other forms of communication. Mencius sanctioned racial amalgamation: only if the white and yellow races merged would the strength of the yellow race be enhanced, in accordance with Confucianism.
Kang Youwei, perhaps the most acclaimed Chinese philosopher of the last hundred years, expounded a utopian vision of the world in his Datongshu, or ‘One World’, completed in 1902. Kang was an outstanding classical scholar from an influential gentry family near Canton. Although many members of his lineage were traditional scholars, some rose to official positions through military service; others engaged in trade, and one of his uncles applied his talents to industrial enterprise. Kang Youwei became the leader of the reform movement and played a key role during the Hundred Days in 1898.
In his Datongshu, Kang projected an idealised view of the world in which distinctions based on race, class, nation, wealth and gender would disappear. He called for an end to property and the family in the interests of a cosmopolitan, equalitarian future. He also argued for the elimination of racial differences in order to achieve universal harmony. He proposed to transform what he viewed as darker and hence inferior races through dietary change, intermarriage, migration and sterilisation.
Dietary change consisted of replacing ‘indigestible insects, grass’ and other raw ingredients, on which Africans were thought to subsist, by properly cooked food. If several generations of Africans were given a Chinese diet, they would lose their fishy smell (xingchou).69 Intermarriage was more difficult to realise. The appearance of Africans, ‘with their iron faces, silver teeth, slanting jaws like a pig, front view like an ox, full breasts and unkempt hair, their hands and feet dark black, stupid (chun) like sheep or swine’, was simply too frightening.70 No refined white woman would ever agree to mate with a ‘monstrously ugly black’.71 Whites and yellows who married Africans as a contribution to the purification of mankind should therefore be awarded a medal with the inscription ‘Improver of the Race’.72
The migration method was founded on environmental determinism. Kang had already observed that British people born in India had a ‘yellow-bluish’ (huanglan) hue, whereas Chinese born in Europe or in the United States evidenced a distinctive white complexion. Elderly Africans should be shipped to Canada, South America and Brazil, the best of the Africans being relocated in Europe.73
The last method recommended by Kang was sterilisation. ‘Browns or blacks whose characteristics are too bad, whose physical appearance is too ugly or who carry a disease should be given a sterilising medication to stop the perpetuation of their race.’74
Some racial theorists in Europe proposed segregation or even extermination, whereas Kang prescribed global unity through racial assimilation. He transformed the imperial concept of cultural absorption into a vision of physical amalgamation. Europe’s technological advances had paved the way to the discovery of the world, but Westerners soon realised that they were demographically in the minority. In the tortured imagination of some racist thinkers, the West was confronted with hordes of uncivilised savages who would overflow and destroy their superior civilisation. China had less to fear. The reformers pointed to its huge land mass and vast population. They could safely surmise that yellow would emerge as the dominant type after an amalgamation of the races, much as Mao Zedong, half a century later, would contemplate atomic war, firmly believing that China would prevail by sheer weight of numbers.
Geographic determinism was important not only for Kang Youwei’s migration plans. Xue Fucheng (1838–94), a high official and respected expert on foreign affairs often quoted by the reformers, stopped in Southeast Asia on his way to Europe, where he served as ambassador in several countries from 1890 until his death four years later. His diary was an eye-witness report: ‘I have seen the aborigines of Saigon, Singapore and Ceylon. They are ugly and savage, similar to deer and swine. The various people from Vietnam, Burma, India, Malaya and Arabia are all black-faced, stocky and boorish. How could they be compared with the Chinese refinement and elegance and the Europeans’ whiteness and tall stature?’75 Climate, Xue surmised, was responsible for this racial inequality. Below the ‘red line’, or equator, the heat drained them of their jingqi,76 or vital essence. ‘In the tropics, people propagate but have no spirit.’77 Only in the temperate zones could jingqi be congealed and accumulated, setting the ‘whites’ and ‘yellows’ apart from the other races. Geographic determinism also helped Liang Qichao to explain the irreversible inferiority of the darker races. Africans lived in tropical regions: they had a ‘muddled mind’ and ‘did not think of progress’.78
In any event, despite all the talk about intermarriage, attitudes remained ambivalent, in particular among the elite. As late as 1910 students abroad were expressly commanded not to approach foreign women. Marriage with an alien female, it was claimed, would only lead to the abandonment of the course of study, to a waste of money, and to national subjugation.79 Official disgrace and public opprobrium continued to meet those who were seen to betray their country by marrying a foreigner. Lu Zhengxiang (1871–1949), a future Minister of Foreign Affairs, married a Belgian girl in 1899 despite the formal disapproval of his superiors. His wife was forbidden from attending any official function for almost a decade.80 Foreign husbands, observed Jerome Ch’en, provoked an ‘acid feeling’ among some men, who sneered at women married to foreigners and would even write threatening letters urging them to stay ‘pure’.81
‘Western influence’
As was underlined in the introduction to this chapter, the reformers interacted mainly with indigenous intellectual trends and had only occasional contact with foreign systems of thought. Liang Qichao’s main source of inspiration was the Yinghuan zhilüe (Brief account of the maritime circuit), which he bought in Shanghai in 1894 after having failed the metropolitan examination. Only then did he ‘start to discover that there were five continents and various nations’.82 The Yinghuan zhilüe, introduced in the preceding chapter, was a world geography compiled from various sources by the New Text Confucianist Xu Jiyu in 1848. It presented Africa as a chaotic continent, inhabited by backward barbarians.
Tang Caichang also drew upon the Yinghuan zhilüe in his description of Africa.83 He introduced his ‘Study of the Races of the World’ with a summary of Yan Fu’s essays.84 Tang’s study was a compilation of quotations taken from Chinese and Western sources. Altogether, he cited thirty-three different sources, of which eighteen were Chinese.85 Besides Xu Jiyu, the most often quoted was the Wanguo shiji (‘A World History’) by the Japanese Okamoto Kansuke, translated in the 1890s. Of the fifteen Western publications cited, all translated by missionaries, eleven dealt exclusively with European history. Finally, of a total of ninety-seven quotations, only twenty-seven were derived from Western sources.
Robert Mackenzie’s The Nineteenth Century: A History was often invoked by the reformers. Translated by Timothy Richard in 1894, it became popular among the new elites and was included in a selection of foreign books that Liang Qichao strongly recommended to students of the West.86 Mackenzie’s history was a hymn to the benefits of progress. The Nineteenth Century depicted a state of barbarism and ignorance that was vanquished by a reign of enlightenment and democracy. Within this universe, missionaries spent years of excruciating effort attempting to undermine heathenism and reclaim the world to God. A typical example was the Sandwich Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. Before the arrival of Christianity and civilisation, the inhabitants had ‘sunk to the lowest depth of degradation. They fed on raw fish and the flesh of dogs… The family relation was unknown. Licentiousness was without limit or restraint of shame… Population was rapidly diminishing under the wasting influence of the vices which prevailed.’87 With Christianity, however, the picture changed drastically. ‘The people became quiet, orderly, industrious… [Christianity was] bringing in its train security to life and property, peace, industry, and progress; raising the wasteful and treacherous savage to the dignity of a God-fearing, law-abiding citizen, who bears fairly his contribution to the common welfare of the human family.’88 The reformers blotted out the whole process of progress which had elevated the ‘savage’ to ‘civilisation’, denying that the ‘black race’ could possibly be part of the ‘human family’. Notions such as ‘equality among nations’, ‘human family’ or ‘coexistence of civilisations’ were discarded. There had been one world, and the world would be one.
Another example is William A. P. Martin’s translation of Henry Wheaton’s standard work, Elements of International Law, first published in 1863. This treatise was used by Tang Caichang and other reformers in support of their views about the empire’s minorities, who were considered to have no culture or religion and thus could not be regarded as equal to the ‘civilised races’. By quoting Wheaton, these opinions were given a pseudo-legal sanction. Yet the reformers considerably distorted the Elements by citing the only sentence concerning ‘savages’ in a 500-page treatise: ‘A state is also distinguished from an unsettled horde of wandering savages not yet formed into a civil society.’89 Kang Youwei had gained fame by drawing on his scholarship to reinterpret the classics: he attempted to demonstrate that Confucius had never resisted social change and that Confucianism was compatible with reform. Equally, the reformers manipulated foreign sources in their efforts to reconstruct an alternative symbolic universe.
Extensive exposure to racial discrimination in Europe or the United States seemed to confirm, rather than undermine, belief in racial categories. In a chapter entitled ‘California, 1882–1885: Confrontation with Racial Antagonism’, the historian Noriko Kamachi has convincingly demonstrated how the reformer Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) developed an evolutionary worldview of racial conflict after having experienced racial discrimination in the United States. Huang was shocked by the violence of anti-Chinese sentiment and felt humiliated by the lowly position of the Chinese in California. He would later express his pride in his country in an aggressive military march with the words: ‘Harmony among the five continents cannot be realised. Blacks and reds were humiliated by the whites. Now the whites are afraid of the “yellow peril”. What is the yellow peril? It is we, we Asians! We! We! We!’90 Belief in universal harmony was all too easily inverted into a vision of racial conflagration.
Huang, however, had developed racial theories even before his arrival in the United States. In Japan, he used the phrase ‘same culture same race’ (tongwen tongzhong) to construct a fictive sense of blood kinship between China and his host country. Huang insisted that the Japanese were descendants of the Han, and reproached them for neglecting to mention their Chinese ancestry.91 Moreover, before his arrival in the United States, Huang was already writing about the ‘black slaves’ and the ‘yellow race’ being endangered by the mounting white tide.92 His ideas seemed to be in harmony with those of Okamoto Kansuke, the author of a world history that was popular with the reformers in the 1890s: ‘There are five human races: the yellow, the white, the black, the purple and the copper. Their origins are all different.’93 In any event, did racial discrimination oblige Huang to denigrate what he called the ‘stupid black slaves’, or had the ‘black race’ never been part of his ideal of universal harmony (datong)?94 At the age of twenty, still immersed in a sinocentric universe, a young Huang Zunxian wrote that ‘all men are fashioned out of yellow mud’. At fifty-four, having discovered the world, he wondered ‘Why is the yellow race not the only race in the world?’95
Alternatives
The traditional elite tried to maintain its power by discrediting the reformers’ competing body of knowledge. For scholar-officials working in the Qing government, ‘race’ was a taboo concept, as it implied a degree of relativism that undermined the very base of their sinocentric universe.96 In mid-1898 a group of conservatives drew up a seven-point ‘Scholars’ Covenant’ criticising the reformers. The sixth point lambasted the vitiated language of Kang Youwei’s followers and denounced the use of terms like ‘yellow race’ (huangzhong) and ‘white race’ (baizhong).97 Ye Dehui also vehemently rebuked the reformers’ proposals for racial amalgamation, which he could only describe as the ‘wild barking of mad dogs’.98 The notion of race remained the prerogative of the reformers.
The reformers viewed race as the extension of a common patrilineal line of descent. Baozhong, or the ‘preservation of the race’, encapsulated contemporary anxieties and legitimised the need for reform. Confucianism, however, continued to exert an influence as a moral faith. Baojiao, or the ‘preservation of the faith’, was an attempt to promote Confucianism as a national religion by giving it institutional legitimation. Despite the many attacks on the traditional worldview, Confucianism remained a powerful form of identity. Baohuang, or the ‘preservation of the emperor’, was also upheld by the reformers in their promotion of a constitutional monarchy. Most people, however, wanted neither Confucius nor Emperor. The revolutionaries would reject both in order to focus on the preservation of the race.