Imperialism concepts and historical contexts

Imperialism & China

Both Joseph Esherick and Lydia Liu examine the ways in which western imperialism would have an effect on China by examining the bias and distortion that the imperialist project permitted in previous intellectual and historical inquiry. For Esherick, it is a school of thought centered at Harvard University in the U.S., which would provide a sort of "spin" on the west's imperial adventures in China to redefine the process as one not of exploitation but one "largely beneficial to China" (Esherick 9). For Liu, it is the introduction of ideas of "national character" through the nineteenth century largely by western missionaries (but also by journalists and western imperial administrators) that will have an effect upon the analysis of the Chinese situation by Chinese critics as well. But for both Liu and Esherick, it would seem that the chief concern in addressing the question of western imperialism in China is one of intellectual first principles, as a way of noting that, to a large degree, imperialism would set the terms even for its chief critics.

Esherick wishes to consider the claim made by apologists that western imperialism in China is better understood as a necessary "process of 'modernization'," which hopes to disguise the fact that "imperialism produced economic, social and political disruptions, distortions and instability of such a nature as to make successful modernization of any bourgeois-democratic variety impossible"; instead, he argues, "revolution became the logical alternative" (Esherick 10). Esherick begins with a fairly clear-cut example of the process of justification offered by the west, quoting former U.S. President John Quincy Adams' view of the Opium Wars between Britain and China in 1841, claiming that "opium was not really the cause of the war" (Esherick 10). He then notes that, from a purely economic standpoint, the effect of Mao's revolution caused China to be subject to a U.S. economic blockade "precisely at the time when the United States acquired the ability and the will to make far greater economic inroads into the economies of the Third World than had even before been possible" and thus "prevented imperialism from running its full course" economically (Esherick 10). He then puts his focus purely on economic events, to demonstrate how the west's trade with China would itself alter China's internal domestic situation, concluding ultimately that China's "government, unable to rid the country of the imperialists, ultimately found itself relying on them to collect Customs revenues, help suppress the Taiping and later rebellions, and provide financial assistance in the form of loans" (Esherick 14). Esherick argues that the Harvard intellectuals who characterize the ultimate result as a modernization of China's economy have exalted a "false modernization" which was "hardly successful in fundamentally restructuring China's massive agrarian economy in the direction of foreign trade" but nonetheless "skewed the modern sector of the economy in that direction" with "little or no hope of producing sustained economic growth" (Esherick 14-5).

Lydia Liu focuses not on the economic predations of imperialism, but the psychological or intellectual ones. Where Esherick notes western imperialism's ability to co-opt native Chinese institutions in order to ultimate serve its own single-minded profiteering, Liu notes instead the way that western missionaries like Arthur Smith would import into China a relatively recent intellectual construct, Herder's German Romantic notion of "national character," alien enough to native Chinese intellectual traditions that it required a "neologism" for expression in the Chinese language (Liu 47). She sees this to some degree as implicating the Chinese into "coauthorship" of a hegemonic imperialist myth that would emerge as an internally-conducted "debate on the Chinese national character" (Liu 46-7). She even reveals, somewhat shockingly, the way that a major political reformer like Sun Yat-sen would have to rely on the intellectual categories imposed by western missionaries in order to make his arguments:

Sun Yat-Sen, for instance, found it necessary to speak of China's problems in these terms. The Chinese, he said, are a peace-loving people, but they are servile, ignorant, self-centered, and lacking in the ideal of freedom. The fact that Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen were the foremost critics of Western imperialism of their time and yet still had to subscribe to a discourse that European nations first used to stake their claim to racial superiority points to the central predicament of the Chinese intellectual (Liu 48-9).

Yet as Liu points out, Smith's speculations on the Chinese national character devolved into an argument that "China stands in need of foreign interventions so that the evangelical message of Christian civilization may spread and improve the character of its people" (Liu 57). Liu then examines the way in which this external (and ill-informed) western missionary analysis of China's national character would be adopted and adapted by Chinese critics like Lu Xun, who would provide a "radical rewriting of the missionary discourse in terms of Chinese literary modernism," which at the same time offered its own native critique of national character (Liu 76).