Western Imperialism in China: Esherick and Liu Compared

Introduction: Two Approaches to Imperialism in China

Both Joseph Esherick and Lydia Liu examine the ways in which western imperialism affected China by exposing the bias and distortion that the imperialist project permitted in previous intellectual and historical inquiry. For Esherick, a school of thought centered at a prominent U.S. university provided a kind of "spin" on the west's imperial adventures in China, redefining the process not as exploitation but as something "largely beneficial to China" (Esherick 9). For Liu, it is the introduction of the idea of "national character" — imported largely by western missionaries in the nineteenth century, but also by journalists and imperial administrators — that would shape the analysis of the Chinese situation even among Chinese critics. For both Liu and Esherick, the chief concern in addressing western imperialism in China is one of intellectual first principles: to a large degree, imperialism would set the terms even for its most determined critics.

Esherick on Economic Exploitation and False Modernization

Esherick wishes to challenge the apologists' claim that western imperialism in China is better understood as a necessary "process of 'modernization.'" He argues that this framing disguises 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, "revolution became the logical alternative" (Esherick 10). He begins with a clear-cut example of western justification, 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).

Esherick 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 ever before been possible," and thus "prevented imperialism from running its full course" economically (Esherick 10). Focusing on economic events, he demonstrates how western trade with China altered China's internal domestic situation, concluding 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 intellectuals who characterized the ultimate result as a modernization of China's economy celebrated a "false modernization" that 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 14–15).

Liu on National Character and Missionary Discourse

Lydia Liu focuses not on the economic predations of imperialism but on its psychological and intellectual ones. Where Esherick notes western imperialism's ability to co-opt native Chinese institutions in order to serve its own profiteering, Liu examines how western missionaries like Arthur Smith imported into China a relatively recent intellectual construct: Herder's German Romantic notion of "national character." This idea was alien enough to native Chinese intellectual traditions that it required a "neologism" for expression in the Chinese language (Liu 47). Liu sees this as implicating the Chinese in the "coauthorship" of a hegemonic imperialist myth that would emerge as an internally conducted "debate on the Chinese national character" (Liu 46–47).

Liu reveals, somewhat strikingly, the way that a major political reformer like Sun Yat-sen was compelled to rely on intellectual categories imposed by western missionaries in order to make his arguments. As Liu explains, Smith's speculations on the Chinese national character ultimately devolved into the 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 how this external and ill-informed western missionary analysis of national character was adopted and adapted by Chinese critics like Lu Xun, who offered a "radical rewriting of the missionary discourse in terms of Chinese literary modernism," providing at the same time a native critique of national character (Liu 76).

Conclusion: Deconstructing the Imperial Frame

Liu and Esherick share a concern with the way that imperialism, and the post-colonial situation, has already corrupted any kind of intellectual discourse analyzing the relations between China and the west in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Esherick focuses mainly on how western intellectuals colluded in a process of economic exploitation by providing it with a veneer of analytical respectability. Liu instead examines the condescending missionary discourse of analyzing the Chinese national character in ways that further necessitated the western presence.