In China, the fear of chaos and the desire for order come first
This summer, China is on everyone’s radar. News reports and water-cooler conversations cover Hong Kong, AI, Taiwan and the human rights situation in Xinjiang. President Biden visited Europe and Britain, perhaps in an effort to strengthen the western alliance as a new Cold War looms. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Brexit, Boris Johnson’s “Global Britain” courts the Pacific zone, in the face of warnings from China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats. As always this state of affairs has precedents in history. Let me take you back to the time Britain genuinely was global – when it ruled an “empire on which the sun never sets”.
In 1793, the man who coined that phrase, Lord George Macartney, led the first delegation from Britain to China. After the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, geopolitics were shifting at alarming speed. Expanding their power in India, the British now hoped to open up trade with the world’s oldest civilisation and biggest national economy. With them they carried a cargo of instruments, clocks, Lancashire textiles, chandeliers, guns, telescopes, Wedgwood dishes, a model battleship and two “mechanical chairs”. This display of “modern” arts and manufactures was intended to show Britain’s wealth and ingenuity – and the strength of its ideas.
The senior mandarins chose their gifts very carefully, too, presenting exquisitely woven silks, a magnificent dragon robe, carved lacquer boxes and precious jade sceptres, all displaying China’s glorious cultural heritage, its wealth and its enduring civilisational values.
The Qianlong emperor told the British that his job was to “think of his ancestors, and make it the grand object of his life to advance the happiness of his people”. Macartney, meanwhile, wanted a special trade deal, a permanent embassy and an offshore treaty port (as Hong Kong would become) in the belief that modern commercial relations would be good for the future of China as well as cementing Britain’s global pre-eminence .
Yet the mission was a failure. China was self-sufficient in all things, Qianlong said, and needed nothing from the British. No trading concessions were offered, and Macartney came away with the conviction that China was a civilisation no longer in touch with the modern world.
I’m still struck by the relevance of this story, which is not only about trade but, really, about ideas. Macartney believed that modernity – as defined by the European Enlightenment – was the future path, and that China was in terminal decline, like “an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these 150 years past… but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom”.
But she has been. After 1949, western China-watchers noted the uncanny way the Communist Party had replicated the bureaucratic tyrannies of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Under Mao, there were huge disasters – the Great Famine of 1959–61, the Cultural Revolution – but his idea of permanent revolution was not the “Chinese way” as Deng Xiaoping saw it just over 40 years ago, when he launched the policy of “reform and opening up” that transformed China. Now a superpower, on track to be the world’s biggest economy, today’s Leninist authoritarian bureaucracy is presented by President Xi Jinping as the embodiment of the “Chinese way”, and polls suggest it is seen as legitimate by most Chinese people. Qianlong would, perhaps, approve.
It may be too early to tell. The rhythms of Chinese history are slower than those of other cultures; the dust is only just settling on the Chinese Revolution, and party rule will end at some point. But those exchanges in 1793 offered insights into the Chinese mind even now. For all its astounding creativity, Chinese history is marked by periods of violence and breakdown. The fear of chaos and the desire for order come first: the collective, not the individual. In 1793, Qianlong said that the most important thing was maintaining the “way” handed down by the ancestors. His gifts symbolised the values of a country the British would struggle to understand for the next two centuries, and still provide a key to understanding the Chinese way of seeing and thinking today.