How did a small island nation off the coast of Europe come to play such an oversized role in the making of modern China? That question must have occurred to both Prime Minister David Cameron and Chairman Xi Jin Ping, perhaps with a touch of irony, when they reviewed the honor guard in London in 2015, under a canopy of Union Jacks and red banners. Kerry Brown, who has written numerous books about both Chinese history and its current leadership, provides his answer through an engaging and wide ranging retelling of the two countries’ entwinement.
Although trade and political interests color relations between any two nations, China’s distance from Britain ensured that the islanders initially considered only the former as the basis for their relations with the Celestial realm. Kerry shows how the radically different government, commercial and judicial systems made it almost impossible for the two countries to engage in trade.
The mandarins, for example, practiced the policy of killing the chicken to scare the monkeys. To keep the unruly mariners under control, occasionally they executed an English Jack Tar. The British, with their views on impartial justice, viewed such acts with horror. A muscular intervention in China’s political system appeared to be an unavoidable imperative for them.
China in the 19th century resembled that great ship of state, described by Britain’s first official emissary George McCartney, as imposing, but rotting within. After the titanic efforts of the great Qing emperors, Kangxi and Qianlong, to secure China’s western frontiers, the empire entered into an enervating era of stasis. China’s statesmen, acting on the unfathomable will of the invisible Daoguang emperor, who rarely left the Inner Palace, sought only to maintain everything as it had been before. No senior official had a mandate to cope with change.
The British, on the other hand, under the jingoistic prodding of their prime minister Lord Palmerston, not only sought major changes to the Qing system of trade, but countenanced terrible acts of violence to force their point. Brown points out that many voices in Britain arose against Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy, and even the idea of free trade in opium— “this black and envenomed poison”, as one Scottish MP called it—was abhorrent to a large portion of British public opinion. (Imagine how one would feel if the Mexican cartels invaded the USA in order to sell Fentanyl freely.) Britain’s influence in China, to cite Chairman Mao’s dictum, grew out of the barrel of a gun. Lord Palmerston expressed the same idea more elegantly, “the Chinese should be aware of the nature and the extent of Her Majesty’s naval power.” By the end of the 19th century Great Britain was China’s biggest trading partner and biggest investor, a legacy that still infuses the views of each side toward one another.
Brown emphasizes that Britain’s effort to open China to trade, in another echo of contemporary experiences with China’s entry in the WTO, did not pay off. Despite two costly wars and the creation of a quasi-imperial infrastructure of consuls and free ports across China, Britain’s trade with China actually declined in the 1860s, even though Britain remained the largest trading partner. The contradictions dogging Britain’s policy to China, far from leveraging the islanders’ famous pragmatism, made them unable either to fully exploit their commercial advantages, or to exercise political control. To make matters worse, the British could not escape from the illusion that their ways were not only superior but historically inevitable. As late as 1992, when Chris Patten arrived as the new governor of Hong Kong, the feeling that British values around individual rights, rule of law and electoral democracy would eventually prevail in China, continued to animate and handicap British policy.
Brown enjoys letting the reader draw parallels between the somber side of Britain’s history with China and current clashes, where the boot is decidedly on the other foot. The Chinese do not take kindly to lectures on human rights from the nation that sacked Beijing and Tianjin. Brown notes that India’s tea plantations originated from “one of the most dramatic acts of intellectual property theft of all time.”
Brown’s thoughtful, four century-long narrative is enlivened by thumbnail sketches of the many genial Britons that made their careers in Chinas, like Robert Hart of the Imperial Maritime Customs Services, Thomas Wade, of the Wade-Giles transcription system, and the Scottish missionary James Legge. Indeed, this is a history where people matter, as the two nations became increasingly interconnected on a personal level. Oxford and Cambridge named old China hands as professors of Chinese. Lascars from China serving on British boats opened restaurants in London and Liverpool. The Qing reluctantly opened an embassy on London’s Portland Place, where the PRC’s ambassador lives today. Relations between the two countries were so important, that by the late 20th century both Prime Ministers Edmond Heath and Tony Blair both sought to use relations with China to boost their domestic positions. Margret Thatcher grudgingly admired Deng Xiaoping.
The importance attached to Heath, Thatcher and Blair to China inspired Brown’s choice of the book’s title: The Great Reversal. By 2001, the once-ailing Chinese economy caught up with that of Britain, and by 2006 became two and one-half times bigger. Tony Blair hailed a golden age of Anglo-Chinese relations, hoping to leverage Britain’s deep ties to China. Unlike the USA, Britain had maintained (or at least tried to maintain) diplomatic relations with the PRC throughout the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Thereafter Hong Kong-based companies like HSBC, Swire and Jardine Mathieson, quickly revived British business on the mainland. Despite this, the golden age has been short-lived. Britain, along with the USA and the European Union regard China warily, rather as the Qing government regarded the British traders in the 18th century. Perhaps that is the real great reversal. One hopes that China will not wind up sending gunboats or proconsuls to preside over a fragmented and declining Britain, if one were to take Brown’s thesis too far.