5.2 THE SELF-STRENGTHENING MOVEMENT
Mid-nineteenth-century Chinese reformers recognized that more needed to be done than just translate Western legal texts. They felt that unless China was strong enough to negotiate as an equal with Western powers, it would continue to be exploited.
Indeed, until China could successfully insist that existing treaties - to which China had been forced to accede at gunpoint - be revised, its interests could not be protected. This group of men has come to be called the “self-strengthening movement (ziqiang yundong),” and I now turn to the partial development of rights language within their writings. For simplicity’s sake, I have chosen to focus on a single individual, Li Hongzhang. We will see that he pays considerable attention to the notion of iiUquanf a traditional concept which in his hands begins to be transformed from “economic control” toward something rather close to “economic rights.”[89]Before I turn to Li, let me briefly note the general connection that existed between the self-strengtheners and statecraft thought. Readers will recall that thinkers sympathetic to statecraft ideals played important roles in the Confucian discourse about the fulfillment of individual desires that I discussed in the last chapter. Statecraft thinkers were also direct sources of inspiration to all those committed to China’s selfstrengthening. Given the manifest technological advantages enjoyed by Western powers, one of the central tenets of self-strengthening was promoting practical, technological development. Such matters had long been advocated by statecraft thinkers, who justified these pragmatic pursuits through the ways they fulfilled the people’s (legitimate) desires. Under the influence of texts like the General Laws, certain of the self- strengtheners started to talk about the reasons for their policies in new ways, but these changes represent only incremental steps from their starting point.[90]
Li Hongzhang (1823-1901) rose to prominence during the massive Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from 1850 to 1864 and which at its height threatened to topple the Qing dynasty.
Li distinguished himself as both administrator and general and was appointed governor-general of the province of Jiangsu in 1862. At that time he moved to Shanghai, from where he directed the province’s defense against the rebels and where he encountered the technology and power of Western nations for the first time. Li sought to learn all he could about the sources of Western power and the intentions of Western nations. Throughout the twenty-five years that Li subsequently served as imperial commissioner of trade and foreign relations for North China, he was a leader of the selfstrengthening movement.[91]In 1867, proponents of self-strengthening held a series of discussions in preparation for negotiations with Western powers that aimed at revising current treaties. David Pong writes that
Of the seventeen officials involved in the deliberations, five used the term quan, and of [this] group, three did so to mean preserving China’s authority or control over specific matters, while Chonghou and Li Hongzhang used it to convey the notion of inherent rights as well.... Thus from its original meaning of China having the ultimate say in protecting its traditional socio-political order from foreign encroachment - a defensive position - the concept of quan, and especially its derivation, liquan, had come to connote as well China’s right to pursue its own course of development. [Pong 1985, pp. 34-5]
In short, Pong argues that in these discussions, we can see two meanings of “quan” one more traditional and one the new idea of “inherent rights.”
In the last section I spent some time reviewing the history of the terms “quan” and “quanli”; before I move on, I want to do the same for “liquan” which Pong rightly identifies as at the core of the self- strengtheners’ concerns. As I said earlier, “li” means benefit or profit, while the basic meaning of “quan” is power. The words “li” and “quan” occur together in classical-era texts, though as we saw earlier with “quanli,” it is often difficult to say whether they are intended as a compound term or as two separate terms.[92] Post-classical texts, however, clearly use “liquan” as a compound term, meaning something like “economic control.” To cite just one example, the seventeenth-century official and scholar Han Tan (1637-1704) made the following comment about monetary policy: “The less money coined by the government, the more the people will use their own counterfeit money to benefit themselves.
Economic control (Iiquan) will be dispersed among the masses.”[93]Han’s statement is interesting because it makes clear that liquan is a matter of control or power rather than genuine authority. The government’s loss of control over the money supply does not mean that counterfeiters are somehow legitimate. There is no temptation, therefore, to see Han’s comment as about rights: In particular, he is not asserting that through government inaction, the people have gained economic rights. If Li Hongzhang comes to use “liquan” to mean economic rights, as Pong believes, then this is indeed a significant conceptual evolution.
Let us look at two examples of Li’s use of “quan” and “liquan.” First, discussing a variety of demands made by Western powers, he says:
In addition to these, there are still other demands. Above, none fail to invade our nation’s liquan; below, they inevitably seek to wrest away our merchants’ livelihoods. These can all be denounced on the basis of the upright words of the General Laws of the Myriad Nations: “All nations have the quan of protecting their people and administering their financial affairs.” [Li et al. 1930, vol. 55, p. 9a (consecutive p. 5149)]
If taken out of context, the reference here to liquan could easily be interpreted as referring to mere economic control. When coupled with the citation from General Laws, though, it sounds like Li is claiming that all nations have inherent rights to economic sovereignty. The quan to which the General Laws refers, after all, are not powers that nations just happen to have, as a matter of contingent reality; they are powers that morally must accrue to all nations.
It is even clearer that Li understands quan in this way in a second passage. Here Li complains that foreign merchants heed only the requirements of the Customs Office - which was overseen by foreign officials - and ignore the Chinese commissioners (jiandu), whose responsibilities included the collection of internal duties on trade (the lijin tax):
The Customs Office appropriates quan that ought to be China’s (zhongguo yingyou zhi quan).
Those who understand [moral] patterns are content with the natural lot (benfen) of things; those who rely on force take whatever they like. In this period of treaty revision, they hope to monopolize everything..., steal the quan of China, and find ways for their merchants to profit. In the course of the treaty revisions, no matter what the cost, we cannot include words authorizing the Customs Office. Then the coastal liquan will no longer go to the foreign countries, and foreign merchants will know that the Customs Office is without genuine (zhen) quan. [Li et al. 1930, vol. 54, p. 22b (consecutive p. 5108)]This passage makes two crucial points. First, reinforcing the conclusion to which we came after the first passage, quan can be subject to moral norms (the quan that ought to be China’s) rather than merely matters of actual control. Second, we see here that Li recognizes this very distinction. His goal in the treaty revision process is to make clear that the Customs Office lacks “genuine quan” which I take to mean something like rights, as opposed to mere power.
Let me sum up. At least partly under the influence of the General Laws, Li began to talk about quan in ways that departed from the valueneutral notions of power and control found in traditional discussions of the term. Li’s uses are clearly marked as different from the earlier ways in which liquan had been discussed; his listeners and readers can attribute commitments to him accurately, seeing him as having opted out of their way of talking about liquan. They might resist using his new concept, referring derisively to “Li’s so-called ‘liquan.' ” Or they might think through the commitments entailed by the old concept and the new one and then decide in favor of the new: Seeing China for the first time as a nation among nations, it might now seem important to talk about China’s morally legitimate powers - and about the foreigner’s lack of this legitimacy. This process of reflecting on one’s concepts and their attendant commitments is the exercise of “expressive rationality,” as we saw in Chapter 2.
It is important to note that through Li’s writings, and throughout the reflections they may have prompted - for others did come to use “quan” in the way that Li did - there were no hints that “quan” could be applied to individuals, or even to the people as a collective. These were ideas applicable to states. This is not at all surprising, given the context in which the terms were discussed. It suggests, though, that it might be premature for me to translate “quan” as “rights.” By doing so I would assert that “quan” carries with it much the same set of inferential commitments that “rights” does, but a central aspect of all familiar, contemporary versions of that concept is their applicability to individuals. “Authority” may therefore do a better job of capturing what “quan” means at this moment to Li and his community.