English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (review)

James Hevia’s goal in this book is to place China firmly within the orbit of colonial discourse. He shows that the British in nineteenth-century China carried out a “pedagogical project,” designed to “teach the [Chinese] natives how to behave” properly in a world of imperial powers (3). He borrows the concepts of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe what the British did.¹ For him, deterritorialization means the destruction of existing institutions, boundaries, and social relations by violence, commercial penetration, and linguistic mastery. Reterritorialization means the reconstruction of new relations of power oriented toward transnational systems of control. In the process, without making China a formal colony, the British and other Western powers incorporated China into the global field of nineteenth-century imperial capitalism.

Specific examples of British pedagogy include the use of new military technologies to inflict mass violence; the propagation of opium, religion, and international law by treaties, in English terms, coercing the recalcitrant Qing elites into a world defined by alien invaders; and — most spectacularly — looting, “liberating” objects from their home in the Qing imperial ritual world and transferring them to international commodity trade. Army barracks, major museums, auction houses, and art collectors still hold massive quantities of Chinese products ripped from the Summer Palace in the heady days of 1860 and 1900.

Focusing on two key moments of Western imposition of its demands on China – the Arrow War of 1860 and the repression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900–1901 — Hevia reexamines classic themes and sources in the light of post-colonial perspectives developed primarily for British India. He casts old subjects in a new light. Opium, for example, becomes more than a simple source of profit for the British East India Company: it acquired potent cultural meanings in both China and the West. In China, it served as a potent lever to undermine Qing sovereignty over its borders and internal trade: Westerners promoted smuggling, piracy, and legal opium trade in order to penetrate the Chinese interior against the resistance of Qing officials, but they gained cooperation from local Chinese merchants and poor laborers who found solace in the drug. At the same time, the image of a China drugged into oblivion inspired missionaries and businessmen to promote aggressive schemes to wake up the sleeping nation to the “realities” of international trade.

Treaties and diplomacy, likewise, did not simply lead China gently into the family of nations; they forcibly reshaped Chinese elite behavior to suit the imperialist world. The emperors had to learn new rituals in which the foreign agents stood up like men instead of kowtowing like children; the Qing established its Zongli Yamen and later Foreign Ministry under Western pressure to treat foreign powers not as tributaries, but as formally equal states. But these rituals of equality masked humiliation and subordination: after 1901, the Qing emperor, propped up by Western treaties after he had been driven from his capital and had his palaces burned, was in Hevia’s view, no more than a “puppet” disguised as an independent ruler (258). In this way, he resembled the princes under British colonial rule in India.

Knowledge collection, too, united British practices in India and China. Brilliant linguists like Thomas Wade tore into imperial documents to learn their secrets and used them to promote British interests through the Chinese classical language. Classical terms like yi, misinterpreted as “barbarian,” were banned, and Qing officials were forced to introduce Western concepts into their ritual diplomatic language. By assembling a vast “imperial archive,” including maps, documents, and dictionaries, designed to make the opaque Central Kingdom open to public view, the Western powers drafted scholarship into the service of empire.

They also rewrote its history. Missionaries reimagined the Boxer attacks as the production of martyrs for the true faith and used these accounts to recruit more dedicated proselytizers. The famous arch at Oberlin college memorialized the Western martyrs and joined Americans to the Chinese missionary networks. The manly ideal of...