The Ambiguities of Chinese Antiforeignism: Chongqing, 1870-1900

Attacks on Westerners and Chinese Christians were a prominent feature of Chinese society during the late Qing. Typically these attacks have been attributed to xenophobia, a fear of foreigners, or seen as a response to imperialism in its many forms---religious, social, economic, and political. The intellectual framework for these interpretations has assumed clearly delineated opposition between that which is Chinese and that which is foreign, in this case usually taken to mean Western. Yet the line between these two categories was neither neat nor constant. Han-Chinese Christians, for example, while insiders in terms of race and nationality, were often the primary victims in these so-called antiforeign campaigns. In the Chongqing prefecture of Sichuan, during the height of antiforeignism from the 1860s to 1900, not one Westerner was killed or even seriously wounded. On the other hand, dozens of Chinese Christians died, many more were wounded and the numbers forced to flee from their homes reached the tens of thousands. ¹ This victimization of Chinese Christians was in contrast, moreover, to earlier centuries when they lived relatively peacefully with their non-Christian neighbors.

Historians have also pointed to Western imperialism as an explanation for the hostile treatment of Westerners and Chinese Christians in the nineteenth century. ² To be sure, imperialist expansion by Westerners in Chongqing elicited hostility that was targeted against their foreign identities. Taking advantage of new privileges exacted in the post-Opium War treaties, Western missionaries and Chinese Christians were much more aggressive in their efforts to encroach upon the local power structure. Western governments were also making major inroads into the province. ³ But local responses to this behavior must be viewed in the context of the region’s own development since the founding of the Qing.

Western imperialism in the Chongqing region exacerbated and worked in tandem with domestic tensions. Provincial trends such as the province’s legacy as a frontier land peopled by migrants from other provinces, population pressures, and social tensions, all contributed to shifting views of Chinese insiders and outsiders. More general domestic forces, such as longstanding Chinese traditions of suspicion of all kinds of outsiders, further complicated this picture. In many cases, demonization and vilification of Westerners mirrored treatment meted out to Chinese outsiders during earlier times.

Antiforeignism in Sichuan, then, was a concept much more ambiguous in nature than we have previously acknowledged. It was prompted by outright xenophobia and hostility toward imperialist ventures, yet it was also fashioned by Chinese domestic unrest and tensions. In such cases foreigners were targeted not because of their foreign identity, but because they fell into a larger and broader category of outsider that included many Chinese.

This analysis of antiforeignism in Chongqing draws from the extensive literature of such activity in China during the Qing, ⁴ as well as from recent scholarship on Chinese insiders and outsiders. Separate works by Frank Dikötter and Barend J. ter Haar, which trace a several thousand-year tradition of Chinese fears of outsiders, suggest that hostility toward Westerners during the nineteenth century was a continuation of old methods and attitudes used on a new enemy. ⁵ Philip Kuhn’s intriguing analysis of the sorcery scare of 1768, moreover, shows that one did not need to be a foreigner to be considered an outsider. ⁶

To the extent that antiforeignism was informed by perceived racial differences, recent works by Dikötter and Pamela Crossley are instructive. Dikötter, while maintaining that distinctions based on skin color and physical characteristics can be traced back to Chinese antiquity, presents as an essential dimension to his argument, nonetheless, an understanding of race as imagined, as “a cultural construct with no relationship to objective reality.” ⁷ There was, thus, an indigenous awareness of difference based on physical characteristics, but the boundaries traced around the various attributes, and the value attributed to these differences, was a product of cultural construction that changed over time.

Crossley examines this cultural construction at work. In her study of three generations of Manchu bannermen, she demonstrates how the Manchu state self-consciously constructed a Manchu racial identity...