Toward the Nineteenth Century

Introduction

Thank goodness sixtieth-birthday celebrations are not seeing off, but cheering on! This issue of Late Imperial China cheers on our colleague and mentor, Bill Rowe, to whom it is dedicated. Besides his long and exceptionally fruitful editorship of this journal, his continuing contributions to the profession are an unusual breadth of conception, a rare versatility of research skill, and, above all, a gift of historical empathy: when we read about the society and commerce of Hankow, the career and thought of Chen Hongmou, the sufferings of the Macheng populace, we feel we are seeing life the way his subjects saw it. His empathic penetration depends less on richness of detail (of which there is plenty) than on his ability to connect with people who lived long ago and far away. This ability extends to his readers as well as to his long-dead subjects. As historians we try to keep faith with the people we are studying, to the point where they might recognize our writings as authentic pictures of their world; and, at the same time, to keep faith with the world of our readers and students by approaching the past in terms that are meaningful to them. Authenticity has to shine at both ends of the timeline. Bill is our master of authenticity. I cannot think of a more essential quality for a leader of our field.

China's nineteenth century is hard to represent as a bounded conceptual unit. We seem forever to be moving "toward" it or away from it. A great many significant trends either ended or began in the middle of it. Many an event of those hundred years can be seen as either a culmination of an old era or the origin of a new one, or both. Such an event could be counted as part of either a "long eighteenth century" or of a "long twentieth century." Nevertheless, we can recognize certain characteristic "nineteenth century issues" when we see them; some of these are addressed incisively by the articles in this issue.

The synergy of foreign and domestic cultures

"Clash of civilizations" hardly describes how Western thought and technology entered China during the nineteenth century. Increasingly we discover how China's own culture and society served as channels for the flow of ideas, rather than as obstacles to them. Angela Leung explains how smallpox vaccination was introduced in Canton around 1810 and later nationwide, through a fertile collaboration among Western physicians, hong merchants, and entrepreneurial Chinese doctors. Vaccination was packaged in native traditions and institutions, using the familiar to popularize the unfamiliar. Public acceptance of the new techniques grew not from their exotic source, but from respected native practices (e.g., analogies drawn from acupuncture) and from endorsements by men of high social standing. The Cantonese emerge from this study as the most cosmopolitan Chinese population of the first half of the century, the first to indigenize all sorts of Western-derived technology, making it part of their own stock of profitable and respected occupations. This story reminds us that the long association of Canton with Western commerce (really since the 1710s) made possible the absorption of skills (such as machine technology) that supported Cantonese livelihoods at home and abroad in later years. Vaccination as a business grew out of a Chinese translation of a medical treatise by an East India Company surgeon during the first decade of the nineteenth century – a perfect illustration of how foreign and domestic synergy worked, and an instructive example to our nineteenth-century scholarship.

The genesis of modern Chinese politics

Mary Rankin's conspectus of "political and cultural changes" of the late nineteenth century depicts what is arguably the formative period of modern Chinese political thought. Though "party states" have dominated Chinese politics only since the 1920s, their not-so-remote origins lay in the fear, anger, and militancy of the 1890s. Literati outrage at China's humiliation by foreign powers, together with demands for a more inclusive polity, were given voice by a lively press and nurtured in literati "study-societies" (which were window dressing for dissident movements).

Is there really a...