James L. Hevia is Chair of the Curriculum in International and Area Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His book Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (published by Duke University Press) won the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

Cherishing Men from Afar

Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793

Duke University Press

Contents

INTRODUCTION

On the tenth day of the eighth lunar month in the fifty-eighth year of his reign, Hongli, the Qianlong emperor, received George Lord Macartney, ambassador of Great Britain, in audience at the Qing empire's summer capital in Rehe (present-day Chengde). Dressed in ordinary court audience robes, the emperor took his throne in a tent set up in the Garden of Ten-thousand Trees (Wanshu yuan), an audience site located within a larger complex called the "Mountain Retreat for Avoiding Summer Heat" (Bishu shan zhuang). Eager to demonstrate his regard for "oriental customs and ideas," the British ambassador wore a "rich embroidered velvet" coat, over which he displayed "the mantel of the Order of the Bath, with a collar, a diamond badge and a diamond star." On his head was a hat of enormous white plumes. Macartney approached the throne, and rather than performing the humiliating "genuflexions and prostrations" (later termed kowtow) demanded by the Chinese court, knelt on one knee, bowed his head, and placed directly in the emperor's hand a jewel-encrusted box containing a letter from his sovereign, George III, king of Great Britain, Ireland, and France. As was usual in such circumstances, Hongli handed Macartney a ruyi, or jade scepter, which, the ambassador noted, did not "appear in itself to be of any great value." The emperor then inquired after the ambassador's and his king's health. Thus began, at least from the point of view of Lord Macartney, the first formal contact between the two richest and most powerful empires in the world.

This brief account of the audience of September 14,1793, is taken primarily from Lord Macartney's journal of his embassy, and from drawings made by embassy members of the event. Chinese-language court records indicate only that the emperor wrote a poem for the occasion. One purpose of the present study is to reconsider the differing presentations of this historical encounter by Qing and British participants. It is also concerned with the significance of gestures that seem, at first glance, trivial—Hongli's inquiries into King George's health, for example, or Macartney's dismissal of the jade scepter as an object without "great value." Lastly, it is about how this event has been remembered over the past two hundred years.

The Macartney embassy is, of course, not a new subject of research. Since the 1930s Anglo-American historians have written a number of studies based on archival sources in Great Britain and China. More recently, the embassy drew renewed attention as the Qing archives in Peking were reopened to Western scholars and as the bicentennial of the embassy approached. Most previous scholarship has treated the meeting between the Qianlong emperor and Lord Macartney as symbolic of the confrontation between "traditional" and "modern" civilizations at the dawn of modernity (see section 1.2 below).

My concerns are somewhat different. For the purposes of this introduction, two of them are of primary importance. The first has to do with my attempt to reevaluate the encounter between the Qing and British empires in light of recent theoretical and empirical studies of imperialism and colonialism in Asia. These works have raised significant questions not only about interpretation, but perhaps more significantly about the moral ground upon which engagements between present and past are constituted. The second has to do with new research emphases in China studies that have arisen over the last two decades. In particular, there has been a growing imbalance toward endogenous as opposed to exogenous factors in explaining change in late imperial China. In the following sections of this introduction, I will explore each of these topics and, drawing from my critical engagement with them, indicate the ways in which this book takes a different approach.

1.1 New Patterns in the Study of Imperialism

Since the 1970s the study of European imperialism and colonialism has undergone significant changes. Stimulated in part by liberation movements in Africa and Asia, by social movements of women and people of color in the industrialized world, and by the movement against the Vietnam War, scholars who studied imperialism began to challenge the notion that economic considerations were the primary and, in some cases, the exclusive explanation for European global expansion. Theoretically, much of this rethinking was stimulated by new strains of Marxist criticism that flourished in England, France, and Germany. Directed at strict economism and overly mechanistic interpretations of base/superstructure relations, historians and social theorists as diverse as E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jürgen Habermas, and Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst directed attention to the complex processes of making social worlds within the constraining conditions of industrial capitalism and the imperial state. With the exception of Hall and a few writings by Barthes, however, these scholars seldom dealt directly with the question of European colonial domination. Yet the particular theoretical turn they effected enabled others to introduce a host of new subjects of study.

Among these topics have been gender construction in the colonial setting, the role of intellectuals and elites in the colonial and postcolonial world, routines and rituals of colonial administration, the part played by imaginative fiction in shaping the subjectivities of colonizers, the mutual implication of race, class, and gender in the construction of bourgeois culture and consciousness, and the modes of producing and deploying knowledge of colonized peoples. In many cases, scholars have sought to defamiliarize objects and products of knowledge, while blurring the conventional boundaries between disciplines. Most fruitful in this regard has been the way in which these shifts in emphasis have allowed significant strains of criticism from the former colonial world (and here I think especially of "third-world" feminism and the Subaltern Studies Group) to enter the study of imperialism and vastly enrich the discussion.

A central element in these new directions of research and writing has been a sensitivity to the place of representation in the imperial projects of North Atlantic nation-states, particularly its crucial role in the production of knowledge about colonial others. Just why representation would become a focal point of colonial studies, however, is far from obvious and requires some elaboration. Consider, for example, how the domains of practice in which many of us routinely operate are founded upon representation. From the national to the local level, the political system of the United States functions in and through representation; so, too, the legal system. The origin myth of the liberal nation-state is ordered around issues of representation, which are welded to the economic through the constantly reiterated phrase, "No Taxation without Representation." The right of representation, defined as the law of inheritance from eldest son to eldest son, serves as a model of Euro-American patriarchy. In a historical social formation that had long privileged the relationship between the individual mind and a stable external object world or fixed reality, representation has simultaneously functioned as the thing observed, as the act of presenting to the eye and mind, and as the product of mind; that is, it might be understood as a clearly conceived idea, concept, or description. In this last sense, representation is thoroughly implicated in what we define as knowledge, as well as in knowledge's philosophic framing discourse, epistemology. Representations can be pictorial, mathematical, or linguistic—and each kind has its own theoretical understanding of how a present figure stands for and refers to an absent reality. If we are personally to function within the social order we inhabit, we must be adept at constructing and recognizing, making and engaging with, representations of ourselves, others, and the world. Moreover, the logic of representation has completely colonized our own world, to say nothing of the worlds of countless others. If something cannot be represented, it is not simply invisible, but, more importantly, not real.

It was precisely the recognition of the hegemonic force of a particular cultural commitment to the logic and practice of representation that helped to revolutionize the study of imperialism and colonialism. Critics from fields as diverse as feminist studies, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, and history began to note that scrutinizing or gazing at other places, peoples, and peoples' artifacts and then re-presenting them in writing or in pictures (first drawing and painting, later photography) was a fundamental way in which knowledge was produced about colonized populations in European empires. Rather than seeing knowledge in all times and places as constructed in this way, some scholars argued that the colonial mode of producing knowledge was an historically specific form of practice, one that gave ontological priority to the ocular faculties as the primary conduit for making things known and knowable.

Exemplary in indicating the political and intellectual significance of representation in the colonial context has been Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978), perhaps more than any other single work, forced the question of representationalism into scholarly consciousness. Focusing attention on images of the "Orient" produced by Euro-American politicians, businessmen, and academics on the one hand, and the political and economic actions of European nation-states in the Orient on the other, Said suggested that knowledge about the Orient was intimately linked to European domination of the Orient. The effect of this link between knowledge production and state projects was to authorize a kind of bird's-eye view of the non-Western world, one that positioned the knowing observer as superior in every respect (more rational, logical, scientific, realistic, and objective) to the object of contemplation. Combining the theoretical insights of Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, as well as those of early postcolonial critics such as Anwar Abdel-Malek (1963), Said's analysis reworked European expansion as a broadly cultural project, while simultaneously opening a new intellectual space for the study of colonialism.

Said's timely analysis had a number of important consequences. It demonstrated, for instance, how one might go about launching a critical project designed to take up issues of knowledge, epistemology, and culture as they relate to imperialism. Close readings of orientalist sources, combined with contemporary scholarship in Africa and Asia, helped to destabilize classic orientalist representations. Drawing attention to images of the Orient and Orientals current in Western scholarship also made it possible to discern that in order for orientalism to operate, it had to control what Foucault called the "enunciative function" (1972:88-105). The orientalist's mastery of the Orient was thereby shown to be based on commanding the sites of its representation. Such authority, in turn, excluded native constructions except insofar as they were translated by the orientalist and transported for consumption in imperial metropoles. As a result of this engagement with the forms of knowledge production characteristic of orientalism, Said's work suggested that it might be possible to think different forms of knowledge, knowledges which might operate through other epistemological formations just as powerful as that which provided the foundation for representationalism.

At the same time, Said also suggested that there was no simple way out of the orientalist's discourse, that one could not simply substitute "true" representations of the Orient for "false" ones. This is so because representations are more than simply passive reflections of reality. Rather, they contribute to the production of the real. This has especially been the case in a situation where epistemological issues were conjoined with the physical power and resources at the command of imperial states. As the works of those who followed Said have shown, imperial projects constructed an Orient that mimicked orientalist representations, and these constructs were, in turn, recovered by later generations of Western scholars as proof of the timeless regularities of the East.

Finally, by including theoretical analyses that presented alternative understandings of colonialism in Africa and Asia, Said drew attention to a pervasive practice among orientalists and their area studies successors— the tendency to apply "objectivist" Western theory, particularly social science models, to non-Western data. In Said's terms, such strategies constructed the relationship between "West" and "East" as one of ontological and epistemological priority of the former over the latter (1978:2-9). After Orientalism, it became extremely difficult to sustain a position that purported merely to reflect or passively to report on "non-Western" realities. It was also difficult to ignore the political relationship between first-world scholars and their subjects of study. Rather Said persuasively demonstrated that the relationship between "Occident" and "Orient" was, and to some extent remains, one of "complex hegemony" involving forms of political, economic, and cultural domination.

In the following sections of this introduction, I draw upon Said both to question the usual representations of "China" and the "West," and to challenge the kinds of models or theoretical frameworks that have been brought to bear on the subject. As such, this study is necessarily positioned in dialogue with both postcolonial criticism and China area studies scholarship. Further, throughout the book, I will treat British, American, and some recent Chinese representations —images in words and pictures, the themes and tropes of cross-cultural encounters —of the Macartney embassy as themselves historical events taking place within real conditions, ones which have, moreover, been substantially produced in practices of representation.

1.2 The Great Transition and China-centered History

For most of the postwar period, the historiography on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century China has been dominated by two approaches. The first of these, the sociocultural (Cohen 1984), arranged China's history with reference to the grand narrative of the "Great Transition," the move from traditional to modern society. Scholars usually referred to this pattern of development under the rubric of "China's Response to the West" (Teng and Fairbank 1954). Positing a stagnant and involuted traditional China, socioculturalists took the Western invasion of the nineteenth century as the necessary stimulus that effected the transition from traditional to modern China. Moreover, since the role of Western influence was a crucial feature of this interpretative framework, China's traditional form of foreign relations and its early relations with the West were a central focus of scholarly inquiry.

By the 1970s, the sociocultural approach came under a variety of assaults. In the general atmosphere of New Left criticism and opposition to the Vietnam War, some charged that practitioners of the approach, especially those who worked on foreign relations, had constructed an elaborate apologetics for Western imperialism in China. Others abandoned the approach altogether and turned to other currents then shaping the Euro-American scholarly world. Under the influence of the Annates school and the descriptive structural sociology of G. William Skinner, a new "China-centered history" (Cohen 1984) emerged that discovered a China rich in events and energized by patterns of development with their own internal logics. In addition to providing ready-made bounded entities that did not demand the reference to a Chinese totality, Skinner's micro-regionalism undercut its predecessor in another significant way: it treated culture as epiphenomenal and variable, helping to muddle, perhaps irreversibly, the coherent notion of tradition that the sociocultural approach to China's past had taken as its foundation.

As eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese history became laden with events, scholars also uncovered a rich and dynamic history of social movements, ordinary life, class and gender conflict, intellectual ferment, and political and economic transformation. However, like its European counterpart, this emphasis on social history had the consequence of allowing, perhaps unintentionally, the state and China's relations with maritime Europe and Inner Asia to recede from view. As a consequence, a field once dominated by an interpretation which privileged exogenous factors as the primary cause for the change from traditional to modern China suddenly found little from the outside that was relevant to China's internal development. As a result, China now has a dynamic internal history, while studies of China's external relations have been neglected for the past twenty-five years. Moreover, most writers who find it necessary to give passing mention to foreign relations in their studies uncritically retain the venerable sociocultural interpretation of those relations known as the "tribute system." Meanwhile, a small number of scholars who still have an interest in historical Chinese foreign relations find it increasingly difficult to support such broad generalizations (e.g., Wills 1988:229). It is to the tribute system and current discussions of its limitations that I now turn.