Sensationalized Seclusion? Historian Tonio Andrade on Narratives of Ming-Qing ‘Seclusion’, Imperial Decline, and China’s zero-COVID Strategy

My first question relates to the introduction of the essay, which lays out competing interpretations as to when and why imperial China ‘secluded’ itself from the international system.

On one hand, some argue that China was ‘closed off’ as early as the Song Dynasty, a reflection of conservatism in China with respect to the economy, culture, and political control. On the other hand, some belonging to the Marxist historical tradition have argued that ‘closed door’ policies emerged hundreds of years later during the Ming and Qing dynasties as a response to capitalist aggression by European powers. Lastly, some question whether China was truly ‘closed off’ at all, citing imperial China’s tributary relations with other regional powers.

Can you briefly reflect on these perspectives? Why is this a source of such significant debate among historians?

This is a huge topic in China studies. There’s a long tradition of thinking of China as a ‘closed’ country. And to my mind, much of this discourse, which I wrote about in my most recent book, emerged in the 19th century after the United Kingdom’s failed attempts to carry out diplomacy with the Qing dynasty, namely the Macartney mission of 1792 to 1793 and the Amherst mission that followed a couple decades later in 1816. Both of the missions basically ended up with the British not getting any of the things that they had asked for. Moreover, during the second mission, there wasn’t even a meeting between the British ambassador and the emperor at the time. And so the question becomes, Why did they fail?

In large part, the people involved in those missions and other people who commented on them concluded that one of the basic problems was that the Chinese court was arrogant and xenophobic. This feeling resulted from a sense of dissatisfaction, the sense that Great Britain, this great European country, had been disrespected in a major way. So British discourse about China became quite focused on the idea that it was a closed, xenophobic, backward place, unwilling to engage with the ‘modern’ West. This British discourse spread and became deeply rooted, and in North America, it became increasingly influential, underlying the seminal work of John King Fairbank, a great Harvard professor and founder of the North American discipline of sinology.

But in recent decades, historians have pushed back against this discourse, especially in the West. People like Jack Wills, James Hevia, Henrietta Harrison, and myself have suggested that China was not nearly as blind or xenophobic or closed as once been believed. Sinophone historians of Taiwan also saw some cracks in these traditionalist views. Historians in the PRC, however, were slower to adopt these sorts of views. Much PRC historiography hewed to the Marxist notion that the Qing dynasty was a feudal regime that was inimical to modernity.

To return to the views that you adduce in your question, the idea that a ‘closed country’ originated in the Song dynasty or earlier is deeply troublesome. Yes, there are of course conservative elements in the Song, but the Song is also considered by most historians to have been very open in many, many ways. There was deep and widespread international trade, a great deal of diplomacy, et cetera. Some people even think that the Song’s economic rise was on the cusp of a leap to modern capitalism, well ahead of the rest of the world. This is a bit overwrought as an idea, but I think we can’t say the Song dynasty or the Yuan dynasty was closed off from the world.

As for later periods, the Ming dynasty did have a maritime prohibition, but this was in no way a response to, as you say, the ‘capitalist aggression’ of the West. It was a response primarily to Japanese piracy. So none of the three strands that you talk about really make sense, except the last one, which questions whether China was truly ‘closed off’ at all. And I would definitely identify myself with that one.

Thank you for such a thoughtful answer, which relates quite closely to my second question, which is about the origin of the expression that the essay explores: bìguānsuǒguó (闭关锁国). The essay argues that this concept actually has very little basis in Chinese historiography, and instead argues that the concept reflects a West-centric view of China’s isolation from Europe.

Can you talk a little bit more about Western European perspectives on imperial China?

If we look at Western perspectives on imperial China, they were really in many cases quite positive. Beginning with Marco Polo, when he went and visited the Mongol-Yuan dynasty, his descriptions were so fantastic that people thought they couldn’t be true. Scholars are pretty certain that they were true because of corroboration in other texts and sources. Overall, his comments were remarkably favorable toward China: what an amazing place with tremendous trade and people from all over the world interacting in these big, beautiful ports.

And if you look at subsequent European perspectives, even into the 18th century, Sinophilia was a real and important phenomenon. The Portuguese, the Russians, the early Dutch visitors were also very impressed by China. Yes, the emperor might be considered arrogant, but their descriptions were no different from the way that many people talked about European kings. The Jesuit accounts of China published in huge influential volumes based on letters written by Jesuits in the Imperial court were so influential that thinkers in the 18th century, such as Leibnitz, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin, wrote glowingly of China.

That began to change in the late 18th century with the English missions, starting with the Macartney mission, when this discourse of Chinese seclusion kicked into high gear. I really believe that those missions began to harden what may have been an increasing sense that China wasn’t all that great. And in the case of the British, China was considered ‘backward’ because many British writers – including participants in the unsuccessful missions – blamed their failures on supposed Chinese arrogance and exclusion. The British were really worried about how they were perceived and how they were treated by other monarchs.

But not all European diplomatic encounters fit into the British model. A great example of this is the Dutch embassy that went to Beijing in the winter of 1794 to 1795, about which I’ve written in my most recent book. The Dutch basically accepted this emperor-centric tradition. Participants in that embassy – which was successful – criticized the British for their distorted perspectives on China.

You mentioned that the English felt spurned, which helped originate this concept of China being ‘closed off’. Can you contrast this sentiment with those of the Dutch?

So one basic question is why the Dutch and British had such different experiences with Qing diplomacy. The Dutch participants in the mission of 1795 considered it a success, as did the Qing imperial court. The British participants in the Macartney Mission of 1793 generally considered their mission a failure, a sentiment shared by the Qing imperial court.

One reason for Dutch success is that the Dutch understood and accepted the tenets of East Asian diplomacy. The Dutch had been ensconced in Asia since 1595, when the first Dutch expedition went to Southeast Asia. Through the next two centuries, they were quite enmeshed in the Asian world. They were based in Japan for example, where they sent a mission each year to kowtow to the Shogun. They understood that in essence the business of East Asian diplomacy was ceremonial, so they had a basic understanding of how to approach the court in Beijing. When they went in 1794, the ambassador and his coterie had orders to basically follow the protocol of the court. If the mission had the chance to ask about making trade better in Canton, then they could certainly do so, but their instructions explicitly stated that they should only engage in this sort of negotiation if it didn’t jeopardize the main mission, which was to participate in the ceremonies and basically congratulate the emperor on the 60th year of reign (60 years being a full cycle in the Chinese calendar, a very auspicious time).

In addition, the Dutch chose for their ambassador and vice ambassador men who understood East Asia and had lived there for long periods. The ambassador, Isaac Titsinch, had lived in Asia for more than a decade, including in Japan, where he participated in the mission to the Shogun not once but twice. He loved Japanese, could read and write Japanese, and even studied Chinese. The deputy ambassador, Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, was also very knowledgeable about East Asia, having lived in the Guangzhou area for many years. He was fascinated by China and praised its art, agriculture, and technology.

The British, on the other hand, sent very different sorts of people. Macartney was an intelligent and educated man, but he had no experience in East Asia, and in his mission, the only one of the British who spoke any Chinese at all was the twelve-year-old son of the deputy ambassador, and he’d only learned it on the way there.

More importantly, the British went in with very different expectations. They had a number of goals, including trying to impress the Chinese with European civilization and goods and to gain access to more trading ports, which was confined to Canton at that time. These might be seen to be reasonable requests, but the British also asked for little colonies on the Chinese coast. As an aside, I always think what would happen if Xi Jinping said, “Hey, you don’t really need Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay. Just give it to us so we can use it as a base.” That’s sort of what the British were asking, which the Chinese court thought was absolutely ridiculous at the time.

So basically, Macartney and his colleagues didn’t understand the system. They just tried to impose their own views and asked for the impossible. Given the circumstances, the Qing actually treated the British pretty well, even as it became more clear what the British were asking. And although a lot has been made of the kowtow issue – how Macartney raised great difficulties about performing the ritual kowtow before the emperor – this wasn’t a major issue. The greater issue for the Qing was the feeling, quite justified, that the British were aggressive and were asking for quite outlandish things.

I’m curious, in any of the writings of the Dutch at the time or thereafter, do you see this discourse of China being ‘closed off’?

Today, when we think of the idea of China being ‘closed off,’ we’re mostly thinking economically. What Dutch and British authors were really quite focused on at the time was diplomacy and the relative stature of monarchs. How are we being received? Are we being seen as equals or are we being seen as lower? Are we being given access? Is it fair? Things like that.

In the case of the writings of the Dutch and people who accompanied the Dutch mission, not all thought that British accounts of China were particularly fair. There was one Frenchman—who you could say was the most anti-Chinese of the Dutch mission—who reviewed a book by one of the British diplomats and thought the way he talked about China was just not fair at all. Yes, the Chinese had an exaggerated sense of their own importance, but the ways the British portrayed the Qing court and its officials were unfair and distorted because the British judged China by their own standards.

Fascinating. So, to the extent that China was closed off, the essay argues that the Qing dynasties ‘indifference’ to Western science and technology aggravated China’s ‘backwardness’, which ultimately contributed to its defeat in the Opium Wars.

At the same time though, the essay does detail how some Qing dynasty emperors, such as the Kangxi emperor, were very interested in Western science and technology. You wrote another book on this subject, titled The Gunpowder Age, which addresses this very point. Can you remedy these contradictory perspectives? In your view, what is the most compelling explanation for why the Qing dynasty fell behind Western Europe despite its technological prowess during the Ming dynasty?

I think a lot depends on what we mean by ‘fall behind’. Typically, people equate science and technology with modernity, and there’s a great case to be made for that. But there’s also a number of other things that we think of when we talk about modernity and the narrative of European advancement: legal and government structures, state centralization, agricultural production, population increases, human rights, and so on. All of these are often put in the same basket of modernity. But like many other scholars, I feel we must disaggregate modernity: what are we specifically talking about?

My book, The Gunpowder Age, tries to do that by looking specifically at military variables. When Chinese reformers talked about reform and catching up to the West, they were thinking about military matters more than anything else, and they still are to a large extent. Even today, China’s leaders are quite focused on military matters. Ever since the nineteenth century, reform and modernization have largely meant building up China’s military to stand up against the West and Japan.

If you look very carefully at the history of China’s military capabilities vis-à-vis the West, China did not really fall behind the West until the middle of the 18th century. Until that time, although Western powers had certain advantages in certain ways or in certain periods, China caught up very quickly and got ahead in certain ways as well. And, indeed, in the beginning of what I call the Gunpowder Age (900 to 1900 AD), China was way ahead in military technology and techniques. The gun was invented, for instance, in what is now China.

Who exactly invented it, we don’t know, but we know that it emerged in a period of state competition as people in the area that is now China and Korea experimented with gunpowder and new types of warfare. The early Ming dynasty (late 1300s and early 1400s) had more gunners in their military than there were soldiers in Europe. By the early 1400s, Europeans had barely gotten the gun but it was already a mainstay of Ming armies.

But this raises a question. If this is the case, why did China eventually fall behind militarily? One of the variables that I researched was how much fighting is actually being done in a given period. People have argued that Europeans were very dynamic, not just militarily, but technologically and in terms of state centralization because there were a bunch of states engaged in constant warfare and competition. You might call this the state-system model.

People have suggested that China, in contrast, was unified and therefore static and less dynamic.

But any student of Chinese history will know that there were many periods when China saw high levels of military or interstate competition: the Warring States period is the most famous, of course, but there were also many other periods. One such period was the Song Dynasty (960-1279), during which the Song and their huge neighbors competed over hundreds of years. That was the time when the gun evolved. Another such period of sustained military competition took place during the transition from the Yuan dynasty to the Ming dynasty, which began about 1250 or so and continued until around the mid-1400s. That’s 150 years of constant military competition. You might expect in that period a high degree of military innovation, and that’s exactly what you find.

Around 1450 or so, however, military competition under the Ming decreased dramatically as the Ming dynasty entered a period of relative stability vis-à-vis its neighbors. Military innovation slowed. Around that same time, however, Europeans entered into a sustained ‘warring states period’, and their guns continued to get more effective: lighter, longer, et cetera.

In the late 1500s, however, China entered a new period of military competition, with rebellions within the borders and wars and raids beyond. During that period, European guns were rapidly taken up by Chinese warmakers and adapted to Chinese contexts. Chinese metallurgists experimented with new types of forging and casting techniques, improving on European designs.

So when do we see a sustained relative decline in China vis-à-vis the West? I believe that happens in the 18th century under the Qing Dynasty during a period I call the ‘Great Qing Peace’, from around 1750 to 1839, the eve of the First Opium War. Now, clearly that peace was not peaceful for everyone. The Qing invaded various places. But during that period, the Qing had become so overwhelmingly powerful that they faced no significant existential threats from anyone inside or outside the borders. As a result, military innovation slowed and a sort of stasis set in. After all, why spend the enormous amounts of money that is required to innovate and make new types of muskets and cannons?

This period ends in 1839 with the First Opium War, in which the Qing was decisively defeated by the British, who benefitted from decades of rapid military innovation, much of it having occurred in the Napoleonic Wars, which revolutionized military technologies and techniques throughout Europe.

But all of this begs another question. Why couldn’t the Qing quickly adopt foreign weaponry in their war against the British? There’s actually a school of revisionist historiography, which I support, that suggests that the Qing reforms were actually quite successful in the 19th century with respect to adopting new technology. The Qing even pulled ahead of the Japanese until around 1880 or so in terms of making steamships and ordnance.

Yet military power and relative decline is not just about techniques and technology. It also involves government and statecraft. The Qing in the late 19^th century was just not a very effective state. An analogy might be how people talk about American decline today. People don’t tend to worry about American technological decline—the United States remains a technological leader. People talk about American decline because they fear that the government, infrastructure, and social fabric are becoming dysfunctional.

So, when one considers the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, it seems likely that the Qing didn’t lose due to a lack of advanced military equipment—many people thought that the Qing navy was as powerful as, or more powerful than, the Japanese one—but because the Qing state didn’t function well. It’s military and leadership structures were dysfunctional.

To follow up on this point, I am interested in the comparisons you draw between history and the present, such as the reflection of the late Qing in the contemporary United States and China’s current emphasis on military development. One idea your answer draws my mind to is Sebastian Heilmann’s and Elizabeth Perry’s argument that the longevity of the People’s Republic of China can be traced to its ‘guerilla policy style’, a learned adaptability from its emergence out of revolution and the Chinese civil war. 

But of course, China hasn’t been involved in any active wars beyond border skirmishes for the past forty odd years. While its military technology is rapidly catching up to the West, many of its troops haven’t seen active combat. Are we seeing a ‘Great PRC Peace’? What does this portend for China’s ability to fight future wars?

That’s a great question. And I think there are two aspects worth considering. One is practice: having seasoned people who are familiar with war, who know how to command in the fog of war, and so on. China certainly lacks practice compared to the United States, which has fought multiple wars over the past decades. But there’s a second aspect, which relates to the state apparatus governing military matters and the military structures in question.

You could say that there has been a great Chinese peace in the late 20th and early 21st century. But it has been a very uneasy peace. In a great power context, China very much sees itself as competing in a sort of waring states system, motivating it to increase its military effectiveness to counter potential threats from the USA and its allies. In that respect, China has been very attentive. How would these different things come together in war with respect to Chinese technology and statecraft? I really hope we don’t ever have to find out.

I have one final question, which relates to how the Chinese Communist Party frequently references historical humiliation at the hands of foreign powers in its legitimating narratives. Do you see any of the ‘seclusion’ policies of the Ming and Qing dynasties reflected in China’s contemporary ‘zero-COVID’ strategy? Do you think this might be a source of anxiety for Chinese intellectual leaders?

Yeah, that’s interesting. People sometimes say that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes’. As you imply, these policies might be concerning to many Chinese intellectuals and people who draw comparisons. While I don’t subscribe to the idea that China was ever truly ‘closed off’, I think you can see China’s zero-COVID strategy as similar to a couple of periods when China did sort of close its doors.

First is the coastal exclusion policy of the early Qing dynasty, 1661 to 1669, where they basically shut down the coastal parts of the province of Fujian, parts of Guangdong, and parts of Zhejiang province by moving the whole population—densely populated areas—back something like 20 miles from the coast in order to basically starve out one of their enemies, the Zheng regime that was based in Taiwan.

So for about a decade, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people suffered because the central government used overwhelming force to command its own people. There are similarities to the COVID response. We have a problem – the Zheng regime or COVID-19 – and we address it with a draconian response. To a certain extent, these policies do seem to rhyme.

Another case would be the Ming response to Japanese piracy, which was to shut down basically all maritime activity for certain periods. So I think that people who are aware of the policies that are being undertaken in China and how they compare to other places, like America and Europe, are probably quite concerned about this shrill and ineffective use of China’s vast governmental power. But I don’t know. What do you think? It’s an interesting question.  

I agree that these policies rhyme. Perhaps what interests me most about this essay is the fact that it doesn’t have specific authorship. Its only listed author is the Chinese History Institute research group, which as some have pointed out suggests that the essay was sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party. It makes me wonder whether some in the Party, or at least some intellectual leaders in China, may believe these policies rhyme too.

Dr. Andrade, thank you for such a fascinating interview.

My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity, Michael. Goodbye.