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The Historic Background of China’s Perception of the West – by Carl Zha
Carl Zha publishes the Clash of civilizations and empires podcast.
This illustrated history was originally tweeted yesterday, May 4th 2018. It is slightly edited and republished here with the author's permission.
How the West’s betrayal of China in Versailles after World War I led to the long Chinese Revolution that shaped today's Chinese perception of the West
(Click on the pictures to enlarge)
99 years ago, on May 4th 1919, the original Tiananmen student protest broke out. The students protested the Allied Powers' betrayal at Versailles: The German Shangdong colony was given to Japan instead of returning it to China. This despite China's sending of 140,000 men to work on the Western front.
The story begins with the first Sino-Japanese War 1894-95. Japan, after going through a full westernization program, decisively defeated China which had a half-hearted 'Self-Strengthening' modernization program that tried to preserve Confucian traditions while adopting Western technology.
Japan defeating China triggered a new round of Imperial Powers scramble to carve up China. Germany was particularly eager to not be left out.
Germany took the port city of Qingdao (Tsingtao) on the Shangdong Peninsula where they brought over beer tech giving birth to Tsingtao Beer.
  
Qingdao(Tsingtao) became the major German base for its newly acquired Pacific colonies until the eve of World War I.
  
In 1890 Germany played a leading role in attacking the Chinese capital Beijing to suppress the Boxer Rebellion together with the 8 Nation Alliance of Britain, France, United States, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and Austria-Hungary.
 
Britain viewed German presence as threat to its colonies in China. After World War I broke out, Britain allied with Japan to besiege Qingdao. 23,000 Japanese and 1,500 British troops attacked 3,650 Germans and 324 Austro-Hungarians. Woodblock print and the Japanese flagship Suwo.
 
Britain promised the German Pacific colonies to Japan including Qingdao. Students explore a scale model of the Qingdao area depicting the city during the siege of the city by British and Japanese forces in October and November 1914.
As World War I wore on longer than anybody expected, the Allied Powers faced acute labor shortages. Britain came up with a scheme to recruit Chinese labors. But China was neutral so she had to be persuaded to join the war
China wanted to have the German Shangdong colony returned. Entered U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson asked China to join the war and promised support for China to gain Shangdong back after Germany’s defeat.
While the young republican China sees Britain and France as ruthless Imperial Powers, it has an enormous regard for the U.S. which it hopes to model itself after. Top Chinese diplomat was the American educated Wellington Koo. Madam Koo, an international style icon, popularized Cheongsam/Qipao dresses.
China did as Wilson asked, entered the war against Germany and send 340,000 men to help with the Allied war effort. 140,000 went to the Western Front, 200,000 went to Russia. Chinese comprised the largest non-European labor force on the Allied side during World War I.
On the Western front, the 140,000 Chinese labor were know as the Chinese Labour Corp. They dug trenches, worked in timber yards, build steamers, repair railroads. 6,000 were even sent to Iraq to work in Basra.
Chinese Labour Corp men load 9.2-inch shells onto a railway wagon at Boulogne for transport to the front line, August 1917.
Chinese Labour Corps men and a British soldier cannibalize a wrecked Mark IV tank for spare parts at the central stores of the Tank Corps, Teneur, spring 1918.
Chinese Labour Corps workers washing a Mark V tank at the Tank Corps Central Workshops, Erin, France, February 1918.
In other cases, Chinese workers staffed munitions factory during World War I.
Chinese Labour Corp men practice martial arts with swords in Crecy Forest, 27 January 1918.
200,000 Chinese men toiled in Russia. 10,000 Chinese build the Murmansk railway in the Arctic Circle. After the October revolution, 40,000+ Chinese would join the Red Army in the Russian Civil War.
The bulk of the 340,000 Chinese men sent to work in the World War I frontlines were recruited from Shangdong province, where Germany's colony of Qingdao was located. The map shows British and French transport routes for Chinese workers to Europe. Little is known about routes to the Middle East and Russia.
Unbeknownst to China, while China joined the war on the allied side at the U.S. urging, hoping to gain back Shangdong province, the U.S. and Japan signed the secret Lansing-Ishii Agreement in 1917 where they recognized each other’s special 'interests' in China. Japan’s interest is the German colony Qingdao.
Fully believing Woodrow Wilson’s promise of self-determination, the top Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo, who won the Columbia-Cornell Debating Medal in his American school days, argued passionately for the return of the Shangdong Peninsula at the Paris Peace Conference.
Opposite of Wellington Koo is the Japanese diplomat Baron Makino, a skilled go player. Makino played his hand tactically. He knew Wilson’s baby is the League of Nations. He proposed a racial equality clause knowing full well that the U.S., with its Jim Crow Laws, would oppose it.
Japan then threaten to veto the League of Nations, which would not work without Japan, unless … the U.S. agreed to give Germany’s former Shangdong colony to Japan. Wilson dutifully complied and decide to honor the Lansing-Ishii agreement, selling the Chinese down the river.
Wellington Koo is not the only Chinese diplomat in Paris. There is Trinidad born Eugene Chen who does not speak Chinese but represent another Chinese government because China was divided between a Beijing government in the north and a Canton(Guangzhou) government in the south.
Eugene Chen was a Hakka Chinese born in Trinidad to a former Taiping rebel who fled to the Caribbean. Eugene became a lawyer and married the French creole girl Agatha Alphosin Ganteaume. But he 'returned' to China after the 1911 Revolution overthrew the Qing Imperial government.
Growing disappointed with the Beijing government, Eugene Chen went to join Sun Yatsen’s Canton (Guangzhou) government in the south. Here is Sun Yatsen with a very young Chiang Kai-shek.
The October Revolution broke out towards the end of World War I. Suddenly an alternative political model appeared to the Chinese.
40,000 Chinese labor trapped in Russia joined the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. A White Army propaganda poster depicts Trotsky as Satan wearing a Pentagram, and portrays the Bolsheviks' Chinese supporters as mass murderers. The caption reads "Peace and Liberty in Sovdepiya".
The Soviets saw a chance to draw China away from the West and into their camp. They leaked details of the secret U.S.-Japan Lansing-Ishii agreement to Eugene Chen in Paris, who then leaked it to the Chinese press. Furious Chinese students took to street to protest at this betrayal especially by the U.S.
Previously young Chinese had looked up to the U.S. as a beacon of democracy. The Versailles Treaty made them realize that the U.S. only pays lip service to freedom and democracy while ruthlessly pursuing its self-interests.The May 4th movement is born to protest the weakness of the Chinese government and calls for reform.
Young people wanted to make China strong so it would not be bullied. They demand fundamental cultural and political changes to make it happen. There is a sense that Confucian traditions had failed China. China must welcome democracy and science and embrace modernity to move forward.
The seminal May 4th movement witnesses an upsurge of Chinese nationalism. New Chinese nationalists call for a rejection of traditional values and the selective adoption of the Western ideals of "Mr. Science" (賽先生) and "Mr. Democracy" (德先生) in order to strengthen the new nation.
Disillusioned with the West and seeking for an alternative political model leads some to look to the newly found Soviet Union. Two leading intellectuals of the May 4th movement, Li Dazhao (left) and Chen Duxiu(right), co-founded the Chinese Communist Party.
 
While heading the Peking University library, Chinese Communist Party co-founder Li Dazhao would influence a young student working there. His name was Mao Zedong.
 
The other leading intellectual of the May 4th Movement is Hu Shih, a classical liberal, who parted ways with the Communists. But the bourgeois soil upon which liberalism thrives is scarce in China, limiting their impact to the small number of educated urban elites.
The anti-traditionalism of the May 4th movement eventually reached its logical conclusion during the campaign to eradicate Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas in the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966 which aimed to destroy all aspects of traditional Chinese culture.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square students protest was the last echo of the May 4th movement, and of the century long Chinese revolution. Students demanded political change to make the nation strong and prosper. Afterwards pragmatism would replace idealism.
China has come full circle. New found confidence enables the people to embrace tradition again. In 2011, a Confucius statue even appeared in Tiananmen Square. But the controversy remained. It was removed after 100 days without explanation.
After the Cultural Revolution, China experience a brief honeymoon with the West in the 1980s. Chinese youth hungered to learn about the outside world. There was a lot of goodwill towards the U.S. This period lasted beyond the Tiananmen protest of 1989.
A big turning point in Chinese public opinion was the 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade where three Chinese journalists were killed. No one in China believed the U.S. claim of an accidental bombing due to faulty maps.
Adding fuel to the fire was the collision of a U.S. spy plane near Hainan Island with a Chinese PLA J-8 fighter plane which caused the J8 to crash and an emergency landing of U.S. spy plane on Hainan Island. Previous pro-American sentiment of Chinese youth decidedly turned.
After the Arab Spring, many Chinese viewed the U.S. just as their elders in the May 4th movement did: paying lip service to freedom and democracy while ruthlessly pursuing naked self-interests. Many sympathized when the Geneva conference on Syria had no Syrians (except the waiter) because that was China’s lot 99 years ago.
May 4th is now the official Youth Day in China. A relief on the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square depicting the May 4th movement.
Thank you for reading this long thread.
May the 4th be with you!
@uncle tungsten #25,writes:
“The USA and its ideology of oligarchism betrayed China as did all the other capitalist road nations.” I don’t know what to make of. “Capitalist Road nations”? — rhetoric from the Mao era. In what way is China not, or in what way has it never been, itself a Capitalist Road nation, for starters.
What ideology of oligarchism is there in the USA? There’s many ideologies afoot there, from “democracy” to “Democracy”; the Randian utilitarianism that the (soon to be late, at least politically) Paul Ryan represented, etc., etc. But oligarchism? It’s not a term often reserved for an ideology popular in America. You often see Russia critiqued this way — though I haven’t seen that particular term employed to describe it. And you have “crony capitalism”, which is what you might mean by this. But I think the term might best fit in China, where the modern form of social/economic organization lends itself to such a description. It is redolent of the Mandarin system. Individuals are selected, almost at random, to be the leaders of a factory, or in a particular sector of the economy. As long as they stay loyal to the Emperor — in this case the CCP — they’re allowed to keep their wealth. The rules of the game are made clear, and order is kept.
What to make of the claim that the US was betraying China? Of all foreign nations at the time, the US had its Open Door Policy, which was a restraint on monochromatic colonialism. And it has to be noted that, in the past and up to the present, China regards itself as a Colonial Power in its own right.
When you write, “you are offered prospect of support from a world superpower nation to achieve your own independence and freedom you are likely to accept such support,” my mind instantly went to Tibet and Tibet’s relations with China.
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@WJ #30
I find it humorous that you want to dismiss Lattimore because he, “viewed this culture and history through the lens of his aspirational liberal globalism.” To the degree that he had any, and I think you’d have to specify which period in his life you found evidence of such, it never seemed to eclipse his integrity as a scholar. But that’s not the part I find funny. It’s that your, WJ’s, aspirational liberal gloabalism, or whatever it is you console yourself with as an ideology, would be somehow more negligible.
One of the things I find impressive about Lattimore is that he had a firm grounding in classical Western thought (or, if you like, ideology), as evidenced by the career of his brother Richard, and that firm grounding is necessary when apprehending an other all too easily romanticized and projected upon. When he approached China, he did so through Mongolia. He was able to hold his own cultural perspective, and those of the cultures he was encountering, in abeyance, and evaluate them in a way perhaps not possible today.
Lattimore was outed as a Communist in an ordeal by the slander of the McCarren Committee and the McCarthy hearings. (Interestingly, Lattimore was in Afghanistan on behalf of the UN when he got called back to the States to stand trial.) He lost his post at the University and disappeared to Leeds. To cite him subsequently as an academic was to invite accusations of being a communist yourself, and so his work, the work of America’s preeminent scholar of Asia, went in the direction of obscurity.
America’s chance for understanding was lost, at least for several generations, with him. He was replaced by his student Fairbanks, a much dimmer light; who, in turn, was replace by Spence, an improvement. These days, if you want to apprehend China, you have to slog through many studies of very specialized topics, and probably learn the language and spend some time there yourself. Most people don’t have the patience or the interest.
Deprived of Lattimore, it has been easy to take something off the shelf purporting to be the real view on China, and use it to further one’s own ideological ends. Thus Mao becomes a hero of erstwhile Communist revolutionaries rather than a Dynastic founder. It’s all too easy to project on to China an other that furthers an argument about domestic politics. Apprehending what China is on China’s terms, while always a bit tenuous, is an invitation to discomfiture, as the result just isn’t going to fit or add up neatly. My advice these days is to look to how China regards Japan, or how Korea regards China, and how Japan regards China, etc. The differences in perspective there, while not immediately useful for evaluating or promoting a western ideology, are at least manageable enough that one can apprehend them conscientiously with some degree of accuracy. And that leads to some understanding.
Again, the premise of this piece, clearly stated, was that the West/America could have been China’s friend, if only . . . My contention is that was never on the table, and its disingenuous to suggest that it ever was. That China and the West should or could have good relations is not something I’m either opposing or arguing would be impossible — though from the current Chinese mindset, China would tend to regard it as such. If it ever occurs, it will be dependent on a host of factors, not the least of which is America’s relationship with Russia. It is truly a global issue, and regarding it on a bipolar America-Chinese axis is bound to be myopic.
My apologies for writing at such length. I think I stated my view on the piece rather clearly, and you & uncle seem to find my objections troubling, and want to dismiss them peripherally. They probably won’t go away, and if you keep following them up, lead to more contradictions. As I wrote, there are no easy answers. (Well, except for the wrong ones.)
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@Debisdead writes in #34 to accuse me of being a troll. I am not a troll and the false accusation of such should discredit @Debisdead evermore, what with the recent spate of Russophobia wantonly using that term, along with “bot”, to discredit anti-establishment narratives.
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@Jen #43
Please have your argument with Karl Wittfogel. Not such a howler, though certainly debatable.
Posted by: Rhetoric | May 6 2018 8:38 utc | 59
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I found out one day that there is a thing I call „data fetishism“ – meaning someone anonymous commits evil deeds and signs them not with his name but with the date+time they were commited, where either this DaTime stamp looks unusual (like „7.7.77“), and/or is of special relevance for the party concerned/damaged, and/or was predicted in the past already, so that it is alleged that the evildoers are active as such since a long time ago and must have much power when they can provide for the realization of their threats after so much time.
One party which seems to act this way – anonymously but signing with a „telling“ date/time stamp – is the SJ (Sociatas Jesu aka the jesuits), the Vatican‘s official army against everyone and everything non-catholic. Because of that I was puzzled by the SJ‘s seal (as shown completely on SJ publications since 1540+, and less completely in catholic churches until now), which seems to be mainly a map of a region (not necessarily of the surface of Earth) and is crowned by a two liner, where the first line says „+“, and the second „IHS“. The explanation offered for IHS is bogus – so, whatdoesitmean? I found that this map looks even more genuine when you turn it upside down, and then the two lines are below and say „SHI +“ – or, a word more english than latin, and a nice proof of what rascals those Holy Fathers can be when they feel being invisible. While the original (upside up) version makes no sense , the first step into its deciphering does, and not only in the region this map depicts.
Still, „SHI t“ does not mean much – could it mean more then just „feces“? Encrypting things by turning them upside down is a very basic encrypting technique, so the next one may also be rather basic. What about seeing a number code in it? S=19, H=8, I=9, t=20 – did the SJ want to point to a future major triumph of theirs, which in AD 1540+ they saw in AD 1989, 20?
What then is „20“? In the context of a year, it may either be a day (day 20 = January 20th = inauguration of potus41_Bush-sr , the Kennedy murderer) or a week in mid May. In that 20th week in 1989 potus41_Bush delivered a speech somewhere deep in Eurasia (I am writing from memory, and the details I found years ago are no longer there, sorry) which was seemingly destined to trigger the Tiananmen event two weeks later. A small putschlet in a far away country was probably not all the Holy Fathers imagined in 1540+ – it seems more probable that they counted on a complete avalanche or stampede of dominos falling from East (CN) via RU towards the West (East Germany). With China resisting the SJ‘s order, the plan stumbled, and the Holy Fathers lost their face as infallible rulers of human history.
Sadly I got to a more detailed notion of data fetishism only years after the SJ‘s day or/and week of SHIt, so that I could not warn the world in time; since then I did do some warning on later occasions, which may or may not have been useful at times. Anyway, in every such case the use of a data fetishist signature proves premeditation and bars all explanations with „spontaneous uproar“ etc.
In this context here, the SJ‘s early SHIt prediction together with the SJ‘s early and keen interest in China seems to exclude any possibility of anything spontaneous happening in early June, 1989 on Tiananmen square.
Also in 1989, I remember the words of a very sympathetic Jewish old lady who lived in West Berlin and hat strong ties with East Germany and their com’party (SED/SEW in West Berlin), who did their utmost to please poor victims of the nazi terror (e.g. free cures etc.). This steadfast enemy of Western capitalism happened to have a „good friend“ in an ultra-capitalist Westgerman company, Daimler-Benz, who seemingly was more concerned with world politics than with cars (and yes, Daimler Benz‘ stronghold at Salzufer was the official residency of the German „Abwehr“ or „BND“ in West Berlin, where reborn nazi orgs were officially „forbidden“). So the communist nazi victim I knew had so close ties with the ex nazi secret service within „Daimler-Benz“, that this friend of her‘s telephoned her early in 1989 and warned her that „very soon everything ‚there‘ (i.e. in ‚the East‘) will crumble, so you should better leave them“, at which that faithful old commie comrade promptly left her commie comrades, suddenly being „disappointed“ that East Germany‘s socialism was not really what she had hoped for. Ties between the SJ and the nazis of then and today are well documented, so that the clairvoyant within Mercedes had his knowledge of things to come very probably not from Abwehr spies within the Chinese student movement, but simply knew first hand when everything was destined not to „crumble“, but to be overthrown: on or beginning with the day/week of SHIt.
Posted by: wbguy | May 7 2018 11:48 utc | 89
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