A letter in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, linked above, replies to my recent short piece there (see below) on activities surrounding the 150th anniversary of the destruction of Beijing's Summer Palace by British and French forces. Or, rather, it doesn't reply at all, but makes a masterly attempt at misdirection worth of a PR pro, and entirely in line with the Chinese government's own policies. Since I've been meaning to expand on the earlier piece anyway, which deals with matters far more important than mere travel writing, let's have a closer look at this response, and then proceed to a number of other loose ends, probably becoming incoherent with rage in the process.
Peter Neville-Hadley criticizes China for opportunistically exploiting history by commemorating the Anglo-French destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing 150 years ago ("Preserving China's Humiliation," op-ed, Oct. 22-24). In China as anywhere, apology and reconciliation are charged subjects. But Mr. Neville-Hadley's piece degenerates into a "China-deserved-it" polemic.
The piece is indeed about the opportunistic exploitation of history (where 'exploitation' means 'lying' and the promotion only of carefully selected events and carefully selected pieces of information about them) by the Chinese government with the aim of diverting attention from its own crimes. But it is simply false to assert that any suggestion whatsoever is made that China deserved the destruction of the Summer Palace, as anyone actually reading the piece can see. But by this time the piece isn't visible to most readers, of course, the edition containing it having gone to wrap fish, so such assertions can be safely made.
The question of whether the destruction was right or wrong was not even addressed, and isn't to the point, although surely the destruction was highly regrettable. China neither 'deserved' it, nor, indeed, received it. The palace complex was a Mongol and Manchu creation, there was no such thing as China at the time, but only the rather larger Great Qing Empire. As pointed out in the piece, the view of the invaders was that the alien Manchu rulers of Chinese territory did indeed 'deserve it', and the looting and destruction was entirely targeted at them, in response to the murder of envoys under a flag of truce, in preference to taking other actions that would have cost Chinese lives. At least one Chinese historian, Yuan Weishi, agrees that the Manchus bore responsibility and has stated that other professional Chinese historians know this, too. Of course, there's no public debate about such matters in China and only the Party's highly manipulative view is permitted. The magazine that published Mr. Yuan's article on this subject was suspended from publication, and its editor was fired.
None of this means that the British and French were right to do what they did, but to concentrate on this question is entirely to miss the point, perhaps intentionally. Let the blame be entirely theirs, by all means.
His key argument seems to be that the palace's destruction could have been much worse but wasn't. He writes: "[T]he destruction of the palace was intended as a retaliation for the torture and murder of 18 foreign envoys, and was chosen as an attack on the property of the alien Manchu rulers of the Chinese in preference to one on the lives of innocent Chinese." By the same logic, should the Prussian army be lauded for destroying and pillaging the Palace of Versailles in 1870, because in doing so Germany "saved" innocent French from Napoleon's Corsican dynasty?
My key argument doesn't seem to be anything of the kind. It's that the Chinese government repeatedly feeds its subjects manipulated history in order to fire up hostility to foreigners and unite them behind the Party as supposedly the only bulwark against foreign depredations in modern times. What I criticise is that the Party doesn't give its citizens a full account of events, nor permit them to come to their own conclusions, nor discuss them publicly, and that there are some extremely gormless foreigners who themselves fall for the propaganda, or who pretend to do so for their own ends.
And there is no logic whatsoever to what follows, which continues its manipulation of the original piece. No one has 'lauded' the foreigners, and the events under discussion are those in China in 1860. Invasions of Paris by anyone at any point in history have nothing to do with it. But again such assertions serve to deflect arguments away from criticism of the Party's 60 years of destruction and brutality.
And contrary to Mr. Neville-Hadley's insinuation, Victor Hugo's criticism of the pillage of the Summer Palace is no less valid just because he had never been to China. If that were the case, then the only people allowed to criticize the Holocaust, Hiroshima or American slavery would be those who were actually there, at Auschwitz or in Southern plantations.
Some very nice use of language here. Victor Hugo is entirely entitled to his view (one that I share) that the destruction of the Summer Palace was a bad thing, and no one has 'insinuated' anything else. That doesn't have any effect on the fact that his actual descriptions of the Chinese and of the site itself were childish nonsense, although very appealing to Chinese egos, nor on the fact that that those actually present--and there are many printed accounts and diaries available from which to choose from 1860 and earlier--and who saw what went on would make better witnesses. Of course not all of those accounts were so grovelling in their descriptions of the Chinese nor as quick to resort to hyperbole about the palace complex, so they don't get quoted in China at all as they would if there was any genuine attempt at education and debate. As far back as the 1790s, George III's envoy to the Qianlong emperor had reported on the dilapidated nature of the buildings and their unsuitability for residence. The waterworks for the Jesuit-built fountain had already been allowed to fall into decay, and the lead piping been stolen.
Some early foreigners gave vast overestimates for the size of the park which wildly differed from each other, and all far greater than the figure given by the park authorities today. They wanted to impress their readers, and much of this hyperbole started with the Jesuits who performed various tasks for Kangxi and Qianlong in particular, and who wanted themselves to promote China's glory and potential in order to justify the high cost of keeping them there. Nevertheless, just as with Hugo's ignorant but pleasing-to-the-ear remarks, and as with other foreign over-estimates of the longevity of Chinese history, the visibility of the Great Wall from outer space, and the complexity of the language, the Chinese are always happy to play these inventions back and amplify them further in order to awe foreigners.
The destruction of the palace complex was certainly a loss, but (to borrow a phrase from later in the letter) a 'cultural catastrophe' it was not. The real catastrophes were to come, and they were inflicted on the Chinese by the Chinese themselves.
The insinuation (I'll borrow the word) that the destruction of the Summer Palace is to be placed on the same scale as 'the Holocaust, Hiroshima or American slavery' is one that should utterly revolt all who read it. All of us can condemn all of these events, both the massive loss of human life and liberty and the relatively minor if still regrettable burning of a few wooden palaces and treasures, few of them unique. All can sift for accurate accounts from those who were there, rather than randomly choosing someone who wasn't, but whose ignorant complaisance appeals.
The humiliation of the Summer Palace is one of many unfortunate traumas that shape China's modern national psyche, even though the scale of the physical destruction was much smaller than the Sino-Japanese War's or the Cultural Revolution's. Likewise, whether there have been apologies or not, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and slavery will stay in the national psyches of Israel, Japan and the United States.
Again, an utterly revolting and highly inappropriate comparison, equating the deaths of millions of people with the destruction of a limited amount of property.
The 'humiliation' of the destruction of the Summer Palace was the direct result of the murder of envoys captured during a truce requested by the Manchus to stall foreign forces from entering Beijing. The intention was indeed to humiliate and punish the Manchus, who had built and owned most of the palace complex, to which none but a tiny number of Chinese were permitted entrance. It did not humiliate the Chinese in any way, but rather avoided the humiliation of putting the former Chinese now Manchu capital under occupation.
What might be thought truly humiliating would be to have your entire country absorbed into a foreign empire, to be forced to shave your head in pattern indicating subjection (if male), and to be ruled by foreigners you outnumber more then 80 to 1 from 1644 to 1912: 268 years. A slightly greater embarrassment than having a handful of foreign troops show up and torch a few buildings, even if the narrative was indeed that simple?
Clearly national psyches are what they are taught to be, and highly selective at that.
A 'put-on'? Absolutely.
Setting aside the vastly different scales, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and slavery are within living memory or the memories of the children of those who experienced them, while the events of 1860 are not. France is not teaching its schoolchildren to hate the Germans because of the events of 1870 (whatever they may have been). British children are not taught to hate the Chinese for the murder of their envoys, nor for the shelling of HMS Amethyst, nor the invasion of the British embassy in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, although if public debate were stifled and newspapers controlled, a campaign of disinformation about China might easily be begun.
Despite the suffering experienced in World War Two the British are not taught to not the Germans or the Japanese, and when they do it's because of direct personal experience of, for instance, Japanese concentration camps, or forced labour on Japanese railway projects in Thailand. The majority alive today were born since the War, and none blames or hates the other for actions for which they were not themselves responsible, although still in living memory, and captured on film. It makes no sense whatsoever to do so. Dunkirk, a tragedy for the British, is celebrated not as a humiliation but as triumph of courage against adversity, and even so it will be less publicly marked as the last survivors of the war finally pass away.
If modern Chinese are aware of 1860 it is because they are taught a false and incomplete version of those events as part of an organised programme of xenophobia. In Hong Kong, as part of the heritage of British rule, a far more balanced view is available, public debate on foreign depredations in the 19th century is permitted, and the school books, as Yuan Weishi pointed out, tell a quite different story from those on the mainland, with assorted points of view. With the exception of a few top-end professional historians, most of whom know when it is wisest to keep quiet, no one in the mainland is capable of entering debate on these matters, the facts being having been kept from them.
The world is now dealing with a China that is behaving with a mixture of nouveau riche pride and insecurity. China seems still to be trying to right the many wrongs from the 19th century, whether rightly or wrongly. In either case, there is no need for Mr. Neville-Hadley to defend a cultural catastrophe as though he were speaking from a moral high ground.
No defence of the British and French forces actions has been made at any point. Either the article has not been read, or this is a deliberate distraction. A little extra detail (the murder of the envoys) was added in passing. And the importance of that detail--the importance of knowing all the facts that can be brought to light--is obvious from the defensive reaction. Should readers also be reminded that the foreign forces were given extensive assistance by Chinese labourers? That the Chinese themselves joined in the sack of the palaces, and continued the destruction long after the foreigners had gone? These inconvenient facts are not available in mainland China, and their lack leaves public opinion misinformed.
The Chinese government has no interest whatsoever in righting wrongs from any period, and as the piece specifically pointed out, there is no desire for any past wrong to be righted even if that were possible, for instance by having some pea-brained foreigners with their own proselytizing agendas, who don't even share a nationality with those responsible, show up to make utterly meaningless apologies for deeds done a century before they were born. The point is to stay in power, and teaching sensitivity to mendacious accounts of ancient history for the purposes of promoting xenophobia and uniting an increasingly sceptical public behind the Party helps to ensure that.
If the Party actually wanted to right wrongs, surely it would begin with those wrongs it has itself committed. It would begin with the vast catastrophes it has rained down on the Chinese since 1949, amongst the greatest disasters in human history, overshadowing in their death and destruction the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and American slavery put together. Anyone wanting to bicker over the detail of events in 1860 is simply party to the cover-up of the Party's horrifying history, and suffering from a collapse of any sense of proportion. Of course, the Party's massive murderousness does not absolve any other group of other crimes of any kind committed elsewhere, but it is the Party that links the destruction of 1860 and the holocausts it itself unleashed on innocent citizens by trying to hide the one behind the other.
If we're going to look for Holocaust comparisons, let's look at precisely the events from which the constant harping on 1860 is a diversion: a minimum of 45 million people killed in the 1958–62 Great Leap Forward campaign from brutality but mostly from starvation caused by deranged Party policies. And while families sold their children, or even ate them, and died wholesale at the roadside, Mao gave interest-free loans to other 'socialist' countries, denied that China had any problems, told cadres to make sure some fields were left fallow since China had such an abundance of food, and exported grain in vast amounts in order to convey the triumph of socialism and the rise of China under Party rule.
Forty-five million dead within living memory: isn't this something worth getting really angry about, rather than the burning of a few palaces 150 years ago. The economy crippled, 30% to 40% of the country's entire housing stock pulled down for use as fertilizer, and instead of sweeping these thugs from power people are diverted into wittering on about the loss of a few palaces.
Nor was that the end of it. The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution saw more insanity, with further tens of millions of deaths, the vast nationwide destruction of historic buildings and cultural artefacts by the million; some smashed, some melted down, some sold off en masse to foreign collectors by weight. The destruction of the Summer Palace by a few foreigners was a pin prick compared to the complete decapitation of culture carried out by the Chinese themselves less than 40 years ago.
Is the Party going to apologise to anyone for any of this? Far from it: instead is suppresses critical commentary, attempts to bury most discussion altogether, and still claims its legitimacy descends through Mao, and the victory of 1949, as the true inheritor of the revolution of 1911-12.
Where's the national psyche now? Could any other countries mentioned above, so unable to get worked up about wrongs done by the previous generation, or the one before, let something on this scale, committed in the last 50 years, go largely unacknowledged?
As it is, almost none of the claims made about the events of 1860 are true, and many are the most enormous lies. On the anniversary of the destruction last year the Summer Palace authorities claimed that about 1.5 million items from the Summer Palace were in museums overseas, with the worst offender being the British Museum with 230,000 items. The British Museum's
entire Chinese collection amounts to only around a tenth of that. Of these, the curators estimate that perhaps 15
may have come from the Summer Palace, and this includes pieces of roof tile and roof ornaments--not exactly fantastic treasures. It was claimed that most of the collection remains locked away because the museum fears that if it is on show it must be returned to China under international law. In fact much of it is on permanent display, all but the more delicate objects (which can be seen by appointment) of the rest are rotated, and although the UK has signed international agreements on cultural acquisitions none of them apply to the museum's Chinese collection. All these claims are entirely false.
The authorities' announcement that Summer Palace items in museums overseas would be catalogued for publication and display in time for the 150th anniversary has met with embarrassing failure. Attribution is difficult since few of the items in the palace collection were unique, and it's a nice irony that those that can easily be identified were created by Italian and French Jesuits at the behest of the Manchus, notably the rather ineptly executed bronze heads from a fountain-water clock that occasionally come up for auction. These are odd choices for the title of Chinese national treasures.
The Chinese team has failed to show up at the much-excoriated British Museum, and probably hopes that we'll quietly forget about the project. Nevertheless, visitors to the site can currently view an exhibition of rather more Summer Palace items than the British Museum can muster, including 150 'repaired items' and 85 pieces of stone carving. But these 'lost treasures' as the Chinese media calls them, have apparently been recovered not from thieving foreigners but from universities, public institutions, and private citizens in China itself. Oops.
Some people (Donald O. Young amongst them) think it's outrageous that the bronze heads now change hands for millions of dollars, although for years their sale went unnoticed (and the sale of other items with supposed Summer Palace links still goes unnoticed) and they changed hands for modest sums until their propaganda value was recognised. It's the Chinese government itself, which practically guarantees that it will find some stooge to make the highest bid at all costs, that has driven the price up, each time using the media to whip people who should know better into a froth of nationalistic outrage.
It's difficult to know where to start with Gaetan Roy and Donald Young, who have swallowed the propaganda whole. Young made it clear that he thought the loss of 18 foreign lives of less importance than the destruction of Manchu property--a disgusting proposition. Bizarrely, Roy blames foreigners at least in part for the deaths in the Taiping Rebellion, which he numbers at 50 million (most other estimates are around half that, but still an extraordinary number of deaths). Given that it was foreign training and leadership of Manchu armies that eventually crushed the rebellion, this is a particularly peculiar claim. He even blames foreigners in part for the Boxer Rebellion, and for the eventual fall of the Manchu Qing dynasty. Since the Party claims the (heretical Christian) Taiping and the Boxers as proto-revolutionaries, and bases its legitimacy on the fall of the Qing, these are not arguments likely to be well received, and may explain (along with the fact that the last thing the government wants to do is to have to accept an apology for any of this) why in six years his project has made so little progress.
Young cannot say enough good things about the current president, while being entirely clueless about the meaning of 'harmony' when the word is used by Hu Jintao. This is despite the widespread repression, the lack of religious freedoms, and so on. Young thinks Hu is doing his best, and all of this was particularly comical to hear (in a painful way) on the day that the Party was mustering its entirely negative response to having a Nobel Peace Prize winner and attempting to suppress all knowledge of the announcement within China. Young wants to separate the current leadership from the past (although Party statements do the opposite) while not seeing that precisely the same separation applies when considering whether the people of the UK and France have any apologising to do for the actions of previous governments 150 years ago.
All this is utterly clueless, and at the same time rather sinister.
Just to add to the whole muddle, Donald Young was president of a Georgia bible college until forced to resign when the college's student newspaper revealed that he had falsely claimed to have a Masters degree. And the man on the ground supposedly making all their arrangements, one Shaun Bao, has been repeatedly reported to claim that he is the grandson of the last emperor, and even, according to one article, that he was born in the Forbidden City. He appears to be Aisin-Gioro Baoxun, relationship to the last emperors unknown: the last two emperors both died childless, and the last emperor was evicted in 1926. Bao appears to be in his forties, and certainly not in his 80s. Supposedly organising information for the press, he failed to reply to emailed questions, and the Yuanming Yuan Society, for whom he was organising the events, provided a cell phone number that didn't work.
There's a long tradition in China of foreign businessmen employing some middle man supposedly with excellent connections to decision-makers at high level who then leads his clients a merry dance, taking what he can from both sides. Contracts are always just about to be signed, just a little more investment is needed, and there's always some excuse depending upon a non-existent inscrutability in which the gullible foreigners are eager to believe when in fact contracts, business, and profits fail to materialise. It came as no surprise when, given that only ten days before the anniversary neither man knew exactly what the sequence of events on the ground would be and that they were still 'waiting for clearance', that most events failed to take place, and neither party wants to talk about it. One even failed to travel to China at all, and no one will say who spoke or said what. The line, 'People like yourself who've followed the events of the past weeks will understand,' was almost laughably corny.
No one comes well out of this: Certainly not the foreign armies of 1860, certainly not the barbarous and bloody-handed Communist Party of China (although the problem is that it comes out far better than it should, with attention successfully deflected away from its atrocities); but least of all the disgusting and embarrassing apologists for the Party who make themselves parties to the cover-up, whether Chinese or foreign.
