Boundaries-Prelims.indd

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ĈčĆĕęĊė 4

Treaties, Politics and the Limits of Local

Diplomacy in Fuzhou in the Early 1850s^1

Introduction

The interaction between China and foreign powers in the post-Opium
War era is often seen in the stark context of either Western imperialism
or Chinese xenophobia. While Chinese nationalistic historiography
stresses the inevitability of clashes in the wake of the intrusion of Western
imperialism, Western-language accounts often depict the Sino-Western
conβlict as a consequence of differing conceptions of international
relations. The latter interpretation assumes that the Chinese did not
understand modern concepts of diplomacy.
The Chinese ofβicials in charge of foreign affairs (yiwu) are generally
portrayed as divided into two factions advocating different policy
approaches: a group of hardliners that advocated the extermination of
the barbarians (jiao yi) and an appeasement party that favored peaceful
control (fu yi). Western scholars often show the appeasement party in
a better light, expressing admiration of their compliance, while treating
the hardliners as being ignorant of international affairs.^2 Nationalistic

1. Using the FO dispatches deposited in PRO, London, and the Qing documents
   in the First Historical Archives in Beijing and the Palace Museum Library in
   Taipei, a preliminary paper in Chinese was given at the Second International
   Conference on Ming-Qing History held in Tianjin. The paper further
   incorporated materials from the Church Missionary Archives at the University
   of Birmingham. A rewritten version, from which this chapter originated, was
   presented at a conference in Perth.


2. See, for example, Fred W. Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yu and His
   Geography of 1848 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Research
   Center, 1975), and Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847‒ 1880
   (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Research Center, 1974). The
   former sees Governor Xu Jiyu as a victim of conservatism and xenophobic
   local literati and the latter βinds the event under discussion as a frightening