Anson Burlingame: American Architect of the Cooperative Policy in China, 1861?1871

Abstract

The United States did not simply follow in British footsteps in China in the nineteenth century. Historians of Western policies in China, relying largely on British archival sources, have emphasized the conspicuous British role in shaping the course of Sino-Western relations before 1900 and, indeed, Great Britain did dominate many aspects of the Western commercial, military, and diplomatic presence in China. The United States and other Western nations found themselves participating in a diplomatic system managed primarily from London. Yet the record of American policy in China, contained in the archives of the United States government, reveals that at least during the 1860s the United States not only had its own policy but actually took a leading role among the Western nations. The 1860s were a crucial period in the history of both the United States and China, and the domestic events in the two countries were related. In America the abolitionist and Free Soil crusades for human equality had helped to bring Abraham Lincoln to the White House and had precipitated a civil war that wrought sweeping changes in American life. Those same American reform forces went to China in 1861 in the person of Anson Burlingame, Lincoln's minister plenipotentiary in Peking. Burlingame, long active in New England reform movements, found in China a new cause to champion. The Ch'ing Dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644, was finally suppressing the bloody Taiping Rebellion, which had raged since 1850. This domestic upheaval and the foreign invasions of China during the Opium War of 1839-1842, the Arrow War of 1858, and the British-French occupation of Peking in 1860 had dealt the imperial government several near-fatal blows. In an attempt to revive itself the dynasty embarked upon the T'ung-chih Restoration in 1862.1 For slightly more than a decade the Restoration leaders made a valiant effort to reach an accommodation with the modern West while trying to preserve the basic values and institutions of China's centuries-old tradition. This struggle for reform within tradition appealed strongly to Burlingame's idealistic spirit. His response to the T'ung-chih Restoration was the cooperative policy.