VOLUME V, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 2
The Unequal Treaty, the Legal Dressing After the Taking
The previous section laid occupying a position bare, the deepest layer. This section returns to the line of law, to look at the last step after the taking, setting down a treaty. Taking is a matter of strength, and a treaty is a matter of words, and a treaty takes what has already been seized and writes it into a lawful accomplished fact on paper. This section uses several core treaties from modern history to lay this mechanism of making things lawful out clearly, one layer at a time.
One. The True Function of a Treaty Is to Dress Naked Strength in a Lawful Coat
One nation's army reaches the other side's capital, presses the other side to the negotiating table, and makes it sign a document, and that document is the balance of strength frozen at that moment. Since the thing has already been seized, why does the strong side still bother to sign a treaty. Because what is held down by force alone is not stable, held today, and tomorrow, once strength shifts, the other side may take it back at any time. Once it is signed, the matter changes its nature, from I took what was yours, to you agreed to give it to me, black ink on white paper, with the other side's state seal as witness, and other nations recognize the account along with it.
A treaty amounts to dressing naked strength in a lawful coat, and from then on what was taken is held with a proper name. This is exactly the extreme version of Huang Zongxi's the law of a single family on the international stage, not one emperor making law to press down on the common people, but one power, or a handful of powers, making law and, borrowing the form of the weak nation's sovereignty, freezing the strong power's result into the text of the international order.
Two. 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing, the Beginning of the Whole System
After the First Opium War, the Qing signed the Treaty of Nanjing aboard a British warship, the first unequal treaty of modern China. Four core terms, five ports opened to trade, Hong Kong Island ceded, an indemnity of twenty-one million silver dollars, and tariffs set by agreement. The fourth term was the deadliest. Tariffs set by agreement meant the Qing lost, from then on, the power to set its own tariffs, and the protective gate around its home market was torn down. Half a year later, extraterritoriality and a one-sided most-favored-nation clause were added, so that foreigners on Chinese soil were not subject to Chinese law, and any privilege one nation won fell automatically to the other treaty nations. Tariff sovereignty, judicial sovereignty, and an equal footing in negotiation, the three pillars an independent nation relies on in international law, were pulled out all at once by a single treaty.
Three. 1860, the Convention of Peking, a Signing Table Lit by a Fire
The Convention of Peking, signed after the Second Opium War, has a background that must be seen clearly. A few days before the signing, the Anglo-French forces burned the Old Summer Palace, the imperial gardens built up over the reigns of Kangxi and Qianlong, reduced to ashes by three days of fire, and the treaty was signed before the smoke had even cleared. The terms went further still, ceding the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, opening Tianjin, allowing foreign missionaries to rent land and build churches in the interior, and paying Britain and France eight million taels of silver each. The Xianfeng Emperor had fled to Rehe, and the one who signed was Prince Gong, and he had no other choice, if he did not sign, the Anglo-French forces would keep fighting their way south. The nature of the treaty shows most completely in a scene like this, what is called agreement by both sides is an agreement one side forced out by arms.
Four. 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Installing Output Directly Inside the Other Side's Body
The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed after the First Sino-Japanese War, weighed more than the two before it. It ceded the Liaodong Peninsula, the whole of Taiwan, and the Penghu Islands, imposed an indemnity of two hundred million taels of silver, roughly equal to three years of the Qing's total fiscal revenue, opened Shashi, Chongqing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, and allowed the Japanese to set up factories and manufacture in the treaty ports. That fourth term was especially deadly. It installed Japan's industrial output directly inside the Chinese market, so that Japanese goods could be produced within China's borders, without even paying tariffs any more.
The effect of this treaty reached far beyond itself. The powers saw Japan win so great an advantage and at once wanted a share of it too, and Jiaozhou Bay, Lüshun, and Dalian were leased out one after another, and 1898 became the high point of the powers carving out spheres of influence in China, carving up China becoming, for the first time, a common phrase in international opinion. This is the mechanism by which a balance of strength is frozen, once one nation breaks through, the rest follow at once. By 1901, after the Boxer Incident and the Eight-Nation Alliance, the Boxer Protocol was signed, an indemnity of four hundred and fifty million taels of silver, nearly one billion taels with interest, equal to seven years of the Qing's total fiscal revenue, and from then on the central treasury was locked tight by this chain.
Five. Inside the Boxer Indemnity, There Is a Turn Worth Pondering
The Boxer Indemnity of the Boxer Protocol was the heaviest chain of the late Qing and early Republic, and yet later the United States, Britain, and other nations returned part of the indemnity to China, one after another, to be spent on education, founding a preparatory school for study in America and funding a group of students to go abroad, training up a generation of modern scholars such as Hu Shih, Chu Coching, and Chao Yuen Ren. Money that came out of the logic of taking turned, in the end, into another kind of cultural strength. The folds of history often twist this way, and it is a reminder of one thing, the same money, the same treaty, falling into different hands and put to different uses, can grow into entirely different things.
Six. Pull the Lens to 1945, the Same Core Wearing a Different Face
That year, fifty nations signed the Charter of the United Nations, with China's delegate the first to put pen to it. On the surface, this is a document entirely different in nature from the unequal treaties, the sovereign equality of all nations, the prohibition on the use of force. But inside the charter's core is written another structure of strength, the five permanent members of the Security Council each holding a veto, and these five seats reflect the balance of strength in 1945, just as the Second World War ended.
Put plainly, the five chairs of the five permanent members are a snapshot of the world's strength at that moment in 1945, whoever won the great war took a seat, and whoever took a seat gripped a veto able to halt anything. Eighty years have passed, and the map of world strength has long since shifted several times over, and yet this snapshot still hangs on the wall, never replaced. Any major resolution on peace, security, sanctions, or the sending of troops, the moment one of the five casts a veto, the whole mechanism stops at once. From 1945 to today, the veto has been used hundreds of times. The form of the rules, from the Treaty of Nanjing to the Charter of the United Nations, looks turned upside down. The core of the rules, the freezing of a balance of strength, runs in one unbroken line.
Seven. Roosevelt Lifting China into the Five Permanent Members Deserves a Point of Its Own
At the Cairo Conference in 1943, Roosevelt pressed to list China among the four postwar powers, and France was later added to make five permanent members. At the time, neither Britain nor the Soviet Union thought much of a China long weakened, and the reason Roosevelt held firm was that China was one of the main battlefields against Japan, and a postwar order without China taking part would not stay stable.
One thing must be seen clearly here. What Roosevelt lifted up was the chair of China, not any particular regime sitting in that chair at the time. This chair was set up in 1945, and the people sitting in it later changed, yet the chair is still there, and the position among the five permanent members is still there. The positional meaning of this stroke runs very deep. The most important position in the international order is often decided not by who sits in it now, but by who set up the chair back then. The person in the chair will change, will grow old, will step down, but once the chair itself is set there, it becomes a lasting position, and who can sit in it, and what can be done once seated, is mostly settled at the very moment the chair is set up. Huang Zongxi spoke of the law of a single family, the identity of the lawmaker deciding whom the law belongs to, and on the international stage, the one who sets up the chair decides whom the chair belongs to.
Eight. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the thirty-ninth layer. Treaty or charter, at the bone both are the balance of strength frozen into words, the law of a single family set down by the few strongest nations of the time, borrowing the signatures and seals of the weak nation, or of every nation, to write it into a lawful accomplished fact. It is not rules that govern nations, it is the strength of nations that sets down different rules in different eras, and then has other nations make their living inside those rules.
From how the taker takes, to how deep the taking goes, to how, after the taking, a treaty stamps it with the seal of law, the position of the strong side has, by this point, been laid out more or less in full. But these past few sections have kept the taken in the position of passively being taken from, as if it could only stand by and watch. The next section turns the lens fully to the taken, and asks, faced with the taker, does a nation that is taken from have only the one road of simply bearing it. The taken of history have, in fact, stood in several very different positions. Carry this layer, a treaty is strength frozen into words, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Three. The Responses of the Taken, Accept, Resist, Grow Strong.