In English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China, area studies specialist James L. Hevia takes a look at imperialism through the lens of cultural pedagogy, striking a different tone than the traditional view of Western imperial action through military might. In doing so, Hevia makes the case for what is really colonializing action taken by Western powers (specifically but not solely the British) against China as comprised of four key elements. These include: (1) the use of violence against the people, institutions, and culture of China, through military means but also through diplomatic and linguistic coercion; (2) the “universalization of pseudo-scientific racial categories;” (3) the anxiety of the Western powers over the contrast between civilization and barbarism and the actions taken in response to that anxiety; and (4) the “practices of military plunder, the public exhibition, and the art market.”
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| James Hevia |
Hevia bookends his work between the Second Opium War and the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. Certainly, the military violence of the period is undeniable. Hevia, however, points to other methods of violence, including the use of diplomacy and the treaty system by the Western powers as a tool to produce Western hegemonic power. Hevia effectively demonstrates the manner in which language is manipulated to Western advantage and used as a tool against the Chinese. Matters such as the development of a standard translation of Chinese ideograms and the restriction of certain words from official Chinese communications demonstrate the lengths to which language was used not only to instruct the Chinese in their relations with the West but to control their actions.
Hevia focuses a great deal of attention in English Lessons on the standard compilation of knowledge of China and the Chinese people developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Western scholars combined the new access to China that arose from the Opium Wars with the sociological, demographical, geographical, and anthropological advances of the time to designate a set of characteristics for the Chinese people, their government, their culture, and more. The end result was a hierarchical categorization of the races encountered by the Western powers during the course of colonialism, knowledge which was then used to direct policy.
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| The sack of the Summer Palace |
Certainly the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion led to the third element of Hevia’s focus noted above, that of the anxiety of the Western powers over the contrast between civilization and barbarism. Here Hevia loses something of the strength of narrative that held the reader’s interest to this point. He writes of the atrocities committed at the time by the Western forces with a sense of detachment, a style which serves as a strange echo of the response of Western leaders to the actions of their troops. Perhaps this was intentional, perhaps not. In any event, while Hevia notes the concerns raised in the imperial centers over the actions of their military (and missionary) men, this seems to have had little effect on the powers themselves. Rather, they turned from the simple process of executing prisoners with bullets to the somehow less-barbaric (?) means of beheading. To off-set the stain of barbarism that attached to Western soldiers during the Boxer Rebellion, Hevia details the cultural methods used to justify the atrocities, including the introduction of the victim-martyr amongst the Christian missionaries and the symbolic place given to such martyrs.
With both the Boxer Rebellion and the sack of the Summer Palace during the Second Opium War, Hevia focuses on the significance of looting. He does an admirable job providing detail on the objects looted, their cultural significance, and the manner in which they were then displayed to the larger world. He identifies looting with the Western pedagogical project, and he is convincing that this was a large part of the process. Where he may be lacking, however, is in attributing other motives to the act of looting. What happened to sheer human greed? Certainly the average British private had more on his mind than teaching the Chinese a lesson? In his zeal to find cultural significance, Hevia might have stepped just a little too far in this area.
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| Troops used during the Boxer Rebellion |
If there is one criticism to be made, it is not really a very important one. From the very introduction to his work, Hevia makes it clear that this will not be another “China-centered approach” to the study of Western relations with the Chinese empire. By focusing on the period of the Opium Wars through the Boxer Rebellion, Hevia sought to reexamine the role of the Western powers in an effort to rescue the actions of the West from its position as a “reified historical agent.” He does this admirably, while also admitting that the Chinese were not totally without agency. Sadly, that agency is not included in this work (can one not hear Andre Gunder Frank shouting in the background “Eurocentrism” with the appropriate exclamation points?). In fact, while Hevia indicates at more than one point in English Lessons that the Chinese eventually adapt Western military techniques and instruments, he does not follow through on the promise to explore this topic. The Chinese appear at best as passive-aggressive agitators and at worse as mere bystanders to their own history.
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| Monument at Oberlin College originally built to honor missionary victims of the Boxer Rebellion |
In a work dense with analysis, James Hevia gives his readers a lot to think about in terms of the processes of colonialism through culture. His section on the pop culture outcomes of the Boxer Rebellion (boy adventure books, films, etc.) is fascinating in its level of detail and its excellent analysis. Yet, while Hevia provides more than ample information on the role of the teacher in the Western pedagogical project in nineteenth-century China, a modern-day scholar will have to look elsewhere for the experience of the student. With Hevia as a starting point, however, it will certainly be worth the effort.
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