"old China hands", called on the British government for a
thorough-going
forward
policy,
nothing less than the
foundation of another India, a vast British protectorate over
the valley of the Yangtze; while the British Foreign Office,
more sceptical of the value of the China market and more alive
to the true costs of another Eastern empire, preferred to
bolster the tottering Manchu regime, urge moderate reform and
pursue a course of limited commitment and limited liability
in China.
In the heated internal debates of the time British
diplomats were accused of being too sympathetic to China. Sir
Rutherford Alcock, the British Minister to Peking in the
sixties, was charged in the British press with being too
"mandarin-minded"; and there was a call for his substitution
by "someone fresh from the political life of Europe."
On the Chinese side, there was much inherited statecraft
on how to handle barbarians, particularly those who were
land-based in the north and therefore capable of posing a
lasting threat to Chinese security. There were the hallowed
precepts "bridle and restrain" (ji mi) and "use barbarians to
control barbarians" (yi yi zhi yi). In practice the rule had
been: exert pressure on the barbarians when China was strong,
come to terms when China was weak. The cautionary tale was
that of the Southern Song dynasty, which fell to the Mongols
thirteenth century, having recklessly pursued a
militaristic policy from a weak base. The first Chinese
Minister to Britain, Guo Songtao, in a memorial to the Emperor
in 1875 feared that his government were emulating the
Southern Song, "considering it disgraceful to make peace
in the
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