treaties but excellent to make war"
At court in Peking about this time the military-
conservative faction was strongly placed and also enjoyed
popular backing. A smaller faction, known as the "foreign
affairs group" had no love of the West, but were realists and
recognised that the only way to salvation was to modernise.
But this was usually a minority view; and its adherents tended
not to prosper in their careers.
Generally through the nineteenth century, although the
Manchu rulers displayed some dexterity in fending off the
more immediate Western threats, and even enrolled Western
help in suppressing the great internal revolts afflicting the
regime, like the Taiping rebellion in the mid-century, they
and their courts remained too frivolous, corrupt and
incompetent to take the measure of the challenge facing them.
And though individual Chinese statesmen and scholars
accurately diagnosed the disease and prescribed the remedy,
and there were in fact spasmodic modernisation movements, the
realists were usually lone voices against a chorus of angry
and blinkered conservatism. The imperial
The imperial tutor, Wo Ren,
reflected the view of the great majority when, in a memorial
to the Emperor in 1867, he questioned the need to
to "seek
trifling arts and respect barbarians as teachers, regardless
of the possibility that the cunning barbarians may not teach
us their essential techniques.
11
So a great opportunity was missed and, for reasons
still not entirely explained, China's response to the
challenge was slow, partial and inadequate. The old learning
was too deeply embedded; Western technology was seen at best