Li Hongzhang

Chinese government administrator

• Born: February 15, 1823
• Birthplace: Hefei, Anhui, China
• Died: November 7, 1901
• Place of death: Tianjin, China

Li Hongzhang played a leading role in China’s Qing Dynasty, instituting reforms based on a moderate policy of Westernization known as self-strengthening, while in foreign affairs he adopted a firm but conciliatory attitude.

Early Life

Li Hongzhang (lee hong-zhahng) came from a wealthy and successful literati family. His father, Li Wenan, was the holder of the highest imperial degree and had achieved that great status in 1838, along with Zeng Guofan. Li Wenan sent his son to Beijing to study with Zeng; in 1847, Li Hongzhang also acquired the highest degree. He began service in the Hanlin Academy and was being groomed as an important high official. Li’s career underwent a dramatic shift in 1853, when he and his father returned home to raise a local militia to protect their region from the Taiping rebels. Through his connections with Zeng, Li entered into the top ranks of the anti-Taiping forces in Anhui (Anhwei) Province. He served with great success in Anhui and Jiangxi (Kiangsi) Provinces until 1861. During this period, however, he had difficulties with his superiors, including Zeng, all of whom he believed were too cautious in taking the offensive.

Li was an unusually tall man for his time, more than six feet in height. As a young man, he was powerful and courageous; photographs taken in his sixties show a dignified, alert, and energetic man dressed self-assuredly in his official robes and with a small white beard. Li acquired enormous wealth in official service; at his death, his estate was estimated to be worth at least 500,000 Chinese ounces of silver, or several hundred million dollars. He used his wealth to sustain his political and family power; personally, he lived a plain and temperate life. Li had five brothers and six sons who profited from his prominence, both politically and financially, but none was as capable as he.

Life’s Work

From 1860 to 1870, Li emerged from the ranks of Zeng’s lieutenants to become a key regional official in the Lower Zhang Jiang River valley and commander of his own regional force, the Huai Army (so named after a region within Li’s home province, Anhui, from which the army was raised). When Zeng assumed overall command of the anti-Taiping forces in 1860, he gave Li and the Huai Army a key role. Li joined in the campaign coordinated by Zeng that destroyed the Taipings in 1864. Three years later, still under Zeng’s leadership, Li and his Huai Army implemented the offensive that destroyed the Nien rebellions in Shangdong (Shantung).

During the defense of Shanghai in 1862, Li incorporated into his forces the foreign-led and -armed “ever victorious army” and became an advocate of Western military technology. Cooperating with Zeng, Li played an important role in the establishment of small-arms factories in 1863-1864, the Kiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai in 1865, and the Nanjing Arsenal in 1867. These early self-strengthening projects were arms factories operated as official state enterprises and thus incorporated the nepotism and inefficiency typical of the Qing bureaucracy. All were headed by foreign technical experts, who were to train Chinese technicians while producing modern arms.

The production of these arsenals was available to Li’s own regional forces, further increasing his power. Unlike Zeng, Li did not disband his provincial forces following the Taipings’ defeat. He and a few others continued to command independent regional armies, a characteristic that gives a special feudal flavor to the late Qing Dynasty period (1860-1912), in which militarily strong officials such as Li are seen as the precursors of China’s twentieth century warlords.

Li’s early regional effort at military modernization is important because it was more effective than another program directed from Beijing by Prince Gong, a brother of the Xianfeng emperor. Gong understood the significance of Western military technology after the sacking of the Summer Palace at Beijing by an Anglo-French force in 1860, but his modernization efforts encountered delays and setbacks. Then Gong’s power declined after the death of his brother, the emperor. The Empress Dowager Cixi consolidated her power behind the new child emperor Tongzhi, and she viewed Gong as a rival. By the 1870’s, Gong was no longer a significant figure in Qing politics.

In 1870, when a crisis arose in Tianjin following a riot in which foreigners were killed, the dynasty turned to Zeng. Zeng’s health was poor, so he recommended Li, who was then appointed governor general of Chihli (Hebei) and commissioner of the Northern Sea. Li quickly settled the Tianjin incident and proceeded during the next quarter century to wield enormous power from his posts at Tianjin, which combined control of military, trade, and diplomatic affairs for the whole of China north of Shanghai. Li also held several key positions in the central bureaucracy at Beijing, such as grand secretary (1872-1901), which further magnified his power.

Li maintained his positions through a combination of ability and political guile. He had relied upon Zeng until Zeng’s death in 1872. Li cultivated Gong during the 1860’s, when the prince’s star was ascendant in Beijing. In 1875, he helped Cixi ensure the enthronement of her infant nephew as the Guangxu emperor, and he became an important supporter of her long domination of the dynasty’s fortunes. Li’s penchant for modernization put him at odds with more conservative officials, and his willingness to compromise in the face of foreign threats of force brought him into disrepute with hot-blooded young officials who hoped to best the foreigners in war. Thus, while enormously powerful, Li was both dependent upon a short-sighted and narrow empress dowager and open to challenge by other officials on a wide variety of grounds.

From 1870 to 1895, while based at Tianjin, Li followed a three-pronged foreign policy that combined moderate accommodation of foreign demands; construction of new Qing military power, especially a modern navy; and extension of Qing influence through the new diplomatic forms emerging in East Asia. Li assumed that the Qing Empire, like other ruling dynasties before, would continue to dominate all states in the region, including Russia and Japan, as well as the new trading powers such as Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Although similar to European conceptions of a diplomacy based on a balance of power, Li’s ideas derived from traditional Chinese notions of international politics, in which the foreigners’ advantages are turned against themselves and China plays various foreign powers’ ambitions against one another.

Li’s diplomatic record from 1870 to 1895 is not distinguished by great successes. He was forced to accept extensions of Japanese power in the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan, Russian power in the far western Ili valley, and the assertion of French power into Vietnam in the period from 1870 to 1885. Li was strongly criticized by more aggressive officials at the time for his role in these affairs as well as by later, nationalistic historians, who often cast Li as a venal traitor. Nevertheless, aside from the defeat in the Sino-French War in 1883-1885, a war Li knew the dynasty should have avoided, the Qing did not suffer any major defeats during this period.

The Sino-French War destroyed much of the Qing’s military and naval modernization efforts south of Shanghai and had the effect of further increasing the weight of Li’s Peiyang (Northern Sea) commissionership. Li undertook modernization programs in his region after 1870 that included the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, the Kaiping Coal Mines, textile factories, a telegraph system from Shanghai to Tianjin, new arsenals, a railroad at Tianjin, and a major naval base on the Liaodong Peninsula. Some of these mark a continuation of his pre-1870 pattern of military modernization; others included new forms of transportation and communication with commercial, diplomatic, and military advantages. Li also approved innovative forms of industrial operation involving less state control, a more active role for merchants, and greater opportunities for personal wealth for both the Chinese entrepreneurs involved and the Chinese officials, including himself.

During the late 1880’s, Li undertook a diplomatic offensive in response to Japanese interest in extending their power into Korea. The complex machinations among the Koreans, the Qing Dynasty, and the Japanese unraveled in the fall of 1894 and produced the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). In this war, Li’s Northern Sea fleet was destroyed, his armies were disgraced, and Japan won a massive victory. Li’s career never recovered from these defeats. Nevertheless, he was dispatched to Japan to negotiate a settlement and while there was wounded in an assassination attempt. Ashamed, the Japanese agreed to impose slightly less humiliating terms on the Qing.

As the distasteful peace with Japan was being concluded, Li became involved in a remarkable diplomatic maneuver known as the Triple Intervention. Seeking to offset Japanese power in Manchuria, Li concluded an agreement with Russia, Germany, and France to intervene and force Japan to give up the special privileges it had won from China in the First Sino-Japanese War. Japan grudgingly conceded to the international pressure but then was incredulous as the Qing Dynasty proceeded to bestow on Russia special privileges, including railway and naval-base rights, in Manchuria.

Li conducted negotiations on some of these matters in Europe and is believed to have accepted bribes from the Russian government for his favor to their interests in Manchuria. This charge of personal venality, combined with his compromise of Qing sovereignty in Manchuria, has sealed the unfavorable judgment of Li held by most historians of modern China. Li’s late diplomacy in Manchuria began the rivalry between Japan and Russia over control of this region of China. That rivalry led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and later produced the 1931 Japanese takeover of Manchuria, one of the critical steps on the way to World War II in the Pacific.

Li had no role in either the reform movement of 1898 or the Boxer Uprising of 1900. He appeared on the dynasty’s behalf in 1901 to negotiate the settlement of the Boxer incident. He had little leverage because foreign armies occupied Beijing and the empress dowager and emperor were in self-imposed exile away from the court, while Li himself was known to be out of favor and devoid of real power. Li died before agreement was reached on the final terms.

Significance

The failure of Li Hongzhang’s efforts and the disgrace of his policies was much more than a great personal defeat. Li represented the best possibility that the Qing Dynasty had to accommodate itself to the rapidly changing world of the post-1850 era. He understood the need for China to adapt itself to an altered political and military situation in Asia and made some of the most enlightened efforts to encourage moderate modernization. These efforts were more successful than those of other Manchu and Chinese leaders but still fell far short of what was necessary.

Personally, Li was a decisive, innovative official who learned to act with restraint. His accommodation of Cixi can be interpreted either as a necessary compromise to the reality of court politics or as tragic misjudgment that doomed to failure all Li’s carefully laid projects and plans. Whatever weaknesses that Li’s stewardship contained, they remained largely unrecognized until the Sino-Japanese War, when all of his authority and glory were swiftly destroyed by the force of Japanese arms. Li’s conception of what would happen to the dynasty and to China after this war remains a mystery, as does the full motivation behind his diplomatic maneuvers after 1895. The collapse of Li’s own career by 1897 reflects the true decline of the Qing Dynasty’s power and authority.

Bibliography

Bland, J. O. P. Li Hung-chang. London: Constable, 1917. Reprint. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. A biography of Li. Bland was a reporter in China, and his account contains much of the foreign community’s gossip about Li.

Chu, Samuel C., and Kwang-Ching Liu, eds. Li Hung-Chang and China’s Early Modernization. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Collection of thirteen essays exploring Li as a modernizer, diplomat, and national official, and attempting to restore his name despite historical accusations of illegal financial activities and nepotism.

Folsom, Kenneth E. Friends, Guests, and Colleagues: The Mu-fu System in the Late Ch’ing Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. A rich and useful study of Li and his staff that contains many details about Li’s life and career.

Hsu, Immanuel C. Y. The Rise of Modern China. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. The author of this standard text is an authority on the self-strengthening period; the section entitled “Self-Strengthening in an Age of Accelerated Foreign Imperialism” puts Li’s career into context.

Liu, K. C. “Li Hung-chang in Chihli: The Emergence of a Policy, 1870-1875.” In Approaches to Modern Chinese History, edited by Albert Feuerwerker et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Liu, who is a leading authority on Li, outlines Li’s policies during his first years as governor-general and Northern Sea commissioner at Tianjan.

Spector, Stanley. Li Hung-chang and the Huai Army. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964. An important study that emphasizes Li’s role in creating the system of regionally based military power in China after 1860.