Abstract
In this book, Erik Ringmar introduces readers to the events and discourses that enabled the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, the Chinese imperial palace, at the hands of English and French forces in 1860. The book juxtaposes the urge by these Western powers to civilise the Chinese with the looting and subsequent burning of Yuanmingyuan that he sees as an act of barbarism, asking how the two are linked. To answer this question, the book turns to the performative nature of the encounter between a Western system of formally equal states, and a Chinese imperial system based on symbolic hierarchy. The book argues that much of what unfolded in the run-up to the burning of Yuanmingyuan had to do with the incompatibility of the two systems, and their associated ways of conducting relations and diplomacy. More fundamentally, however, it had to do with who these Europeans were and how they saw their place in the world.
The book therefore focuses on the French and English attitudes to China and to the looting and burning of Yuanmingyuan. The book draws on a range of philosophical works in a well-informed manner, but its real strength comes out when it draws on the personal accounts of Europeans who observed or participated in the destruction of the imperial palace. It quotes from journals and letters written at the time to give readers an insight into how various Europeans who engaged in the events in one way or another thought about their own participation in (or resistance to) the destruction of Yuanmingyuan.
At times, it seems a pity that we are not given similar access to Chinese accounts. Indeed, with the book’s emphasis on the performative and the relational, it is odd that so little is said about the reception of the European performance by the Chinese, and how some Chinese may have been part of producing a particular performance in the first place. It would have been interesting to juxtapose the European soldiers’ and officials’ accounts to that of their Chinese counterparts. On occasion, the absence of Chinese accounts leads to strongly underplaying, if not completely writing-out, Chinese agency from this story. For example, it is said that the Chinese empire had lived in its own world before 1860, but that it was forced to live in a world of Europe’s making after that point. This is indeed a common simplification of events, but one that has been challenged in recent literature, for example in Pär K Cassel’s Grounds of Judgement: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan, which shows Chinese actors to have had far more agency in shaping ‘unequal treaties’ than is commonly recognised. Having said this, Liberal Barbarism is explicitly concerned with the self-image of Europeans. As is often argued in the wider academic literature, our relations to others are often more concerned with constructing a particular image of ourselves, for ourselves. This book focuses on a particular set of selves, and provides a point from which others may explore the potentially co-constitutive relation to their Chinese others.
This critique of ‘liberal barbarism’ clearly has implications in the contemporary world. The book asserts that the tensions and attitudes that lead to the burning of Yuanmingyuan live on in contemporary Western liberalism, although it never goes as far as to argue this case in a sustained manner. As such, it should be of interest as a case study to those who engage in wider debates about neo-colonialism and liberal warfare – debates that often lack the empirical detail and rigour provided in this volume, particularly regarding China. With regards to the Chinese context, the timeliness of Ringmar’s book will also undoubtedly make it appeal to many. As the author notes in his conclusion, the burning of Yuanmingyuan has become part of the Chinese Communist Party’s mythology of ‘National Humiliation’ (guochi). In this narrative, constructed memories of past suffering and humiliation are deployed to explain why Party rule is beneficial and necessary. Again, this means that this is not simply a book about a historical event. Most of all, it should be read as an intervention into important political debates over the contemporary efforts to build not only a particular image of benevolent Western liberalism, but also a particular Chinese sense of self and the legitimisation of Party rule to which it contributes under Xi Jinping.
Finally, the author should be commended for the forthright and accessible style in which the book is written. Where many theoretically informed works get bogged down in obscure language, this book is so smoothly written that it will not only lend itself well to undergraduate teaching, but also makes for a most pleasant reading experience.