UC San Diego

This dissertation examines five missions sent by the Qing court to investigate Europe and engage in diplomacy between the Opium Wars and the Sino-Japanese War. How did the attitudes of Chinese officials towards the West change, and how did they conceptualize and internalize what they saw there? To address these questions, this study looks at the meeting of cultures from the Chinese point of view and revises the defunct "Western impact, Chinese response" school of history by understanding the subaltern perspective. Diplomats were instructed to remit journals regularly to the court. Each chapter takes one diplomat's submissions as its subject. Chapter one focuses on Binchun's travels in 1866. He deployed a wide range of literary techniques to tame, feminize, and domesticate the West, treating it as an object of fantasy. Chapter two focuses on Zhigang's mission from 1868 to 1871. He concluded that the scientific and political achievements of the West were due to a superior application of Neo- Confucian principles. Chapter three focuses on Zhang Deyi's travels from 1866 to 1872. He was open to Western categories and ways of thinking, exhibiting a proto- nationalist consciousness. Chapter four focuses on Guo Songtao's mission from 1877 to 1879. He concluded that the West was in possession of the Mandate of Heaven. Chapter five focuses on Xue Fucheng's mission from 1890 to 1893 and the professionalization of Chinese diplomacy. This dissertation identifies three modes of narrative. Binchun and Zhang Deyi, in the 1860s, were enchanted and unsettled, and wrote to entertain. Zhigang and Guo Songtao, in the late 1860s and 1870s, explained the success of the West based on the moral and natural principles of Confucianism. Xue Fucheng, in the 1890s, employs a strategic and confrontational depiction of the West to win domestic support for modernization. The diplomats applied existing categories and ways of thinking to describe the West, creating versions of the West which were not in conflict with Chinese thought and practice. This process shifted and enlarged the meaning of tradition and enabled the Qing literati to embrace texts and practices outside of the Neo -Confucian orthodoxy