The conception of China's place in the world underwent a major transformation under the Qing, but not quite thanks to Western imperialism in the 19th century, but rather due to Manchu imperialism in the 17th and 18th. Moreover, when we view Western imperialism in China, we have an unfortunate tendency to retroject the state of affairs in 1911 as having been established in 1842, but really the process of Western imperial encroachment on China was itself a gradual one, in which opinions could and did undergo substantial shifts.

To the people of the Late Ming, a dynasty that defined itself by, quite literally, solid manmade boundaries between Han Chinese 'civilisation' and Inner Asian 'barbarism', the takeover of the 'barbarian' Manchus and their subsequent campaigns of expansion into the old Mongol Empire fundamentally challenged Chinese worldviews. James Millward, using the diaries of the Qing official Qi Yunshi, describes quite vividly how by 1805, the Jiayu Guan in Gansu, once the western terminus of the Great Wall and the farthest limit of China, had been stripped of much of its significance, and in practice became merely an ostentatious milestone on a route that would only take one further into the imperial dominion – as the crow flies, it was still 1000km to the Xinjiang administrative capital at Ürümqi, and 2000 to the westernmost Qing-held city of Kashgar.^1 In 1793, the British ambassador George Macartney travelled by land to Jehol in Manchuria from Beijing, and while he was impressed at first by the Great Wall, it evidently was not in the best of shape. The young George Thomas Staunton, later one of Britain's top Sinologists, took a couple of pieces of rubble with him as a souvenir.^2 Under the Ming, China was 'between the seas' – seas of water to the east and south, and seas of land to the north and west. But the Qing had transgressed these bounds. Manchu imperialism took not only Manchu but also Chinese armies across the Great Wall time and again into Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, and behind the armies trailed administrators, merchants and, increasingly, farmers, who settled into enclaves in the new conquests. During the early years of the military administration in Xinjiang, senior Chinese officials petitioned for retrenchment and the abandonment of the unstable Tarim Basin, believing it an unnecessary expenditure and, perhaps deep down, a vanity project of the Qianlong Emperor. But by the 1870s, it was senior Chinese officials like Zuo Zongtang, leading ethnic Chinese armies, that were calling for a reconquest of Xinjiang after the 1860 revolts.^1

The re-situation of China from the centre of the world to the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent came about not due to a sudden shock to the system from Western imperialist expansion in the 1840s, but rather a more gradual process of Manchu and Chinese imperial expansion from the 1640s onward. The southern Chinese scholar Wei Yuan is probably most famous today for the 1844 海國圖志 Haiguo Tuzhi (Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime States), which surveyed the geography, politics and militaries of the Western powers China was then encountering, but his real magnum opus was the 1842 聖武記 Shengwuji (Record of the Sacred Campaigns), a military history of the Qing Dynasty centred on the wars against the Zunghar Mongols, rather than the recently-concluded war with Britain, which occupies only the last two chapters. Wei's interest in global geography was not suddenly spurred on by Western contact, but was rather the most recent expression of classical traditions of strategic culture which emphasised cultivating an understanding of regions beyond the frontiers of the ruling dynasty.^3

Returning to the particulars of Western imperialism, the process was not a matter of seismic, instantaneous change upon the conclusion of the First Opium War and cession of Hong Kong, but instead a gradual process of escalation to which the Qing, while not totally free to act, were not completely cowed into agreeing to either. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking did not make any demands that fundamentally altered the nature of the maritime frontier insofar as contact remained constrained to the coast, and indeed mirrored – albeit almost certainly inadvertently – a similar arrangement made with the Khanate of Kokand a decade earlier regarding commercial relations in southern Xinjiang.^4 On both the maritime and landward frontiers, the Qing had made a concerted effort to restrict points of commercial access – the Altishahr cities in Xinjiang, Kiakhta on the border with Russia, and Canton on the coast – and to heavily regulate the trade ongoing there through merchant monopolies. The 1832 agreement with Kokand and the 1842 treaty with Britain did make a few major changes to the specifics of the relationship, notably the abolition of the Chinese merchant monopolies, the establishment of extraterritorial rights (technically part of the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue in 1843), the renegotiation of customs duties and, in the case of the latter treaty, the opening of new ports. The loss of Hong Kong, whilst somewhat more extreme in that it involved the permanent transfer of territorial sovereignty, nonetheless could be viewed as an escalation from the lease of Macau to Portugal, rather than a total innovation.^5 However, contact would remain constrained to the maritime frontier, and free movement within China by foreign nationals – including missionaries – remained off the table. It was not until the Treaty of Tientsin, signed in 1858 at the close of the first phase of the Second Opium War, that Christianity was decriminalised, foreigners were allowed free movement – but not residence – in China as long as they held a valid passport, and a treaty port was to be established, provisionally, at the inland Yangtze city of Nanjing (at this time still serving as the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.)^6 Even then, it was only in 1861 that there was a treaty port in Hankou, much further on the Yangtze, and it would not be until the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki with Japan made Chongqing a treaty port that commercial penetration into the Chinese interior reached its deepest extent. In turn, the extension onto land of European investments, primarily in the form of railroads, only really began after the 1898 Scramble for Concessions.

So when we think of reactions, it is important not to catastrophise each individual step. The Daoguang Emperor ultimately gave his assent to the Treaty of Nanking despite it being agreed to behind his back. Hong Kong Island has a natural land area of barely 71 square kilometres, and the total area of Hong Kong today measures barely over 1000 square kilometres – hardly a major carving up of territory. The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin and 1860 Convention of Peking in some ways paralleled the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, as by expanding European commercial stakes in China, particularly in Taiping-held territory, Western support could be more easily brought to bear against the far more important internal crisis of civil war. The first major public outrage over a foreign attack came after the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, not the 1842 Treaty of Nanking or either the 1858 or 1885 Treaties of Tientsin.^7

But the aforementioned matter of civil war raises a significant complication to the terms of the question: why should there have been a major court response to Western imperialism when the domestic affairs of the country tended to be far more important? Qing military resources in 1860 were far more devoted to the Taiping than the Anglo-French expedition. Conflict with France in 1884-5 and Japan in 1894-5 received the attention they did in part because they emerged out of competing interests in the traditional Qing tributaries of Vietnam and Korea, respectively. The Self-Strengthening Movement from the 1860s onward is often seen as defence against the West, but this was not the only element at work. On land, Self-Strengthening would give the Qing the tools necessary to suppress major revolts. Not only would Western arms be used against the French and Japanese, but also the Taiping rebels in southern China, the Nian rebels in the north and the Dungan and Turkic Muslim revolts in the west and Xinjiang.^8 From a cynical point of view, wealthy elite reformists and constitutionalists stood to gain heavily from the establishment of representative political bodies, the erosion of the Confucian education system in favour of Western technical education, and the devolution of authority for taxation and security away from the central bureaucratic structure to provincial and sub-provincial gentry and bourgeois strongmen.^9 The polarisation of politics and the emergence of a radical constitutionalist wing under Liang Qichao and a loose revolutionary alliance under Sun Yat-Sen owed more to the largely internal failure of the 1898 reform movement – a movement admittedly spurred on partly by the recent defeat to Japan and the Scramble for Concessions – than it did to the Western military response to the Boxer Uprising.^10 And in the end, it was not the Western powers directly that brought down the Qing in 1911-12, but the Chinese elite, the radical wing due to both dissatisfaction with Qing weakness in actually dealing with the foreign problem and the slow pace of internal political reform, the conservative wing due to fears of a social revolution by the urban radicals.^11

In short, changes in the Qing worldview predated Western imperialism, and while the Qing opinion of Western attacks was hardly to sit and take it, in the broad context of things it was not necessarily the most concerning issue.