Asian Angle | To see why Trump’s tariffs have hit a Chinese nerve, read history
From foreigners running the country’s lucrative customs service, to Mao’s ‘self-reliance’, to finally joining the WTO; terms of trade have long shaped China’s relationship with the West
Donald Trump’s tariff war against China (and other parts of the globe) is not the first time the terms of trade have shaped China’s relationship with the West. In 1894, a cartoon appeared in the English magazine Vanity Fair, showing a bearded Briton dressed in green silk robes with a caption reading “Chinese customs”. It was a caricature of one of the most powerful figures of late 19th century China: the Inspector-General of the Maritime Customs Service, Sir Robert Hart.
While Hart is a legendary figure in China, the organisation he ran has rather faded in historical memory. For a century, between 1854 and 1951, much of China’s customs revenue came through an organisation headed by a Briton, not a Chinese. And that fact is a reminder of why the sometimes arcane-seeming issue of tariffs can ignite such passion in China.
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The struggle for independence has marked the trajectory of numerous nations over the centuries. That struggle tends to be remembered through its most powerful symbols: Gandhi’s non-violent struggle for India’s freedom, or conflicts such as the American war of independence. But in the case of China, freedom of trade (and the lack of it) has been a recurring theme.
It was a trading issue, the British desire to smuggle opium into China, that was at the heart of the first major confrontation between China and the West in the 1840s. Following the opium wars, under British pressure, the Chinese government created a new agency, the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, which collected taxes and tariffs that were, essentially, run and regulated by foreigners to provide income for the Chinese government.
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This led to a love-hate relationship between the customs service, usually headed by a Briton, and China’s rulers. Hart, the object of that Victorian cartoon, stayed in charge of the entity for nearly half a century, longer than most emperors. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, and during the “warlord” period of the 1920s, control of Beijing also meant control of the customs service, a valuable prize indeed as it was one of the very few reliable sources of income for any government. But by the time the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government came to power in 1927, the new goal was “tariff autonomy”, the idea that China should set its own taxes on imported goods, a goal achieved in 1930.
