China#39;s worst diplomat_ The fall guy _ The Economist.pdfVIP

26.12.13 Chinas wor st diplomat: The fall guy | The Economist The fall guy Chinas worst diplomat Bad emperors get all the credit for crumbling dynasties. What of the incompetent functionaries who do all the work IT WAS the summer of 1880. In China’s rugged north-west, Russian soldiers were skirmishing with Chinese forces. In the seas to the east, the tsar’s navy was approaching Chinese waters. Thousands of Chinese troops were dispatched to Tianjin, near the capital, Beijing, where an army was mobilising for a war the Qing empire did not wish to fight. Considering that China and Russia had just negotiated a treaty, things were not going terribly well. In Beijing the blame for all of this was falling heavily on the head of one plump, bewhiskered gentleman, Wanyan Chonghou. A wealthy nobleman and formerly a trusted confidant of the imperial family, Chonghou, then 54, was in prison awaiting decapitation. He had been sentenced to death, essentially for the crime of being China’s worst ever diplomat. Sent to Russia to extract concessions from the tsar, he made them instead. The Qing had negotiated humiliating treaties before, but that had been at the barrel of a gun. This was a different kind of indignity, achieved by way of incompetence and naivety. The empress dowager Cixi pictured below , who for a second time held power while a young boy sat on the throne, refused to abide by the treaty, and her court condemned Chonghou for treason. A “war party” agitated for his death. Foreign diplomats, meanwhile, pleaded for his life. Many feared that if Chonghou were executed, Russia would invade, or that a newly bellicose www ./news/christmas-specials/座机电话号码-bad-emperor s-get-all-credit-crumbling-dynastie s-what-incompetent 1/7 26.12.13 Chinas wor st diplomat: The fall guy | The Economist China would also reject its “unequal