Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China's Technological Modernization, 1860-1890

Reviewed by: Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China’s Technological Modernization, 1860–1890* J. Robert Selman (bio) Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China’s Technological Modernization, 1860–1890. By Erik Baark. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Pp. xii+216; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $69.50. Erik Baark, of the Technical University of Denmark, describes in the preface to Lightning Wires how, as a student of Chinese language and history, he found himself almost at the outset becoming interested in telegraphy. As part of his M.Phil. thesis research, he had to catalog the letters in Chinese mixed in with other correspondence in the archives of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He found to his amusement that they contained numerous complaints about the telegraph and its harmful effects, and his book makes clear why. In the period 1870–90, China, Denmark, and telegraphy were connected in ways of which only a few students of history may nowadays be aware. In the race for telegraph connections from Europe to the Far East, either via Russia or via India and Singapore, the Great Northern Telegraph Company, established in 1869 by the farsighted Danish banker C. F. Tiegten, played a very important role. Its agents in the Chinese treaty ports were the pioneers of this technology in the extremely reluctant China of the late Qing dynasty. “We have examined the application of techniques for sending [information] via copper wires in China, and found that they are extremely inconvenient; therefore, they can never be introduced.” Thus wrote Prince Gong, chief of the Zongli Yamen (Council on Foreign Relations) at the Qing court, in 1865 to the Russian Minister in Beijing. This was the official response to repeated entreaties to allow a Russian company to construct a telegraph line between Siberia and Beijing. With characteristic ambiguity, his letter continued “Now we have received Your Excellency’s communication stating that if other countries in the future are granted permission to establish [lines] with this technique, your country should be allowed to become the first. Let this be granted!” [End Page 671] Baark shows how this preemptive quasi-concession was then voided in a twenty-year history of deliberation and postponement. Resolute Danish or British entrepreneurs tried to create a fait accompli by surreptitiously constructing telegraph lines between Wusong (at the mouth of the Jiangtse) and Shanghai, and later in Fujian province. These attempts were first sabotaged by the peasant population and local officials, but eventually helped by Chinese businessmen and local officials. The dilemma created by these “facts on the ground” and the early quasi-concession eventually forced the government to choose the lesser evil: accept the telegraph but control it (or try to control it), and reluctantly start educating some of its people to manage the new technology. In returning to the discovery of his student days, Baark does more than unearth in detail a sometimes amusing episode in which the Danes are found to be abetting nineteenth-century Western expansionism in China. His objective is to illuminate the process of technology transfer and acceptance from the perspective of both Chinese and Western contemporaries. He succeeds well in this task, which requires penetrating through notions of cultural superiority (on the Chinese side as well as the other), linear progress (on the Western side), and the Chinese view of history as cyclic. One might object that the Chinese perspective presented in his book is, after all, pretty much a political one, distilled from Chinese government documents and the known facts of nineteenth-century Chinese history. For example, the disastrous Taiping rebellion (1850–64), which the government had only recently overcome with foreign military help (assisted by the telegraph), arose from and galvanized the peasant population so strongly that, without a doubt, it was a powerful motivator for the Qing court to oppose the telegraph. This military tool, if allowed to become a means of impersonal mass communication, was politically “extremely inconvenient.” But equally, the court was aware that the telegraph had contributed mightily to the military strategy by which the foreign military finally quelled the rebellion. This ambiguity pervaded all official reactions to the “lightning wires.” It is understandable that the author’s perspective emphasizes this...