Everyone Will Return to Harmonious Cooperation

When language fluency becomes an intellectual property violation. The Soybean is Everything, part IV.

Part I. Part II. Part III.

James Flint arrived in Canton as a teenager in the year 1736. His story begins in the historical record with an entry in the Minutes of the Court of Directors of the British East India Company: a copy of a note sent from London to EIC agents on board the trading ships York and Princess Mary.

"Captain Rigby left a young lad in China, James Flint, to learn the language. If you meet with him there you will do well to entertain him in our Service, in case he will be of any benefit to you.”

We don’t know anything about Flint’s family background or why Captain Rigby decided that this “young lad” was a likely candidate to become the EIC’s first Chinese interpreter. But as one later chronicler of early English-Chinese interactions wrote, Flint “was undoubtedly a man of unusual energy and ability, and not lacking in enterprise or boldness.” It’s not an easy thing to learn Chinese in the best of times; Flint managed to accomplish the task without the help of anything resembling an English-Chinese dictionary, in an environment where helping foreigners gain linguistic mastery was considered a cultural betrayal.

Flint persevered. By the mid-1740s he was regularly interpreting for the EIC and in 1749 he was promoted to the rank of “supercargo” -- the second most important position, after the captain, on an East India Company trading ship.

1736, the year of Flint’s arrival, also happened to be the first year of the Qianlong emperor’s 60-year reign.

So choose your avatar: “insignificant barbarian” or “Son of Heaven.”

James Flint, expat Chinese student, soybean aficionado, and agent of the British East India Company, a corporation that over the next century would be more instrumental than any other single actor in executing both Great Britain’s conquest of India and the humiliation of China.

Or Qianlong: the “sage emperor,” connoisseur of art and philosophy and conqueror of Xinjiang. Fluent in Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese, and a calligrapher, painter, and poet in his own right. Notoriously dedicated, at least during the first half of his long reign, to personally managing the minutiae of imperial governance.

The two sides represented by our protagonists were hardly equal. In 1736 the Qing dynasty was approaching its apogee; BY the middle of his reign, Qianlong presided over arguably the richest and most prosperous country in the world. The British Empire, in contrast, was still in its infancy. It would be another twenty years before the decisive battle of Plassey established British dominance in India. The crucial technological innovations that powered the Industrial Revolution -- the spinning jenny and James Watt’s steam engine -- were also decades away. When James Flint arrived in Canton, England could not impose its will on China by force; British traders went about their business at the sufferance of the emperor.

But despite the disparities in their relative levels of privilege, there were still ties that bound James Flint and Qianlong together.

The first was economic. Despite Qianlong’s occasional dismissiveness of the West’s relevance to China, the emperor benefited enormously from foreign trade. A substantial portion of the silver that East India Company sea captains and supercargoes exchanged for Chinese silks, tea, and porcelain went directly to the Emperor’s private coffers. Occasionally, Qianlong did consider banning trade with the West altogether. But then he would review his account books and shelve the idea. Qianlong profited every time James Flint closed a deal.

The second linkage relates to the events of 1759, when Flint managed to get his memorial detailing British complaints about how trade was managed in Canton before the eyes of the Emperor.

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Previous to 1760 the study of the Chinese language by Europeans in China was not actually forbidden but was thoroughly discouraged by the presence of the so-called “linguists” at Canton, the port at which trade was now centered. These men, speaking the “broken English” which had taken the place of a corrupt Portuguese in use earlier as the language of foreign business, held a monopoly as interpreters and claimed high fees for their services. When questions came up which required a wider vocabulary than they possessed it was necessary to make use of Chinese speaking Europeans, usually Catholic missionaries residing at Macao. As these naturally had little desire to advance British interests, a command of Chinese by some member of the Factory would seem to be a thing of the greatest value to the [British East India] Company.

Susan Reed Stifler, The Language Students of the East India Company’s Canton Factory

I understand the Honourable Court of Directors have Condescended to make some Mention of me in their Instructions to you and therefore presume to address you & offering my service to stay here to learn to read & write and Endeavour to make myself acquainted with the Mandareen, as well as the Common Language that is talk'd in this place, Provided you will be pleas'd to allow me some support during my Continuance here; I am Inclined to hope for your Complyance, as I have nothing of my own to maintain me, at this place.

(A letter to the supercargo of the York from James Flint, 1739.)  

In the middle of the 18th century the vast majority of trade between China and the West was confined to Canton. A dozen or so Cantonese merchants -- the Cohong -- enjoyed an imperially sanctioned monopoly on trade with Europe, a fact that not only made those merchants extraordinarily rich, but also put the foreign traders at the mercy of whatever “fees” -- or, as the traders complained, “extortions” -- that local officials or merchants cared to apply.

It was therefore a top priority for the East India Company to open up another seaport and break the bottleneck. The port of Ningbo was appealing for two reasons: it was adjacent to the rich province of Zhejiang, and local officials had previously expressed willingness to engage in trade, even in the face of imperial displeasure.

James Flint’s Chinese fluency had made him a critically important character in the East India Company’s struggles to improve their trading position. In 1759, his primary goal was to establish a trading post at Ningbo. But failing that, he had a backup mission: to present the East India Company’s list of complaints to the emperor.

The first mission failed; the second, succeeded, disastrously.

What appears to have happened is that Flint bribed a lower-level official to get his memorial presented at the imperial court. This accomplishment alone demonstrates Flint’s facility for dealing with the niceties of Qing bureaucracy. But from Qianlong’s perspective, the missive represented a massive breach of established imperial protocol.

For most of his life Qianlong was a conscientious and decisive ruler who paid attention to detail. In 1759 he was 48 years old and very much at the height of his powers. He immediately launched an investigation of the British complaints. The investigators confirmed the truth of some of the British complaints about extortion, and Qianlong ordered the removal from office of the local official in charge of foreign trade in Canton.

But Qianlong also wanted to ensure that nothing like Flint’s memorial could happen ever again. So Flint was imprisoned for three years and then banned for life from ever returning to China. Qianlong also directed his investigators to find out if any Chinese had collaborated with Flint. After his investigators reported that a Sichuanese man named Liu Yabian had helped Flint write his memorial, Qianlong ordered the man beheaded.

As for Flint, the emperor’s edict addressed him directly in startlingly personal terms.

“We consider that that you are an outer barbarian and are ignorant [of Chinese customs and regulations]. Although you have made accusations everywhere, if you had no other faults, we might be lenient. Now we have discovered that you have connections with the traitorous Chinese who wrote the articles. [You] hoped to go to other ports, in violation of the laws, although the crime is not one punishable by death, still [you] should be transported to a distant place... Therefore [you will] be punished leniently by three years’ imprisonment at Macao. When the time is up, [you] shall be sent back to your country and not allowed to loiter and cause trouble... After the governor-general has announced the edict, [let him] execute and expose Liu Yabian, so that local rowdies may be awed, and the barbarian merchants may know the wrath and the kindness of the court. [Their] cunning plans cannot be successfully carried out... Everyone will return to harmonious cooperation.

(Translation by Edward Farmer in James Flint versus the Canton Interest)

The ultimate outcome of “the Flint affair” was that Western trade was confined to Canton even more stringently than had hitherto been the case and henceforth, by imperial order, Chinese citizens were banned from acting as language teachers or scribes for Europeans.

Some people might imagine that mutual comprehension via interpretation would be a prerequisite for “harmonious cooperation.” But it is clear that Qianlong saw James Flint’s Chinese fluency as a threat to the state. In Strangers at the Gate, Frederick Wakeman Jr.’s exploration of how the Opium Wars destabilized local communities in southern China and ultimately contributed to the Taiping Rebellion, Wakeman suggests that the reason why teaching barbarians about Chinese culture was considered a betrayal was explained by a Confucian mindset in which “civilization was a set of techniques” and “mastery of them, including literacy, meant dominance over the uncivilized, the unlearned, the weaker.”

From this perspective, helping foreigners gain Chinese literacy was tantamount to giving them the intellectual property that assured Qing superiority. By getting his memorial in front of the Emperor’s eyes, Flint had cracked the code of Chinese civilization. This could not be tolerated.

Of course, the real threat to China turned out to be, at least in part, the failure of emperors like Qianlong and his descendants to appreciate how the world was changing around them. Of course it is definitely possible that the  economic and technological forces that propelled European hegemony across the globe could not have been resisted by any single person’s choices. But it’s instructive to think about how Japan responded to the challenge of the West and wonder, how might the course of history in China have changed if Qianlong had decided to add English to the list of languages he could speak?

NEXT UP: The perils of interpreting, then and now.