Reconstruction’s Relations: The Geopolitics of the Burlingame Mission in the United States and China, 1868

Seeking to explain importance of his visit to Congress on June 9, 1868, Anson Burlingame mixed his metaphors. The head of the first embassy from China to reach the capital of a Western power, Burlingame reached heavenward to properly encompass the occasion: it was a meeting of “two civilizations which have hitherto revolved in separate spheres,” he intoned, a “mighty revolution.” Burlingame was well known for his elocutionary exuberance oratory – but still his characterization of his mission suggests deeper layers to a moment in international politics most often understood as an aberration.

The mission Burlingame headed was welcomed by contemporaries as heralding new epoch in world history, one marked by China’s acceptance of international norms and reciprocally liberalized commercial and migration flows between East and West. It was also the product of  disaster. The Qing Empire he represented was emerging from the near-apocalypse of the Taiping Civil War, and innovating in the management of internal and external affairs. The United States Burlingame visited was accounting the consequences of the slaveholders’ defeat, while working out how the Republican Party, infused with a free labor ideology set on capitalist development, could govern. For ruling elites in both U.S. and China, the late 1860s was a period of “unfinished revolution.” But while the scholarship on China has situated Burlingame’s mission within this protean moment, for the most part the American historiography has not.

This paper will analyze Burlingame’s mission, and the treaty it created, as embedded in these fraught processes of reconstruction. Examining American and Chinese reception of the mission, it will argue that this new alignment of Chinese and American geopolitical goals was significantly motivated by “domestic” politics – among radical Republican Party members and Qing Restoration elites – and that its brevity was tied closely to their failing fortunes.

See more of: US-China Relations in Three Keys: Grand Diplomacy, Trade, and Person-to-Person Interactions
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