Introduction
In 1865, when a Russian minister to Beijing tried to persuade the Zongli Yamen (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in China) to introduce a telegraph system, he said: ‘Wherever there are wires, all locations will become the same regardless of their distances. Information will converge on Beijing from the four directions, and Beijing will possess the power to control the four directions. Surely this will help increase the dignity of the Court?’Footnote 1 Although China did not accept this advice immediately, a seed had definitely been planted. Within ten years, telegraph lines had started to appear on the coastlines of southern China, and this conservative-minded country finally allowed itself to be connected to the world by electrical means.
By including the introduction of the telegraph as part of the Self-strengthening Movement programme, scholars have paid attention to the impact of the telegraph on the late Qing period in terms of politics and major war events, for example, how the telegraph was used during the Sino-French War during 1884 and the Boxer Uprising in 1900.Footnote 2 From an economic perspective, scholars have noted that the telegraph helped China's international business as it enabled banks to fund minor trading agents, which meant that they were able to become bigger players and challenge the giant trading companies. The telegraph also allowed the prices of local Chinese products to be linked with international market prices.Footnote 3 The arrival of the telegraph also contributed to the hierarchy among China's cities becoming ever more evident, the development of Shanghai as China's financial centre, and the growth of stronger relationships between the coastal and inland areas.Footnote 4
Indeed, within a relatively short period after the arrival of the telegraph, we see many examples of its recognizable impact on Chinese society. However, while prior scholarship has paid much attention to these changes, in business as well as other areas, problems associated with this technology—notably relating to how it was implemented in China—have been far less studied. This paper seeks to focus on how the telegraph was introduced to Chinese society and its associated problems and limitations. In doing so, the paper attempts, first, to explore how the telegraph as a commercial service was received in China, with its unique cultural and historical background; and, secondly, to enrich the scholarship through investigating and reconstructing communication frameworks during the late Qing.
Albert Feuerwerker, in his well-received work on the telegraph in China, has already outlined the problems of the Telegraph Administration, established in 1882. In 1907, the Telegraph Administration was reorganized and became the Telegraph Bureau (Dianzhengju) under the supervision of the Ministry of Posts and Communications. Up until then the Telegraph Administration serves as a good example of a government-supervised merchant undertaking during the Self-strengthening Movement, which controlled the lion's share of telegraphic business in China. To be sure, not all the telegraph lines were constructed and controlled by the Telegraph Administration; most notably, lines were constructed and managed by provincial governors in their jurisdictions, mainly for military and administrative purposes. But in contrast to these local services, and although under government supervision, the Telegraph Administration was set up to be commercially managed and privately funded. It focused on areas of high commercial demand in China, and aimed to make profits for its shareholders. Meanwhile, although there were some submarine telegraph lines in the China Sea (including from Guangzhou to Shanghai, and from Japan to Shanghai), which were constructed and owned by Western companies, the latter did not own a significant number of telegraph lines on land, except during the Boxer Uprising, and these were purchased by the Telegraph Administration soon after the conclusion of hostilities. In short, the Telegraph Administration dominated the commercial telegraph service in China. However, even with such an advantage, as Feuerwerker has pointed out, the Telegraph Administration suffered considerably because of the Qing government's exploitation of it, because of its managers’ ignorance of telegraphic affairs, and because of their excessively bureaucratic style of management.Footnote 5 Much less addressed in Feuerwerker's work, but central to this paper, are the problems that were encountered by the Telegraph Administration's customers.
Price and quality are the two most important criteria in our examination of the condition of telegraphic communications in the late Qing. As we know, the Telegraph Administration's telegraph lines were laid in the more densely populated areas as well as areas where commercial activity was concentrated. Commercial telegraphic traffic far outweighed government business. But what made the Telegraph Administration unique was its peculiar structure as a government-supervised merchant undertaking. The Telegraph Administration made profits due to its monopoly status, but it did not have a good reputation. The lack of competition compounded its shortcomings in technology, service quality, and pricing strategies, thus undermining its potential to develop as a communications service for the Chinese public.
So far it has proved impossible to systematically collect substantial material on the experience of Telegraph Administration customers, besides that of government officials, so this paper relies heavily on government sources. However, commercial telegrams used the same telegraphic systems as the government, so both sets of users encountered similar problems, which this paper sets out to examine.Footnote 6
Hands-off approach: the Telegraph Administration's structure and flaws in service design
Although to begin with the Qing court had been reluctant to endorse a telegraph project, there were those who were keen to embrace this technology, particularly the local provincial governors, as they believed the telegraph would improve communications between themselves and the central government, and between the court and its overseas diplomats.Footnote 7 Consequently, the first telegraph lines were constructed in Taiwan and Fujian in the late 1870s, and a series of operators were trained in Fujian through the joint efforts of Ding Richang, the provincial governor of Fujian, and the Great Northern, a Danish telegraph company. Noting the utility advantage of the telegraph, Li Hongzhang, viceroy of Zhili Province and the initiator of many projects associated with the Self-strengthening Movement between the 1860s and 1890s, wanted to introduce this technology to northern China. When he presented plans proposing the construction of a line connecting Tianjin and Shanghai, he suggested that it should be managed in the style of a government-supervised merchant undertaking.Footnote 8
With the Ili Crisis of 1879–1881, the Qing court also realized the importance of using the telegraph for telecommunications for national defence. The court eventually approved Li's proposal to construct a telegraph line between Tianjin and Shanghai. The line was completed in 1881, after seven months’ construction. In the meantime Li also supervised drafting the charter of the Telegraph Administration, and recruited merchants to participate in its management. The Telegraph Administration was founded on 18 April 1882, four months after the completion of the Tianjin-Shanghai line. The start-up capital came from merchants’ investment. When the company first started up, it took over previous government telegraph lines and facilities, including the Tianjin-Shanghai line. The merchants paid back the construction costs to the government in instalments and through payment in kind, for example, by allowing certain government departments to send first-class government telegrams for free (though this was later changed to the government paying half price for fourth-class telegrams). The merchants managed the company under the government's supervision or—to be more precise—Li Hongzhang, on behalf of the government, supervised the company through his protégé, Sheng Xuanhuai. Sheng, who was also one of largest investors, was appointed director of the company.
The main reason why the Qing government set up the Telegraph Administration was to hand over the construction and management expenses of the telegraph system. The cost of each construction project was calculated according to its degree of difficulty, the length of the supply route to the construction site, the conditions on that supply route, and the number of telegraph lines to be installed. Hence, construction charges for different places varied from 50 or 60 to 100 taels per li.Footnote 9 If we use the Tianjin-Shanghai line as an example to examine the costs of construction and maintenance, we can clearly see the reason behind the need to charge customers high prices for using the service. The Tianjin-Shanghai line was 2,736 li (about 1,642 kilometres) long and it was completed in December 1881. The cost of construction was 178,700 tales, which works out at 65.3 tael per li (please see the Appendix 1 for more relevant information, as well as details of the building costs for other lines). But this is not the end of the story, as the maintenance costs for this line were even higher: Table 1 shows how much it cost to run this line between December 1881 and April 1882.
Table 1 Maintenance costs for the Tianjin-Shanghai line, GX7/11-GX8/2 (December 1881–April 1882).
Source: HFD-DX, Vol. 2, p. 348; HFD-DX, Vol. 2, p. 419.
In just four months, the Qing government paid 28,756 taels in maintenance costs, which meant the annual maintenance fees could have been as high as 86,268 taels. When we consider that it cost the Qing government 178,000 taels to build the line, it appears that after only two years, the line's annual maintenance cost already exceeded the cost of its construction. The Telegraph Administration not only took over construction costs but also paid the salaries of foreign engineers as well as expenses associated with operating the telegraph offices, including staff salaries. Meanwhile, the Qing government agreed to cover the cost of guarding the lines for the first five years, after which the Telegraph Administration would take over the patrol costs as well.Footnote 10 The Telegraph Administration not only managed the telegraph system they had taken over, but also built new lines for commercial purposes, mainly in densely populated areas.
Following the Ili Crisis, a principal reason behind the Qing court agreeing to build the telegraph system was military; this is evident in the Telegraph Administration's regulations, which stated: ‘The first purpose of the telegraph lines is to transmit military messages; however they can also be used for the convenience of merchants and the general populace.’Footnote 11 Hence, the development of the Chinese telegraph system was inseparable from military affairs,Footnote 12 and it seems clear that this narrow view of the function of the telegraph system prevented the Qing government from developing and exploiting the new communication systems to its fullest extent. With this principle dominating, the Telegraph Administration needed to compromise its programme and service levels, as it prioritized its service to the government.
In order to manage delivery of government telegrams as quickly as the system could accommodate, the telegraph service came up with various measures. One of the first involved giving government telegrams special treatment compared to other traffic. Telegrams were grouped into four classes, each of which was given a different priority and charged at a different rate. First-class telegrams were telegrams dispatched from the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen, and other metropolitan offices; from the superintendents of trade for the northern and southern ports; and from provincial governors. Second-class telegrams were mainly official telegrams sent from telegraph office staff in order to administer the telegraph system itself, and these had different levels of urgency. Only third- and fourth-class telegrams were open to ordinary users, although the government also used these. Even within the third and fourth classes, officials’ messages always took priority, and staff were required to deal with these before moving on to ordinary and commercial telegrams.Footnote 13
In 1884, a new class of telegrams—urgent first-class (jia ji yi deng bao)—was introduced, which took priority over ordinary first-class telegrams.Footnote 14 This kind of institutional bias towards official and against commercial traffic had a negative effect on the reputation of the Telegraph Administration, and limited its development as a popular communication service as well as its ability to modernise and introduce new technology as it emerged, which we will look at in later sections of this paper.
In order to ensure that telegrams were delivered on time, it was very important to keep the telegraph lines in good working condition. Once the lines were broken, telegrams were inevitably delayed until repairs could be made. Hence the Qing government hired line guards to protect the telegraph lines. A soldier or a telegraph office staff member was deployed every 20 li, and did an inspection of his length of line twice daily.Footnote 15 In addition, in 1892, the Qing government introduced severe punishments for anyone caught damaging the lines. When the wires were damaged or stolen by local mobs, the wrongdoers as well as the local officials who governed the area were punished.Footnote 16
However, despite the priority given to government telegrams, and even with the line guards protecting the lines and the severe punishments meted out to saboteurs and vandals, the quality of the service remained unsatisfactory. For example, in 1897, officials of the Zongli Yamen became very dissatisfied with the telegraph service and constantly complained about the delays they experienced. Some telegraphers were reported to be occasionally missing from their desks during office hours. The Zongli Yamen believed that these delays were caused mainly by mistakes and delinquencies made by telegraph office staff. One example, which occurred in Beijing, was provided as evidence of the Zongli Yamen's complaint. A manager of the telegraph office in the Inner City of Beijing accused his telegraphers of absence for several days without giving any good reason—they just stayed at their homes, which were quite near the telegraph station.Footnote 17 Later we see that the Ministry of Posts and Communications came to share the same view as the Zongli Yamen. In 1908, the Ministry mentioned that ‘recently telegraph offices have often reported that they have experienced communication breakdowns and crossed wires. The reasons for these problems included the absence of telegraphers without notice, a dire lack of patrolmen, and the employment of unnecessary workers. Sometimes these workers even broke wires on purpose in order to profit from the repairs.’Footnote 18
In response to such unfavourable feedback, the Telegraph Administration did not entirely accept responsibility for its management of personnel, but focused instead on issues relating to bad weather conditions and theft. According to Sheng Xuanhuai, the director of the Telegraph Administration, delays caused by telegraphers’ mistakes or their unauthorized absences were relatively uncommon. Most delays were caused by damage to the lines, and he listed floods, snowstorms, and theft as the main reasons for such damage.Footnote 19
Certainly the telegraph lines were very vulnerable to severe weather conditions. Every year, thousands of disruptions were reported as the result of high winds, heavy rain or snow, lightning, and flooding. For example, between February 1908 and February 1912, high wind and heavy rain caused most damage to the cablesFootnote 20 (see Appendix 2) and as a result, the wires themselves often became worn out or were in poor condition. However, both the Telegraph Administration, and later the Telegraph Bureau, consistently failed to spend enough money on maintenance, leaving the telegraph lines to deteriorate. In 1908, the Ministry of Posts and Communications found that half of the Telegraph Bureau's lines had deteriorated beyond repair. The estimated budget for urgent repair work alone was five or six hundred thousand taels.Footnote 21
In addition, although guards patrolled the telegraph lines, it was impossible to guarantee their safety. As mentioned earlier, special regulations for cases of theft were drawn up in 1892. However, after a short time, the pattern of theft, followed by delays, followed by repairs, resumed as before. According to one investigation, merchants and dealers were willing to buy stolen telegraph wires because the metal used in them was very strong and durable. Bandits therefore had a ready market among hardware shops or carriage manufacturers.Footnote 22 Even inside Beijing, telegraph facilities were attacked and components stolen. In 1897, the Zongli Yamen stated: ‘In Beijing a number of telegraph poles and insulators have been vandalized, so your office [the General Commandant of the Gendarmerie: Baojun tongling] should dispatch officers and soldiers to guard the telegraph lines.’Footnote 23 It is easy, therefore, to imagine how insecure were the telegraph poles and lines that traversed the more remote areas of the countryside and mountainous regions, given that they were being patrolled only twice a day by one or two guards. Whenever the lines were damaged by local criminals, the Telegraph Administration asked the provincial governors and governors-general to investigate the crimes and arrest the culprits, but prefects and magistrates usually ignored these orders, and seldom made any effort to alleviate the situation.Footnote 24
Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the Qing government's telegrams were subject to frequent delays, given the negligence of the telegraph workers, the fact that the land-based telegraph lines crossed many hostile environments and existed in a constant state of disrepair, and that there were few alternatives to land-based lines. The following report from summer 1899 summarizes some of the drama caused by persistent delays:
Nowadays not just a few telegrams are delayed or handled carelessly. This month a telegram (no. 8610) was sent from the Zongli Yamen to the Governor of Guangxi on 12 June 1899, but he received it on 18 June, and a telegram (no. 8616), which was sent to the Governor-general of Liangguang on 14 June, was not received until 21 June. Another telegram (no. 8603) was sent to the Governor of Guizhou, but there was no reply from him, which made our office people curious. When the Governor of Guangxi responded to the telegram on 20 June, we suddenly realized the telegram had been mistakenly sent to Guilin. The telegram was sent to back and forth for more than ten days, but Guizhou has not received the mail yet. A telegram that was sent from Beijing to Berlin on 22 June arrived in Germany on 24 June. The Chinese minister to Germany sent a telegram to investigate the reason for the delay. Although the delay was, compared to delays within China, not too long, the telegram was very important, so he could not ignore this case.Footnote 25
Even in less dramatic circumstances, first-class government telegrams were often delayed for two or three days. Tianjin is very near Beijing, but it often took as long as 11 hours for messages to be relayed between the two cities, which was slower than the postal service provided by the newly founded Imperial Chinese Post Office. The Zongli Yamen once ridiculed the telegraph, saying: ‘If a message were sent by train, it could arrive in Tianjin earlier than a first-class telegram. So what is the point of using the telegraph? Why should we use first-class governmental telegrams, thereby paying a sizable amount of money every month?’Footnote 26 Unsurprisingly other classes of service suffered even worse delays. In 1899, a French minister claimed ‘telegrams from Chengdu in Sichuan and from Haikou on Hainan Island were delayed several times. Sometimes it takes a whole month, and even when they are delivered relatively quickly, it still takes more than ten days.’Footnote 27 In order to bypass broken or jammed telegraph lines, telegraph offices sometimes wired the same telegram on two routes, which only made the traffic worse.Footnote 28
Had the Telegraph Administration adopted more advanced technology, such as submarine cabling or radiotelegraphy to resolve cable-related problems, the quality of service could have been improved. However, submarine cables cost far more than land lines to construct, and for the Telegraph Administration, which was reluctant to pay even to maintain the established lines, the construction of submarine cables must have been an almost unthinkable option.Footnote 29 By 1903, the Qing court was aware of the existence of radiotelegraphy. That year the governor of Shanxi stated in a memorandum that the wireless telegraph had remarkable abilities, and could replace established wire telegraph systems. Sheng Xuanhuai and the Telegraph Administration certainly knew of the invention of radiotelegraphy, but it was not an advance they particularly welcomed, as they worried that it could threaten the Telegraph Administration's domination of China's telegraph business.Footnote 30
The Qing government first employed wireless telegraph systems in 1905. That year, Yuan Shikai installed radiotelegraph machines on four warships, and trained a few Chinese operators with the help of an Italian engineer.Footnote 31 After that, however, the Chinese telegraph administration did not pay much attention to the advantages of the radiotelegraph system, and so by the end of Qing dynasty, the use of wireless telegraph machines was mostly limited to connections between warships or between a harbour and ships at sea.Footnote 32
While the Telegraph Administration and its supervisory body were reluctant to invest in either submarine cables or radiotelegraphy, they were very concerned about information security, and devoted some of their energies to investigating ways to encode messages. Despite their short-sightedness in improving technology and hardware, the effort undertaken by the Telegraph Administration and the Qing government to develop telegraphic codes during this time laid the foundation for the future of secure telegraphic communications in China. Indeed, concern about information security was one of the main reasons why the Qing government was so conservative about introducing the telegraph system to China. The Zongli Yamen was greatly concerned that foreigners would use the telegraph lines for espionage.Footnote 33 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western telegraph companies often tapped into their users’ information, which they duly passed on to the intelligence services of their home countries.Footnote 34 The Eastern Extension Company (British) and the Great Northern Telegraph Company (Danish), which competed for monopoly of China's telegraphy market, were not politically neutral interests. During the Sino-French War, the two companies pretended to engage in espionage activities for China, but they mostly provided a great deal of dubious telegraphic information, which only served to confuse Beijing.Footnote 35 It was suspected that Eastern Extension Company was responsible for disseminating rumours in support of the French.Footnote 36
Such experiences encouraged the Qing government to press ahead with constructing and controlling its own telegraph lines, using local funding and, where possible, local technicians, which, taken together, substantially enhanced the security of all government telegrams. Tighter monitoring of the telegraph system was applied whenever there was a national crisis, and during such periods, telegraph offices screened every domestic and foreign commercial telegram, and refused to deliver any telegrams written in secret codes.Footnote 37
In order to further guarantee the security of telegraphic information, the Qing government made an effort to develop secret enciphering methods. In fact, the Qing government had published a secret codebook even before the first telegraph was installed in China. H.C.F.C Schjullerup first invented a four-digit code system to encipher Chinese characters, and in 1872 S.A. Viguier, a French harbourmaster at Shanghai, published the first Chinese telegraph codebook—New Book for the Telegraph (Dianbao xinshu)—on the basis of Schjullerup's unfinished work.Footnote 38
While Viguier wrote up this work on telegraph codes, Zhang Deyi, an attaché to the Chonghou apology mission to France, compiled the first Chinese government telegraph codebook while he was in Paris. After the mission returned, Zhang's codebook was published in Beijing in 1872 with the title New Method for Telegrams (Dianxin xinfa).Footnote 39 Zhang's book was the one used within Qing officialdom for sending government telegrams, and it provided a foundation and many ideas for later versions of secret government codebooks.Footnote 40 Whenever a new secret codebook was deployed, the previous ones were downgraded for use in ordinary official telegrams.Footnote 41
In addition to these standard codebooks, special codebooks were used for secret correspondence between the Zongli Yamen and designated officials, including the governors-general of Zhili and Manchuria, as well as the Tartar general of Guangzhou.Footnote 42 During the Sino-French War the Qing authorities used the Method of Addition and Subtraction (Jiajianfa).Footnote 43 This was very popular for protecting both commercial and government telegraph messages. It worked by both sender and receiver secretly agreeing to add or subtract a certain number from the code number initially assigned by a codebook. Even if someone hacked into this communication, they would only get an unintelligible message.Footnote 44
In spite of all the measures taken to secure telegraphic information, the spreading of false messages and the leaking of secret information were constant concerns for the Qing authorities. All the enciphering measures mentioned above turned out to have gaps through which information could be leaked. In the case of the Method of Addition and Subtraction described above, for example, if users added or subtracted a simple number (for example, a multiple of ten), the number could be discovered after a period of trial and error. On the other hand, if the number were too complex, mistakes could easily occur in the enciphering and deciphering process.Footnote 45
Even though the government regularly updated the codes, the contents of secret telegrams sometimes appeared in newspapers. A soaring number of newspaper titles flourished during the period, all competing strenuously with one another for breaking news, and their correspondents were not reluctant to bribe telegraphers in order to get secret information.Footnote 46 Unlike palace memoranda, where original copies and secondary copies were stored in the Forbidden City, the code memorandum and tapes of every telegram were left in each of the telegraph offices and stations on the way to their destinations.Footnote 47 It was easy for these records to fall prey to telegraphers who wished to supplement their incomes by becoming involved in the black market. Such wrongdoing was sometimes uncovered and the culprits were severely punished, but it nevertheless continued. Some secret telegrams dispatched from the Fengtian and Hunan provinces appeared in newspapers in 1906.Footnote 48 This led to the introduction of a series of regulations for telegraph security that same year, but this did not lead to any significant improvement.Footnote 49 In 1908 the Qing government were still finding that one day's telegrams would sometimes appear in the following day's newspapers without a single character different from the originals.Footnote 50
These leaks were not just mischief-making by the telegraphers; government officials were another vulnerable link in the telegraphic communications process. In 1909, according to the governor of Jilin Province, the Bureau of Civil Affairs showed a secret telegram to members of a chamber of commerce, and eventually the contents of the telegram appeared in the newspapers.Footnote 51 Even the secret telegraph codebooks themselves could be leaked by officials. The Ministry of Posts and Communications pointed out that telegraph codebooks could be in service for several years, whereas the officials were constantly changing; thus the ministry suspected that codebooks were being smuggled from government offices.Footnote 52
Li Hongzhang had good reasons for wanting China to have its own telegraph company—and eventually China did achieve its own telegraphic communication systems—but the journey proved to be a difficult one. Li's honourable intentions in adding another project to the programme of the Self-strengthening Movement seemed to have resulted in dashed expectations. In short, we can see the main problems in managing the first Chinese telegraph company were: high costs in construction and maintenance; security leaks; delays in delivering messages due mainly to technical problems; and a four-tier service which prioritized official messages and was not attractive to ordinary private and business customers. However, instead of attempting to resolve problems by addressing technical and procedural issues so they could provide a better service, those running the company chose instead to focus on pricing.
Pricing strategy and service development
The telegraph significantly expanded the information network in the late Qing period, and to some extent at least proved its value both to business and the military. But despite being quite a lucrative venture in the context of the many projects of the Self-strengthening Movement, it nevertheless was not highly regarded by its customers. Due to the nature of its business structure, it needed to make steady profits in order to keep attracting funds from shareholders. To maintain this situation, its managers chose to charge its non-official users very high fees, and deliberately shied away from improving old telegraph facilities. Since the Telegraph Administration dominated China's telegraph business, there was no alternative for its customers but to continue to use it.
As we shall see later in this section, the cost of sending a telegram in China was far more expensive than in most other countries. This was the result of many contributing factors. Zheng Guanying, a Telegraph Administration executive, attributed the high prices to the fact that China had to import the materials it needed to manage and construct the telegraph lines. He also noted that hiring foreign telegraphers and engineers was a major expense.Footnote 53 For instance, from 1882 onwards, on the Tianjin-Shanghai line alone, foreign telegraph engineers were deployed in each of the eight telegraph offices along the line, each paid 1,700 tael per month.Footnote 54 To reduce the expense associated with retaining foreign engineers, the Telegraph Administration took steps to gradually replace them with trained Chinese staff. Western literature on the telegraph was translated into Chinese, and telegraph schools were established.Footnote 55 However, these changes alone were not enough to maintain the Telegraph Administration's profits and enable any lowering of fees, particularly for commercial and private telegraph users.
From the 1870s, as the telegraph lines started to spread across China, prices for telegraphic services were plunging in the West, where the technology was developing rapidly.Footnote 56 After the first Morse telegraph machine was produced in 1842, Western inventors rushed to create an automatic machine, with the highly successful Wheatstone automatic transmitter appearing in 1858. This machine could transmit telegrams ten times faster than the most skilled telegraphers. After some initial refinements, the machine became widely used from 1867 on. The Western telegraph industry was further boosted by the invention by Joseph B. Stearns of the duplex system in 1872. The system made it possible for signals to be sent simultaneously in opposite directions along a wire, just by attaching special pieces of equipment at the two ends of the wire. This allowed existing telegraph lines to handle twice as much traffic. In 1874, Thomas Edison trumped Stearns’ duplex system with the quadruplex, which made it possible for four signals to be sent concurrently along a single wire. A new automatic telegraph, devised by the French inventor Jean Maurice Emile Baudot, made even greater use of the telegraph line by enabling a single wire to carry six lines’ worth of traffic. Moreover, this automatic telegraph device did not need operators at the receiving end of a wire, eventually reducing the number of telegraphers by 50 per cent.Footnote 57
This resulted in a dramatic decline in telegraphic charges in the West, as well as a huge increase in telegraph traffic. Originally telegraph fees had been charged by the number of words in a telegram. However, once the Wheatstone automatic transmitter became widely used, telegraph fees were charged according to the length of type recorded instead of by the number of words.Footnote 58 In 1865, when a telegraph line was installed between Britain and India, a 20-word message from Britain to India cost 101 shillings; by the end of the nineteenth century a telegram of the same length would cost only four shillings.Footnote 59
Despite these developments internationally, the gap between Chinese telegraph fees and those of foreign countries grew greater as time went on, because the Chinese telegraph industry failed to take advantage of these trends. By 1908, there were 597 telegraph machines in telegraph stations in China. Of these, 589 were primitive Morse telegraph machines; China had only six Wheatstone automatic transmitters and two Baudot automatic machines. In fact, in the last years of the Qing, the number of Morse telegraph machines in use actually increased rather than being replaced by automatic telegraph machines. Stearns’ duplex and Edison's quadruplex systems were never used in the Qing telegraph network (see Table 2).Footnote 60
Table 2 The type and number of telegraph machines in China's telegraph system, GX33-XT2 (13 February 1907–29 January 1911).
Source: JTS-DZ, Vol. 2, pp. 87–92.
As a result, the Telegraph Administration not only failed to reduce telegraph charges by adopting more efficient telegraph transmitters, but also missed its opportunity to make the telegraph as popular as it could have been in the Chinese market. From 1881 until almost the end of the Qing dynasty, telegraph fees rose steadily. The Ministry of Posts and Communications later aptly reflected on China's brief telegraph history and described the serious problems of China's exorbitant telegraph fees as follows:
The fees of the Chinese telegraph service are the highest on earth. According to the telegraph charges of foreign countries in the East and the West, a twenty- or fifteen-character domestic telegram would cost about four or five qian. If sent within a province the fee would be almost the same as for express mail. Therefore using the telegraph is very convenient. However, in China the cost of sending one or two characters to a distant province is almost the same as sending twenty words in foreign countries.Footnote 61
When the details of Telegraph Administration charges are broken down further, we find customers charged separately for every single service: elements such as encoding or decoding telegrams, applying and decrypting ciphers, and using commas and dots, all resulted in additional costs. As the Telegraph Administration needed to reserve first- and second-class telegrams entirely for government messages, which were charged at discount rates, they insisted on keeping high rates for the third- and fourth-class services. There was less delay on the third-class service, which was twice as expensive than the fourth-class service, so merchants were often forced to pay double for the former.Footnote 62
This kind of pricing policy shows the lack of vision on the part of the Telegraph Administration's management. A few managers and investors in the company, such as Zheng Guanying, understood that the telegraph was an important tool, not only for military affairs but also for economic development and the people's welfare,Footnote 63 but the majority of shareholders were principally concerned with regularly receiving handsome dividends.Footnote 64 This made it almost impossible for capital reinvestment to secure the long-term development of the telegraph, and for price reductions to be introduced, which would have widened its use.
After the Qing government sold the telegraph lines to the Telegraph Administration, the government became a paying customer of the service. Besides enjoying the privilege of having their messages treated as a priority within the four-tier classification, the government negotiated to have all its first-class telegrams sent at half the price of fourth-class telegrams.Footnote 65 Then, in order to save further telegraph fees, the Qing officials invented various abbreviations to reduce the number of characters in their telegrams. All Chinese geographic names were represented with numbers of three digits, and departure dates of telegrams were denoted with special characters based on rhymes.Footnote 66 Palace memorials and edicts often quoted previous memorials and edicts at great length, but in telegraphic communication previous telegrams were identified only by their departure date. In addition, telegrams did not include the sender's title, and the sender's name was abbreviated using one or two characters from his full name.Footnote 67 When a sender sent a wire to a senior official or to a higher organization, they refrained from using extravagant greetings, and put only one word, su (bow) or kou (kowtow), at the end of the telegram to express respect.
In spite of these devices to reduce expenses, the Qing government found that they were still spending a huge amount of money on telegraphic communications. Apart from reducing words in telegraphs, they applied strict protocols to using the telegraph. For example, during the 1880s, when the telegraph was first installed in Yunnan Province, the Zongli Yamen ordered the provincial governor to use the telegraph for confidential and urgent matters concerned with military and frontier affairs only.Footnote 68 Even when the refugee court was temporarily set up in Xi’an during the Boxer Uprising, the Zongli Yamen was ordered to report only critical (jinyao) matters by telegraph or by using secret messengers, while other information was to be delivered by the mail relay service.Footnote 69
The consequence of restrictions on using the telegraph was that it was not particularly favoured by many officials, who, outside of wartime, still preferred to communicate with their colleagues through the postal system. Weng Tonghe's diary explicitly demonstrates that the telegraph was of little use to the government as a method of communication during peacetime. Weng recorded the number of telegrams the Grand Council received each day in his diary. When he first entered the office during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, the Grand Council received more than 150 telegrams every month. After the end of the war, the number quickly dwindled to fewer than ten a month.Footnote 70 As a result, the use of the telegraph within the Qing government was mainly limited to periods of diplomatic crisis or social unrest, when officials had no choice but to take their chances regarding security and use the more rapid means of communication that the telegraph provided. For routine communications, however, the telegraph system contributed very little to improving the efficiency of the late Qing bureaucracy.
If the story of the Telegraph Administration is a rather gloomy one, the experience of the provincial government telegraph administrations was not much brighter. As mentioned above, some provincial governments constructed local telegraph lines, but they were not really in a position to compete with the Telegraph Administration. Provincial government telegraph administrations were able to charge for commercial telegrams, but they often delivered government telegrams either for free or at discounted rates. During the late 1900s, the provincial government telegraph offices in Shandong, Guangdong, Chuanzang, Fujian, and Xinjiang did not even charge for government telegrams at all.Footnote 71 The provincial government telegraph administrations used the income from telegraph fees to defray the cost of maintaining their telegraph offices and telegraph lines, but this was simply not enough to cover these expenses. In 1907, there were ten provincial government telegraph administrations, all of which failed to make any money. With a total deficit amounting to around 77,700 taels,Footnote 72 these administrations had no choice but to accept subsidies from the provincial treasuries.
Taking into account all of the above, it is fair to conclude that the main reason for China's difficulty in creating and sustaining a successful, popular telegraph service was the Qing government's ineffectiveness. Instead of actively negotiating with the administrators of the telegraph system—the Telegraph Administration and the provincial telegraph administrations—in order to reduce fees, repair old lines, and introduce new technologies, the Qing government was reluctant to intervene except in very minor ways. It was not until the 1900s that the Chinese government began to change its perspective on the telegraph in any noticeable way. In 1906, ministers returning from inspection tours of the world's great powers reported the importance of developing transportation and communication systems, including the telegraph, and argued for establishing a special office that would deal with these matters exclusively. They recommended that the government set up a Ministry of Transportation and Communication (Jiaotongbu), based on Japan's Bureau of Postal Service.Footnote 73
This suggestion was accepted, and the Ministry of Posts and Communications (Youchuanbu) was established that same year. Two years later, a Ministry memorandum emphasized that as the telegraph service was concerned not only with military, but also with diplomatic and domestic affairs, telegrams should not be blocked or delayed. It noted, however, that the current telegraph administration—the Telegraph Bureau—could not live up to this expectation. The Ministry pointed out that the organization paid too much attention to paying dividends to its shareholders at the expense of maintaining its networks; in addition, it had not extended the telegraph lines into frontier areas to establish a nationwide telegraph network and it had imposed burdensome telegraph charges on its users. For future development, as opposed to short-term interests, the Ministry suggested that the government should buy out the merchants’ share of the administration, and then extend the lines to remote areas and reduce the telegraph charges.Footnote 74 By the end of 1908, the company was almost completely nationalized, and the government had set up and executed large-scale repair operations and extension work, while cutting down the cost of sending a telegraph to some extent. The provincial government telegraph administrations were merged with the nationalized organization in February 1911.Footnote 75
Following this reorganization, many of the existing users felt the effects very quickly, and for many official customers, the good old days of paying relatively smaller fees were over. From 5 August 1910, metropolitan offices had to pay for their first-class telegrams out of their own funds, with the exception of the Grand Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the General Staff Office, and diplomats overseas, whose first-class telegrams were still covered by the diplomatic fund.Footnote 76 As for the provincial governments, from January 1911, telegrams marked with a red flower stamp were to be regarded as first-class government telegrams and were to be charged at half the regular rate, but other government telegrams were all to be classified as fourth-class telegrams and therefore charged full price.Footnote 77 In addition, although the Ministry took over the provincial governments’ telegraph lines, local governments still had to pay for half of the maintenance costs of the lines in their jurisdictions.Footnote 78 The good news for non-official customers was that from 22 January 1909 the Qing government reduced telegraph fees for ordinary messages, and the charges for enciphering, express service, and translations by 20 per cent.Footnote 79
Conclusion
This paper has focused the problems of late Qing telegraph communications. Although the arguments are built on the currently available historical materials from one user group only—government officials—the problems they encountered in using the telegraph for transmitting their messages are sufficient to explain the weakness of Chinese telegraph system. Among these problems, the insecurity of telegraphic information was not unique to the late Qing telegraphy. Indeed, telegrams in Western countries were also far from secure.Footnote 80 Like their Chinese counterparts, Western diplomats were also often bribed and occasionally sold their telegraph codebooks to foreign intelligence agents.Footnote 81 In fact, even to this day, security issues relating to telecommunications continue to be a problem for China.Footnote 82 On the other hand, the frequent breakdowns and interruptions to service and the exorbitant charges were distinctive characteristics of the late Qing telegraph system.
The essential characteristics of the Telegraph Administration were government supervision and merchant management. The rationale behind the creation of the Telegraph Administration was that central government would be able to pass on to private investors the expense associated with building and maintaining the system, while still being able to send government telegrams at a special rate or free of charge, and would quickly retrieve its initial investment. Unfortunately, at the same time the government chose to forego any active role in directing the development of the telegraph system, and the Telegraph Administration, dominated as it was by the interests of its merchant investors, was charged with its management.
This combination of the Telegraph Administration's generosity to shareholders, and an associated dire lack of reinvestment, meant that fees remained very high and that telegraph facilities were not upgraded as technology progressed, and indeed often fell into disrepair, resulting in frequent delays and widespread inefficiency. Consequently, the use of the telegraph within officialdom was limited to wartime or emergencies when messages needed to be delivered as quickly as possible, at any cost and regardless of the risk.
As we have already seen, it was not until the 1900s that the Chinese government began to seriously rethink their telegraph policies and nationalized the industry. A short while later, however, the Qing government collapsed before they could witness the results of those reforms.
Appendix 1: Construction costs of telegraph line networks
Appendix 2: Number and length of outages on telegraph lines, GX33-XT3
