The Search for Modern China 

China’s population of some 120 million was far larger than that of all the European countries combined.

Rulers in Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire were all struggling to develop systematic bureaucracies that would expand their tax base and manage their swelling territories effectively, as well as draw to new royal power centers the resources of agriculture and trade. But China's bureaucracy was already firmly in place, bonded by an immense body of statutory laws and provisions that, in theory at least, could offer pertinent advice on any problem that might arise in the daily life of the people.

• Governed by a massive bureaucracy and legal system centered in Beijing, with provinces run by governors, the whole thing overseen by the emperor and his palace staff.

• Drama, painting, philosophy, poetry all flourishing.

• The political structure: emperor at the top, six ministries below, a censorate to check officials, and a provincial system of governors and magistrates administering ~1,100 counties.

• But cracks were beginning to show.

  In the early 1600s, despite the apparent prosperity of the wealthier elite, there were signs that this dangerous unraveling might be at hand. … Instability in he urban world was matched by unrest in the countryside.

• Emperor Wanli shut himself off from the rest of China and so the eunuchs, as the middlemen between the emperor and rest of China, gained more and more influence.
• The Donglin Society (reformist scholars) tried to fight corruption but were crushed by Wei (eunuch under Tianqi).
  • That campaign of terror damage to the state prestige was severe and perhaps irreparable.
• External pressures piling up simultaneously: Mongol threats, Japanese pirates, a costly war when Japan invaded Korea, Jurchen tribesmen (Manchus) consolidating in the northeast.
• Economic crisis: a massive influx of silver (from trade) caused inflation.
• Famines became common, especially in north China, and pressures and tensions grew rapidly.

• Ming court lost control of rural bureaucracy, especially tax structure → cut costs by laying off employees, one of whom was Li Zicheng.
• Li and another rebel leader, Zhang Xianzhong,roamed much of China and ocassionally cooperated but more often competed.
• The Ming had some loyal generals and local militias, but it wasn't enough. Li Zicheng entered Beijing in 1644. The last Ming emperor hanged himself on a hill behind the Forbidden City.
• To make matters worse, plague devestated the country.
• “Finally it was not the Manchus, but the rebel Li Zicheng who brought down the Ming dynasty.” In April 1644 his army entered the city gates without a fight.

• Jurchen = Manchu ≠ Chinese. A northeast tribal group with their own language, customs, and military traditions.
  • Nurhaci's clan had accumulated wealth from trading with the Ming, and that silver funded the conquest. He organized his forces into the Eight Banner system (military-administrative units that organized Manchu society into hereditary companies for war and governance) and used a mixture of threats and promises to consolidate power.
  • Two uprisings from Chinese subjects, perhaps due to the strain of large Jurchen troop arrivals on limited farmland, but Ming generals failed to exploit either one.
  • His son Hong Taiji modeled the Manchu state on China's: built a bureaucracy, reorganized the military, renamed the dynasty “Qing” and conquered Korea, all while the Ming were too consumed by internal crises (Li Zicheng, famine, plague from above) to respond to the growing threat on their border.
  • When Hong Taiji died in 1643, his brother Dorgon became regent for his young son and seized the moment when the Ming finally collapsed.

• Wu Sangui's effectively opened the door for the Manchus rather than submit to Li Zicheng.
• The Manchus installed Hong Taiji's son as Emperor Shunzhi in Beijing.
• Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong, and various Ming loyalists were all hunted down, and they were weakened by infighting and couldn't coordinate against the Manchus.

• Dorgon was determined to make the Chinese adapt to Manchu dress and hairstyle and this forced public submission was source of tension. There was segregation, where the eight banners were surrounding the Beijing palace walls while Chinese inhabitants were relocated.
  • Also Reduced number of eunuchs, mindful of harm to Ming regime.
• Three components of state: Manchus, other bannermen (Mongol and Chinese; mostly families that surrendered early), Han Chinese.
• “In most areas of governmental and intellectual organization, the Manchus were content to follow Chinese precedents. … The six ministries … were retained intact … seven grand secretaries [served] together in the early years of Shunzhi’s reign: two were Manchu, two were Chinese bannermen, and three were former senior Ming officials who had recently surrendered.”
• Shunzhi adapted to Chinese ways, but when he died, his four Manchu regents reversed course toward nativism.
  • Fundamental tension: how do you run a Chinese empire as a foreign minority without losing your identity?

• “Qing emperors had to grow up fast if they were to grow up at all”: arrested his overbearing regent Oboi at age fifteen.
• The three feudatory lords: Wu Sangui (the same one who let the Manchus in!), Shang Kexi, and Geng Jingzhong controlled huge portions of southern China with their own armies and tax bases.
• Wu Sangui's threw off allegiance and the other two joined him. His revolt nearly succeeded and pulled in much of south and southwest China, but the feudatory lords couldn't coordinate (hard to earn Ming loyalists' trust when you'd already betrayed the Ming once).
  • Kangxi was ruthless to rebel leaders but was compassionate to those who had been caught up in the fighting!

• Koxinga had driven the Dutch out of Taiwan in 1662 and used it as a base for Ming resistance. Expanded power while Qing was busy with the above.
• After the feudatories fell, Shi Lang conquered Taiwan (1683), and Kangxi incorporated it.
• However, limited emigration and trade there, reflecting a basic Qing distrust of maritime commerce and colonization.

• Scholars famously refused to serve the Qing and wrote independent histories.
• But Kangxi's patronage (commissioning dictionaries, encyclopedias, histories) eventually produced a flowering of Chinese culture in the later 1600s.
• Kong Shangren's play The Peach Blossom Fan made even the fall of the Ming an acceptable topic in art, a sign of how far cultural reconciliation had come.

• The point of this section really is to show the empire’s growing capacity:
  • The Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia: fixed the northern border, permitted controlled trade, and crucially prevented a Russian-Zunghar alliance.
  • Kangxi personally led campaigns against the Zunghar leader Galdan, defeating him at Jao Modo (1696).
  • Invaded Tibet and installed a new Dalai Lama loyal to the Qing.
    • Taiwan rebellion was put down efficiently even while the Tibet campaign was ongoing

• Kangxi created a "palace memorial" system (secret reports bypassing the formal bureaucracy) to check the accuracy of senior officials.
  • This same system revealed that his heir Yinreng had conducted himself disastrously, eventually even plotting assassination.
  • Kangxi removed him but refused to name another heir for his remaining ten years, leaving the succession dangerously uncertain.
• The Catholic missionary question became a fight over imperial authority.
  • Kangxi favored the Jesuits at court, but other Catholic orders believed he was claiming supremacy over church doctrine and that the Jesuits were fatally weakening the integrity of Christian faith.
  • Kangxi ordered the expulsion of any missionaries who refused to sign a certificate accepting his position.
• On taxation and rural administration, Kangxi made no constructive reforms besides granting money to selected banner organizations.
  • Life in the countryside remained a grim struggle for millions.
  • Most importantly, he froze tax assessments at 1712 figures, which would “seriously impede his successors' attempts to rationalize national finances.”

• Clouded from the start: no one knows whether he was truly Kangxi's chosen successor, though Kangxi did trust him most. He immediately began arresting rival brothers to cement his position.
• China was far from homogeneous. Nine macroregions with different levels of urbanization, economic sources, population densities, and social systems.
  • e.g., the lower-east coast macroregion centered around Fujian had profitable trade contacts with Taiwan and Southeast Asia, while the northern macroregion centered around Beijing was less urban than most others despite the presence of the capital.
• Population growth was extraordinary. New lands opened up after resettlement of areas devastated during Kangxi's rule (north China, Sichuan), plus the introduction of food crops from the Americas. (Population roughly doubled from 1680 to 1776.)

• The obligations of filial piety to Kangxi were too strong: Yongzheng did not attempt to change his father's 1712 tax freeze. Moreover, an important premise of Chinese political theory was that a low tax base was essential for the people's wellbeing and proof of the emperor's benevolence.
• "Such a system, lacking regulation and transparency, was an invitation for corruption and abuse."
  • Reforms succeeded in the northern macroregions, where independent landholding farmers were common and land registration was comparatively easy.
  • Failed in the south and southwest, where tax quota figures were far lower (recently settled, sparsely populated areas) and surcharges didn't bring in enough money to cover the high number of officials' salaries.
  • Worst of all were the central Yangzi provinces. Here lived many retired but still powerful former officials and their relatives, whose land was never properly registered. In some cases landowners had divided their holdings into hundreds of false names.

• Wanted to build up forces in the far west but supply lines were very long, and secrecy was critical. This led him to create a new inner circle (“inner grand secretary”) and a secret bureau overseen by his closest people: the Office of Military Finance, which gave him a discrete place to file documents concealed from other ministries.
• The long-planned campaign against the Zunghars went badly, and it would take another 30 years to settle security problems in the region.
• But the institutional legacy mattered more than the military outcome:

  "Surveying these developments in the supervision of finance, the communication system, and military affairs, we can see how the Qing empire was developing in terms of unity and autocracy. In the near century since conquest, the power of the great Manchu regents or noblemen had waned. Royal brothers could still be a danger to the emperor but they could be manipulated or suppressed. The regular bureaucracy was considered useful in many ways but a hindrance in others, especially when speed and confidentiality were required."

• He didn't simply establish an important new office. Instead he worked through undramatic, roundabout channels. He was "a remarkable tactician with a flair for—and a belief in—informal and secret structures. Dominance of those structures was, to him, the essence of power."

• “At one level he played the role of Confucian monarch, at another he bore the autocratic impatience of his conquering Manchu forebears.”
• Amplified Kangxi's Sacred Edict by expanding the maxims and putting them on exams.
• Stern with Catholic missionaries, but made a point to be benevolent to some.
• Handled opium cases with surprising nuance: insisted officials should "always ascertain motivation in actions under investigation."
• Emancipated the so-called "mean people" (hereditary outcast groups).

• Most important legacy of Qianlong's early reign: conquest and integration of huge western territories.
• The Office of Military Finance evolved into the Grand Council (alongside the Grand Secretariat), formalizing what Yongzheng had built informally.

“This is not to say Qianlong was not a conscientious ruler, for he was. ... It was rather that he left a great deal of the actual decision making to his grand councilors; as a result the sense of dynamic central leadership that had characterized the reigns of his father and grandfather faded away.” Loss of impulse on reforming rural tax collection.

• Commissioned the Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu): an effort to collect, copy, and catalog every significant work in Chinese literature. (Also functioned as a censorship tool: texts deemed anti-Manchu were destroyed in the process.)

• Earlier Qing scholars (under Kangxi) had rejected late-Ming individualism and looked back to Song-dynasty neo-Confucianism for guidance.
• Kaozheng scholars rejected that too: they wanted to strip away centuries of commentary and recover the original meaning of ancient texts through philological and empirical methods.
• The movement represented something like a proto-scientific turn in Chinese intellectual life, emphasizing evidence over speculation.

• Cao Xueqin “was thus thoroughly familiar with the Sino-Manchu tensions that persisted through the Qing dynasty and, by the time of his death in 1763, had tasted the nectar of luxurious living and the gall of bankrupt gentility.”
• Family structure: male-dominated, mothers are powerless, but the grandmother is matriarch. Prestige flows to elders.
• Political power: the Jia family is powerful both locally (the magistrate knows not to prosecute one of the Jias) and imperially (a family member is a consort to the emperor).

  This political power is potentially self-perpetuating, since the web of princely friends and the patterns of examination success will propel the younger men of the lineage into positions of influence, and the young women of the family into powerful marriages.

• Economically: can call on resources beyond the imagination of most families, plus scores of indentured servants.
• Religion: grounded in Confucian tradition.

• Failed Vietnam campaign; rebellions including Wang Lun and the White Lotus.
• Pattern of corruption worsened dramatically. Heshen became entrenched as the emperor’s favorite (unproved accusations of a sexual relationship), received extraordinary promotions, and dominated the court.
• Qianlong abdicated in 1796 as a “filial” gesture (not wanting his reign to exceed Kangxi’s sixty-one years) but Heshen continued to wield power through him. When Qianlong died, Heshen was immediately arrested and forced to commit suicide.

“It was a melancholy yet somehow fitting end to one of the richest centuries in China’s long history, an end that highlighted the mix of strength and weakness that was now emerging as lying at the heart of the Qing dynasty. It used to be generally accepted that Qianlong’s reign marked a pinnacle in our assessments of the long span of the Qing dynasty. But as we learn more, we can also see the roots of future problems were becoming glaringly apparent, and that the dynasty was going to be forced to adjust to the troubles it was facing, whether for good or ill.”

• Three systems for handling foreigners:
  1. The Lifan Yuan (Office of Border Affairs) managed relations in the north and northwest (Mongols, Russians, Central Asian peoples).
  2. The imperial household and the Ministry of Rites supervised European missionaries.
  3. The Ministry of Rites also handled interactions with Southeast Asian countries that shared some cultural background, through the traditional tributary system.
• European trade was a different category, and the Qing never developed a coherent institutional framework for it. Trade was initially permitted at several ports, but after the Flint Affair (1759), a British merchant who sailed north to petition the emperor directly and was imprisoned for it, Qianlong restricted all non-Russian foreign trade to a single port: Canton (Guangzhou).
• Under the Canton system (1757–1842), foreign merchants could only trade through the cohong, a guild of licensed Chinese merchants who served as intermediaries.
• The imperial customs superintendent (known to foreigners as the Hoppo) oversaw the system.
• Britain's Macartney Embassy (1793) attempted to renegotiate these terms: a permanent British ambassador in Beijing, access to additional ports, a small island for British use, and reduced tariffs. Qianlong refused all requests, famously writing to George III that China had no need for British goods.
  • The kowtow controversy (Macartney refused to fully submit himself) became the external interpretation for the embassy's failure.

• Lord Macartney acquired a copy of the Qing dynasty’s legal code, which made clear that the Chinese and the Europeans had different views of what constituted the law. In Chinese law:
  • The magistrates acted as detectives, judge, and jury.
  • Qing penal system maintained Confucian social hierarchy (crimes against emperor/state the most serious, and family structure mattered).
  • Baojia mutual-responsibility judicial structure, where members of a community were collectively responsible for the god order of that community. This concept and its foreign misunderstandings become a “flashpoint of contention in the qing state’s prosecution of Westerners accused of breaking the law.”
• The Lady Hughes affair (1784): a salute fired from a British merchant ship accidentally killed two Chinese bystanders. The Qing demanded the gunner be surrendered. The British resisted but eventually handed him over to his death by strangulation.
• The Terranova case (1821): an Italian sailor on an American ship was accused of killing a Chinese woman. American merchants handed him over to Chinese authorities, and he was executed.
• These incidents fed a growing Western demand for extraterritoriality: the principle that foreigners should be tried under their own countries' laws, not China's.
• Qing demonstrated “resolve to hold foreigners accountable for criminal acts and to enforce its own laws.” They also received internal pressure under a rising force of antiforeign nationalism by their own people to be harsh toward the “foreign devils.”

• The trade imbalance problem: Europe wanted Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, but China wanted almost nothing Europe produced. Europeans had to pay in silver, draining their reserves. Opium was the solution to this chronic deficit.
• The East India Company expanded opium cultivation in Bengal and auctioned it in Calcutta to private "country traders," who smuggled it into China through Canton's coastal networks. The East India Company kept its hands technically clean—it grew and sold the opium trading licenses but didn't carry it to China itself.
• Yongzheng banned opium sale and smoking in 1729. Jiaqing banned importation in 1796.
  • Neither ban was enforced effectively. By the early 1800s, importation was growing rapidly, and opium addiction was spreading across Chinese society.
• The consequences were twofold: a public health crisis (millions of addicts) and an economic crisis (silver now flowing out of China to pay for opium, destabilizing the currency and tax system).
• The Qing court was divided between those who wanted to legalize and tax opium and those who wanted stricter prohibition.

• Catholic missionaries (especially Jesuits) had intentionally painted China favorably in their reports, presenting it as a moral and sophisticated society ripe for conversion. Their writings were the most detailed accounts available in Europe.
• Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire admired China's system of government: a meritocratic bureaucracy guided by reason and Confucian ethics, without the interference of organized religion.
• Chinoiserie became fashionable across Europe in the mid-eighteenth century—Chinese-inspired art, design, gardens, and architecture appeared in palaces and aristocratic estates from London to Potsdam.
• This intelletual and aesthetic appreciation of China faded swiftly when angry accounts became available.
• After the Macartney Embassy's failure, philosophers like Hegel argued that China had reached its peak long ago but was now frozen: its isolation and self-regard prevented further progress, putting it in danger of irrelevance or destruction.