The Fall of Qing Dynasty

I came upon this video:


The greatest impression I got from this was that history is truly a river. When it comes to a certain point, there is nothing individual persons can do to prevent events from happening the way they will. Li Hongzhang tried to do this by cultivating a strong navy for the Qing dynasty, yet this simple military reality was lost on the other ministers.

We look back at this with 150 years of hind sight, and we wonder how these highly educated ministers could be so foolish. Yet, we look today at the US, and we see the same pattern of behavior: denying reality and trying to carry on as if nothing has changed.

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You might find when societies have opportunity to reform, have clear indication that reforms are desperately needed, but fail to reform, the reason is usually because the reform depends on raising the status and privilege of a new class of people whose skills and outlooks are more suited for the future, and that threatens the prerogatives and status of existing privileged class in the society, So existing privileged class used their power and influence to suppress the new class that would have pushed for reform and made reform work.

It is class struggle.

The military defeats of the Qing were but a symptom of their chronic malaise. The Empire had been on a downward trajectory since the early 18th century. White Lotus Rebellion, Taiping Rebellion, Nian Rebellion, Miao rebellion .. Demographic pressure trapped the populace in economic involution. Personal morality declined as struggle for survival made pursuit of ideals a likely death sentence.

nlalyst said:

The military defeats of the Qing were but a symptom of their chronic malaise. The Empire had been on a downward trajectory since the early 18th century. White Lotus Rebellion, Taiping Rebellion, Nian Rebellion, Miao rebellion .. Demographic pressure trapped the populace in economic involution. Personal morality declined as struggle for survival made pursuit of ideals a likely death sentence.

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To be fair, Qing dynasty is one of the strongest dynasties in Chinese history, along with Han and Tang dynasties. Under the reign of Qing, China had experienced one of its longest period of stability and prosperity, relatively speaking. None of Qing emperors are considered to be utterly incompetent, unlike most other dynasties (think Ming dynasty). Under the Manchu rule, Chinese territory was expanded the most because Manchu brought with them their experiences dealing with Mongols, Tibetan and other peripheral minorities. The Manchu nobles also largely learned and accepted Chinese culture and were eventually accepted by Chinese scholarly class and ordinary people. Qing/Manchu were therefore in the best position to integrate the Qing/Chinese empire, better than Han or any other ethnic people. They were also eventually assimilated by Han Chinese and have become indistinguishable from Han.

Like any Chinese dynasty before, Qing started to experience long stagnation and decline. They had also encountered a completely different force and beast, the European/Western civilization at its youth, which accelerated its decline and led to its eventual collapse. To be sure, Qing was not the only empire or civilization that was engulfed by the trend of the times, pioneered by the European/Western countries. It was Western civilization that was the exception.

If anything, Chinese civilization has had a remarkable records of rebirth and revitalization. If we look back at the Chinese history, China had reached at or among the pinnacle of the civilization at their times three or four times: Han, Tang, Ming/Qing. PRC is currently on track to be another one, if the trends are not to be disrupted. Among major civilization, Chinese is so far the only one to be able to do so.

The northern hybrid Huaxia states created by the various nomadic peoples were often more inclusive than the southern agricultaralist states like the Ming. The Manchu Qing basically defined what it means to be Chinese in the modern sense. No more of that Huaxia=Han chauvinism of the Ming. Five races: Manchu, Mongols, Han, Tibetans and Hui. All equally part of Huaxia. The same 5 races that featured prominently in the flag of the Republic of China. The ugly side of the northern hybrid states is that they often practiced apartheid.

nlalyst said:

The northern hybrid Huaxia states created by the various nomadic peoples were often more inclusive than the southern agricultaralist states like the Ming. The Manchu Qing basically defined what it means to be Chinese in the modern sense. No more of that Huaxia=Han chauvinism of the Ming. Five races: Manchu, Mongols, Han, Tibetans and Hui. All equally part of Huaxia. The same 5 races that featured prominently in the flag of the Republic of China. The ugly side of the northern hybrid states is that they often practiced apartheid.

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In fact, not only Manchu/Qing, the other two strongest dynasties/periods before Qing were also relative peripheral people: Qin/Han should be considered as one period, with Qin being the relative backward and peripheral people. Founding families and noble class of Sui//Tang dynasties had nomads blood lines.

What that tells us is that when a large dynasty experienced stagnation or suffered terminal decline, you need new blood to revitalize. If we look at the current CCP/PRC, you could argue that it was the foreign/western import, or more specifically the Communism ideology, that had midwifed the CCP which ultimately founded the PRC. Of course, like almost all foreign imports, the Communism was largely sinicized by the Chinese (also think Buddhism).

weig2000 said:

In fact, not only Manchu/Qing, the other two strongest dynasties/periods before Qing were also relative peripheral people: Qin/Han should be considered as one period, with Qin being the relative backward and peripheral people.

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I think the Song should get an honorable mention. Despite being relatively weak militarily and incompetent at diplomacy, they were cultural, scientific and economic giants. Based on the latest economic history research, the per capita GDP peak of the Song was never attained by the Ming and only very briefly by the Qing.

The greatest contribution of the Qing was to redefine China from being a Han only nation to a multinational country that included many minorities like Manchus, Mongols, Uyghurs, Tibetans, etc.

Overall the Song Dynasty is my favorite because its technological and commercial success was the greatest for China during the Imperial era. No dynasty would ever attain that level of relative advancement over the West again.

nlalyst said:

The military defeats of the Qing were but a symptom of their chronic malaise. The Empire had been on a downward trajectory since the early 18th century. White Lotus Rebellion, Taiping Rebellion, Nian Rebellion, Miao rebellion .. Demographic pressure trapped the populace in economic involution. Personal morality declined as struggle for survival made pursuit of ideals a likely death sentence.

Click to expand...

I think the idea of “chronic malaise” is over used in traditional historiography. When things go badly, it is always easy to point to anecdotes of “moral decay”. The problem is when things go well, one could easily find such anecdotes as well, it’s just that no one looks because no one thinks these would be relevant. So evidence of chronic malaise often reflect confirmation bias.

There are some very good analysis which assign large portion of the responsibility for the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the success of the first half of the Qing dynasty, and its later decline after 1800 to the profound underlying economic, environmental and demographic consequence of major shift in Chinese agriculture that was instigated by the large scale introduction of originally American crops such as potato, sweet potato and corn that were brought to China via Philippines by the Spanish, as well as the skewing effect on Chinese agriculture of large scale trade with the Spanish in Chinese silk and porcelain and South American silver. The demographic impact, in the form of quadrupling the population of China from 1600 to 1800, and ecological impact, in the form of soil erosion, 15 fold increase in disastrous flooding, took 250 years to play out. These led to the conditions that facilitated the stress upon and decline of the Qing dynasty.

@Richard Santos

I agree, the chronic malaise was primarily caused by the demographic explosion, enabled as you said by imports of new crops that could succeed on lands previously unsuitable to agriculture. However, the expansion of arable land failed to keep with the rise of population and the average plot size per capita declined from 9 mu during Song to less than 3 mu during Qing, despite the latter being over 4 times the size of the former. Starting with the early 1700s, per capita GDP went into a steep decline so that by the late 1700s even Japan overtook the Qing.

GDP per capita in PPP 1990 dollars

Source:


There were also structural and political problems, some of which date back to the early Ming dynasty. For example, the Hongwu emperor abolished in perpetuity the prime ministership and the central chancellery, after having the prime minister, his extended family and his entire guanxi network executed (at least 40000 people). This made the emperor the civil and military CEO of the country. This system was carried over to the Qing. Due to his deep distrust of the scholar class, all affairs of the state had to be reported directly to the emperor and his entourage of loyal eunuchs numbering in 10s of thousands: eventually the court would have 70,000 eunuchs. Beating of scholars (sometimes to death) for punishment, previously banned by law, become commonplace during the Ming. Hongwu basically decapitated the civil bureaucracy.

Hongwu's fiscal reforms starved the government of revenue. The tax collection system was incredibly inefficeint, and promoted corruption. The problem of weak fiscal revenue persisted into the Qing. By the time of the Opium War, despite having an economy 11 times larger than Britain, the Qing goverment had less revenue!

As far as military matters are concerned, there were serious problems in the 19th century Qing. In the early stages of the war, local Han population was welcoming to the British. They readily provided them supplies and often worked as guides for the British army. Although, their popularity with the local Chinese eventually ran out.

The Green standard army was poorly trained and demoralized. In battles against the British, they would offer token resistance and quickly disperse. The British routinely described the bannermen as the toughest opponents.

Battle of Zhenjiang casualties. Note the casualty discrepancy between the bannermen and the the Green Standards:

From: Mao Haijan (2005) The Qing Empire and the Opium War