Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Similar events took place elsewhere in the lower Yangzi valley, as places changed hands (sometimes several times). Yao Tinglin, scion of a gentry family from Shanghai, later recalled how in 1645,

  Whenever the Qing army approached every household in the towns and villages would paste pieces of yellow paper on the door with the characters Da Qing shunmin (‘obedient subjects of the Great Qing’) written on, but would tear them down as soon as the loyalist rebellion seemed to get the upper hand, only to paste them again when the Qing troops were supposed to come back.

  This explains why Dorgon enforced the tonsure decree so ruthlessly as a touchstone of loyalty: one could opportunistically paste up and tear down pieces of paper, but no man could fake his tonsure. By the end of 1645 the Qing had prevailed throughout Jiangnan. In Shanghai, Yao Tinglin recognized that ‘nothing would be the same as before: it was to be a new dynasty, people looking differently, new social hierarchies, new rituals, and so forth – in short, “another world, with no restoring of the old order”’.82

  ‘China in Tigers’ Jaws’

  The Qing conquest of Jiangnan marked an important stage in the success of the Great Enterprise because it secured Beijing's food supply. Rice, millet, wheat and beans once again came up the Grand Canal, to be stored in the capital's enormous granaries. Although most of these supplies went directly to the Manchu families of the Inner City, other residents benefited because the government used the granaries to keep prices low and to run soup kitchens for the poor.83 The Qing also preserved the traditional examination system for the civil service. They held the first triennial metropolitan examination in 1646, just three years after the last Ming exercise, a supplementary one in 1647, and then a regular cycle from 1649. They also tightened up the lax examination standards that had prevailed under the late Ming, for example by executing candidates found to have cheated.

  As one Qing minister wearily noted, however, ‘Seizing the empire is easy; ruling it is difficult.‘84 The absence of any effective geographical barrier separating Beijing from the lower Yangzi had greatly facilitated the Qing's progress thus far, but extending control into areas of the south and west loyal to the Southern Ming presented greater challenges. First, the Little Ice Age continued to cause hardship and disruption. The winter of 1649–50 seems to have been the coldest on record in both north and east China, while the capital experienced such a serious drought in 1657 and again in 1660 that the emperor personally conducted prayers for rain. In the south, 17 counties in Guangdong province reported frost or snow in the 1650s – the highest number in two centuries. Guangdong also suffered more typhoon landfalls between 1660 and 1680 than at any other time in recorded history.85 Second, troops raised in the steppe had seldom encountered smallpox and so possessed little immunity when they entered China: the sudden death from the disease of so many Manchu troops and commanders began to undermine campaign plans. The Qing adopted several panic measures: they banished from the army any soldier who contracted the disease, and they ordered that only princes who had survived smallpox should command their armies. These measures failed: inevitably, not all cases of smallpox were detected before they spread to other soldiers; and, in pursuit of honour and booty, some princes disregarded the risk of infection and insisted on campaigning and promptly died.86

  Losses from smallpox, and the need to garrison initial conquests with reliable soldiers, reduced the number of Banner troops available for the conquest of the south, forcing the Qing to rely on former Ming units of questionable loyalty. In 1645, for example, a small Qing force captured the great port of Guangzhou (Canton) by a ruse and entrusted it to a general who had defected from the Ming; but he soon declared for the Southern Ming. Forces loyal to Beijing only returned five years later and blockaded Canton for eight months, until a defector opened one of the gates, allowing the besiegers to rush in. Over the next two weeks, they ‘never spared man, woman or child; but all whosoever were cruelly put to the sword; nor was there heard any other speech, but “Kill, kill these barbarous rebels”’. Well-informed sources placed the number of slain at 80,000, and even a century later a mound of congealed ashes marked the spot where their corpses had burned on a huge funeral pyre.87 The Qing now entrusted the unruly southeastern provinces of Guangxi, Guangdong and Fujian to three Chinese generals from Liaodong who had joined them at the outset.

  Despite abundant proof that head-shaving united their opponents, the Qing persevered with the policy after Dorgon died in 1650. Thus when the principal Ming naval commander, Zheng Chenggong (‘Coxinga’), seemed willing to defect, at first the Qing offered him a ducal title and lands, promised that he could keep all his troops under arms, and conceded that all shipping off the coast of Fujian ‘shall be subject to your management, inspection, and collection of taxes’. Then, just when Coxinga seemed about to accept these terms, the envoys sent by Beijing to handle the final negotiations bluntly stated: ‘If you do not shave your head, then you cannot receive the [emperor's] proclamation. If your head is not shaven, then we need not even meet.‘88 Outraged, Coxinga used his warships – some of them armed with Western-style artillery – to dominate all trade in the South China Sea until by 1659 he had gathered sufficient funds and support to mount a campaign up the Yangzi. Thirty-two counties and seven prefectural capitals declared their allegiance before a Qing counter-attack forced Coxinga first to retreat to the coast and eventually to abandon the Chinese mainland, making the island of Taiwan his new base.89 Lacking a fleet capable of pursuing him there, the Qing now imposed another draconian and deeply unpopular measure on their Chinese subjects: in the hope of starving out Taiwan, they ordered all who lived within 20 miles of the mainland's southeast coast to abandon their homes and move inland. They then forbade all seaborne trade, destroyed all buildings, and issued orders to kill any human found in the ‘no go’ area.

  The trade embargo produced what the Chinese called shu huang: ‘dearth in the midst of plenty’. Famines, war and disorder had already decimated domestic consumption in southeast China: now the government removed all export markets so that, once better weather increased rice yields, supply rapidly outstripped demand. The price of a bushel of rice fell one hundred-fold and, according to a local source, ‘with such low grain prices, peasant-farmers could not pay taxes or support their families, thus much land was abandoned’.90 The entries in a county gazetteer in Jiangnan epitomized the agonizingly slow process of restoring domestic order. Three times – in 1649, 1654 and 1664 – it optimistically recorded that ‘now that the bandits have been pacified, the dikes were at last rebuilt'; but only on the third occasion did lasting repairs to the irrigation system, the vital precondition for wet-rice cultivation, actually get underway.91

  One cannot blame the Qing alone for this prolonged devastation. As Lynn Struve noted in her path-breaking study of the Southern Ming: ‘The long struggle between the Ming and Qing was not so much a direct clash between two states as a competition to see which side would prevail over, or be defeated by, a third state, so to speak: that of socio-political anarchy’:

  In the whole eighteen-year span of the Southern Ming, there were not more than a handful of instances in which the Qing had to fight to wrest control of a community from Ming officials and military forces that had been in place there prior to the dynastic crisis. The problem for the Ming had been to maintain control, and for the Qing it was to re-establish control, over a patchwork quilt of districts, prefectures, and circuits the size of a subcontinent. Generally speaking, the Ming lost in this competition more rapidly than the Qing won.92

  First the Southern Ming court fled south to Fujian, then westward to Yunnan and finally into Burma where in 1661 Wu Sangui hunted down the last claimant and executed him. After this regicide, the jubilant Qing granted Wu extensive powers in Yunnan, where he settled with his victorious troops and created a prosperous fief.93 That same year, Coxinga and his followers departed for Taiwan, and with that all organized resistance to the Qing on the Chinese mainland temporarily ceased.
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  Nevertheless, for several reasons Qing power remained fragile. First, the death of the Shunzhi emperor in 1661 left a vacuum in which the regents for the young Kiangxi emperor competed for power, destabilizing the entire state. Second, fiscal shortfalls caused by the cost of the various Manchu conquests led the central government to decree that all tax arrears must be paid immediately and to threaten that all officials would be denied promotion, or even demoted or dismissed, unless they delivered outstanding tax quotas in full. In Jiangnan, a combination of unusually high tax evasion and lingering loyalty to the Ming led the Qing to institute a crackdown, imprisoning or executing ‘tax resisters’ and barring them from holding office. Although these savage measures worked in the short-term – tax evasion by the gentry dropped dramatically – they created a reservoir of discontent: in the words of a Jiangnan gentleman-scholar, the ‘laws were like a frost withering the autumn grass’.94 Finally, global cooling continued to afflict most if not all regions of China: 9 of the 14 summers between 1666 and 1679 were either cool or exceptionally cool, and a recent study of Chinese glaciers suggests a late seventeenth-century climate on average more than 1°C colder in the west and more than 2°C colder in the northwest than today.95

  The factional struggles, fiscal shortages and bad weather undermined Qing power, but a further challenge arose in 1675 when Wu Sangui submitted a formal petition to the Kangxi emperor requesting, on grounds of old age, that he be allowed to resign his fief of Yunnan, and that his son should succeed him. The emperor, now aged 19, granted only the first request and took steps to establish central control over the region. Alarmed, two other Chinese generals appointed to rule southeastern provinces as fiefs decided to test Qing resolve by submitting identical petitions.

  Most of the imperial council favoured rejecting these petitions, especially the one from Wu Sangui, fearing that acceptance would lead him to rebel; and they urged the Kangxi emperor to temporize, but he opted for confrontation and terminated Wu's authority. As the councillors had predicted, Wu promptly rebelled and (despite having executed the last ruler of the former dynasty) he adopted the slogan ‘Fight the Qing and restore the Ming’ and proclaimed that all men could once again dress and wear their hair in the traditional Chinese fashion.

  The two other feudatories joined Wu in rebellion, hence the name ‘The Revolt of the Three Feudatories’, and so did many other disgruntled Chinese (including some of the Jiangnan gentry imprisoned for tax evasion a decade before as well as troops from Taiwan commanded by Coxinga's son). Yet Kangxi still underestimated the scale of the challenge he faced, sending a mere 10,000 troops to confront the rebels, who therefore gained control of almost all China south of the Yangzi, as well as of Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces. Wu demanded that the Manchus withdraw beyond the Great Wall, while the Dalai Lama (then as now a major Buddhist leader) offered to broker a deal that would partition China between Wu and the Qing. Even though Wu died in 1678, partly because of the difficult terrain and partly because the rebels practised a scorched-earth policy as they retreated, it took three years and the deployment of over half a million troops to regain all the rebel territories.96

  Once Qing forces had crushed the Three Feudatories, they turned to Taiwan, where in 1683 they forced Coxinga's successor and the last Ming loyalists to surrender. The emperor now authorized the return of local inhabitants to the coastal areas of southeast China from which they had been banned for a generation, and allowed the resumption of maritime trade. After almost 70 years of disruption, destruction and disaster, the Qing had completed their ‘Great Enterprise’.

  The Cost of ‘Changing the Mandate’

  The victorious Kangxi emperor now visited the tombs of his ancestors at Mukden to ‘perform the rites of reporting success’, and then toured much of Manchuria and Shanxi. In 1684 he set off to visit Jiangnan: the first emperor to do so in almost three centuries. His aim, according to his ‘official diary’, was to ‘investigate the unknown sufferings of the people'; but he did not investigate too closely. On his 2,000-mile tour, the emperor avoided places punished for their loyalty to the Ming, such as Yangzhou; he slept in the segregated and safe ‘Tatar Towns'; and he returned to Beijing after two months.97

  The imperial party also bypassed the provinces that had suffered the worst devastation, such as Hunan, where a government survey revealed a shortfall in taxpayers of up to 90 per cent. Nor did it visit Lingnan, where the prohibition on coastal trade had caused a population loss of one-fifth and the abandonment of up to one-half of all cultivated land; or Sichuan, where the savagery of Zhang Xianzhong's ‘Great Western Kingdom’ and the brutal conquest meant that ‘well over a million people must have been killed and the local gentry was virtually exterminated’.98 Nevertheless, the emperor must have seen abundant evidence of depopulation and devastation along his route. The total of cultivated land in the empire had fallen from 191 million acres in 1602 to 67 million in 1645, with a partial recovery to only 100 million in 1685, the year after his tour. Even a generation after the conquest, when pious family members in Anhui province sought to update their collective genealogies, they found that ‘entire households had been massacred or had died of disease, “so that the lineage was barely saved from extinction”’, while ‘some of their survivors were unable to name their ancestors and degree of kinship to one another’. Meanwhile, in Jiangxi province, ‘wherever you look, you see signs of abandonment,’ a visitor noted in 1662, ‘and you realize that before the upheavals there must have been a dense and thriving population here’.99

  Human losses were qualitative as well as quantitative: thousands of members of the elite met a premature death by suicide, by imperial decree, or at the hands of soldiers or bandits. In 1647 the closet Ming loyalist Gu Yanwu lamented the ‘uncles, and brothers and cousins who have died in the last two years, those in-laws and friends who have died, those who were older than I and have died, those who were younger than I and have died, and the number is uncountable’. Many more would perish over the next quarter century. In 1702 historians commissioned by Kangxi to compile the official Ming History included the biographies of almost 600 men who killed themselves out of loyalty to the Ming dynasty and of almost 400 women who either ‘followed their husbands into death’ or died after being dishonoured.100 Since they only included those who had definitely taken their own lives out of principle, and omitted the rest, the true total must have been far higher: many other members of the elite, both male and female, died because they simply got in the way of soldiers, rebels or bandits, and left no surviving documentary trace. It therefore seems appropriate to speak of a ‘lost generation’: in no other part of the seventeenth-century world did such a high proportion of the elite meet a violent end, with the exception of Germany – and Germany was a fraction of the size of China.

  The compilers of the Ming History omitted many other victims of the transition – such as the millions of Han Chinese who became slaves, either because Bannermen took them as booty or because they sold themselves and their families into servitude to escape debts, taxes or starvation. Qing Beijing had a lively slave market; and the dynasty enforced draconian fugitive slave laws. The Dutch diplomatic envoy Johannes Nieuhof provided a graphic example of the consequences. As he and his colleagues travelled by boat upriver from Canton towards Nanjing,

  We saw into what a miserable condition the Chinese were reduced by the last war of the Tartars, who put them upon this slavish labour of towing and rowing their boats, using them worse than beasts at their pleasure, without any exception of persons, either young or old. Often the track'd ways on the riverside are so narrow, uneven and steep, that if they should slip, they would infallibly break their necks, as many times it happens. Now and then they walk up to the middle in water, and if any of them grow faint and weary, there is one that follows, having charge of the boat, who never leaves beating of them, till they go on or die.101

  The Ming History likewise omitted the suffering of Chinese women during the transition because of new le
gislation introduced by the Qing. Thus female slaves (both married and unmarried) were considered the sexual property of their masters: although a female slave could in theory resist rape by her master, if she struck or injured him in doing so she would be punished according to the severe laws against resisting one's ‘owner’. The Qing Law Code, promulgated in 1646, also required a woman who sought redress for being raped to prove that she had struggled against her assailant throughout the entire ordeal; her body must show bruises and cuts; her clothing must be torn; and witnesses must have heard her repeatedly cry for help.102

  Many Han Chinese women committed suicide rather than live in such a world, some of them leaving suicide notes in verse that explained how fate had ruined their lives (see chapter 4 above). Others wrote heart-rending prose letters and verse laments concerning their lot. Thus Huang Yuanjie, abducted by soldiers who probably raped her before selling her to a brothel, escaped and later became a celebrated poet and painter. In 1646 she marked the Qingming Festival (the day when families gathered around the family graves to remember their dead) by writing a poem that recalled not only her misfortunes but also her husband, lost in the anarchy of the previous year:

  Leaning against a pillar, I am besieged by worries about the nation;

  Others, as always, go to the pleasure houses.

  My thoughts persist like unending drizzle;

  Tears fall like fluttering petals without end.

  Since we parted, a new year has already arrived …

  Thinking of my family I stare off into the white clouds.

  My small heart overwhelmed by grief.103

  There can have been scarcely a woman in Jiangnan, and in many other parts of China, who did not feel ‘overwhelmed with grief’ for a relative or friend who perished during the Ming-Qing transition.

  Even the Chinese men and women who survived the transition often lived in fear. Ding Yaokang, a gentleman scholar from Shandong, wrote a personal memoir evocatively entitled A Brief Account of My Escape from Disaster. It described how he and his family had to abandon their ancestral lands twice – once in 1642, to avoid the great Manchu raid, and again in 1644 when Li Zicheng retreated from Beijing. They survived only because they could afford to charter a boat to take them (and other gentry families) to safety on an island off the coast. On both occasions he noted the death of many who remained, because troops stole and destroyed everything they could, and any crops still in the field could not be harvested for lack of labour. In the adjacent province of Henan, Li Tingsheng was studying for his shengyuan degree when the bandits came in 1642. He too fled, spending the next two years on the move while he evaded both rebel forces and government armies, disguised as a food vendor and impersonating a carter until it was safe enough to resume his life as a scholar and to write A Record of Hardship, which made clear that only the support of other gentry families had allowed him to survive.104