A further difference between the Chinese state and the various European states was that the former never faced competition from rival elites seeking to limit its power. By the mid tenth century, the Chinese aristocratic elites had been destroyed, with the consequence that no elite enjoyed authority independent of the state. The opposite, in fact, was the case, with the bureaucratic elite enjoying unrivalled authority and numerous privileges, and all other elites dependent for their position on the patronage of the state. [229] The key mechanism for the selection of the bureaucratic elite was the imperial examination system, which had been more or less perfected by the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) [230]. Although the nobility enjoyed an advantage in these exams, they were open to a wide cross-section of society, and were the means by which recruitment to the imperial elite was greatly broadened. Knowledge of the Confucian classics formed the core of the exams and served, for successful and unsuccessful candidates alike, to articulate and reinforce a common set of values. [231] Whereas in Europe the elites remained relatively autonomous, except at extreme moments like war, the Chinese elites were absorbed by and became effectively part of the state, often being called upon to act on its behalf. The imperial bureaucracy, under the aegis of the emperor, faced no challenge from a Church (after the seizure of Buddhist properties in the ninth century), a judiciary, a landed aristocracy, the military or an urban bourgeoisie. [232] The most important exception was the tradition of the literati, like Confucius himself, who were given licence to write critical things provided that they, in effect, removed themselves from everyday society.
The Chinese state was thus never constrained by independent power elites in the manner of Europe: it enjoyed universal and unchallenged authority. While the boundaries between the state and society in Europe were clearly delineated and constantly contested, this was not the case in China, where the frontiers remained blurred and fuzzy, as they still are today: there has been no need to define them because there were no competing social groups. Given the non-conflictual nature of state-elite relations, the boundaries between state and society were instead determined by practical issues of organization and resource constraints. In Europe, by contrast, autonomous, competing elites — nobles, clerics and burghers — fought to constrain the power of the state. Whereas the contest between state and elites in Europe was intimately bound up with both Church and class, in China the functional differentiation into scholars, peasants, merchants and tradesmen did not translate into independent bases of power or institutionalized voices.
With such a vast territory to govern, the Chinese state could not, and did not, depend solely or even mainly on physical coercion for the exercise of its rule. [233] It would have been neither feasible nor viable — the resources required being too enormous. In comparison with Japan, indeed, the military remained strikingly absent from Chinese life — at least until the early twentieth century. Instead, the power of the state has rested primarily on consent reinforced by forms of coercion. The Chinese state went to great lengths, in both the Ming and Qing periods, to inculcate in the population a sense of shared values and culture based on Confucian principles. Here was another contrast with Europe, where such matters were not considered to be the responsibility of the state and, until the late nineteenth century, were left in the hands of the Church. [234] The Chinese state saw moral instruction, amongst both the common people and the elites, as both desirable in itself and also as a means of exercising social control. For the elites, the state required that the Confucian classics be taught in schools as well as in preparation for the imperial exams. It promoted lectures for the common people on the virtues of Confucian behaviour, and imperial edicts frequently adopted a moral tone on issues such as social hierarchy and the payment of taxes. The state also sought to promote the worship of particular deities, while at the same time discouraging those which it saw as potential sources of social unrest. [235] On these matters, it was, with the exception of religious control, many centuries in advance of European states, which only began to concern themselves with such questions after the emergence of the modern nation-state and concomitant nationalism in the late nineteenth century. As the historian Bin Wong suggests: ‘From a Chinese perspective, the lack of concern for education and moral indoctrination in Europe constitutes a basic limitation on European rule, no less important than the absence of representative political institutions in China.’ [236] The same can be said of the manner in which the Chinese state, as a matter of course, engaged in surveillance of the population — by registration and other means — in order to be better able to anticipate sources of dissatisfaction and potential unrest. [237] A crucial mechanism in the exercise of social control was the clans or lineages, which were — and remain, even — far more important in China than they generally were in Europe. These were huge extended kinship groups, which traced their origins back to a common male ancestor (at the time of the 1949 Revolution there were still fewer than 500 surnames in China), [238] and were based on formal membership. They enjoyed huge authority, with the power of expulsion and the consequent threat of social ostracism. [239]
The imperial state was mindful of the importance of good governance and the need for restraint. This notion of good governance was intimately linked to the Confucian tradition, with its stress on the moral responsibility of the rulers: a continuing feature of imperial rule, for example, was a recognition that taxes needed to be kept low so that peasants would prosper, harmony would be promoted, resistance and rebellion avoided. [240] Nor was there a complete absence of accountability: imperial rule was always haunted by the possibility that the mandate of Heaven, and therefore its right to rule, might be withdrawn. During the Zhou dynasty (1100-256 BC) emperors claimed for the first time that their sanction to govern came from a broader, impersonal deity, Heaven ( tian), whose mandate ( tianming) might be conferred on any family that was morally worthy of the responsibility. This doctrine proclaimed the ruler’s accountability to a supreme moral force that guides the human community. The Chinese concept of Heaven differed from the Western concept of a universe created and controlled by a divine power. For the Chinese, Heaven was seen as superior to anything on earth but it was not regarded as the creator of the universe, nor was it visualized in concrete terms. Unlike a Western ruler’s accession through the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which rested solely on birth, the Chinese mandate of Heaven established moral criteria for holding power, which enabled the Chinese to distance themselves from their rulers and to speculate on their virtue and suitability. [241] A succession of bad harvests, or growing poverty, or a series of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes, might bring into question in the minds of the people the right of a particular emperor to continue his rule: such a growing crisis of legitimacy could lead to and sustain huge popular uprisings, the last great example being the Taiping Uprising against the Qing dynasty in the mid nineteenth century, when tens of millions came to believe that the mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn.
The moral role that the Chinese state assumed was only one aspect of a very broad conception of how it conceived of its responsibilities. The mandate of Heaven meant that the state felt obliged to intervene in ecological and economic questions and also in ensuring the livelihood of the people. A striking example was the way the Qing during the eighteenth century managed granary reserves in order to ensure that the local laws of supply and demand worked in a reasonably acceptable fashion and produced relative price stability, a practice which dated back much earlier to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and even before. [242] The state also took on responsibility for what were, by the standards of the time, huge infrastructural projects, such as the maintenance of the Yellow River in order to prevent flooding, and the construction of the Grand Canal, which was completed at the beginning of the seventh century. [243] In each of these respects, the Chinese state was very different from European states in that it assumed functions that the latter were only to regard as legitimate areas of concern many c
enturies later. In these instances too, then, developments in China prefigured those in Europe, and confound the idea of a single Eurocentric path of development that other states are destined to follow. If anything, indeed, quite the reverse: the Chinese state acquired many of the characteristics of a modern state, not least a large-scale bureaucracy, long before, on a European time-map, it should have done. Moreover, those forces that later drove the expansion of the nation-state in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards — the exigencies of warfare, the need for revenue and the demand for political representation — were very different from the factors that shaped China’s imperial state. In contrast to Europe, where no state dominated, China enjoyed overwhelming power over its neighbours for more than a millennium, [244] while political representation was to remain an alien concept, even after the 1911 Revolution and the fall of the Qing dynasty. The dynamics of state-creation in China and Europe were profoundly different in almost every major respect. [245]
IMPLOSION AND INVASION
The problems faced by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) began to mount in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its first taste of what lay in wait was its defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839-42). Then, around the middle of the century, as economic difficulties began to grow, the Qing were shaken by a series of local revolts together with four major rebellions: a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the south-west (1855-73), another Muslim rebellion by those of Turkic descent in the north-west (1862-73), the Nien Rebellion in the north (1853-68), and the Taiping Uprising (1850-64). [246] Of these, the Taiping was by far the most serious. With trust in the imperial regime shaken by its defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War, together with serious floods and famine in 1848-50, the conditions were ripe for rebellion. The Taiping Uprising started in southern China and laid waste to much of the rich lower Yangzi region before moving north and west, and threatening Beijing: it is estimated that the uprising resulted in the deaths of 20–40 million people. The historian Paul Cohen describes the Taiping’s ideology as ‘a bizarre alchemy of evangelical Christianity, primitive communism, sexual Puritanism, and Confucian utopianism’. [247] Initially it drew considerable support from various ethnic minorities in the south which had migrated from the north, especially the Hakka, and contained a strongly anti-Manchu element (the Qing dynasty being from Manchuria). [248] The outcome remained uncertain for several years, with the rebellion only finally being crushed by the raising of new armies by the Qing and the support of British and French troops. Although the ultimate ability of the Qing to triumph indicated that it was still a robust and powerful force, its moral authority had been seriously undermined and was never restored. [249]
Following the defeat of the Taiping Uprising, the problems posed by growing Western ambition and aggression began to move centre-stage in the 1870s and 1880s. [250] The First Opium War, in which the Qing unsuccessfully sought to resist British demands to allow the import of Indian-grown opium, led to the Treaty of Nanjing. [251] This was the first of the so-called unequal treaties and resulted in the imposition of reparations, the loss of Hong Kong, and the creation of four treaty ports in which the British enjoyed special concessions. The impact of the defeat, however, was limited. The Qing dynasty was not forced to rethink its attitudes in the light of its defeat: the imperial state, indeed, continued to perceive the British in rather similar terms to the way it regarded other foreigners, whether they were the peoples of the northern steppes and Central Asia, or its many tributary states in East Asia, like Korea and Vietnam. [252] The sense of Chinese superiority and self-confidence remained obdurate. [253] This state of affairs began to change with the Second Opium War (1857-60), which culminated in the ransacking and burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops and the resulting Treaty of Tianjin and the Beijing Conventions. These established a whole string of new treaty ports in which Western citizens were granted extra-territoriality; the right to foreign military bases was conceded; missionaries were given freedom to travel in the interior; and further reparations were imposed. As a result, China began to lose control over important aspects of its territory. [254] In 1884 the French succeeded in crushing the Chinese navy in a struggle for influence over Vietnam, which had long been part of the Chinese tributary system but was in the course of being colonized by France. The naval battle revealed the alarming disparity between the power of an advanced European industrial nation, even so far from its home base, and that of an overwhelmingly agrarian China. The Chinese flagship was sunk by torpedoes within the first minute of battle; in less than an hour all the Chinese ships had been destroyed and the way was clear for France to take control of Indochina. [255]
The decisive turning point was the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, which, like the war with the French, concerned China ’s influence over its tributary states, in this case Korea, which had for many centuries been one of the tributary states closest to China. The Chinese suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of its rapidly industrializing and increasingly aggressive neighbour and in the Treaty of Shimonoseki was forced to pay huge reparations, amounting to three times the government’s annual income. Korea effectively became a Japanese protectorate, though not formally until 1905. China lost Taiwan and part of southern Manchuria, four further treaty ports were created, and Japan won the right to build factories and other enterprises in one of the now numerous treaty ports. Japan ’s victory also proved the occasion for further demands from the Western powers and a series of new concessions from a China impotent to resist. [256] By the turn of the century, China ’s sovereignty had been severely curtailed by the growing presence of Britain, France, Japan, Germany, the United States, Belgium and Russia on Chinese territory.
The Boxer Uprising in 1900, which received the tacit support of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who held de facto power over the Qing government between 1861 and 1908, was occasioned by growing anti-Western sentiment and resulted in widespread attacks on foreign missionaries and other Westerners. Eventually a joint foreign army drawn from British, Japanese, French and American troops marched on Beijing, suppressed the uprising and then proceeded to base itself in the Forbidden City for over a year. Further concessions were extracted from the Chinese authorities, including another round of reparations. Although China was not colonized, in effect it became a semi-colony, with foreign troops free to roam its territory, the treaty ports resembling micro-colonies, missionaries enjoying licence to proselytize Western values wherever they went, [257] and foreign companies able to establish subsidiaries with barely any taxation or duties. China was humiliated and impoverished. [258] The fact, however, that it never became a colony, even though the Japanese were later to occupy Manchuria and then conquer lands much further to the south, was of great importance for China ’s ability to revive after 1949.
Major Unequal Treaties Imposed on China
Treaty of Nanjing (1842) with the United Kingdom
Treaty of the Bogue (1843) with the United Kingdom
Treaty of Wanghia (1844) with the United States
Treaty of Whampoa (1844) with France
Treaty of Aigun (1858) with Russia
Treaty of Tianjin (1858) with France, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States
Convention of Peking (1860) with the United Kingdom, France and Russia
Treaty of Tientsin (1861) with Prussia and the German Customs Union
Chefoo Convention (1876) with the United Kingdom
Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking (1887) with Portugal
Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) with Japan
Li-Lobanov Treaty (1896) with Russia
Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory (1898) with the United Kingdom
Boxer Protocol (1901) with the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands
Twenty-One Demands (1915) with Japan
China ’s impotence in the face of growing foreign intervention st
imulated a movement for reform aimed at modernizing the country. Unlike in Japan, however, it failed to command anything like a consensus, its base never extending beyond a small elite, with the consequence that reform was always a hesitant and piecemeal process. It was driven by a small coterie of imperial civil servants, together with various writers and scholars, such as Kang Youwei, a well-connected man adept at showing how new ways of thinking were compatible with traditional Confucian texts. [259] The imperial government for the most part, however, neither understood nor accepted the necessity, let alone the urgency, of modernization, remaining passive or actively opposed — unlike in post-1868 Japan, where the state was the key agent of modernization. Nonetheless, there was some reform of the armed forces and various ministries, including the establishment for the first time of a diplomatic presence in major capitals like London and Paris, while the educational curriculum was revised after the turn of the century to include Western disciplines. In 1898 the reform movement reached its apogee when it finally received the formal blessing of the imperial hierarchy, but the imprimatur only lasted for a few months. [260]
One of the major problems facing the reformers was that modernization became intimately associated with the West at a time when the latter was colonizing and humiliating the country: far from being seen as patriots, they were regarded as tainted by the West or, worse, as traitors. As a result, the growing hostility amongst the Chinese towards the West was to work against the process of reform. The fact that China enjoyed such a unitary and centralized system of government also conspired to inhibit and stifle the development of alternative reforming impulses, in contrast to Japan, where authority was more dispersed. This problem was compounded by the hegemony enjoyed by Confucian thought, which made it very difficult for other ways of thinking to gain ground and influence. Until around 1900 the idea of reform was virtually always articulated within a Confucian framework — with an insistence on the distinction between Chinese ‘essence’ and Western ‘method’ (or, in the famous phrase of Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), ‘Chinese learning for the essential principles, Western learning for the practical applications’). [261] After the turn of the century, other modes of thought began to acquire some traction, including socialist and Marxist ideas amongst sections of the intelligentsia, [262] a process that culminated in the 1911 Revolution largely being inspired by Western thinking. [263] Although Confucianism certainly declined during this period, it did not die. Nor should it be regarded as having been, or being, inherently incompatible with, or fundamentally antithetical to, change and reform. [264] However, it was in urgent need of revitalization through a process of cross-fertilization with other ways of thinking, as had happened to it in earlier periods of history with Buddhism and Taoism.
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