Qing (Manchu) (1644 - 1911)
In 1644, the Manchus took over China and founded the Qing dynasty. The Qing weren't the worst
rulers; under them the arts flowered (China's greatest novel, a work known variously as The Dream of
the Red Chamber, A Dream of Red Mansions, and The Story of the Stone, was written during the
Qing) and culture bloomed. Moreover, they attempted to copy Chinese institutions and philosophy to a
much greater extent than then the Mongols of the Yuan. However, in their attempt to to emulate the
Chinese, they were even more conservative and inflexible than the Ming. Their approach to foreign
policy, which was to make everyone treat the Emperor like the Son of Heaven and not acknowledge
other countries as being equal to China, didn't rub the West the right way, even when the Chinese were
in the moral right (as in the Opium Wars, which netted Britain Hong Kong and Kowloon).
To live during the Qing Dynasty was to live in interesting times. Most importantly, the Western world
attempted to make contact on a government-to-government basis, and, at least initially, failed. The
Chinese (more specifically, the ultra-conservative Manchus) had no room in their world-view for the
idea of independent, equal nations (this viewpoint, to a certain degree, still persists today). There was
the rest of the world, and then there was China. It wasn't that they rejected the idea of a community of
nations; it's that they couldn't conceive of it. It would be like trying to teach a Buddhist monk about the
Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. This viewpoint was so pervasive that Chinese reformers who
advocated more flexibility in China's dealings with the West were often accused of being Westerners
with Chinese faces.
Other problems that plagued the late (1840 onwards) Qing included rampant corruption, a steady
decentralization of power, and the unfortunate fact that they were losing control on too many fronts at
the same time. Rebellions sprouted like mushrooms after a rain; apocalyptic cults undermined what little
official authority remained. Several of the rebellions, such as the Taiping Rebellion, very nearly
succeeded. Compounding the problems was squabbling between various reformers who disagreed on
how to best combat the chaos and the West (not necessarily in that order); in hindsight, it is clear that
the entire system was slowly collapsing. An excellent account of this period is Frederic Wakeman Jr.'s
The Fall of Imperial China.
The attitude of the Western powers towards China (England, Russia, Germany, France, and the United
States, were, more or less, the primary players) was strangely ambivalent. On the one hand, they did
their best to undermine what they considered to be restrictive trading and governmental regulations; the
best (or worst, depending on your point of view) example of that was the British smuggling of opium
into Southern China. Other examples included the 'right' for foreign navies to sail up Chinese rivers and
waterways, and extra-territoriality, which meant that if a British citizen committed a crime in Qing
China, he would be tried in a British council under British law. Most of these 'rights' came into being
under a series of treaties that came to be known, and rightly so, as the Unequal Treaties.
On the other hand, they did do their best to prop up the ailing Qing, the most notable example being the
crushing of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 by foreign troops (primarily U.S. Marines). What the Western
powers were interested in was the carving up of China for their own purposes, and that, paradoxically,
required keeping China together.
But two things happened to prevent that. First, in 1911, the Qing
dynasty collapsed and China plunged headlong into chaos. Second,
in 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand told his driver to go down a street
in Sarajevo he shouldn't have, and Europe plunged headlong into
chaos.
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