The History of China - #311 - Qing 42: Charting the Collision Course

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

The 19th Century is going to be exceedingly rough on Qing China. So, before we venture down into the chasm that is the "Chinese Century of Humuliation's" opening salvos, let's assess where we - and the Empire - sit as of 1810... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 311, charting the collision course. So from the very ancient time, Zhong Guo was a unified country. All countries surrounding were barbarians. They did not have culture. They did not have a developed political system.

Our people, Umin, thus did not treat the barbarian countries as equal counterparts, and our country, Wu Guo, for several thousands of years, had always been in the position of standing alone. Our people thus considered our country as the entire world.

Yang Qi Chao, Chinese politician, social and political activist, journalist, and intellectual, 1899. We human beings have not secured happiness. On the contrary, science gives us catastrophes. We are like travelers losing our way in a desert. They see a big black shadow ahead and desperately run to it, thinking it may lead them somewhere. But after running a long way, they no longer see the shadow and fall into the slough of despondency. If it is true that our civilization has something pitiable about it, you have the choice of concluding with Rousseau that this pitiable civilization is to blame for our bad morality, or against Rousseau,

that our good morality is to blame for this pitiableness of our civilization. Our weak, unmanly social concepts of good and evil and their tremendous ascendancy over body and soul have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped the self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, the pillars of a strong civilization. Where one still encounters bad morality, one beholds the last ruins of these pillars. Thus, paradox stands against paradox. The truth cannot possibly be on both sides. And is it on either of them?

Test them and see. Friedrich Nietzsche. Daybreak. Thoughts on the prejudices of morality, 1881. My oh my! We certainly have come a long way together, haven't we? we've stepped across oceans of time in just a few short years and a few hundred episodes from the very creation of the universe itself all the way to the last and perhaps at least

in some respects greatest of the imperial chinese dynastic orders we've come at last to what probably more than a few of you very patient listeners may have started listening to this show in the first place for china in the 19th century modernity mechanization and the entire basket of problems that that will inexorably dump on the shores of the Middle Kingdom in the hundred years or so to follow. We're not going to start cold at the year 1800, of course. When have we ever been lucky enough to be quite so neat and tidy after all? We've been through most of that already.

Last time, by which I mean before the strange tales, we finished off with the story of Zhang Yi Sao and her floating pirate kingdom, the Red Flag Fleet, finally disbanding in what amounted to a near total victory of almost all the pirates, blanket pardons, and cushy government posts all around, unless you pulled the short straw. But even only a decade in, the rigors of the 19th century had already taught the Qing critical lessons about the path forward, if only they were keen enough to heed them. Lessons like, the oceans were no longer barriers, but an entirely new frontier and one that China was finding it had already ceded to competing foreign interests now at their very doorstep. Imperial opulence was a millstone around their necks. Belts needed to be

tightened. The White Lotus Rebellion alone cost three years of government revenue. Corruption siphoned off whatever scraps might yet remain. It was, to put it briefly, untenable. If the dynasty were going to thrive, or even survive in this strange new world, it would have to adapt and quickly. That's right, buckle up, because we're officially entering early modernity, and it's going to be an exceptionally bumpy ride. Any discussion of modernity must, of course, begin with an unpacking of that extremely dense, and, to be frank, problematic term itself. Kind of like a fish, though we all have a pretty consistent.

and broadly overlapping concept of what being modern is, there's actually no definition that we have that meets all metrics while eliminating all non-metrics. That is to say, I know what a fish is, and you know what a fish is, and we can know that we're eating fish together. But there is no definition of fish that we can use that wouldn't also include organisms that we consider definitely not fish, while also excluding species that we'd broadly consider to be pretty fishy.

So, too, with modernity. We can point to examples. We can talk about general traits. But the moment we try to define it down precisely, it gets really slippery. We can use the usual markers, but as always, the reality remains more complicated. Such confusions are further compounded by the fact that, well, we are talking about China. And its history, as well as its modernity, have long been and still remain controversial. We know the major events, to be sure.

But what those events meant, or even still mean today, are frequently held in contention by rival factions of academics, ideologues, revolutionaries, and governments both within China proper and outside of it. At the same time, much of what modern historians have really come to build their disciplines bred and butter on in terms of actually building a three-dimensional understanding of time and place, the seemingly minor events, the lives of the common people, person, accounts and other sides of history than the official government-approved narrative have long been and even today remain far too often unfound, unknown, untranslated, disregarded, or destroyed. Though the historians and archaeologists of the 20th and now 21st centuries, especially in the post-Mao years that finally cooled off the PRC's historicidal fugue state of the cultural revolution, have labored mightily and with tremendous success to find, preserve, and disseminate newly discovered and translated works, with updated understandings and foci, much remains in the dark to us,

and even more remains hotly contested. Historian John Fairbank terms this chasm of understanding as widespread historical ignorance of the subject. Frankly, he nailed it. Now coming up on 12 years hammering away at this very issue myself, I can attest that Chinese history isn't beating those charges anytime soon. From Fairbank, quote, the primary task of history is to understand the circumstances, motives, and actions of all parties concerned, and an unbalanced knowledge of one side only, may leave us still quite ignorant of the other side of the conflict, and therefore less able to comprehend it, end quote.

Such one-sidedness has plagued the historiography of China for ever, but the opening salvos of modernity actually serve to further compound this long-standing issue. rather than help resolve it. Take the first opium war, for instance. We've long been constrained not only by the sources from which the information comes from, in the case of both the Qing and the British, largely official accounts from very high level of governments usually quite far away, but also the problem of time and availability. British records of the conflict were available to the public before the ink on the Treaty of Non King was even dry, where the gunpowder smoke over Canton had cleared off. Yet the Qing account,

of the conflict, they were also fighting, remained locked within the imperial vaults for 90 years, only to be published finally in 1932, two decades after the old regime and the imperial system altogether had been buried. They would ultimately be released as part of the Qingsegao, the draft history of Qing, which, as the name denotes, isn't even the official release version of the official imperial history of the dynasty, an impasse that remained. That remains, unresolved, and thus the work remains in its quote-unquote draft state, even today, 93 years later, still in beta. The point being, Chinese history is a tough racket. But I'm afraid it gets worse. A second cause of controversy is the broad cultural gap that separated the major

historical protagonists. We come to this vast expanse of an epoch facing twin crises. First, the cultural confrontation of a recalcitrant and imperial Qing regime based on agrarian peasantry and barrobed bureaucracy, versus the expansionistic and ruthlessly mercantile interests of the West's rising power. And second, stemming from the first, the building pressure cooker of social discontent versus elite political aloofness under blindness that would culminate in it all boiling over into the quote-unquote greatest of all revolutions. Such sweeping Gales of change in conflict, inner order versus chaos from abroad, the old regime versus an increasingly modern population more and more out of step with one another onto absolute breakdown,

have reduced nearly as many conflicting viewpoints and understandings as there have been hands to pen them. Another primary point of conflict will be that of no less than fundamental worldview. I'm not actually dropping any of this on you out of nowhere, by the way. We've been getting down to the core of this issue for quite some time, in fact. Right about when the Qing started to become aware of the Russians and their Tsar nosing around the northernmost reaches of the realm. And it developed further as the two powers came into the uncomfortable affixing of mutual borders while carving up the late Zhonggar Khanate's peoples and territories for themselves.

And so it came to the apex of Qing conceit with the Chanlong Emperor's haughty dismissals of the British king's entreaties as the grovelings of a barbarian vassal lord, only to quickly find the worrying limits of their military might in the new frontier of the sea amid the cannonades of the Red Flag Pirates. In brief, the classic imperial Confucian Chinese construct of not just themselves, but their entire central placement in the very fabric of the universe's power structure, writ cosmic, had begun to smash headlong into the very modern Western conception, of the sovereign nation state, and it would not be a pretty collision.

Great Qing, as with all prior Chinese dynasties, institutionally believed, quote, in the classical Confucian teachings and the universal supremacy of the Son of Heaven, who maintained his rule by the edifying example of his virtuous conduct at the top of a harmonious social order of hierarchy and status. In this Ancien regime, the classical learning tolerated only changed, within tradition. The extended family system dominated the individual. A doctrine of duty eclipsed any doctrine of rights. Civil administrators controlled the military and used the merchants,

and the principles of moral conduct took precedence over human passions, material profit, and the letter of the law. Truly, two civilizations stood embattled, end quote. An aside here, that, as most other quotes so far this episode, come from volume 10 of the Cambridge History of China, the academic history series, from which you're doubtless aware, I have been and continue to draw much of my primary narrative arcs. The funny thing about the Cambridge history, something that I find myself empathizing more and with as time goes on, is that the various volumes are published widely spaced apart and frequently non-chronologically to their own narrative structure.

The series itself began in 1976. Volume 3 on Sway and Tong, Part 1, was published three years later in 1979, yet volume 4, Sway and Tong, Part 2, remains yet unpublished to this day. More to the point, part 9 on the early Qing Dynasty, which has been everything up to the year 1800 in this show, so until now, was published nearly a quarter century ago. in 2002, which, okay, fine. But the volume I come to next? Volume 10? Late Ching?

It was published all the way back in 1978. And don't get me wrong, that in no way takes away from the great work that it is. But both the tonal, narrative, and even chronological viewpoint shift to reading John Fairbank in the same year that Mao Zedong died. Very obviously still a bit agog and lost as to where this whole revolution thing will ultimately wind up eventually, can be kind of jarring. That forced and almost comical shift in perspective, at least for me, has been an instance of seeing my own hand at work as well. A half century on, some of the perspectives have since become outdated, debunked, overwritten, better researched,

or just a bit quaint. It falls, as it always must, to historians working in their own time to once again reorient those lenses and perspectives to better align the important truths that history offers us with the times and understandings themselves. Such is the eternal upkeep of historiography. All right, aside over. Strategically, China's own blind spot was just as deep. For two centuries, the Qing had mastered the art of conquering and stabilizing land. The empire was built by defeating Mongols, Oiroths, and Central Asian Connets, threats that came from the steppe and mountain, not the open water. The sea, by contrast, was an afterthought. Coastal defense meant preventing piracy, not preventing invasion. The emperors saw the ocean not as a frontier, but as a

wasteland. Quote, barbarians come from the land. The sea produces nothing. When European gunboats appeared over the horizon. They didn't just bring cannons. They brought a set of geopolitical assumptions that Chang had never needed to understand before. For the first time in its history, China faced an enemy it could not absorb, isolate, or assimilate. Boarding for flight 246 to Toronto is delayed 50 minutes. Ugh, what? Sounds like Ojo time. Play Ojo, great idea. Feel the fun with all the latest slots in live casino games and with no wagering requirements. What you win is yours to keep, Hey, I won! Boarding will begin when passenger Fisher is done celebrating.

19 plus Ontario only. Please play responsibly concerned by your gambling or that if someone close you, call 186653310 or visit Comexonterio.ca. The decline and fall of the last Chinese dynasty is above all a tragedy, almost incomprehensible in scale. Even measured against other dynastic collapses in China's long past, few events rival the magnitude of suffering unleashed during what would come to be known as its century of humiliation. In terms of lives affected or cut short, only the truly globalized conflicts of the 20th century eclips it. And further, as for the destruction of entire civilizational worldviews in the service of imperial profit, I'm afraid history offers a foul glut of examples. the Americas, Africa, and the Indian subcontinants, to name just a few. Yet even events as titanic as these must stand right alongside the upheaval that tore through

the Middle Kingdom over the last 200 years. Quote, as the more ancient and less rapidly changing civilization gradually gave way before the more modern and dynamic, a pioneer generation of Chinese scholars and administrators pursued goals of reform, gradually working out a new view of the world and of China's place in it." Such a novel undertaking, seeing China suddenly not as the central spoke of heaven and earth, but a mere nation among at least nominal equals, would inevitably breed disunity of thought and of viewpoint, never a pleasant possibility to darken the imperial visage.

Such things never sat easily with an empire that demanded harmony as proof of legitimacy, and certainly not under foreign guns. The gradual but unstoppable erosion of central imperial authority and the inner rot of the creaking bureaucratic apparatus beneath it would ultimately give bloom to a revolutionary panoply of ideas, reforms, and even advances, but not without considerable, at times nearly terminal, gangrene in the process. And below that official imperial structure lay a social order just as resistant to change. Everyday life was not shaped by the state so much as by the lineage. Extended families controlling land, credit, marriage, and even community justice.

The gentry, degree-holding local elites, mediated everything between the magistrates and the people. They were landlords, arbitrators, educators, and brokers of imperial favor. To challenge this old order was not simply to defy a government. It was to attack the very structure. that defined family, morality, and identity. Reform, therefore, could never be just political. It was existential. A modern nation-state can and should be criticized, often.

But a Confucian moral cosmos could not be. This tragedy, writes Fairbank, was, quote, the more bitter because it was gradual, inexorable, and complete. The old order fought a rear-guard action, giving ground slowly, but always against greater odds. Each disaster followed by a greater, until one by one, China's asserted superiority over foreigners,

the central power of the emperor at Peking, the reigning Confucian orthodoxy, and the ruling elite of the scholar officials were each in turn undermined and destroyed. End quote. With the incursion of modern nationalism imposing itself from outside, so too came the inevitable growth of nationalism from within.

But those who had lived through it directly, and Chinese historians in particular, looking back from the 20th century, on what their society had been versus the completely alien world they, by comparison, now existed within, came to be understood and focused through the twin ideological lenses of nationalism and revolutionary doctrinal thought. The many slights and humiliations the Chinese of late Qing had suffered was officially understood within Chinese scholarship as naturally, quote, provocative, of patriot indignation, end quote. More and more, from the period of World War I, this foreign invasion was called imperialism, and imperialism was seen as a humiliation that must be wiped out. Accompanying this viewpoint was the tacit understanding that China's succumbing to these foreign imperialist depredations was primarily to be blamed not on the foreign powers, who were, after all, simply acting on their own better interests, but instead on the weakness

of China itself. It's frankly embarrassing military frailty. It's creaking, rotted bureaucracy, unable to respond to an increasingly fast-paced global order. Even the alien nature of its imperial overlords that the Chinese had long ago accepted in defeat and subservience. But even more than those material concerns was the leveled charge of moral weakness on the part of the Chinese people. Quote, in a lack of patriotic devotion, in working for foreigners and profiting with them from the vicious traffic in opium or in coolies, as well as from the evils of industrial exploitation of labor in port cities. Moral degeneracy was equally evident in warlord particularism, landlord selfishness,

family first nepotism. Most of all, China's weakness had inherited the old ruling class strata, the alien Manchu court, the out-of-date officials trained in ancient classics, the literati whose prerogatives let them monopolize higher learning and culture, the landlords who exploited impoverished tenants. All this complex of institutions and practices could be summed up under feudalism, end quote. Historical understandings, both personal and societal, inevitably change over time. China's own historical consciousness shifted dramatically over the course of the myriad rebellions, revolutions, and conflicts that came to define its 19th and 20th centuries.

As such, it's critical that we take into account that self-image, even as it underwent such a total sea change, as well as the material differences of life under the old regime, and as it faltered. This serves to flesh out and three-dimensionalize the effects of its imperialization, beginning as, quote, a unilateral force which overwhelms China from the outside. It becomes a result of interaction, and as this interaction between China and the outside of the outside, world is studied further, imperialism as a generality breaks down into a variety of factors and circumstances, end quote. So let's go ahead and take a look at all that, right? We might as well address the elephant in the room right off the bat, and that is China's sheer size and scale. Yes, I know we've been going on and on about this literally forever. It comes with the territory, but it is, in the 19th and 20th centuries especially, that China goes from being a really big country,

with a whole lot of people, finally cracking that 300 million mark only by about 1790 and 400 million by 1840, to being the global population juggernaut that we understand it today by 1980, reaching more than 1 billion people, and it's probable all-time high water mark of 1.42 billion people as of 2020. Incidentally, current demographic trends strongly indicate that China will once again past the one billion people mark, but going the other direction, by about 2070, and by the end of the 21st century, Macya's population halved to just over 600 million. But we leave such things to future historians. Then, as now, because of its size and population, China, quote, was less easily influenced from abroad, and the reactions to foreign contact were diverse and separated,

rather than uniform and concentrated. China, at the dawn of the 19th century, remained largely self-sufficient, both by luck and design, from foreign trade, which remained confined to the peripheries, conducted under the ritualistic auspices of Imperial Tribute missions, and affecting the lives and economic decisions of the vast majority of the country, not at all. Moreover, its early engagements with the foreign powers poking about its peripheries, Russia, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, etc., yes, but also the Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Southeast Asian peoples that, while less known abroad, had outside's impacts on the empire's foreign policy footing.

The Qing had handled these early entreaties and tribulations from abroad with strength and diplomatic deafness, for the most part, setting it up in a, certainly seeming at the time, strongly defensive position to rebuff further unwanted foreign advances. To the Qing, foreign relations were not diplomacy between equal states. They were ritual. Foreigners did not negotiate with China. They submitted to its mandate. Within the classical synocentric worldview, all under heaven, Tianxia, formed a hierarchy radiating outward from the emperor, the son of heaven, himself.

Those nearest to that central font of civilization were themselves civil. Those furthest away were mere barbarians of decreasing quality the further into darkness they descended. Tribute missions were therefore not expression of trade or mutual recognition. There were acts of deference. In return for ritual submission, the emperor granted gifts that were often worth well more than anything the foreigners had brought. The system was never designed to manage sovereign equals, only concentric layers of deference. to the one true civilized authority. And crucially, it worked.

For centuries, this was the operating logic of East and Inner Asia. No one had ever showed up claiming equality, much less demanding something called rights. Yet still another traditional practice of Chinese foreign policy would serve to undercut this position of strength and render it fatally slow to respond to external aggress. And that was the long-standing tradition in the face of historical barbarian incursions, envelopment, internal resettlement, and cultural assimilation. Quote, the absorption or neutralization of the barbarians in the vastness of China's society and culture, and quote.

For this reason, imperial Confucianism had become, quote, a supernationalistic system which could not easily appreciate the sentiments of nationalists from outside countries. and quote. Beneath that worldview was a bureaucratic machine that structurally prevented any sort of rapid response. The Qing magistrate, the basic unit of imperial governance on the ground, was expected to govern hundreds of thousands of people, often in a region whose local dialect he didn't even speak, without a staff he controlled, and without a budget that he owned. Local clerks and runners, not imperial officials, held all practical local power.

They're the ones who controlled the documents, collected the taxes, and enforced the laws. To survive, a magistrate had to cooperate with, and therefore in time, be inevitably captured by the local gentry. The state was enormous, but hollow at this point of contact. Orders from Beijing arrived slowly, were interpreted creatively, and were executed, or not, depending on whether the local power brokers felt cooperative that month. The system was perfect for maintaining domestic order in a predictable, stable world, but it would prove catastrophic when speed and dexterousness became the currency of imperial survival. When played out across history itself, what this resulted in was, in the early 1800s,

a Chinese society and government both self-absorbed in domestic life and problems, and thus equally incapable of reacting quickly or decisively to foreign incursions. Subsequent interactions and conflict with the foreigners were approached by the Chinese authorities on the terms of their own traditional worldview, rather than with one capable of interfacing and understanding the new rules of the game when it came to powerful and expansionistic nation states. Quote, the Qing dynasty, for example, was not primarily concerned with foreign trade and investment as functions important to the state. The Qing regime was mainly concerned with preserving the agrarian social order

over which it presided, and from which it derived its main sustenance. The barbarians outside the walls were just that, peripheral concerns. It was at first naturally assumed that the Western powers could even be co-opted as distant tributary member states of the greater Chinese imperial polity, where they'd serve, as foreign peoples had done since ages long past, as the empire's effective border guards and tribute givers. This would prove to be a rather infamously flawed assumption. This triad of conditions, unresponsiveness among the ruling class,

comfortable self-sufficiency, and sheer geographical and social size itself, rendered the Qing political orders and Chinese society overall, critically unprepared for a headlong crash into the post-vestphalian Western conceptions of sovereignty and imperialism. Even at the very top, the machinery of decision-making was not what Western states imagined. The structure most Europeans assumed was the Chinese government, the ministries, boards, and formal bureaucracy, was actually the outer court. Real power increasingly lived in the inner court, that is, the Emperor's personal secretariat, headed by the Grand Council.

It alone controlled information flow, memorials, troop deployments, and crisis management plans. The Emperor, and a handful of his confidants, could, and often did, bypass the local official government entirely. From the outside, this looked like incredible efficiency. In reality, it meant that the Empire's ability to respond to crisis depended on the personal stamina, willpower, and attention span of a single human being. When the emperor was capable, the system surged with focus and vivacity. When he faltered, the entire state drifted with him. Qing China had a full and comprehensive playbook for how to deal with neighbors and treat distant states,

and it had worked with very little need of revision for millennia at this point. It was culturally and politically woven into the very fabric. of how China and the Chinese conceived themselves at both a personal and civilizational level. Prior to 1800, there'd been very few signs that such a central wheel of state would even need significant maintenance to keep on spinning for centuries more, much less requiring total replacement right now. Yet, as the century of humiliation would amply and painfully demonstrate, it proved to be fundamentally incapable of handling the road ahead. head. As lamented by the reformer Liang Qi Chao, who we quoted at the beginning of this episode,

he stated in 1896, quote, Now here is a big mansion, which has lasted a thousand years. The tiles and the bricks are decayed, and the beams and rafters are broken. It is still a magnificently big thing, but when the wind and rain suddenly come up, its fall is foredoomed. Yet the people in the house are still happily playing or soundly sleeping. and as indifferent as if they have seen or heard nothing. Even some who have noted the danger know only how to weep bitterly, folding their arms and waiting for death without thinking of any remedy.

Sometimes there are people a little better off who try to repair the cracks, seal up the leaks, and patch up the ant holes, in order to be able to go on living there in peace, even temporarily, in hope that something better may turn up. A nation is also like this. It's a portrait of a civilization not yet fallen or even quite falling, but already condemned. A dream still vivid while the dawn of modernity burns at the windowpane. For the Qing, the winds were already rising, and the storm would not politely wait for them to wake up.

The century to come would strip away not just the dynasty, but the very iconic. idea of what China had been, forcing from its ruins a new vision of what it might yet become. And here, for today at least, we'll let that sleeping mansion lie. This has been, of course, something of a setup episode, a bit heavy on the historiography, but it lays the groundwork for the turbulent decades to come. Next time, we'll forge ahead, looking at the empire as a whole, but from the perspective of its own increasingly remote and out-of-sync capital, Beijing, sat at the end of the 18th century at the arrogant height of its power,

but by mid-century of the 1800s, having shown itself to be a hollow colossus. We'll once again turn to look at the frontiers of Inner Asia, and the ongoing and often compounding struggles the chain wrestled with among its steps and dunes. Such difficulties and the understandings and prejudices they reinforce will help us explain the preeminence of its overland frontiers in the minds and thoughts of far-away courtly officials. coming even to dominate its overall strategic thinking by the turn of the century,

even as newer and far more potent threats loomed out to sea. Until then, as ever, thanks for listening.