The History of China - #314 - Qing 45: The Big Squeeze

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

The Qing Empire did not collapse because it stopped working. It collapsed because it kept working — just barely — under pressures that compounded faster than reform could relieve them... Time Period Covered: ~1790s-1840s CE Major Works Cited: Jones, Susan Mann and Philip A. Kuhn. “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion.” The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10: Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part I Kuhn, Philip A. Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864. Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Are you interested in the parts of history that remain a mystery? Do you want to learn more about the historical myths and misconceptions used to prop up false belief today? I'm Nathaniel Lloyd. In my podcast, Historical Blindness, I delve into all of these topics, sharing puzzling tales from the past, and examining hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and misremembered events that provide insight into modern politics and religion. New episodes every two weeks. Find historical blindness on most podcast players and platforms.

Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 314, The Big Squeeze. It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. Edward Gibbon, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Tacitus Tian Gao Huang Di Yuan

Heaven is high and the emperor is far away Traditional Chinese proverb We concluded last time with our sweeping tour of the Qing Empire's sprawling frontier zones Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, respectively and the many, many problems such a vast overland imperial project had and would continue to wreak on the realm's stability. But Great Ching isn't down just yet, so today, let's go ahead and kick it some more. We move away from the realm of external pressures and border peoples, and back to the welcoming

embrace of the empire's interior, and its beating imperial heart atop the dragon throne in Beijing. Any discussion of the late Qing period and its decay over the course of the 1800s almost must center around the imagery of dynastic decline. Such a term is intentionally broad and loose in its definition, but Susan Mann and Philip Kuhn give it a pretty solid go. Quote, the dynastic decline has traditionally implied a loss of moral and administrative vigor among the bureaucracy, an ebbing of centralized power, and its accretion in the hands of regional satraps, a disruption of the balanced tension between state and society, end quote.

It's what many of us in the West think of when we look at the successively declares. Marble Columns on the six-book spines of Gibbon's vast series, or the feeling of reading King Ozymandius' decree from the Percy Bish Shelley poem. So, too, is it baked in to most Chinese conceptions of Qing decline and eventual collapse, both now and at the time, from contemporaneous decaying mansion metaphors, from 19th century authors like Liang Ti-Cao, and even much earlier, such as throughout the 18th century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, whose portrait of the crumbling Jia clan has long been read as an allegory of chain decline.

But that worldview itself stems back further still, arguably all the way to two of the earliest and most central concepts of the Chinese imperial self-understanding, that of the mandate of heaven and the dynastic cycle. Not to belabor this point too terribly much, but just as a quick refresher, the mandate holds that a dynasty shall endure only through its continual devotion to good governance and the accompanying favor of the divine, which can be stripped away if their moral authority is corrupted. The dynastic cycle further explains that it is expected and normal for this to periodically occur, as human history, like the Tao or the Wheel of Samsara,

is circular and repeating. Only impermanence is permanent. Within either framework, we can construct a satisfactory explanation of the decline and fall of the Qing Empire within the context of that broader model of decline. But there is more to it than that. Or in the words of Arbiter Thel Vadam of the Covenant, as of 2553, were it so easy? Quote, some of the elements of long-term social and political change that link the late Qing to the broad trends of China's modern history can be understood more easily in the context of the social and political worlds in which bureaucrats had to live than the moral categories which adhere to the familiar decline model. Certainly, there was rampant corruption throughout the bureaucracy,

yet the early 19th century also witnessed a surge of concern for institutional reform and national defense among some of China's leading scholars and administrators, end quote. Great Qing certainly receives, and in many cases, deserves its fair share of Knox from the judgments of history, both internal to and outside of China. It's something of a time-honored and standing tradition in Chinese histories to pretty much uniformly finger-wag the last and inevitably failed regime. And as we've already been exploring aspects of, the Manchu regime certainly made more than its fair share of unforced errors over the course of its tenure.

Yet, for all that, neither is it fair to dump it into the box of corrupt failed government collapses because it's bad at its job. Maybe one of the least appreciated but most consequential features of chain governance was that it didn't just collapse outright. Rather, it heroically succeeded in keeping that crumbling mansion standing, if only just, in spite of just about every possible factor turning against it all at once. As we'll look at more of today, climate, geography, geopolitics, industrial scale, population and demographics, apocalyptic, religious, revolts and uprisings, foreign invasions, rampant drug addiction, bureaucratic calcification, economic insecurity, and ever-spirling maintenance costs, all that, and so much more, conspired together over the course of the 19th century to convulse Qing China time and again

with crisis after crisis that surely would have destroyed most other nations of the era, or even today, not to mention most other Chinese dynasties across time. Yet for nearly a century, it managed to cling on and hold itself up, until at last it could no longer, in the face of yet another popular rebellion, the Sheenhai Revolution of 1911. We are, in fact, now perfectly situated in time and place to delve further into this topic, since we must necessarily begin in the aftermath of our own Jocching Emperor's early rain crisis and his very limited success in precipitating basic reform. forms. As you will surely recall, once Jha Ching had been taken out of his father's I'm retired but not really purgatory following the Qianlong Emperor's death in 1799, his most immediate and pressing task had been to scour his administration of the most corrupt official in Chinese history, Hachun, and everything and every one that his long trail of slime had coded.

Yet even after the minister was dispatched and his confederates removed from office, quote, there remained the problem of what to do with the vast network of patronage built and nurtured by Hushan's faction, whose influence permeated the bureaucracy in the provinces, particularly the military administration. There were, to put it quite simply, far too many of them across the whole of the empire, to even consider affecting a sweeping purge of them all. Instead, the Jocching Emperor seemed to accept the political necessity of deciding that most of those caught up in Hushan's web were more or less honest dupes, who'd been beguiled

or coerced into assisting his corrupt endeavors, and ought to be redeemed. After all, summarily getting rid of everyone caught bribing others would only result in near-total governmental paralysis, as well as nullifying his efforts to re-establish communication between officials and the throne. Jha Qing was, as with so much else over the course of his earnest but very frustrated reign, bound by the choices that his father made, even now in death, and could only really try to stem the damage as best he could. In the case of Hachan and his corrupt network, even the Son of Heaven could only address the boil at the surface and was unable to treat the underlying condition. It would thus be left to fester. Even a well-intentioned emperor

simply could not uproot the patronage system that was woven into every artery of provincial governance. But institutional rot was only one factor in a tail is sweeping as Qing decline. Social factors also contributed greatly to pressures on the system overall, and few as obvious or central as China's rapid population growth during this period. Man writes, quote, the long period of internal peace that began in the late 17th century and lasted until the White Lotus uprising in the late 18th century saw China's population more than double, from around 150 million to over 300 million. The period from 1779 to 1850 alone brought a 56% increase

with the population in the neighborhood of 430 million, end quote. Drowen into modern terms, that's going from being Russia to the entire EU, or the U.S., Canada, and Australia put together if you're not feeling continental. Point being, it was going to result in some pretty big structural. changes no matter what. Commerce, the lifeblood of any society, began its own process of early transformation toward modernity, forced to adapt and accommodate the tremendous increase in both local and regional trade. Along the coasts, north-south shipping flourished, while inland, numerous market networks began to spring up. In cities, merchant guilds rapidly expanded, and with them

access to things like credit institutions, such as the first native banks called Qianzwang, and especially in northern China, the proliferation of the Piao or the Shanzhi banks, which offered a full range of banking services to their clients. But as we're well aware, internal market demand was far from the only economic consideration. Just beyond the Celestial Empire's borders, foreign nations also clamored for their own access to Chinese goods and market. Quote, the demand for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain in European markets was a further spur to the commercialization of the domestic economy, end quote. But increasing commercialization meant, as always, increased wealth stratification, especially by geography.

While commercialization brought prosperity and affluence to the cities and towns of the populist plains and east coast, areas unconnected to the major arteries of trade and communication remained poor and depressed. And even the impoverished regions faced a veritable tide of new residents, overwhelmingly themselves, landless, poor migrants, on the hunt for some new opportunity, having in many cases simply run out of space in their home regions to make a livelihood for themselves.

Up to this point, China's food production had been mostly able to keep up with its burgeoning population. This had been largely thanks to the gifts of the new world, in the form of being able to massively expand the realm's cultivatable land by planting crops like sweet potatoes, corn, and peanuts, in what would have before been considered wastelands. This had the dual benefit of not only being able to feed more people, but to employ more of them in this increased production. More people meant more manpower for the labor-intensive process of double-cropped patty rice culture, as well as more fertilizer in the form of nightsoil.

It was a mutually beneficial feedback loop, if rather unpleasant-smelling, over much of the Ming and early Qing eras. But this kind of labor, agriculture, mutual growth was inevitably going to hit a point of diminishing returns. Eventually, adding another field hand to the farm is just not going to be worth the cost. Eventually, the land available to increase production will all get irrigated and cultivated. and that loop would begin to reach its breaking point by the end of the 18th century. This is the point where modern scholars sometimes invoke what's called the high-level equilibrium trap, the idea that Qing China had become so good at the old labor-intensive way of doing things, that it had very little incentive to mechanize or

restructure. Not dissimilar, in fact, from the question that comes up in just about every high school world history class, why did the Romans keep using so much slave labor when they could have mechanized and probably gotten better results? It's neither ignorance nor laziness. It's the system crystallizing around the patterns of its own prior successes, until the cost of altering those patterns becomes prohibitively high. As with inertia itself, a civilization in motion will stay in motion along that trajectory, right up until it crashes into something. This was no mere problem on paper.

You could see it directly in the land. By the late 18th century, even the empire's great safety valves, once considered so vast as to be effectively infinite, were beginning to run out of room. Sichuan, the big resettlement basin that had swallowed waves after waves of migrants for generations, was by this point packed to the gills. Even the border mountains around it had begun filling with people fleeing poor, harvests from neighboring provinces. In the south, the valleys of Guangxi saw Haka migrants competing fiercely for farmland.

In western Hunan, new arrivals clashed with Miao communities as the frontier tightened. And in the lower Yangze, the very heart of the empire's economy, the overcrowding was growing desperate indeed. What looked like stability from afar was, right up close, a demographic engine with far too much pressure and far too few events. Across the provinces, this overpressuring was cumulative and impossible to ignore. Regions that had once been underpopulated, again places like Sichuan Guangxi and the Hunan Highlands, were now crowded to the point of volatility. Migration no longer relieved stress, instead it just moved it slightly elsewhere. And whenever new settlers

arrived, they pushed into someone else's already established world. Through all this, the Qing state still projected an image of control, but the local reality was harsher. Competition for land turned violent. Frontier peoples were forced into revolt, and famine migrants spilled into places that simply couldn't support them. This is not to say the system had failed, not yet, but it was losing any semblance of elasticity to changing circumstances. And as more people slipped off the bottom of the agrarian world, they didn't just vanish, but instead resurfaced in the gray margins beneath the officialdom. Landless men hired themselves out as government laborers, yaman runners, muscle for local gentry,

or as mercenary militiamen who answered to whoever last paid them. It was a quiet hollowing out of the established bureaucracy, a slow seepage of authority away from centralized imperial control systems, and back to a much more localized web of patrons, fixers, and private retainers. Even a well-intentioned emperor couldn't uproot a system so thoroughly woven into the very fabric of provincial life. If the long-term effects of Qing China's demographic ballooning were ruinous on the ordinary people, its corrosive impact on the political system was equally grave. More than at any time before, political life in the late Qing had hardened into a desperate zero-sum competition

for a stagnant number of appointments and promotions. officeholders clung to their positions with white-knuckle intensity, and as the pressure continued to rise, it's little wonder that extra-legal, and at times outright violent methods, crept into the system. Man puts it bluntly, quote, China was already experiencing the classic symptoms sometimes associated with underdeveloped societies in the present age, an overproduction of literate men in relation to the capacity of the economic and political systems to absorb and reward them. end quote. And that's a pretty high-level summation, so let's take a look at what that meant

on the ground. By 1800, China had nearly 2,000 years of practice molding its governing class into the idealized scholar-gentry official. The educational system existed primarily to produce literati candidates for office. Alternative career paths were few and mostly undesirable. The system had always been a high-pressure meritocracy, one in which the many failed aspirants would simply try again next time. When the mechanism functioned normally, this competition separated the wheat from the chaff while theoretically keeping corruption in check. When the weather cools down, Golden Nugget Online Casino turns up the heat. This winner, make any moment golden and play thousands of games like her new slot wolf it up and all the fan favorite

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Physically present in Ontario. Eligibility restrictions apply. See Golden Nuggettcasino.com for details. Please play responsibly. But by the 19th century, normal, was no longer possible. Because the central government could not expand proportionally to match the empire's massive population growth, the exam and appointment structure seized up under its own weight. Although a few local Jinxia, or metropolitan degree quotas, were raised,

overall quotas for Jinxia and the lower provincial degrees fell relative to the size of the population. Worse yet, Jincha quotas were actually reduced during the Long-Tianlong reign and then legally fixed in place there. And even the previously unlimited pool of low-level student candidates came under heavy restrictions. A career ladder that had once been narrow shrank down to a pinhole. And in any system where demand so vastly outstripped supply, corruption inevitably propagated. Magistrates readily accepted lavish bribes from families willing to pay top dollar to keep their sons on the examination rolls. The direct sale of Imperial Academy studentships and even of formal offices themselves became

so commonplace that it was simply treated as a normal form of government revenue. From the perspective of the officials involved, it was a purely economic decision. It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business. When these practices failed to ease the pressure, and may even have intensified it, the spillover flooded into new channels. Foremost among these was the proliferation of what are called supernumerary positions, which are posts for personnel that the government did not need, but now tolerated as a political release valve. These are nothing new. We've discussed them before, but it has been a while, so to quickly recap, these weren't part of the formal administrative hierarchy. They were the attaches, clerks,

retainers, runners, secretaries, family hangers on, and paid underlings who cluttered government offices doing work that maybe needed doing, but certainly not by that many people. Think of them as a bureaucratic make-work program. Peter Gibbons seven bosses at Inotech fretting over his TPS cover reports. Quote, The spectrum of clerks and runners who carried on the menial tasks of record-keeping, errand-running, tax-urging, and local enforcement became swollen with profit-seekers, many of whom were literate, but to whom legitimate channels of mobility were closed.

End quote. One provincial judge notably complained in 1800 that his offices were choked with needless clerks, each trailed by multiple deputies, and each deputy with deputies of his own. As opportunities tightened, an entire shadow stratum of quote-unquote expectant officials emerged. Men who'd passed the exams, sometimes multiple tiers of them, but for whom no office actually existed. The Pax Sinica of the long 18th century had pulled ever more educated men into the system, but the system itself had not grown along with them. Lower degrees could still be purchased when money was short and the state needed revenue, but the real prizes, the provincial

and metropolitan degrees, were frozen behind rigid quotas. The inevitable result was a swelling pool of credentialed men stuck at the bottom rungs and with nowhere to climb. Most had little choice but to wait, year after year, for vacancies that would never come. Others sought alternative careers outside the bureaucracy. Careers that were legal, semi-legal, or definitely not legal, but maybe nominally tolerated. Some became tax farmers, acting as middlemen who transmitted commoners' taxes for a commission. This was officially banned, but when has that ever stopped anyone? In practice, it was everywhere, and everyone knew about it.

Others became what are called pettifoggers, litigation specialists who haunted County Yaman, drafting petitions, coaching plaintiffs, and smoothing cases through the machinery of justice, with a mix of expertise and personal connections, a really early form of attorney or legal counsel. Officials despised them, of course, as meddlers and parasites, not dissimilar to what many today think of lawyers. But in reality, they performed functions. that the system needed done. A well-connected tax farmer could shield his clients

from the worst abuses of Yaman underlings, while a skilled litigation fixer could make a hopeless case legible to a magistrate. And hanging over all this was an even deeper structural irony. By design, no magistrate in the Qing Empire

was ever allowed to serve in his own home region, and most were frequently rotated. No matter how common, competent, he could never fully master the local administrative details, and if he ever got close, he'd be moving away soon. That meant that the one group he could not escape, the clerks and runners who embodied the institutional memory of the Yaman, was also the group that he feared and despised the most. Officials railed constantly against their corruption, their manipulation, and the commercialized grip they had on all aspects of local governance. not too terribly far off, in any regard, from many contemporary charges leveled at the so-called

deep state. Yet, they remained indispensable for the system to work at all. A magistrate simply could not function without them, no matter how much he hated them, and he knew it. And social forces only deepened the problems. Government posts, real or invented, became the host organism for a swelling occupational group, educated but under-employed men hungry for income, influence, and of course, status. Their presence blurred the distinctions that had once separated the respectable gentry from the bureaucratic rabble. A censor even lamented as of 1803 that the clerks and hangers-on now dressed so lavishly that there was, quote, no longer any way to distinguish persons of high or low status, end quote. This institutional

riptide of clerk bros were well supported in their endeavors, of course, but how? Personal and family fortunes were often not enough in and of themselves, and so an entire industry sprang up under and around this burgeoning class of image-obsessed try-hards, obtaining them funding via patronage networks, which was extracted from bureaucratic personnel, and ultimately from the taxpayers by extortionate methods referred to colloquially as the squeeze. During the long 18th century, the Qing state also reshaped the educational landscape itself. Now, back in the Ming period, most schooling had been private. But by the Qing, especially under Yong Zheng and Qianlong, it had built a network of state-sponsored provincial academies.

On paper, these were meant to raise standards and, quote, eliminate fickle argumentation, end quote, as Yong Zheng put it. In practice, they pulled more people than ever into the exam. system. The court's intense interest in scholarship, combined with the chilling effect of the literary inquisition, pushed these academies toward a narrow focus on examination composition. By the early 19th century, many had become, in essence, technical schools for writing the perfect eight-legged essay. In other words, they'd become academies built to teach to the test, and little more. Educational opportunities expanded and were standardized, and scholars increasingly traveled

between regions to study, which broadened their horizons and their ambitions. But the fundamental bottleneck didn't budge. Provincial and metropolitan degrees remained frozen behind the quotas that had been set by this point generations before. In the most populous southern provinces where educational culture was strongest, social mobility rates actually declined. The legitimate path to success, education, then examination, then office, became both seemingly more accessible and yet practically less so, and thus all the more disappointing for failed aspirants. Such pressures made the alternative routes seem all the more attractive. If the official ladder was jammed, one could purchase a lesser degree, cultivate a patron,

or slip into the semi-legal managerial world on the margins of the bureaucracy. And for those within the system, the scarcity of opportunity amplified the role of recommendation, guarantees, and personal ties. When the formal channels clogged, the informal ones carried more and more of the traffic. Patronage networks, rooted in kinship, native place, and student-teacher ties, became the machinery that kept careers moving or could stop them cold. The grain tribute system, the massive logistical artery that delivered southern rice to Beijing and the rest of the north, offers another window into the state's deepening dysfunction. On paper, it was one of the three great superintendencies, parallel to the government's salt monopoly and the Yellow River Conservancy.

Practically, by the early 19th century, it had become a swollen, corrupt bureaucracy layered atop the regular provincial government. Its workforce had originally been built around hereditary canal families, the so-called Chiding, which had been settled along the Grand Canal since the Ming. But as the population continued to grow, many of these hereditary workers lost access to the land that was supposed to sustain them. Into this gap flooded thousands of hired boat hands, called Shui Shao, whose numbers tripled by the time of the Jia Qing era. Every stage of transport from local collection to final delivery,

developed its own sets of fees, opportunities for graft, and its own minor armies of middlemen. By the 1800s, a single grain junk that in the early Qianlong period had cost maybe 150 tails to move, required by the end of his period of rule as much as five times that amount. As expenses rose, local gentry bargained for exemptions, pushing the burden down onto the poorest households. grain quotas were increasingly met not with local tax grain, but with rice purchased from private merchants, a creeping commercialization of a system that was supposed to be a straightforward state tax. The real political weight, however, lay in the system's patronage networks.

Hundreds of expectant officials, again those degree holders waiting for posts, clustered into the canal towns as grain deputies, minor positions handed out by the Director General of Transport, often as personal favors. The entire system had become a web of interests, reaching from the canal locks all the way up to the court granaries in Beijing itself. And underneath it all, to top it off, the canal itself was choking. Years of neglect in the Yellow River Conservancy, combined with the river's rising bed and massive silt load,

created sandbars, floods, and repeatedly stalled grain fleet shipments. When the whole system itself began to seize up as of 1803, reform-minded provincial officials called for shifting those shipments to the coast, a sea route that private merchants had used successfully by this point for decades. But those who profited from the canal fought fiercely to preserve their status quo, warning the emperor that abandoning the inland route would violate ancestral precedent and throw hundreds of thousands of canal workers into financial ruin. That political tug of war between a failing system and the vested interests determined to keep it,

became one of the clearest's early signs that the Qing state's administrative apparatus was no longer flexible enough to reform itself. If the patronage system hollowed out the Qing bureaucracy, its effects were felt most brutally in the empire's finances. By the early 1800s, officials at every level were running deficits, not because the taxpayers weren't paying, but because much of the money was being skimmed off by the magistrates, clerk, and their entourages that each officeholder was expected to maintain.

As one censor dryly observed, quote, the larger the shortage, the better the treatment, and quote. A big deficit signaled not failure, but powerful friends. After Hushan's downfall, the court tried to restore discipline by forcing officials to repay those deficits, even those that they might have inherited from their own predecessors, with predictable results. With every magistrate suddenly scrambling to fill the hole in his account, the burden simply

cascaded down the ladder and onto, who else, the poor taxpayers. Provincial governors docked their subordinates already meager incorruptibility allowances, and magistrates responded by squeezing more customary fees out of the peasantry. Even the Daugong Emperor's early attempt to freeze these miscellaneous surcharges was smothered by bureaucratic pressure. Local officials insisted that they could not function without wringing these extractions from the people. Structurally, the Cheng tax system practically invited this kind of exploitation.

The basic quotas had been permanently fixed back in the early 18th century, but the surtaxes that covered local expenses were elastic, informal, and infinitely expandable. In a monetized society where grain and labor obligations had long since been commuted into direct silver payments, the officials who received the taxes controlled the exchange rates and therefore controlled how much people really had to pay. A county might submit the correct amount of silver on paper while forcing his farmers to deliver two or even three times that official amount in grain equivalent. The peasantry endured it in part because the long 18th century had brought sustained inflation in grain prices, up to almost 300%.

that inflation, driven by expanding commerce and the inflow of foreign silver, gave rural producers enough margin to absorb the bureaucracies' ever-increasing appetite. It also, ironically, helped fuel the wholesale corruption of the Hushan era. When prices rise, after all, graft is easier to hide. But post-1800, the winds shifted. Grain prices leveled off, and then began to reverse sharply. Silver began draining out of the country through the opium trade, and its value relative to copper shot upward. Since peasants paid taxes in copper cash or grain, but officials remitted their quotas in silver, the real tax burden doubled or even worse.

Small landowners, already pressed by fees, surcharges, and forced purchase schemes, collapsed into ruin. By the 1830s and 40s, the situation in the Lower Yangza was catastrophic. provincial officials frequently falsified reports of floods and droughts simply to secure emergency tax remissions from Beijing. It was easier to lie about a disaster than to request a lawful reduction in tax quota. Whether these remissions ever actually reached the actual taxed population is unclear. Tenancy rates were high, and landlords often pocketed the benefits themselves. As conditions deteriorated, a wave of tax-resistance movements swept the center and lower-yungsavallies. Their leaders were often drawn from the lower literati, those very same

men with degrees but no offices, who'd long made their living as those tax farmers, intermediaries, and legal fixers. In the fiscal chaos of the 1840s, their ambiguous position was suddenly made to look pretty good, even almost heroic. They became the brokers and buffers between the desperate villagers and the predatory magistrates. They organized petitions, litigated, blocked tax collectors, and in some cases led angry mobs that seized county seats. We shouldn't be confused here. Their motives were not revolutionary. These men were creatures of the state they'd pushed against, and their outlook never escaped that framing. But their actions further eroded local authority.

emboldened popular defiance, and helped carve the channels through which the Taiping movement would soon surge. In the very regions where tax resistance burned the hottest, the Taiping's would later find their largest pool of recruits, and that was no accident at all. So, that's the picture. A state that wasn't stupid, were blind or even uniquely corrupt, just increasingly constrained and under pressure. Constrained by success. population growth, geography, and its own institutional operating system, as well as by the fact that every workaround layered onto the system made the next workaround even more necessary.

This is the big squeeze. Not a dramatic collapse or a palace coup, no mustache-twirling villain in Beijing, not this time, just pressure. Pressure on people, on institutions, on the very idea of what a late imperial megastate could realistically do. In both this episode and the ones leading up to it,

we've been seeing how the Ching and system has been trying to accommodate this vast change. But by now, the regulator is overheating and the pipes are groaning. Next time, we'll get to see what happens when they really start to burst. Until then, as ever. Thanks for listening.

As a long time foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots of places, but nowhere is important to the world as China. I'm Jane Perlase, former Beijing Bureau Chief for the New York Times. In our third season of face-off, the U.S. versus China, we'll explore some of the biggest issues dividing these global powers today. Trump and Xi Jinping, AI, China's growing military might, and also robots. New episodes of face-off are available now. Wherever you get your podcasts.