The Ch'ing Dynasty was the period between the Manchu
conquest that
established the dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century and the
cataclysms that broke its power in the mid- nineteenth. The barbarian
origin of the Manchu conquerors of China was always to some degree a -
lem, but particularly so at the beginning and the end of their rule:
the dynasty was hated as alien by the Ming loyalists who resisted its
advent, just as it was to be by the nationalists who finally overthrew
it in the early twentieth century. In the face of such hostility, the
Manchus took the remarkable step of obliging all adult male Chinese to
manifest their allegiance to the new dynasty by adopting the
distinctive Manchu hairstyle, the shaved pate and the pigtail or queue;
as the Chinese put it, the choice was to "keep your hair and lose your
head, or lose your hair and keep your head," and they acted
accordingly. But seen from the other side of the street the Manchu
problem looked very different: it was not that the Manchus were too
foreign, rather that they soon became too Chinese. One Ch'ing emperor
of the eighteenth century felt it necessary to make Manchus take
examinations in the Manchu language, a clear sign of how far the rot
had already spread—real barbarians do not take examinations, least of
all to test their knowledge of their own language. Perhaps the only
people who were thoroughly comfortable with the Manchu role in China
were the Koreans; now that China was languishing under barbarian rule,
they could flatter themselves that they had become the last repository
of true Chinese culture. This did not mean that they were so imprudent
as to refuse to recognize the overlordship of the Ch'ing; they duly
sent their tribute missions to Peking, but might use the occasion to
complain about derogatory references to Korea in Chinese history books.
Whatever the Koreans thought, the Chinese society over
which the Ch'ing
held sway was in many ways a thriving one. The Chinese population was
growing substantially, and the economy grew with it, approaching an
unprecedented size and complexity in all its major
sectors—agricultural, industrial, and commercial. These trends were not
new, but they reached their consummation under the Ch'ing. Thus by the
end of the eighteenth century, Chinese society represented a larger
accumulation of people and wealth than at any time in antiquity. This
was true for the country as a whole and even more so for the region of
the Yangtze delta; in economic and social terms this part of the
country had become its unchallenged center of gravity, despite the fact
that the political capital was located far to the north in Peking. Yet,
despite this growth, Chinese society had not changed in its fundamental
character. It continued to be dominated by a landed elite, and the
crucial interfaces were between the gentry and the peasantry, on the
one hand, and between the gentry and the state, on the other. Though
the economic expansion meant the existence of a substantial commercial
bourgeoisie, its power was not commensurate with its wealth.
The picture was similar with regard to culture: there
was more of it,
and it was more sophisticated than ever, above all in the Yangtze delta
region. For example, more studies of local history were written and
printed than ever before; there were more noes to read in colloquial
Chinese, more theaters played to the public, and so on. The prevalent
intellectual trends remained broadly Neo-Confucian, in the tradition of
the philosopher Chu Hsi (or Zhu Xi, d. 1200), but this did not mean an
absence of significant innovations and commotions. The sixteenth
century saw the birth of a new classicism that denounced the prose
style of the Sung period and sought to return to ancient models; in
later centuries this movement was rather forgotten in China, but it was
to have a considerable impact in eighteenth-century Japan. A more
lasting development was the emergence of a school of exact textual
scholarship of a kind that had not previously existed in China. It was
a seventeenth- century philologist who established that almost half of
a revered Chinese classic, the Book of Documents, was a later forgery.
One eighteenth-century scholar in this tradition strayed into
philosophy, where he rejected the Neo-Confucian synthesis altogether;
but he was an isolated figure. Moreover, the relaxed, if superficial,
openness to European learning that had developed with the arrival of
the Jesuits in the late Ming period was now less in evidence. It did,
however, have a curious repercussion among the Chinese Muslims: they
learned from the Jesuits how to defend a monotheist religion against
the charge of being incompatible with Confucianism. A seventeenth-
century Muslim scholar in Yunnan in the far southwest wrote a book in
this vein; he even made a journey to Peking in an effort to obtain for
the descendants of the Muslim prophet the same prestigious status that
had traditionally been accorded to those of Confucius. He failed:
imperial China tolerated diversity, but had better things to do than to
celebrate it.
All in all, China under the Ch'ing dynasty is an instructive
phenomenon
in the history of Eurasia. It shows how far a traditional agrarian
civilization could go without becoming something else.
