Mongols, they engaged in both stock raising and farming, and they were highly Sinicized. Structuring their government on the Ming model, the Manchu emperors ruled China in a Confucian way, as any Han Chinese emperor did. But they outdid the Ming by being more autocratic and conservative. The Manchu constitute only 2 percent of China’s population. To make up for this numerical disadvantage, they employed extreme brutality. In the early stages of their war of conquest, they carried out extended campaigns of slaughter, arson, and rape to any tenacious resistance, leaving cities and countryside desolate. Their slaughter at Yangzhou and Jiading are notorious examples. Large regions of China were left with drastically reduced populations, and the Qing government later had to relocate people from one province to another to reclaim abandoned farmland and repopulate cities.
To break the Chinese people’s sense of national identity, the Manchu conquerors ordered that every Han Chinese man must uniformly adopt the Manchu hairstyle—clean‐shaven front crown and long ponytail braid on the back of the head. The saying was: If you keep your hair, you lose your head. The new rulers of China made a vigorous and sustained effort to exert mind control to force the Chinese into total submission. A major literary project the regime undertook was the compilation of the Complete Collection of the Chinese Classics (1772–1781). Officials throughout the country were ordered to collect and submit to Beijing copies of every book for review and consideration for inclusion in the Collection. The completed Collection contained over 3500 categories in about 80,000 volumes. It took 13 years for over 360 high official‐scholars and more than 3800 scribes to complete the compilation. It was officially extolled as a great project for preserving Chinese cultural heritage, but it turned out to be the opposite. For in the process of collecting and compiling, books amounting to 150,000 copies of 13,600 volumes as well as over 10 million files of archives of the Ming Dynasty were censured and burned. Intended burning, deletion, distortion, and falsification of books and historical documents made the Collection defective. That is why Chinese historians have lamented the compilation of the Complete Collection of the Chinese Classics as an act of destroying Chinese culture.
The Qing regime was notorious for its waves of “literary inquisitions,” that is, witch‐hunts for oblique or fabricated attacks on Manchu rule expressed in the writings of poetry, literature, or history. Victims were routinely imprisoned, exiled, or executed, and their families and relatives often suffered the same punishment through “guilt by association.” Literary inquisitions had a chilling effect on the scholar‐official class and stifled free and creative thinking in a way that affected generation after generation of educated people. However, once the Manchu were firmly in control, they brought Han Chinese into the regime as junior partners to acquire broader support. This might partially explain how a tiny minority could rule over a vast empire for almost three centuries.
When the Qing Dynasty was first established, China was suffering from the aftermath of wars, rebellions, and dynastic change. The people were desperate for a peaceful environment where they could make their livelihood. Three successive emperors of the early Qing Dynasty (Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong) are credited for taking successful steps to revitalize the exhausted population and economy. Some historians see the entire period of their reigns (1661–1796) as a “Golden Age of peace and abundance.” Others refer to this period as the High Qing.
At the time, China had vast amounts of abandoned farmland. It was either land that once belonged to the royal families of the Ming who were now toppled, or that belonged to cultivators who had died in wars and massacres. The early Qing emperors offered rewards of cash and farm animals to peasants who relocated to the abandoned farmland, took up farming, and raised large families. They also encouraged the adoption of new food crops and new farming techniques. Peasants began to grow high‐yield food crops such as corn, potato, and sweet potato, which were recently introduced from South America and could grow in poor soil. In the South, peasants adopted “double cropping,” sowing and reaping rice twice a year on the same piece of land. The government helped by constructing irrigation and flood‐control projects, broadened the tax base by stripping large numbers of government officials and landed gentry of their tax exemption, and loosened the laws that tied peasants to the land. Emperor Yongzheng went as far as to lift the Exclusion Act to allow foreign trade with Southeast Asia.
Qianlong Emperor.
Source: Láng Shìníng.
These measures improved agriculture and contributed to social stability. Back on the land, uprooted peasants were now able to make a living for themselves. Food supply became more plentiful. Tensions between the Han Chinese subjects and their Manchu masters gradually receded into the background. Also, they increased the government’s revenues. This was a period of peace, stability, and economic growth. China’s population more than doubled in the first two centuries of Qing rule, reaching 100 million, and was adequately fed by increased agricultural output. Under Manchu rule, China was the world’s largest, richest, and most populous country as the Qianlong Emperor’s reign neared its conclusion.
Some of the best reform policies were highly effective in early Qing but had negative impacts in late Qing. The population increase turned into a population explosion, and created grim problems. Per capita farmland dropped by half, food grain prices shot up by five times, and per capita food consumption dropped. When natural disasters struck, widespread famine followed, which in turn evoked massive resistance to paying rents and taxes. Starving and desperate peasants began to flee from famine‐stricken areas and raid private and government granaries. Part of them joined secret religious societies, among which the strongest was the White Lotus Society. As a secret folk sect allegedly founded in 1133, it was integrated with other religious sects (one of them rooted in Persia) and continued to grow through the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties. Its leaders claimed to have superhuman powers to communicate with the spiritual world, perform miracles, heal the sick, and forecast the future. It was the most complex, mystical, and rigidly hierarchical religious sect in China’s history. Over the centuries, it had attracted followers struggling at the bottom of society, such as destitute peasants, bankrupted artisans, and even bandits and thieves. When times were bad, it empowered the powerless against the government. When suppressed, it would conversely gain strength. Now it erupted into the White Lotus Society Rebellion (1795–1804). It was one of the largest peasant rebellions during the Qing Dynasty, sweeping across Central China and lasting nearly a decade. The government eventually managed to put it down, but the heavy toll of lives and high cost in fortune left the Qing government exhausted and impoverished.
Ever‐increasing successful candidates in the expanded imperial examination system made the government enlarge the size of its bureaucracy to position them, but only a portion of them could be accommodated. Those left out of the establishment were likely to turn against it as critics or rebel advisors. The handwriting on the wall loomed. Seemingly doomed by the age‐old dynastic cycle, the Qing Dynasty had entered its declining phase. It would be reasonable to expect that the fall of the Qing Dynasty would be followed by the rise of another dynasty. But that didn’t happen, for a powerful alien force was ready to jump into the fray. The new intruders were not the traditional “barbarians” sweeping southward from the boundless steppes, but “ocean barbarians” on ships armed with firearms approaching China’s seashore from out of nowhere. They would prove immune to Sinicization, and they would push Chinese history in entirely new directions.
The arrival of the West, particularly the appearance of the British, created major challenges. London wanted greater access to the China market, which remained limited under the Guangzhou System. When the West first arrived in China, both Europe and China conducted trade on a mercantilist monopoly‐to‐monopoly basis. By the late eighteenth century, Europe’s—particularly Britain’s—economic guidelines began to favor a more laissez‐faire approach. Ultimately that resulted in merchants on both sides who were legally excluded from trade successfully evading the strict monopoly‐to‐monopoly guidelines. Moreover, one of the items of trade—opium—began to drain silver from China to pay for the drug. That made the purchase of silver with copper coins increasingly