WORLD HISTORY: 1750–1914 The Late Qing Empire in Global History BY PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY The Tongzhi Emperor The Empress Dowager Xiaoqin (Cixi) The Guangxu Emperor The Xuantong Emperor, Puyi Nineteenth Century Qing Dynasty silver dollars, and background image of a bridge leading to the Summer Palace. Image source: http://www.drben.net/ChinaReport/Sources/History/Qing/Descendancy_Summary_Qing_Dynasty_1644-1911AD.html. The role of the Chinese empires in global history at the height of their economic power (roughly 1400–1800) has been well described in powerful books by Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Bin Wong. In that period, China’s advanced technology and commercial economy, as well as access to their markets over sea and land, created a market that drove techno- logical development, efficiency in industrial organization, and an increasing volume of long-distance trade. The effects were felt first in East Asia and Southeast Asia, but eventually powered the devel- opment of travel, trade, and finance throughout the Indian Ocean, and finally drew Europeans, eager to connect with the center of wealth, out of their continent and into the oceans. After roughly 1800, however, various factors caused China to lose its global economic leadership as it experienced social turmoil, economic fracturing, and the imposition of European imperialism. Global historians some- times lose sight of the China thread between this threshold of 1800 and the appearance of modern China as an ascendant power in the late twentieth century, but there are many reasons why we should continue to see important trends and their effects reflected in the modern Chinese experience. 4 EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 13, Number 2 Fall 2008 WORLD HISTORY: 1750–1914 environMental deCay famine were acknowledged by regional governors During the eighteenth century, China’s popu- as major and persisting problems. Refugees lation growth accurately reflected the doubling from collapsed local ecologies joined refugees of global population, rising from about 150 mil- from the war, bloating the populations of coastal lion to a little over 300 million. Intense popu- and riverine cities, deserting some of the formerly lation pressures in southeast China gave rise not most productive land, and contributing to the so- only to increased emigration to Taiwan and cial disorders that afflicted the late Qing. Southeast Asia, but also to a much more mas- China’s experiences of the late nineteenth sive internal migration to provinces such as century provide a model for understanding the Sichuan and Shaanxi. Population growth and the causes and effects of environmental decay in redistribution of intense population complex- many parts of the world in the twentieth and es further up the Yellow River and the Yangzi twenty-first centuries. Despite a high degree of caused demand for timber to soar. By the end specialized knowledge and a history of effective of the eighteenth century, China’s deforestation management, decades of neglected environ- was nearly complete. For some decades in the mental stewardship, combined with short-term early nineteenth century, the internal areas challenges such as climate change and war, were not only able to absorb immigrants, but in pushed some regions of China into crisis. Today, fact experienced an agricultural boom, due in management of the Yellow River remains a crit- part to more widespread use of new crops ical issue in China’s environmental management such as corn (maize) and sweet potatoes, made program, as climate change is again evident. As available by trade with empires that had acquired China is now a bellwether of likely global envi- the crops in Africa and in the Americas. By the ronmental problems, so it was in the late Qing 1850s, however, the new crops had only ex- when history gives us clues to the origins of en- hausted the soil of the few nutrients that the tra- vironmental patterns of the twentieth century. The Yellow River. ditional crops had left behind, or, in the case of China on the Frontier Image source: The Damn Interesting Web site at corn, depleted the soil to a far greater depth than oF Modern WarFare http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=436. rice, barley, or sorghum could. As fields failed China ’s enormous civil war of the nineteenth and were abandoned, they added to the erosion century is insufficiently appreciated as a theater problem that had already been aggravated by de- of modern warfare, as critical as the Crimean The emperors of the early forestation. War (1853-56), the Indian Rebellion of 1857, or In 1855, the Yellow River changed course. the American Civil War. The Taiping War nineteenth century were This was not the first time it had done so, but the (1850-1864) was the bloodiest conflict anywhere sixth (the seventh would come in 1938). Man- in the world before the twentieth century, and aware of the acute need to agement of the Yellow River had been a preoc- is still among the most destructive wars in cupation of governments based in China for history. Fatalities are estimated at 25 million maintain water works . thousands of years, since without periodic to 40 million, out of a total population of dredging, and in some cases embankment, the roughly 340 million c.1860. The casualties were But, declining river becomes quickly silted by the light, sandy overwhelmingly civilian; most encounters con- soil of northern China. The emperors of the sisted of months of siege warfare, with each finances and major early nineteenth century were aware of the side—whether locked up in a fortified city or acute need to maintain water works, whether in camping outside the walls—using starvation as political distractions . the case of the Yellow River or of the Grand a weapon against each other. Canal. The Imperial government had a long his- The longest continuous siege was against kept the Qing court tory of exact knowledge and practice of river the city of Nanjing, where the Taipings had not management, including the damming of tribu- only created a base, but also a government and from immediately taries and release of the water to scour silt from bureaucracy for themselves. Between 1854 and the Yellow River’s bottom.1 But, declining finances 1864, it stood as a state surrounded by the Qing dealing with and major political distractions, not least the Taip- Empire. The professed Christianity of the Taip- ing War, as well as constant pressure from for- ings aroused the interest of governments in Eu- river issues. eign governments for political and trade con- rope and the United States for a time, and they cessions, kept the Qing court from immediate- considered the possibility of recognizing the new ly dealing with river issues. The Yellow River government. But disillusionment with Taiping course change in 1855 was only emblematic of beliefs and behavior, as well as a cold realization the environmental problems in North China par- that the growing foreign investment in the ticularly, as temperatures dropped in mid-cen- Qing Empire as a unified entity was substantial, tury and aridity rose. By the 1870s, drought and eventually led the interested foreign powers to WORLD HISTORY: 1750–1914 Of the early modern land training and outfitting of technologically and is now the Russian Maritime Province. In 1871, strategically advanced military units. In ensu- Russia seized part of Qing territory in East ing decades, the growth of provincial and re- Turkestan (later Xinjiang province). Tibet was empires that dissolved gional armies became an element in the de- invaded by Britain in 1904. After a short-lived struction of the Qing Empire, and in the shap- treaty between Britain and Tibet in 1906, and the within this time window, ing of the post-imperial political system. payment of an indemnity by the Qing to Britain, eMpire and nationalisM international consensus subsequently forbade the The Qing Empire was one of the great land- signing of treaties with Tibet directly. Never- it appears that only the based empires of the early-modern period. theless, Britain continued to support Tibetan na- With the exception of the Mugal Empire, which tionalists, resulting in the effective independence Qing Empire persisted ended in 1858, the remaining empires— of Tibet from about 1905, and, secondarily, the Ottoman, Russian, and that of Austria-Hun- British introduction of boundaries and agree- gary—all dissolved between 1912 and 1924. The ments that still wreak havoc in relations between as a national entity. Qing was the first to fall, and its patterns of na- the People’s Republic of China and India. Tibet tionalism and revolution tell us something was not formally a part of a centralized Chinese about the phenomenon of the fall of the empires government again until 1951. In the case of Mon- in general. As in the case of the other empires, golia, the regional Buddhist leader established the Qing was beset by a nineteenth century by the Qing declared independence in July 1911, struggle between “modernizers” (or “Western- establishing a theocratic state that survived izers”) and traditionalists. Nationalism emerged until it became the Mongolian People’s Repub- in China as it did in Russia and Turkey, from the lic in 1921. This took a very large swathe of Qing send troops and mercenaries of their own to aid modernizing party, who argued that the impe- Inner Asia—the area once known as Outer Mon- the empire in suppression of the Taipings. By rial form was obsolete, obstructing the “national” golia and now the Republic of Mongolia—out 1860, substantial British and French forces sensibilities of the majority population. The con- of Chinese control forever. were on scene, and other European, as well as cept of national characteristics, however, was Nevertheless, the greater part of Qing Im- American, advisors were on the way.