Modern China

Exploration pack 2 (for both Wednesday and Friday)

This week I focused on both the experience of Chinese laborers at the European front during World War 1, and on the Revolutionary movements in China following the collapse of the Qing dynasty. In particular I was struck by the unique experience that many Chinese laborers had in France, the odd combinations of political and economic systems propose by Sun Yatsen, and the bizarre but highly entertaining Diary of a Madman.

Chinese laborers on the European front were underpaid, underfed, and experienced varying forms of racism from the European soldiers. However, their experiences were widely varied depending on which army they were interacting with. For example, the British tended to infantilize the Chinese and look on them as children, while at the same time often praising them for their hard work and cleanliness (which, as was remarked by several officers, was far superior to the British). The French were similarly racist, although there were more positive interactions, particularly between Chinese laborers and French women, of which there were several unions after the conclusion of the war. Things were far more violent among other nations, with the Australians and Canadians often attacking the Chinese camps and leading to riots and fights between them.

For their part, the Chinese laborers were racist to the African laborers on the front, and had particularly violent disputes with the Moroccan laborers, whom they called “black devils.” On the whole, the experience seemed to be a microcosm of Imperialism: bringing many different peoples with wildly different beliefs that had previously no knowledge of each other and forcing them to work together. Although there were some positive interactions, i.e. the marriages between French women and Chinese men, the front was characterized by racism, racial and national tension, and exploitation.

When looking at the writings of Sun Yatsen, I was struck by his attempt to join Western ideology with Chinese ideology. In particular, he proposed a five branch system of democracy: executive, legislative, judicial, civil service, and censorate, which he claimed would be the “most perfect” system as it combined the best aspects of both Western and Chinese politics. He also advocated for nationalism as a way to unite the 400 million odd Han Chinese, claiming that their splintered nature was what had led to both their defeat at the hands of the Manchu and their continued domination by foreign powers. Diary of a Madman, one of the first modern pieces of Chinese literature, reflects the Revolutionary ideas of the time through the lens of a schizophrenic’s diary, using “cannibalism” as a metaphor for a Chinese culture and political system that has existed for thousands of years. It is as entertaining as it is strange, but it also speaks to a wider movement of Chinese people questioning the old order and attempting to reform and revolutionize their country.

Works Consulted:

Lu Xun, “Diary of a madman”. Translated by William A. Lyell. In Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1990. 

Sun Yatsen. “The Three People’s Principles” in Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 through the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, 202-205. Edited by Wm. Th. de Bary and R. Lufrano. Columbia Univ. Press, 2001. 

Xu, Guoqi. Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011

I am choosing to pass on this Show and Tell.

This week I focused mainly on the Boxer Rebellion and its characteristics, since it was the main event in the Basic Set this week. What I found most interesting about the Boxer Rebellion was the fact that it was not actually a Rebellion per se, rather this was a label applied to it by Western historians so as to not implicate the Qing dynasty. In reality the Dowager Empress supported and protected the Boxers due to her hatred of Western and Japanese influence upon China. It was technically a “rebellion” because the provincial governors in southern China gave their support to the West instead, and so fought against the Boxers.

The entire ideology of the Boxers was also interesting, both because they did not have any central leaders or command structure, and due to their iconoclasm. For a powerful nation like China to have fallen under the influence of so many foreign powers, it makes sense that the people who were most affected by the economic exploitation that came about as a result of dynastic instability and Western imperialism would take up arms. Physically destroying the means and monuments to Western domination while at the same time espousing traditional Chinese values and focusing on martial arts, the Boxers would probably have been a nightmare for the West had they been able to rally all of China to them.

As it was, the Boxer Rebellion gave the West and Japan the excuse they needed to storm in and carve China into pieces. I remember learning about the United States’ Open door policy in regards to China in American history classes, but was never really clear on what it was or how it worked. Moise’s book Modern China offered a much clearer view of the policy, especially the fact that it was not any sort of treaty but rather a passive agreement that nations with influence in China would not “exclude other nations from commerce” by means of their own imperialism. It also loosely prevented the division of China into colonies. I had always wondered why the West did not just divide China into colonies, and this class has offered some insights to that. China just seems to be too big to effectively split it, as well as the fact that, as weak as the Qing government may have been, it would have been even more difficult to break off entire provinces from the central government.

Works consulted

Edwin E. Moise. 2008. Modern China. Vol. 3rd ed. Harlow, England: Routledge. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=634614&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Melvin Bragg and guests “The Boxer Rebellion”. In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, March 19 2009.

For this assignment I picked one of the sources I used for my Show and Tell project on the Manchu banner system. This was Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labor. On one of the pages, there is a footnote giving more information on Manchu booi and how they were different from aha. Both were servants, but the booi had greater freedom and influence and were used for military service. The source this comes from was Mark C. Elliot’s The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China.

After searching the catalog, we do not have the book in the Trexler Library, either as a physical copy or as an ebook. There are several book reviews that can be accessed through jstor, but nothing else. It does appear to be a source that would be useful for further research into the Eight Banner system, but I would like to actually get my hands on an ebook or physical book to flip through it.

As for other books by the author, I was not able to find any on the Trexler Library website. This definitely could be a useful source if I was able to access the book directly, and if I could see some more work done by the author himself.

Works Consulted:

Moll-Murata, Christine, and Ulrich Theobald. “Military Employment in Qing Dynasty China.” In Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher, 353–92. Amsterdam University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wp6pg.15.

Exploration Pack 2: Migration

I thought this particular exploration pack was important because it highlights a phenomenon that is not usually discussed when looking at history, that is diasporic communities migrating to countries that are not in the West. When I think of Chinese migration, I typically think of eastward to the American West, California, San Francisco, the construction of the trans-continental railroad, and so on. This week, we did take a look at this wave of immigration, as well as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the racism experienced by the Chinese in America, but it was interesting to look at alternative experiences the Chinese had as they left a country that was becoming increasingly dangerous and difficult to survive in.

The Peranakan Chinese culture is one that I had never heard of, and indeed had never really thought about. The blending of Southeast Asian and Chinese culture was something I had never really considered, knowing that the two were connected but always keeping them to an extent separate. The fact that many of the cultural elements that we associate with China came from Peranakan customs is just the sort of historical twist that I find so intriguing.

In particular I found the photographs of the Peranakan men to be interesting, since they all wore clothing and accessories that was a mix of Imperial Chinese, South Asian, and European culture. One man wore robes that marked him as a high-ranking imperial Chinese official, but carried a handkerchief: a South Asian cultural marker. Another wears a dragon robe without a badge of rank, but also carries a handkerchief and wears a ring on his finger, which is a European style. The third man pictured in the article has a Manchu queue, and is dressed in more muted clothing, but on the table beside them these is a distinctly European hat and statue. It all works to create an interesting cultural blend that one would not notice if one was not looking closely enough. In the West, we tend to lump Asian cultures all together with little regard to diversity. Especially in the cases of the men in imperial robes, I would not have even realized that they were not from mainland China unless the article had pointed out the specific elements that marked them as Peranakan.

I would be curious to learn more about this cultural syncretism, not just in South Asia, but in Japan, Korea, Russia, Mongolia, and even more in the United States. So much of what we identify as 100% Chinese (or any culture for that matter) is almost always a blending of multiple cultures brought about by migration.

Works Consulted:

Choong Wilkins, Rebecca. “Who are the Peranakan Chinese? Deep roots and many routes” LARB China Channel January 24, 2019. https://chinachannel.lareviewofbooks.org/2019/01/24/peranakan/

“The Chinese Exclusion Act”. Directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu. Public Broadcasting Service, 2018. https://video-alexanderstreet-com.muhlenberg.idm.oclc.org/watch/the-chinese-exclusion-act

Exploration Pack 3

Both readings on the Taiping Rebellion offered a fascinating, albeit disturbing look into civilian life during the Taiping Rebellion. One of the ideas put forward that was most interesting was the psychological impact that comes from seeing corpses everywhere.

The death toll of the rebellion was catastrophic, and because entire villages were being slaughtered, there was no way to dispose of the corpses. Not only did the corpses choke the waterways, foul drinking water, spread disease, and in general look unsightly, their very existence also brought despair to Chinese civilians. Since many of the mutilated corpses could not be identified, they could not be given proper burial rites, and it was believed that their spirits would wander throughout the country. During the period, this gave rise to fear of ghosts and spirits that, unable to rest peacefully were constantly roaming the countryside.

Cannibalism was also practiced in desperation, as in many places the only source of sustenance were the massive piles of bodies, the fields of grain having been burnt and the water supply having been polluted. The horrific practice of eating human flesh, at least as Meyer-Fong argues, is a sign that a people has been dehumanized to the point where bodies themselves are viewed simply as meat. For a people that placed so much importance on the veneration of the dead, filial piety, and proper burial, this treatment of bodies was antithesis to their spiritual and national character. The eyewitness account of Daye Zhang is a good example of just how draining this was to the Chinese people, his memories telling the story of a broken and terrified people concerned only with survival and navigating a countryside that had become a hellish wasteland.

The sheer quantity of bodies also led to ideas about purity and impurity propagating throughout the regions that the Taiping Rebellion ravaged. This typically applied to women, but stories circulated about bodies being found that were perfectly preserved despite having been left in the open. The preservation was said to be related to the virtues and ethics of an individual in life: the more honorable a person was, the more likely it would be that their body would not be fouled in death. In the case of women, this usually referred to women committing suicide rather than being raped by bandits or rebels.

One of the questions I had about the Taiping Rebellion was why was it so costly? The sheer brutality and callous violence that became so commonplace seemingly came out of nowhere. Reading the story of Zhang, and the horrific images of human bodies being piled up literally everywhere made me question just what it was all for. Beyond the aims of the rebels themselves, there did not seem to be any reason for the conflict to turn so brutal.

Works Consulted:

Meyer-Fong, Tobie S. “4. Bones and Flesh.” In What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Zhang, Daye. “Part 2.” In The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath. Translated by Xiaofei Tian. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.

The Manchu conquest of the Ming dynasty was a result of a mixture of careful planning on the part of the Manchu, corruption and general degeneration of Ming rule and an inability to secure the borders of the empire, and military success on the part of the Manchu, which ushered in the dominion of a new dynasty: the Qing.

The Manchu were regarded, along with the other peoples that existed on the outer edges of the empire, as barbarians. In the eyes of the Ming, they were uncivilized and in many ways less than human. Their conquest of what was seen as a vastly superior culture was both humiliating and frightening. While the Manchu certainly did exercise ferocious tactics in their conquest of Ming China, notable the Yangzhou massacre, they were not simply an invading force of barbarians looking to plunder the country. Well-versed in Chinese ideas about rulership such as the Mandate of Heaven, the Manchu not only conquered China but also ruled it.

In part, the military success of the Manchu is thanks to their Eight Banner system, a system of military organization that allowed them to control their ranks from top to bottom. The origins of the system come from Nurhaci, who united the Manchu and divided all of the warriors that had pledged themselves to him into groups designated by different banners, all of which had different colors and designs which troops wore into battle. After Nurhaci, the banners were also divided by ethnicity, with Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese each getting their own specific banner within a specific company, meaning there were actually twenty-four total banners.

The nature of the Eight Banners made military organization and discipline far easier, and also made it easy for companies to distinguish each other on the battlefield. The fact that the companies were also divided along ethnic lines also allowed a degree of separation between the Manchu and the people they had conquered.

This was one of the many ways the Manchu enforced their rule upon the ethnic Han Chinese–the double-edged sword of separation along ethnic lines yet dominance and compulsory participation in the Manchu culture, at least on the part of men. The forcible wearing of the Manchu queue, what was very much a terrifying sight to Han Chinese on the battlefield, combined with the fact that soldiers now had to wear Manchu colors would have severely denigrated the Han and shown the superiority of the conquerers.

There was also another army, the Green Standard Army, which was far more numerous than the soldiers of the Eight Banners, but subordinated to the Manchu, as it was composed mostly of Ming troops and managed by Han Chinese officers. These two armies were also kept separate by the fact that the Green Standard Army defended the interior of China and the Eight Banners mostly garrisoned the borders.

Membership to a company of the Eight Banners was hereditary, and a source of considerable prestige (at least at the beginning of the Qing dynasty). The banner system was also important because it did not remain solely as a military system, but emerged as a societal structure as well. Membership to a banner was not only for a soldier, but also for his household, and it was a designation and distinction he held for life. This marriage of political and societal structure to military service is one of the things that made the Qing military so powerful and allowed to conquer a territory and population much larger than it. Its continued usage and expansion during Qing rule, particularly with its inclusion of other ethnic groups, reinforced Qing dominance and promoted the supremacy of its military.

Ultimately, the Qing dynasty was a military state, which, despite its smaller size, was able to outmaneuver and outperform the Ming dynasty on the field of battle. The Ming had lost much of its prestige, power, ability to control and pay its military, and its control over the more farflung provinces. For citizens of the empire, the prospect of being taken over by a “barbarian” people was terrifying, and in some cases the terror was very real. However, the Manchu exceeded the expectations of the ethnic Han Chinese in many ways due to their understanding of Chinese customs and their well-oiled military machine. The sight of a shaved forehead on the battlefield may have struck fear into the hearts of Imperial Chinese soldiers, but as the Qing incorporated them into their military-political system, they came to fight alongside them bearing the banners of their companies, and sporting the same queue that had caused Li Zicheng’s troops to flee in terror from Beijing when Wu Sangui and his Manchu allies attacked them.

Works consulted:

Lovell, Julia. The Great Wall: China against the World, 1000 BC-AD 2000. 1st paperback ed. New York: Grove Press, 2007.

Moll-Murata, Christine, and Ulrich Theobald. “Military Employment in Qing Dynasty China.” In Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher, 353–92. Amsterdam University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wp6pg.15.

Exploration Pack 2

One of the things that I found most fascinating this week was the attitudes that the Europeans had towards the Chinese people and the Chinese empire early on in their contact with them. My understanding of the relationship was that it was always an imperialist, oppressive European presence against a victimized Chinese people, but the actual history is far more nuanced.

While the European powers certainly had the idea of extortion in mind in their trading relationship with the Chinese Empire, and were only concerned with acquiring goods and resources that could help them further their own power, it was not as simple as just marching in and taking what they wanted. China was also a powerful nation, and the Europeans were restricted to trading cities along its coast. The Chinese also had the advantage in that they needed nothing from the Europeans but money: the Europeans produced nothing that was of value or use to the Chinese that they could not make themselves, while the Europeans heavily relied on goods from East Asia.

China’s view towards the foreign nations on its doorstep was also not necessarily of invaders, but rather weaker, resource poor nations that required the wealth of China in order to survive. This can be seen in the Qianlong Emperor’s response to the British King George III, who sent China a series of requests that would have greatly expanded Britain’s power and influence over trade in the region. The Emperor refuses all the requests, referring to the “lonely remoteness” of Britain, in addition to calling it and all the Western states “barbarian nations.” This appears more to be an interaction between equal, or at least semi-equal nations, not a colonizer and a colonized nation.

In addition to China occupying more equal footing with the West in the earlier days of trade, Chinese culture was held in a higher regard by the West, at least for a time. The Jesuit missionaries that had ventured to East Asia took great care to integrate Confucianism into the Christianity they were spreading (although they were not accepting of Daoism and Buddhism) and Western Enlightenment philosophers looked at China as superior to the West philosophically and intellectually. It was only after disputes with the Christian authorities that the Jesuits began to tamp down on Chinese culture and tradition, but before this, there was a great sharing of tradition and syncretism between the two cultures. This can be seen most beautifully in the paintings of Giuseppe Castiglione, which marry Western realism with Chinese subject matter and landscapes.

“The Qianlong Emperor in Ceremonial Armor on Horseback” Giuseppe Castiglione 1739

Works Consulted.

“6.5: The Second Edict [from Qianlong to King George], Sept. 1793”. In The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection, edited by Janet Y. Chen, Pei-kai Cheng, Michael Elliot Lestz, and Jonathan D Spence, 90-93. Third ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Mungello, David. “4. European Acceptance of Chinese Culture and Confucianism.” In The Great Encounter of China and The West, 1500 – 1800. Critical Issues in History. World and International History. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.

Exploration Pack 2: Conquest

One of the things I found to be most interesting this week was the conflicting claims found in the reading “The Great Fall of China” and the account of the Yangzhou massacre by Wang Xiuchu. Both offer wildly different depictions of the Qing dynasty, which is made doubly interesting by the fact that one is a primary source and one is a secondary source.

In many ways, “The Great Fall of China” is not just a critique of the Ming dynasty and its failings, but broadly of Chinese policy towards foreigners before the Qing. The chapter discusses the ultimate failure of the structure that is now known as the Great Wall, and how it not only failed to protect China from barbarians, but in many ways hastened its destruction. With wealth, resources, and manpower being spent on keeping the wall fortified and garrisoned, the Chinese empire ultimately wasted its energy. To top it off, particularly during the rule of the Ming dynasty, sentries were not well-paid nor were they properly outfitted, subject to the extreme cold of the steppe and in constant contact with Mongol and Manchu raiders. It is small wonder that given the opportunity to defect or turn in the other direction while raiders crossed the border they did so.

Although the wall was seen as one of the many failures of the Ming, a historian hired by the Qing government to tell the history of the past dynasty devoted a particular section to the absurdity and utter failure of the continuous wall construction, “Why did we build walls for 10,000 li?/Dynasty after dynasty has done the same thing,/so why do we only laugh at the First Emperor of Qin?” The wall as a whole was a colossal failure: it did not protect the Chinese from invaders, it bled the country dry of resources to construct and maintain, and it separated parts of the military from the rest of the nation, making them prone to revolt. Ultimately, the chapter seems to praise the Qing for solving the problem of the wall by no longer making it China’s northern border, portraying them as a more inclusive dynasty than the aloof and oppressive Ming. The Li Zicheng led rebels were also portrayed as the true plunderers of the country, with the Qing as the tolerant liberators that spared the people, put to right the political turmoil of the country, secured Beijing, and returned a sense of normalcy to the nation.

All of these ideas are contradicted in Wang Xiachu’s account of the Yangzhou massacre, which is staggeringly disturbing in its brutality. Qing troops enter the city of Yangzhou, at first demanding payment from the merchant-class, then rounding up the gentry and killing them, and finally issuing a general mandate to kill every person in the city. Wang describes rape, torture, murder, infanticide, and general brutality, estimating at least eighty thousand dead, with many more unaccounted for. This account serves both to illuminate the often inhuman and genocidal actions of any invading army, as well as shows the different ways that a regime may be remembered depending on who is recording its history. Wang’s account is a primary source, but it is unlikely that a Qing primary source from the same period would tell the same story he told, which serves as a general reminder to be aware of who is writing the source and for what purpose, as well as the significance of what is included and what is left out.

Works Consulted:

Lovell, Julia. The Great Wall: China against the World, 1000 BC-AD 2000. 1st paperback ed. New York: Grove Press, 2007.

Struve, Lynn A. Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers’ Jaws. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

This week, I thought that the most interesting concept we discussed was the meaning of the word “modern,” and the potential problems that can arise when applying it as a descriptor for nations past and present. The largest issue is that the word “modern” is defined in a Western context, and so while it can be used to describe the development of Western nations, it is far less neat when it comes to describing East Asian nations like China.

Many of the characteristics that western philosophers said made a nation “modern” were part of China for centuries, in some cases a thousand years before present day. Aspects such as a bureaucratic examination and commercial farming made China seem like a modern nation in a period long before what is considered the modern era. Also, is it fair to define a nation under the terms created by another, which has an entirely different tradition of philosophy, culture, and values?

The idea of modernity is also rooted in the narrative of progress, that history is a linear story of continuous, gradual movement in a positive direction, and that the future will bring further advancement and solutions to the problems of the present. It is itself based in a teleological understanding of history, that is, the cause and effect chain of events can be traced all the way back to the beginning of recorded history, everything being influenced by what came before.

The idea of modern is also inherently relativistic: for peasants in the 1500s, technology of the 1800s would seem modern, but to us in the 21st century, our era is “modern,” and the technology and ideas of two hundred years ago seem (in many cases) antiquated and outdated. Although historians have defined a “modern” and “pre-modern” era largely independent of how we imagine these terms, relativism still creeps into the definitions. It also raises interesting questions about the idea of “post-modern.” Mitter offers one understanding of “modern” as “recent,” which makes the idea of “post-modern” strange and in some ways impossible.

As we progress in the course, I am interested to see how we answer (and do not answer) these questions about the definition of modern and how they affect our study of China. In general, we will also be hampered linguistically and culturally, as we are studying the history of a country that is profoundly different from our own Western nations.

Works consulted:

Mitter, Rana. Modern China: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (ebook Trexler)

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. First ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.