The Everlasting Empire (33 page)

Second, despite their highly divergent outcomes, major rebellions can be viewed as the single most important factor underlying dynastic changes in Chinese history. The outbreak of a rebellion signaled that the dynasty’s malfunction had reached the dangerous level beyond which it should be replaced. In times of prolonged stagnation and persistent corruption, when even the loftiest and most courageous officials failed to convince their colleagues and superiors to mend their ways, when elite malpractices reached their apogee while the peasants’ burden became intolera

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ble—rebellion became singularly effective in shattering the system and enabling the eventual restoration of its proper mode of functioning. Rebellions can be interpreted as a peculiar (and very costly) readjustment system, a kind of bloody popular “election,” which determined what family would rule for another dynastic cycle, corrected certain wrongs, allowed the influx of new blood into the government apparatus, and thus contributed toward the improvement of the empire’s functioning. As such, rebellions became indeed, in Meadows’s words, “the storm that clears and invigorates a political atmosphere.”

In generating people-focused policies and facilitating dynastic change, rebellions contributed to the improvement of the commoners’ lot and to the empire’s functioning in general. Yet they had another, subtler impact on the empire’s fate: through their persistent willingness to be co-opted into the imperial order, the rebels evidenced this order’s exceptional viability. Like nomadic conquerors, rebellious commoners were a formidable enemy of the imperial state; yet even if successful, they proved finally incorporable within the imperial political system. This pattern not only reflected the imperial order’s hegemonic position but also further reinforced this position. Any new rebel-turning-emperor served as proof that there was no real alternative to the political system established in the aftermath of the Warring States period. Insofar as the empire’s ideological invulnerability remained intact, domestic and external challenges could be accommodated within the extant order and even garnered to improve it. It was not until the late nineteenth century, when alien ideologies backed by alien armies began undermining this invulnerability, that the empire’s doom was sealed.

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CHAPTER 6
Imperial Political Culture in the Modern Age

It is too soon to tell.

—
Zhou Enlai
,

on the impact of the 1789 French Revolution

IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, the reigning Qing dynasty and the Chinese empire in general reached the peak of their development. For two millennia the empire had withstood countless challenges and recovered from a variety of crises; its statesmen had accumulated historical wisdom enabling them to continuously improve the functioning of the imperial system. Moreover, the Qing dynasty was blessed with a sequence of extraordinarily gifted monarchs, who were skillful in both domestic and external affairs, and under whose aegis China entered one of its lengthiest ages of stability and prosperity, of unprecedented territorial expansion and security on its borders. A casual observer could well have concluded that the empire was truly immortal.

Nonetheless, the seeds of crisis were well sown by then. An unprecedented demographic expansion had dangerously decreased the land/man ratio, driving millions of peasants to the edge of subsistence level, aggravating ecological degradation, and impeding the government’s ability to monitor the expanding population. Parallel to these developments a new threat materialized at the dynasty’s maritime boundaries, where the increasingly assertive British Empire was no longer prone to tolerate what it perceived as the Qing authorities’ discriminatory practices toward British merchants. The dynastic leaders, who were well prepared to combat threats from Inner Asian boundaries, woefully underestimated the potential of Her Majesty’s fleet; and when the conflict occurred—in the socalled Opium Wars, 1839–1860—it resulted in the crushing defeat of the Qing armies. In the meantime, a series of domestic uprisings, which culminated in the Taiping apocalypse of 1851–1864, wreaked havoc in the domestic sociopolitical fabric, bringing an end to the lengthy age of peace under the Manchu aegis.

The story of the empire’s fall is well known and requires only the most cursory review. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, the Qing leaders desperately tried to restore the fortunes of their battered state through adopting certain achievements of Western civilization, most specifically military technology, while preserving the “essence” (
ti
) of im

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perial rule intact. The futility of these attempts was mercilessly exposed when China suffered a humiliating defeat in 1894–1895 at the hands of Japan, the country that a generation earlier had introduced much more profound and successful reforms than anything contemplated by the Qing leaders. Immediately thereafter, China fell victim to the great powers’ “scramble for concessions,” in the process of which its sovereignty and territorial integrity were significantly impaired. Only then (1898) was the first attempt made to introduce truly substantial reforms; but as these reforms were swiftly smashed by the conservative opposition, the imperial court entered the twentieth century in a state of stubborn disregard of new realities. This self-imposed blindness once again extracted a heavy price, as the dynasty entered into a suicidal conflict with the entire “civilized world” of those days, the so-called Boxer War (1900). The subsequent defeat at the hands of Western (and Japanese) expeditionary forces was humiliating enough; moreover, the atrophy of the dynasty’s domestic prestige was further demonstrated by the behavior of many regional governors who, ignoring the court’s call to arms, proclaimed neutrality in its conflict with the foreign powers. The empire lost not just its military but also its political vigor; change was inevitable.

Imperial China had in the past faced similar combinations of domestic and external threats—but this time it also had to withstand an unprecedented cultural challenge. In marked distinction from the empire’s traditional foes, Western powers had no respect for its political system and were not prone to adapt themselves to Chinese ways. While the Westerners in general did not aim at toppling the imperial regime, the demonstrable superiority of their political models in an age of bitter interstate struggle meant that China’s erstwhile consensus in favor of imperial rule was steadily eroded. Most fundamentally, the millennia-long insistence on stability as the most essential political virtue came to an end. The narrative of “progress” and “modernization” firmly captivated the minds of the educated elite, becoming a new political paradigm, in light of which the virtues of sociopolitical arrangements had to be measured. By the early twentieth century a broad new consensus emerged: in order to survive, China must modernize itself. Whereas the precise meanings of “progress” and “modernization” were constantly debated, it was increasingly obvious that changes were required not just in the economy and the military but also in the political system and even in basic cultural values. This was the background for the introduction of radical antimonarchical ideas, which in due time ended the once unshakable ideological hegemony of the imperial system. Lacking its ideological legitimacy, the empire collapsed almost instantly in the wake of the somewhat accidental 1911 Republican Revolution. The longest continuous political system in the world abruptly came to its end.

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The empire’s collapse brought about woeful ideological turmoil. The intellectual elite was unified in its hope to restore “a rich country with a powerful army” (
fu guo qiang hing
)—and its members were increasingly aware that to attain this goal they must dispense with significant aspects of the imperial system or even dismantle it outright. Yet the rapidity of the empire’s disintegration had caught them unprepared: few, if any, could clearly envision an alternative to the imperial model. For decades following the collapse of the Qing dynasty China remained a huge battleground of competing ideologies and political systems. Almost any “ism” practiced anywhere throughout the twentieth century was tried in China or parts of it: from experiments in parliamentary democracy to military regimes, from theocracy (e.g., in Tibet) to colonial rule of different kinds; from Leninism and Stalinism to experiments in fascism, anarchism, renovated Confucianism, and Legalism; from an Islamic republic and khanates in Xinjiang to a variety of local idiosyncratic regimes under military and civilian leaders. As evidence of the peculiar ideological openness of twentieth-century China, suffice it to cite the Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan (1883–1960), who proudly proclaimed that he ran his province according to the perfect ideology, one that combined the best features of “militarism, nationalism, anarchism, democracy, capitalism, communism, individualism, imperialism, universalism, paternalism and utopianism.”
¹
Notably, Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, Buddhism, and all other traditional “isms” are absent from this ideological supermarket. While twentieth-century Chinese leaders occasionally looked to the native political tradition for answers to persistent crises, more often than not they sought these answers elsewhere—in a variety of novel ideologies introduced into China from the West.

What remained of China’s traditional political culture amid these endless twists and turns, in which foreign ideologies appeared incomparably more attractive than the native ones? This question fascinated— and continues to fascinate—scholars in China and in the West. From Joseph Levenson’s seminal trilogy
Confucian China and Its Modern Fate
to countless studies by current Chinese, Western, and Japanese scholars, the answers fluctuate tremendously, reflecting ever-changing political and historical perspectives. Naturally, a definitive answer to this question is impossible: as suggested by this chapter’s epigraph, a statement ascribed to Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), it is advisable to be humble when dealing with events of the recent past. Perhaps the only clear conclusion that we can draw from the analysis of the last century of historical developments in China is this: any reductionist view—either identifying China’s twentieth-century turmoil as nothing but another dynastic change, or, alternatively, arguing that China witnessed a total rupture with its past—is not tenable. David Shambaugh usefully identifies the current

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Chinese state as an “eclectic” one, in which “each new departure was never total, although all were sharp and each sought to ‘overthrow’ and replace the former. In reality, though, each new Chinese state maintained certain features of the old.”
²
But which features of the old were adopted by the new state formations, and which—if any—were cast away altogether? To answer this question, I shall focus on the modern trajectory of those major aspects of traditional Chinese political culture that I discussed in previous chapters. I hope that this line of analysis will serve to summarize my study, while adding a few new dimensions to the discussion of continuities and ruptures in the modern Chinese state.
³

THE QUEST FOR UNITY

The concept of political unity was the most fundamental idea behind the empire’s formation, and it remained the least affected by the advent of modernity. While China underwent a painful process of adaptation from an empire with pretensions to world leadership into a nation-state, the idea of unified rule was only marginally affected. Rather, unity, once conceived of as “universal,” came to be understood as a “national” one. This readjustment was not entirely nonproblematic, though, especially insofar as postimperial leaders had to preserve huge territories beyond the limits of China proper, inherited from the Qing regime. The process of adaptation to new realities had some painful repercussions on the empire’s ethnic frontiers, where former dependencies of the Qing tried—with varying degree of success—to attain independence from the Han-led Chinese Republic. For a short while, as the image of the empire’s inclusiveness was profoundly shattered, the possibility of ethnic secession was entertained even by staunch Han nationalists, such as the eminent thinker Zhang Binglin (1868–1936), and even the Republic’s “father,” Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan, 1866–1925).
⁴
Yet soon enough Han nationalists reinterpreted the idea of “national unity” as pertaining inclusively to all the dwellers of the former Qing realm, as it is incorporated nowadays into the official parlance of the People’s Republic of China. The close proximity between the traditional idea of unified rule in “All-under-Heaven” and the modern notion of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of a nationstate supported the efforts of China’s modern leaders to preserve the former Qing territories intact.
⁵

This said, the process of preserving the territorial integrity of the Qing realm was not smooth, and its unity was questioned—even if briefly—not just on the ethnic frontiers but even within the imperial core. Centrifugal forces were set in motion at the very end of Qing rule when the court allowed the formation of provincial assemblies staffed by members of local elites as an entirely new vehicle of political participation. The establish

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ment of the assemblies enabled an unprecedented institutionalization of local interests, turning these new bodies into a powerful instrument in the hands of provincial elites, who sought to protect their economic and administrative interests at the court’s expense. The assemblies adopted an increasingly confrontational attitude toward the central government and played an important role in the breakdown of Qing rule. It was the assemblies’ declarations of “independence” of the Qing that hastened the empire’s collapse in late 1911. These declarations indicated that the new province-oriented discourse, which had emerged in the assemblies, was potentially detrimental to the country’s territorial integrity.