WORLD HISTORY: Volume II - Chapter 22 (p737-742)

SHADOWS OVER THE PACIFIC: EAST ASIA UNDER CHALLENGE

THE DECLINE OF THE MANCHUS

In 1800, China was ruled by the Manchu (also called the 'Qing') dynasty. China had been peaceful and prosperous for a long time. There had been two very good emperors: Kangxi and Qianlong. China's borders were safe and secure and Chinese culture was very advanced. The emperors of China lived hidden away behind the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing. They called China the Central Kingdom. However, just over one hundred years after this, in the early 1900s, the Manchu, or Qing dynasty was finished. The powerful Western countries had sent their big ships and big guns to China and they had caused great problems to the Manchu leaders. China was made to feel weak and stupid. The dynasty was over.

Many historians used to say that the reason for the quick decline of the Manchu dynasty was that it was an old-fashioned, traditional society and that the West had put pressure on China to change. However, now most historians believe that there was trouble within the ruling family. This trouble caused the dynasty to collapse.

In fact, both explanations are correct to some extent. Like many other dynasties, the Qing dynasty had its problems. They had been very successful for a very long time but now there was corruption amongst its officials, the peasants were not happy and there were many people who worked at the royal court who were not very good at doing their jobs. In addition to these problems, the Chinese population was growing fast. There had been no wars for a long time, there were new crops from America and new kinds of rice that could grow faster than the old types of rice. All this meant that people were living longer and the population had doubled between 1550 and 1800. It continued to grow after 1800 and reached 400 million by the end of the 1800s. This meant that the farmers had to produce a lot more food for everyone. The Manchu dynasty would probably have finished even if the Western powers had not sent their ships, guns and ideas to China. The Westerners simply speeded up the end of the dynasty. They added to the problems but were not the main cause of the problems.

Opium and Rebellion

By 1800, Westerners had been in contact with China for more than two hundred years. However, Westerners were only allowed to trade in one small location in Canton. The British were not happy about this. They wanted to be able to trade more freely and they also wanted to buy tea. More and more people in England wanted tea. The British tried twice to solve this problem: first in 1793, they sent the Macartney mission and then in 1816, they sent Lord Amherst. It was no good - the relations between England and China were very bad. The British answer to this situation was opium. Opium was grown in northeast India and then the British shipped the opium to China. The Chinese had grown opium in southwest China for hundreds of years but it had only been used for medicines. Now, more and more Chinese people started to use the drug and became addicted to it. The Chinese couldn't get enough opium. The Chinese government said it was illegal to use opium but it made no difference. Chinese people wanted to buy more and more of the drug from the British. Soon, money was going out of China and into the pockets of British merchants.

The Chinese government was very worried about this. They tried to negotiate with the British. In 1839, the Chinese government chose a government official called Lin Zexu (1785-1850) to ask Queen Victoria, the queen of England, to stop the sale of opium to China. He said the Chinese would stop the sale of rhubarb to England if she did not agree (rhubarb was used as a laxative in nineteenth-century Europe and the Europeans bought it from China). Queen Victoria refused. The British wanted to make a profit with opium and did not really care whether it was right or wrong to sell opium to Chinese people. The British said if the Chinese did not want the opium, they did not have to buy it. Lin Zexu started punishing opium smokers, arresting opium dealers, and seizing supplies of opium as importers tried to smuggle the drug into China. This last idea was a big mistake. Lin Zexu blockaded the foreign warehouse area in Canton and said the foreign traders must give him their opium. The British government said that the British traders there had been insulted and treated unfairly. The British then sent a naval expedition to punish the Manchus and force the court to open China to foreign trade.

The Opium War

The Opium War (1839-1842) was between China and Britain. Britain showed that they had better guns and warships than the Chinese. The British warships destroyed the Chinese coastal and river forts. They seized the island of Zhousan not far from the mouth of the Yangtze River. The British then sailed up the Yangtze River to Nanjing and cut off the supply of 'tribute grain' from southern China to northern China.

The Qing rulers then decided that the British had won the war and had to agree to what the British wanted. They signed the treaty of Nanking in 1842. In the treaty, the Chinese agreed to do the following things:

In the treaty, there was nothing about the opium trade. The trade continued in the same way as before until the Chinese government finally got it under control in the early twentieth century.

Many people have said that the Opium War was the beginning of modern Chinese history. However, most Chinese people probably did not think this at the time. The ruling dynasty had made concessions to foreigners but this was not the first time this had happened. The Chinese had opened five ports to the British but this was not a threat to the empire’s security. A few Chinese people said that the royal court should learn more about European ways and ideas but other Chinese said that China had nothing to learn from the West. They said that the foreigners were barbarians and that if China followed European ways, it would destroy the old, Confucian Chinese culture. For now, the Manchus tried to control the situation by ‘playing off’ the foreigners against each other. The Chinese gave concessions to other Western powers like the U.S. and soon there were lots of concession areas in the treaty ports along the southern Chinese coast from Canton to Shanghai.

The Taiping Rebellion

At the same time as this was happening, the Qing court was not dealing with the economic problems in the empire. The peasants had a big revolt. It was called the Taiping rebellion. It was partly caused by the new Western ideas in China. The leader was a man called Hong Xiuquan. He had failed his public exams and had changed his religion to Christianity. He believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He wanted to start a ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Supreme Peace’ in China and for all Chinese people to be Christians. However, there were local causes for the Taiping Rebellion, too. The Chinese population had increased very quickly and a lot of peasants had to try and earn money to live by working as labourers. There was a lot of official corruption and a lot of officials were not very good at their jobs. This led to higher taxes and fewer government services. The Grand Canal was not looked after properly by the government and it silted up. This meant that it was difficult to get grain delivered. In 1853, the rebels seized the old Ming capital city of Nanjing. However, the rebellion was not successful for very long. The rebels did not agree with each other and the government stopped the rebellion. By 1864, the rebellion had ended but it had had a big effect on Chinese society. More than 25 million people had been killed. Most of these people were not soldiers, they were just ordinary civilians.

One reason that the dynasty did not deal well with its problems was that it also had a lot of problems with the West. The Western powers wanted to have China as part of their empires. The British and the French were not happy with China because the Chinese had limited their trade and their religious missionary activities. In 1856, the British and the French attacked China and seized Beijing in 1860. The British destroyed the emperor’s summer palace just outside the city. The fighting stopped and there was a peace treaty. It was called the Treaty of Tianjin. The Qing agreed to make the opium trade legal, to open more ports to foreigners and to give the island of Kowloon (opposite the island of Hong Kong) to the British. More land in the north was given to Russia.

Efforts at Reform

By the late 1870s, the old dynasty was falling apart. When the Qing had been fighting the Taiping Rebellion, they had used soldiers from small, local armies. When the revolt was over, however, these armies refused to split up. They started collecting taxes and were helped by local lords and nobles. They kept the taxes for themselves. The empire was breaking down.

The court finally began to listen to officials who wanted reform. The reformers wanted a POLICY called ‘self-strengthening.’ This meant using Western technology but still keeping old CONFUCIAN rules and ideas. This policy had a slogan: ‘East for Essence, West for Practical Use.’ This policy was used by the Chinese for the next twenty-five years. Some people even wanted reform in the Chinese education system and the political system. One man, a journalist called Wang Tao, said that China should be more like Britain in its politics. He said that England was strong because the government and the people had a good, close understanding of each other. He said that everyday political life in Britain followed the same ideas as the old Chinese Golden Age. However, these ideas were much too radical for a lot of people in China. One of the most important court officials was a man called Zhang Zhidong. He said that giving ordinary people rights was a bad idea. He said that if there was a parliament like in Britain there would just be a lot of confused people meeting in one place. Even if one of them was sensible and clear-sighted, there would be a hundred others there that were not. They would not know what they were talking about and '…talk as if in a dream. What would they talk about?' he said.

Most people listened to him. From 1875 to 1900, the Qing tried to modernize their military and to build up their industries. However, they did not want to change the basic ideas of Chinese life and what Chinese people believed in. They built railroads, weapons and shipyards but the values of the Chinese stayed the same.

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