history
fntr25
HIST1060lecture14.pptxLand Empires in the Age of Imperialism, 1800-1870
Lecture 14
The Qing Empire
How did the impact of European imperialism on China differ from its impact on Russia and the Ottoman Empire?
The Qing Empire
Social unrest grew in Qing China through a combination of discontent among the poor and displaced indigenous.
1. When the Qing conquered China in the 1600s, they restored peace and stability and promoted the recovery and expansion of the agricultural economy, thus laying the foundation for the doubling of the Chinese population between 1650 and 1800. By 1800, population pressure was causing environmental damage and contributing to an increasing number of itinerant farmhands, laborers, and merchants;
The Qing Empire
Social unrest grew in Qing China through a combination of discontent among the poor and displaced indigenous.
2. There were numerous sources of discontent in Qing China. Various minority peoples had been driven off their land, and many people regarded the government as being weak, corrupt, and perhaps in collusion with the foreign merchants and missionaries in Canton and Macao. Discontent was manifest in a series of internal rebellions in the nineteenth century, beginning with the White Lotus rebellion (1794–1804);
The Qing Empire
Qing attempts to ban opium imports provoked the Opium War in Britain, which exposed Qing military inferiority.
3. Believing the Europeans to be a remote and relatively unimportant people, the Qing did not at first pay much attention to trade issues or to the growth in the opium trade. In 1939, when the Qing government realized the harm being done by the opium trade, they decided to ban the use and import of opium and sent Lin Zexu to Canton to deal with the matter;
Lin Zexu
Daoguang Emperor
The Qing Empire
Qing attempts to ban opium imports provoked the Opium War in Britain, which exposed Qing military inferiority.
The Qing Empire
The Treaty of Nanking gave extraterritoriality and other privileges to Brian and led to further losses to other Western powers.
4. The attempt to ban the opium trade led to the Opium War (1839–1842), in which the better-armed British naval and ground forces defeated the Qing and forced them to sign the Treaty of Nanking. The Treaty of Nanking and subsequent treaties signed between the Qing and the various Western powers gave Westerners special privileges and resulted in the colonization of small pockets of Qing territory;
The Qing Empire
Social resentment and foreign intrusion ignited the Taiping Rebellion, which, after the Arrow War, the Qing quelled with British and French Aid.
5. The Taiping Rebellion broke out in Guangxi province, where poor farmland, endemic poverty, and economic distress were complicated by ethnic divisions that relegated the minority Hakka people to the lowliest trades. The founder of the Taiping movement was Hong Xiuquan, a man of Hakka background who became familiar with the teachings of Christian missionaries in Canton. Hong declared himself to be the younger brother of Jesus and founded a religious group (the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace or Taiping movement) to which he recruited followers from among the Hakka people;
The Qing Empire
The rebellion encouraged epidemics, devastated agriculture, produced overcrowded cities filled with refugees, and coincided with environmental disasters.
6. The Taiping forces defeated imperial troops in Guangxi, recruited (or forced) villagers into their segregated male and female battalions and work teams, and moved toward eastern and northern China. In 1853, the Taiping forces captured Nanjing and made it the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. The Qing were finally able to defeat the Taiping with help from military forces organized by provincial governors like Zeng Guofan and with the assistance of British and French forces;
The Qing Empire
The rebellion encouraged epidemics, devastated agriculture, produced overcrowded cities filled with refugees, and coincided with environmental disasters.
7. The Taiping Rebellion was one of the world’s bloodiest civil wars and the greatest armed conflict before the twentieth century. The results of the Taiping Rebellion included 20 to 30 million deaths, depopulation and destruction of rich agricultural lands in central and eastern China, and suffering and destruction in the cities and cultural centers of eastern China.
The Qing Empire
The rebellion and China’s recovery afterward resulted in a process of decentralization led by reformist aristocrats.
11. After the 1850s, the expenses of wars and the burden of indemnities payable to Western governments made it impossible for the Qing to get out of debt. With the Qing government so deeply in their debt, Britain and France became active participants in the period of recovery known as the Tongzhi Restoration that followed the Taiping Rebellion;
The Qing Empire
The rebellion and China’s recovery afterward resulted in a process of decentralization led by reformist aristocrats.
12. The real work of recovery was managed by provincial governors like Zeng Guofan, who looked to the United States as his model and worked to restore agriculture, reform the military, and industrialize armaments manufacture. The reform programs were supported by a coalition of Qing aristocrats, including the Empress Dowager Cixi, but they were unable to prevent the Qing Empire from disintegrating into a set of large power zones in which provincial governors exercised real authority.
Empress Cixi
Conclusion
Similarity of Responses Among the Empires:
1. Subjects of the Ottoman, Russian, and Qing Empires did not consider European economic pressure a challenge during the first half of the nineteenth century;
2. By the 1870s, European challenges to the empires had become widely realized—for the Ottoman and Russian Empires during the Crimean War, and for the Qing Empire during the Opium War;
3. Although historians view economic pressure as the force that weakened the empires, rulers of the Ottoman, Russian, and Qing Empires themselves considered their greatest challenge to be the military superiority of the Europeans;
4. Reforms were too little or too late to make difference, and reformers began to oppose both the foreign powers as well as ruling dynasty.
Conclusion
Distinctions in Response Among the Empires
1.China’s geographic distance protected it from the political tensions between Britain and Russia;
2.The Ottoman Empire was left out of deliberations among European powers that included Russia mainly because Europe anticipated the eventual demise of the Ottomans;
3. Unlike Africa or India, only small pieces of the Qing Empire were directly ruled by foreign powers in China.
