#314 - Qing 45: The Big Squeeze

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the history of China. Episode 314 The Big Squeeze It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public

felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long piece introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the Empire. Edward Gibbon, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Tacitus. Tian Gao Huang Di Yuan.

is high, and the emperor is far away. Traditional Chinese proverb. We concluded last time with our sweeping tour of the Qing Empire's sprawling frontier zones, Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, respectively.

And the many, many problems such a vast overland imperial project had and would continue to wreak on the realm's stability. But Great Qing isn't down just yet. So today, let's go ahead and kick it some more.

We move away from the realm of external pressures and border peoples, and back to the welcoming embrace of the Empire's interior, and its beating imperial heart atop the dragon throne in Beijing. Any discussion of the late Qing period and its decay over the course of the 1800s

almost must center around the imagery of dynastic decline. Such a term is intentionally broad and loose in its definition, but Susan Mann and Philip Kuhn give it a pretty solid go. Quote,

Dynastic decline has traditionally implied a loss of moral and administrative vigor among the bureaucracy, an ebbing of centralized power, and its accretion in the hands of regional satreps. A disruption of the balanced tension between state and society.

End quote. It's what many of us in the West think of when we look at the successively decaying marble columns on the six book spines of Gibbons' vast series, or the feeling of reading King Ozymandias' decree from the Percy Bischelle poem.

So too is it baked into most Chinese conceptions of Qing decline and eventual collapse, both now and at the time, from contemporaneous decaying mansion metaphors from 19th century authors like Liang Tiao, and even much earlier, such as throughout the 18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, whose portrait of the crumbling Jia clan has long been read as

an allegory of chain decline. But that worldview itself stems back further still, arguably all the way to two of the earliest and most central concepts of the Chinese Imperial self-understanding, that of the Mandate of Heaven and the Dynastic Cycle.

Not to belabor this point too terribly much, but just as a quick refresher, the Mandate holds that a dynasty shall endure only through its continual devotion to good governance and the accompanying favor of the divine, which can be stripped away if their moral authority is corrupted.

The dynastic cycle further explains that it is expected and normal for this to periodically occur as human history, like the Tao or the Wheel of Samsara, is circular and repeating. Only impermanence is permanent. In either framework, we can construct a satisfactory explanation of the decline and fall of the

Qing Empire within the context of that broader model of decline. But there is more to it than that. Or in the words of Arbiter Thelvedam of the Covenant as of 2553, "...were it so easy."

Quote, some of the elements of long-term social and political change that link the late Qing to the broad trends of China's modern history, can be understood more easily in the context of the social and political worlds in which bureaucrats had to live than the moral categories which adhere to the familiar decline model.

Certainly there was rampant corruption throughout the bureaucracy, yet the early 19th century also witnessed a surge of concern for institutional reform and national defense among some of China's leading scholars and administrators." Beijing certainly receives, and in many cases deserves, its fair share of nox from the judgments

of history, both internal to and outside of China. It's something of a time-honored and standing tradition in Chinese histories to pretty much uniformly finger-wag the last and inevitably failed regime. And as we've already been exploring aspects of, the Monchou regime certainly made more

than its fair share of unforced errors over the course of its tenure. Yet, for all that, neither is it fair to dump it into the box of corrupt failed government collapses because it's bad at its job. Maybe one of the least appreciated, but most consequential features of Qing governance was

that it didn't just collapse outright. Rather, it heroically succeeded in keeping that crumbling mansion standing, if only just, in spite of just about every possible factor turning against it all at once. As we'll look at more of today, climate, geography, geopolitics, industrial scale, population

and demographics, apocalyptic religious revolts, and uprisings, foreign invasions, rampant drug addiction, bureaucratic calcification, economic insecurity, and ever spiraling maintenance costs, all that, and so much more, conspired together over the course of the 19th century to convulse Qing China time and again with crisis after crisis

that surely would have destroyed most other nations of the era or even today. Not to mention most other Chinese dynasties across time. Yet for nearly a century it managed to cling on and hold itself up until it lasted no longer in the face of yet another popular rebellion,

the Shi'en High Revolution of 1911. We are, in fact, now perfectly situated in time and place to delve further into this topic, since we must necessarily begin in the aftermath of our own Jia Qing Emperor's early reign crisis and his very limited success in precipitating basic reforms.

As you will surely recall, once Jia Qing had been taken out of his father's I'm Retired but Not Really purgatory following the Qianlong Emperor's death in 1799, His most immediate and pressing task had been to scour his administration of the most corrupt official in Chinese history,

Hushan, and everything and every one that his long trail of slime had coded.