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The moral role that the Chinese state assumed was only one aspect of a very broad conception of how it conceived of its responsibilities. The mandate of Heaven meant that the state felt obliged to intervene in ecological and economic questions and also in ensuring the livelihood of the people. A striking example was the way the Qing during the eighteenth century managed granary reserves in order to ensure that the local laws of supply and demand worked in a reasonably acceptable fashion and produced relative price stability, a practice which dated back much earlier to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and even before. [242] The state also took on responsibility for what were, by the standards of the time, huge infrastructural projects, such as the maintenance of the Yellow River in order to prevent flooding, and the construction of the Grand Canal, which was completed at the begi
IMPLOSION AND INVASION
The problems faced by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) began to mount in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its first taste of what lay in wait was its defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839-42). Then, around the middle of the century, as economic difficulties began to grow, the Qing were shaken by a series of local revolts together with four major rebellions: a Muslim rebellion in Yu
Following the defeat of the Taiping Uprising, the problems posed by growing Western ambition and aggression began to move centre-stage in the 1870s and 1880s. [250] The First Opium War, in which the Qing unsuccessfully sought to resist British demands to allow the import of Indian-grown opium, led to the Treaty of Nanjing. [251] This was the first of the so-called unequal treaties and resulted in the imposition of reparations, the loss of Hong Kong, and the creation of four treaty ports in which the British enjoyed special concessions. The impact of the defeat, however, was limited. The Qing dynasty was not forced to rethink its attitudes in the light of its defeat: the imperial state, indeed, continued to perceive the British in rather similar terms to the way it regarded other foreigners, whether they were the peoples of the northern steppes and Central Asia, or its many tributary states in East Asia, like Korea and Vietnam. [252] The sense of Chinese superiority and self-confidence remained obdurate. [253] This state of affairs began to change with the Second Opium War (1857-60), which culminated in the ransacking and burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops and the resulting Treaty of Tianjin and the Beijing Conventions. These established a whole string of new treaty ports in which Western citizens were granted extra-territoriality; the right to foreign military bases was conceded; missionaries were given freedom to travel in the interior; and further reparations were imposed. As a result, China began to lose control over important aspects of its territory. [254] In 1884 the French succeeded in crushing the Chinese navy in a struggle for influence over Vietnam, which had long been part of the Chinese tributary system but was in the course of being colonized by France. The naval battle revealed the alarming disparity between the power of an advanced European industrial nation, even so far from its home base, and that of an overwhelmingly agrarian China. The Chinese flagship was sunk by torpedoes within the first minute of battle; in less than an hour all the Chinese ships had been destroyed and the way was clear for France to take control of Indochina. [255]
The decisive turning point was the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, which, like the war with the French, concerned China ’s influence over its tributary states, in this case Korea, which had for many centuries been one of the tributary states closest to China. The Chinese suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of its rapidly industrializing and increasingly aggressive neighbour and in the Treaty of Shimonoseki was forced to pay huge reparations, amounting to three times the government’s a
[242] Peter Nolan, China at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 134- 40.
[243] Ibid., pp. 130-34; Bin Wong, China Transformed, pp. 90–91.
[244] The nature of the tributary system, and its relationships, is discussed fully in Chapter 10.
[245] Ibid., pp. 93-5.
[246] Cohen, Discovering History in China , p. 16.
[247] Ibid., p. 18.
[248] Fairbank and Goldman, China, pp. 206- 12.
[249] Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, pp. 546-65;Spence, The Search for Modern China , pp. 171-80; Bin Wong, China Transformed, p. 155.
[250] Cohen, Discovering History in China , pp. 21, 29.
[251] Zheng Yangwen, ‘“Peaceful Rise of China ” After “Century of Unequal Treaties”? How History Might Matter in the Future’, pp. 2, 7, in Anthony Reid and Zheng Yangwen, eds, Negotiating Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009); Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 48. For good reason, in both Japan and China the treaties imposed by the foreign powers were known as the unequal treaties.
[252] Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 554.
[253] Bin Wong, China Transformed, pp. 89, 154; Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 234.
[254] Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, pp. 577-84.
[255] Spence, The Search for Modern China , p. 220.
[256] Ibid., p. 222; Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, p. 569.