Ever since the 1940s, the minority
rule question has haunted Qing historians.
How did the Manchus, who were outnumbered by the Hans by about three
hundred and fifty to one, manage to conquer China and then succeed in ruling
for nearly three hundred years? What
are the implications that the Manchus, a Tungusic people distinct from the
Hans, ruled during this crucial phase of Chinese history? This question has been debated for a long
time. In 1942, Franz Michael introduced
the argument that the organization and ideology of the early Manchu state
reflected that of the Chinese empire and that it was the Chinese officials who
enabled the Manchu to conquer China. In
1949, the counterargument of Feng Jiasheng and Wittfogel of the Altaic school
appeared, arguing that that there was a social and cultural “symbiosis” whereby
Manchus could not be assimilated simply by acquiring Han lands.
The debate has continued over the
past several decades. At the end of
1990s, it reoccupied
the center of the Asian studies field with renewed vigor, initiated by Evelyn
Rawski in her presidential address at AAS in 1996. This address was plainly targeted at Ho Ping-ti’s sinicization
theory explaining Qing success in empire building thirty years before. According
to Richard Madsen, any good sociological work is the result of the triangular
dialogue among social theories, the objects they study, and the general
convictions of the time period (35).
Historical works bear the same traits.
To put it more concretely, researchers are bound by their theoretical
knowledge of reality and also by their own constructions and convictions of the
world, i.e., their world views.
Moreover, researchers’ conclusions can be limited by the characteristics
of their research objects and the devices employed in their research. Since any historical study is not just about
accumulating materials but also involves building upon a given perspective, it
is impossible to claim that any book is free from preconception. In this paper, I shall examine the
approaches of three different generations of scholars that have addressed the
minority rule question. From their
divergent approaches, one can see how much the history field has been
influenced and shaped by ever-changing academic trends.
The Hegemony of the
Sinicization School, 1950s-1970s: Mary Wright and Ho Ping-ti
The
dominant theory from the 1950s onwards was the sinicization school, which
argued that Manchus maintained their position by sponsoring neo-Confucian norms
of government, which won them the support of the wealthy, lettered Han elite
essential for their political survival.
After 1800, the distinction between Manchu and Han had disappeared and
it was unimportant that it was a Manchu minority dynasty facing western
imperialism.
The
sinicization school’s huge influence was attributable to the solid foundation
laid by Mary Wright. In The Last
Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-Chih Restoration, 1862-1874,
Wright argues that from 1862 to 1870 a group of extraordinarily talented
Manchus and Hans “rallied around the discredited throne with virtually
unanimous loyalty (7)” to briefly restore the vigor and effectiveness of a
dynasty in fatal decline. This effort secured
societal peace and prosperity and the survival of the Qing ruling house for
another fifty years. Wright attributes
this miracle to the Manchu and Han conservatives who sincerely believed
in the “Confucian” doctrine of government and acted to solve this crisis
through its revival.
Wright’s
writing revised Republican era scholarship that had fixed the blame for China’s
troubles on the Manchus, implying that the interests of the Manchu court and
the Han Chinese were dissimilar and that the court “sacrificed the people for
the dynasty.” To refute this
accusation, Wright argues for a Manchu-Han synthesis. She established that the Qing had failed in its attempt to
preserve a Manchu homeland in the Northeast; instead, Manchus had melded into
the general Han populace. She shows
that after the middle of the nineteenth century the court had stopped pursuing
its earlier objective of legislating Manchu isolation. Further, the racial animosities that had
spawned Manchu and Han factions eroded away during the Taiping Rebellion,
because it exposed the cultural outlook and political interests shared by
Manchu and Han elites. The result was
that while suppressing the rebellion, Manchus and Han had become virtually
indistinguishable, united to reestablish China’s stability, sovereignty and
prosperity.
Highly
influential and well-supported though her arguments were, Wright’s ideas were
still bound by the social theories and general
convictions of her time. In North America, especially
in the 1950s and 1960s, the prevailing belief was in western-style modernization,
which advocated industrialization, a market economy, and a nation-state. Amongst researchers of China, that lacked
much information about its internal diversity and based much of their
scholarship on Confucian classics and several anthropological studies, China’s
portrayal was always as an entity which was bound by Confucian structure and
tradition. The
stereotyped image of a “Confucian China” and the countervailing western
modernization trend were so powerful that they together formed a sharp
dichotomy of the “modern” west and “traditional” China. Due to this dichotomy, internal ethnic diversity and
incongruence were obscured.
Consequently, according to a cultural rationale, the failure of China’s
striving for Western wealth and power after the Opium War was ensured because
the “requirements for a modern state run directly counter to the requirements
of the Confucian order” (312).
The
sinicization argument was expressed more forcefully in Ho Ping-ti’s 1967
article, “The Significance of the Ch’ing Period in Chinese History.” In this article, Ho lists five reasons
demonstrating the significance of the Qing Dynasty: geographic expansion,
demographic expansion, a successful government run by conquerors, the maturity
of its political, economic, and social institutions, and its phenomenal
material culture and art. Moreover, he
attributes the success of the Qing to its systematic sinicization policy (Ho a,
191). In the article, Ho uses the term
sinicization in a very loose and favorable way, for example, adopting Han
political institutions also meant “becoming Chinese,” which expanded the scope
of sinicization and helped prove his conclusion (Ho a, 192).
Though
very subtle, one still notices the impact of Ho’s own ideology on his writing of
Qing history. He was bound by a
contemporary consensus on history writing that gave precedence to the
nation-state and also by his conviction of Han dominance. By comparing the Qing with all the dynasties
that had occupied China proper, Ho has introduced his implicit ideology, that
of a continuous China in which the Qing are just one chronologic stage. However, such a presumption is actually a
nationalist invention since “it was not until the rise of nationalism that
history was written as a seamless narrative of one realm, the territory of the
modern state” (Rawski, 841).
Nevertheless, in 1967, when almost every contemporary Chinese historian
projected China’s past in terms of its 1911 borders and thought of modern China
as the natural heir of the Qing, Ho was never challenged. It was only thirty years later that his
claim that “all non-Han people who have entered the Chinese realm have
eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture” faced severe challenges from
critics of Han nationalism.
Challenges
and Debates, 1980s-1990s: Crossley and Rawski vs. Ho Ping-ti
Pamela
Crossley tells us that though it is fashionable today in Qing studies to point
out how significant the Northeastern heritage is for understanding the
political style, social milieu and cultural vigor of the Qing Dynasty, it used
to be extremely difficult in the 1970s when she started graduate school. It was a time when the fad was to brush
aside any questions of Manchu culture or language as having little importance
both before and after its conquest of China.
Discourse was awash with ideas like sinicization, which “is hopelessly
vague and unapologetically stamped with the prejudices and assumptions of
Chinese nationalist scholarship” (i).
However,
new academic trends encouraging writing histories of the underprivileged
developed. As one of the ‘hegemonizing’
histories, sinicization came to be suspected of masking other narratives. Moreover, theoretically, the newly developed
conceptual tools about identity which deconstructed the well-received
categories such as “nation” and “ethnicity,” also encouraged the deconstruction
of terms such as Han, Manchu, and Chinese.
In terms of historical sources, the reopening of Qing archives brought
about a new awareness of Manchu aspects of the Qing court. All these led to increasing discoveries of
the historical improbabilities underlying the conventional sinicization
model. A new paradigm was required.
Pamela
Crossley was a pioneer among scholars who rediscovered Manchu identity. In her dissertation-based book Orphan
Warriors, she looks at the journey of three eminent Manchus of the Suwan
Guwalgiya clan in Hangzhou and Zhapu garrison: Guancheng, his son Fengrui, and
his grandson, Jinliang. She challenges
Wright by arguing that “knowledge of life at the court sheds no light upon the
life of Manchu people in China” and demonstrating that Manchu identity in fact
survived beyond the fall of the dynasty and well into the twentieth century.
Crossley
traces the changes in Manchu identity and suggests that it was weak at first
and strengthened over time. In the
seventeenth century when the Eight Banners began to be formed, people were
classed as Manchu based on their cultural affinities, with little reference to
ancestors. By the eighteenth century,
the Qianlong court put a new emphasis upon genealogy and led to the creation of
new racialized identities for deciding who was and was not Manchu. An ethnic identity, according to Crossley,
emerged only in the late nineteenth century after the Taiping Rebellion when
Manchu communities in Nanjing and Hangzhou were slaughtered and the alienated
banner garrison communities scattered around China. The construction of a common Manchu identity was the result of
these newly marginalized groups and was further reinforced during the
Republican revolution in 1911.
In
Crossley’s writing, we can see the large impact of theoretical trends
represented by Benedict Anderson’s theory of the “imagined community.” Refusing to accept the static category
called “Manchu,” Crossley tries to see the Manchu identity as a matter of
self-perception, a personal statement regarding the relationship of the
individual to society which occurred despite the state no longer assigning
racial identities.
Crossley’s
and other new scholarship enabled Rawski to advocate a new paradigm in
understanding Qing history—a Manchu-centered view. Though agreeing with Ho Ping-ti on many aspects of the magnitude
of the Qing achievement, Rawski disagrees with him about the key to its
success. In contrast with the adoption
by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization argued by Ho
Ping-ti, Rawski believes that the key to Qing success, at least in terms of
empire building, lay in its ability to use its cultural links with the non-Han
peoples of Inner Asia and to differentiate the administration of the non-Han
region from the administration of the former Ming realm (831). In contrast to the view that the Han Chinese
literati dominated Qing government, Rawski finds that the conquest elite, composed
of banner nobles and imperial kinsmen, were superimposed upon the Han
bureaucracy. Moreover, Rawski argues
that the ability of the Manchus to bind warriors from a variety of cultural
backgrounds, by disseminating different images of rulership to various subject
people, differed significantly from Han precedents.
Radically,
Rawski points out that the reason for the wrongful sinicization interpretation
of Qing history was due to contemporary ideology, namely, nationalism. Thus, Ho Ping-ti’s portrayal of the Qing
period as a milestone along the path of China’s development as a nation-state
needs to be powerfully questioned and reevaluated in response to new scholarly
trends and research. The tendency to
conflate the Qing and China was debunked by scholars who viewed both ‘the
nation’ and ‘Hans’ as newly constructed concepts. Rawski maintains that Han identity dated from the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when scholars like Liang Qichao responded to the
European notion of race and claimed that Hans were the dominant yellow race,
initiators of civilization, and civilizers of all Asia (839). Thus, Rawski attacks the sinicization school
as a twentieth century Han nationalist interpretation of the Chinese past and
not as a historical process. Since
sinicization is only a nationalist ideology, it cannot be the reason for Qing
success in territorial expansion. The
reason can only be its hybrid origins and the way it drew on multiple sources
and adapted ideologies of rulership and administrative structures from the
cultures of subject people.
Rawski’s denial of the Han and sinicization as a real process infuriated Ho Ping-ti. In his “In Defense of Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski’s Reenvisioning the Qing,” Ho attacked Rawski for her “distortion” of his arguments and her misrepresentation of the international scholarship in a very unforgiving style.
Ho
is a “hopelessly” unconscious nationalist who will never try to understand the
ideological bias to his theory. His
tracing back of the Sinitic people to 9000 years ago and naming them the
culture precursors of China has been proven wrong by archeological findings
about the multiple origins of Chinese civilization. However, Ho was quite right that Rawski formed a false dichotomy. The multiethnic measures that the Qing
employed to govern Inner Asia could not explain how the Qing ruled China,
especially since governing China meant first and foremost developing the
capacity to rule China’s many millions.
Without putting the issue of how Manchus ruled the China proper in her
explanation, Rawski’s argument about the success of Manchu rule is severely
limited Also, Ho was clear that sinicization refers to acculturation. Thus, Rawski’s failure to recognize clearly
the cultural aspects of sinicization theory made her unable to effectively
refute Ho’s argument.
The Current
Neo-traditionalism: Mark Elliot’s Ethnic Sovereignty
Facing
the challenges of the sinicization school, Mark Elliot emerges in the Altaic
camp to straightforwardly respond to Ho Ping-ti’s challenge by looking at the way
that the Manchu governed China proper and by recognizing Han acculturation of
the Manchu people in the cultural sense.
In addition, Elliot is critical of the notion of the late beginnings and
limited influence of Manchu self-referential ethnicity, which according to
Crossley only appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century after the
Taiping. Instead, Elliot takes a
neo-traditional stand. Like Crossley,
Elliot insists that the notion of Manchu difference mattered throughout the
dynasty and that the Manchus were not in fact ever really absorbed or
assimilated. At the same time, he
argues that with the creation of the Eight Banners in the early seventeenth
century, the fundamental outlines of Manchu identity were already falling into
place; otherwise, it is easy to argue that there could not possibly have been
an ethnic discourse during the Qing making the concept of a Manchu-centered
approach pure fantasy.
When
explaining the reasons for Manchu success, Elliot believes that Qing dynastic enterprise
depended both on Manchus’ ability to adapt to Chinese political traditions and
on their capacity to maintain a separate identity. To be more concrete, the Qing claim to power, apart from its
Confucian underpinnings, rested on its domination as a separate people that
transcended either the narrow interests of the ruling family or simple
considerations of military dominance.
Elliot then proposes thinking of the second mode of Qing rule as a
separate sort of legitimatizing authority—“ethnic sovereignty.” This sovereignty includes three elements:
the special position of the Manchu emperor at the apex of a universal empire
composed of multiple hierarchies; the idea that alien conquest instilled fear
in the Hans; and the preservation of the cultural integrity of the
conquerors. All of these can be said to
maintain differentiation between conquerors and the conquered and was vital to
all Inner Asian dynasties’ domination over the Han people. The maintenance of this ethnic sovereignty
and Manchu identity, in Elliot’s hypothesis, was due to the Eight Banners,
which were the preeminent emblem of Manchu hegemony. Therefore, though unable to maintain the cultural framework upon
which Manchu mores rested, through the timely reform of the banner system, the
Qing court managed to save the institutional bulwark upon which Manchu identity
had come to depend.
Though
Elliot believes Manchu success was based on its separation from those it ruled,
he also recognizes that the Manchus were acculturated by the Hans. They conversed and wrote in Chinese, enacted
its cultural patterns and were gradually forgetting their own culture. To understand the Manchus obvious cultural
similarities and differences, Elliot proposes using the concept of ethnicity to
understand the identity of the Manchus.
Identity does not operate simply and it is not just determined by or
through culture; people do not conceive of themselves as belonging to
categories of either this or that. In
thinking about identity, ethnicity is a better conceptual tool than
sinicization because it is flexible and open to negotiation. Also, it enables us to understand Manchu
ethnic coherence in spite of apparent cultural disintegration and it allows us
to view identity in a broader context.
In contrast, the sinicization definition is misleading. First, adopting Han political institutions
did not make one a Han. Second, a term
like sinicization obscures the fact that being ‘Chinese’ changes over
time. Third, sinicization explains
something about how minorities ruled China, but it cannot explain
everything. Therefore, by acknowledging
both the reasonable aspects and the problems of sinicization theory, Elliot
treats the sinicization argument in the most convincing and constructive way.
Conclusion
As we have stated, researchers are
bound by their theoretical knowledge of reality and their own constructions and
convictions about of the world. For the first generation of
scholars discussed in this essay, the belief in an overarching contrast between
the West and China and the lack of a critical theory on nationalism, led to the
notion that interpreting history according to the development of the
nation-state is natural, and strongly influenced sinicization theories
explaining the success of the Qing. For
revisionist scholars in the 1980s, writing history about the unprivileged and
deconstructing the “totality” of nation helped them to challenge the current
conventional wisdom that gave primacy to the Han interpretation of Chinese
history. However, it was only another
decade later in the new millennium that scholars like Mark Elliot could retain
a neutral stand and reexamines the merits and ideas provided by the
sinicization school. He resumed the
previously dichotomized debate, started a real dialogue between them, and
recognized both the merits and shortcomings of both groups of scholars. The result of Elliot’s reflective
reexamination is the most comprehensive and refined understanding of Manchu
Rule. Moreover, we have seen that researchers’
conclusions were also limited by their research methods. Before the 1980s, the only sources that
historians could get were the published records of Han literati. The reopening of the archives in China,
especially the accessibility of the Manchu language sources, has greatly
enhanced scholars’ understanding of the various groups who lived in China. This forces scholars to rethink and redefine
China, Hans, nation and minorities at a whole new conceptual level.
As this review has shown, the issue
of the Manchu’s success has instigated profoundly opposing scholarly
arguments. The result has been a
sharpened and more sophisticated conceptual tool which explains reality much
better. In the end, I believe that for
academia, the process of conceptualization is more important, than the
conclusion that are discovered.
Crossley, Pamela K. Orphan
Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
________________.
A Translucent Mirror: History and
Identity in Qing Imperial ideology. Berkeley: University of California
Press: 1999.
________________.
Evelyn S. Rawski, “A Profile of The Manchu Language In Qing History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53,
no.1 (1993): 63-102.
Elliot,
Mark C. The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners
and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001.
Ho, Ping-Ti. “The significance
of the Ch’ing Period in Chinese History,”
Journal of Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (1967):189-195.
__________. “In Defense of
Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski’s ‘Reenvisioning the Qing’,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no.1
(1998): 123-155.
Madsen,
Richard. “Wudai Meiguo shehui xuezhe dui Zhongguo guojia yu shehui guanxi de
yanjiu.” In Gaige kaifang yu Zhongguo
shehui. Xianggang: Xianggang zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2002.
Rawski,
Evelyn S. “Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of
the Qing Period in Chinese History”
Journal of Asian Studies 55, no.4 (1996): 829-850.
Wright, Mary C. The Last
Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-Chih Restoration, 1862-1874.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.
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Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.