Unraveling of the Imperial Fabric

The overall Qing strategy of keeping each of its ancestral governments on its own bottom and dedicated to its own functions was effective during the period of expansion and conquest to 1757, but was unraveled by the challenges of permanent occupation.

The pressures weakening the distinctions of the governments came partly from the complexities of settling Eight Banner soldiers and their families within the civilian spaces of the Chinese provinces; from the exploitation of Mongolia, in which Chinese, Mongol, and Russian individuals and economic practices generated conflicts that were not easily resolved entirely within the Frontiers Department; from the administrative transitions of southern and southwest China from indirect rule to direct rule by the civil government; and from the increasing costs of military mobilization (due partly to corruption and partly to the actual increasing size of armies) through the eighteenth century. The result was that by the end of the eighteenth century the Ministry of Finance and the Grand Council were, with the imperial court itself, transcendent over the state's separate governments. Eight Banners administration had been parsed among the Ministry of War (bingbu), Ministry of Finance, and parts of the imperial inner bureaucracy. The Frontiers Department had lost some functions to both the Grand Council and the Ministry of War.

Before the mid-nineteenth century the empire had defeated a large number of interior uprisings. Some were civil actions against corrupt officials or abusive landowners. Some, such as the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796-1804 or the Xinjiang uprisings of the 1820s, had religious or ideological components. A few, such as the Jinchuan uprisings of the latter eighteenth century by Tibetans living in Sichuan province, were based on the discontent of cultural groups. In most cases the emperors settled on harsh suppression—even if it took years—combined with token recognition of grievances, but did not undertake the impossible task of rooting out the infrastructure of the rebellion.

It was, however, the Taiping War (1850-1864) which brought about the demise of Qing imperial organization. This challenge from a spreading movement fired by millenarian religious passions and a widespread loss of confidence in the imperial state was suppressed only by the devolution of military and financial decision-making to the provinces. Indeed it is not too much to say that the empire itself did not in any meaningful sense survive that war.

When the Taipings put together a movement with a strong infrastructure, an evolving system of centralized command, and a rich resource base by 1851, its uprisings spread quickly and experienced easy early victories against regional Eight Banner forces sent to suppress them. Loyalist forces were able to stop the Taipings in 1853 from advancing very much beyond the Yangtze River and contained them in the Nanjing environs for over a decade. But this success was not due to tightened centralization, command of new resources, or a quick search for new talent by the imperial court. Instead it was due to allowing local governors to select the most effective troops (including cavalry) from the Eight Banners and combine them with professionals from the Green Standard armies and a very large number of local mercenaries. In the process the remaining Banner garrison populations were even more neglected, the court awarded local civil governors unprecedented authority over military resources, and revenues were permitted to stay in the provinces, diverting them from the civil government and the imperial treasury.

In effect, the Taipings were defeated only by systematic dismemberment of the existing Qing regime; the delicate balance of its contrived three governments coordinated by a tiny imperial bureaucracy was destroyed by the Taiping challenge, and no initiative to centralize or regather initiative at the level of the imperial court arose. The three governments were gutted in the process of the regional governors' reorganization of resources on their own priorities.

And while political authority and financial decisions devolved away from the court, mounting debts to foreign allies in the war, particularly France and Britain, were ascribed directly to the court. By the end of the war in 1864, China had suffered a minimum of 20 million deaths (and perhaps twice that many), major cities of the Yangtze Delta were shambles, and cities such as Shanghai were suffering under the weight of desperate refugees. The civil government was permanently in debt, the imperial treasury was vastly diminished, and the court was politically dependent upon the goodwill and support of a generation of extremely powerful local governors for postwar reconstruction. A consortium of those governors sustained the court as a legal entity (important for recognition by foreign governments) and a point of moral symbolism until 1912. But the spreading desuetude of the empire's elemental governments after the Taiping War offers an index of the lack of viability of the Qing state as a diminutive and decentralized continental imperial government attempting to meet modern challenges both domestic and foreign.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Unraveling of the Imperial Fabric

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