Manchus and Han

Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928

Edward J. M. Rhoads

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295997483
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295997483

China's 1911–12 Revolution, which overthrew a 2000-year succession of dynasties, is thought of primarily as a change in governmental style, from imperial to republican, traditional to modern. But given that the dynasty that was overthrown—the Qing—was that of a minority ethnic group that had ruled China's Han majority for nearly three centuries, and that the revolutionaries were overwhelmingly Han, to what extent was the revolution not only anti-monarchical, but also anti-Manchu?

Edward Rhoads explores this provocative and complicated question in Manchus and Han, analyzing the evolution of the Manchus from a hereditary military caste (the "banner people") to a distinct ethnic group and then detailing the interplay and dialogue between the Manchu court and Han reformers that culminated in the dramatic changes of the early 20th century.

Until now, many scholars have assumed that the Manchus had been assimilated into Han culture long before the 1911 Revolution and were no longer separate and distinguishable. But Rhoads demonstrates that in many ways Manchus remained an alien, privileged, and distinct group. Manchus and Han is a pathbreaking study that will forever change the way historians of China view the events leading to the fall of the Qing dynasty. Likewise, it will clarify for ethnologists the unique origin of the Manchus as an occupational caste and their shifting relationship with the Han, from border people to rulers to ruled.

Winner of the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Modern China, sponsored by The China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies

1 / Separate and Unequal

Anti-Manchuism, narrowly defined as ethnic opposition among China’s Han majority toward the “alien” Manchus, figured prominently in the critique of the Manchus’ Qing regime in the years immediately following the antiforeign Boxer uprising of 1899–1900.¹ As Zou Rong (1885–1905), for example, complained in his pamphlet The Revolutionary Army (Gemingjun) of 1903, “Unjust! Unjust! What is most unjust and bitter in China today is to have to put up with this inferior race of nomads with wolfish ambitions, these thievish Manchus [Manzhouren], as our rulers.”² The revolutionaries, to be sure, were never narrowly or exclusively anti-Manchu. While “expulsion of the Tartar caitiffs” (quzhu Dalu) was the first of its stated goals, the revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui) in 1905 had three other, no-less-important objectives: revival of China, establishment of a republic, and equalization of land rights. Furthermore, the revolutionaries advanced numerous reasons other than ethnic opposition to justify ousting the ruling Manchus: they were incompetent; corrupt; oppressive and arbitrary; and, above all, incapable of defending China’s national interests against the rapacious foreign powers. Nevertheless, apart from and in addition to such criticisms, the revolutionaries time and time again asserted simply that the Manchus had to go because they were not “Chinese.”

But who, exactly, were the Manchus? They are often described as the descendants of the scattered Jurchen tribes in the northeastern frontier of China, bordering Korea, whom Nurhaci (1559–1626) began in the 1590s to unify and whom his son and successor Hong Taiji (1592–1643) renamed in 1635 “Manju” (“Manzhou” in Chinese). They were, in fact, a much broader, more heterogeneous group; they encompassed the total membership of the Eight Banners (Baqi), of whom the Manzhou were only one (though, admittedly, the core) group. Members of the system were known, collectively as well as individually, as “banner people” (qiren). Thus, the issue of Manchu identity is inextricably bound up with the Eight Banner system.

How valid were the revolutionaries’ criticisms of the Manchus as an alien people? To what extent and in what ways were the Manchus in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1912) separate and distinct from the Han, particularly in view of the 1865 edict cited by Mary Wright in The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism that purportedly had abolished most remaining differences between the two groups?

THE CASE AGAINST THE MANCHUS

Anti-Manchuism was a loud chorus among the young, revolutionary-minded intellectuals who gathered to study in Japan in the early post-Boxer years. Their immediate concern was the menace of imperialism. Following the multinational invasion of north China to suppress the Boxers and the Russian occupation of Manchuria in 1900, China seemed to be on the verge of being partitioned among the foreign powers. The perilous condition of their homeland could easily be blamed upon the Qing government, the Manchu court, and the Manchu people as a whole. An article in Enlightenment Journal (Kaizhilu) in 1900–1901 spelled out the link between anti-imperialism and anti-Manchuism: “People of our country speak daily of the shame of becoming the slaves of the foreigners, but they overlook the shame of being the slaves of the Manchus. They speak daily of expelling the foreign race but ignore the expelling of the foreign Manchu race [Manzhou zhi waizhong].”³

The most outspoken of the anti-Manchu critics in the early post-Boxer years were Zhang Binglin (1868–1936), Zou Rong, and Chen Tianhua (1875–1905). Zhang Binglin, the oldest and most persistent of the three, had been loosely associated with the radical reformers of 1898 and, like them, had had to flee China after the Hundred Days of Reform. He did not become a revolutionary until the summer of 1900, when, distressed by the empress dowager’s mishandling of the Boxer crisis, he published his first attack on the Manchus. In one of two statements written for China Daily (Zhongguo ribao), the newly founded organ of the Revive China Society (Xing-Zhong Hui) in Hong Kong, he announced that he had cut off his queue—thus severing his ties to the Qing dynasty—and explained why he had done so. Later on, as part of his assault on the monarchical reformers, he published other criticisms of the Manchus, such as a 1901 article on Liang Qichao (1873–1929) in the Tokyo Citizens’ News (Guominbao) and a 1903 Shanghai pamphlet on Kang Youwei (1858–1927). For his anti-Manchu writings, Zhang was arrested in 1903 in Shanghai as part of the Jiangsu News (Subao) censorship case. Following his release from prison in 1906, he joined forces with Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) in Tokyo and became editor of The People’s Journal (Minbao), the organ of Sun’s year-old revolutionary Alliance.⁴ Zou Rong, the second of the three chief anti-Manchu critics, was the author of The Revolutionary Army, which was published in 1903 in Shanghai as a pamphlet, with a laudatory preface by Zhang Binglin. Zou had written the tirade a year or two earlier while a student in Japan. Because of his unrestrained criticism of the Manchus, he too was arrested as part of the Jiangsu News case. He died in 1905, at twenty years of age, in prison. In part because of his youthful martyrdom, in the post-Boxer decade Zou’s The Revolutionary Army became the most widely circulated of the anti-Manchu writings.⁵ Finally, Chen Tianhua, who was Zou’s elder by ten years, was the author of two pamphlets, A Sudden Look Back (Meng huitou) and An Alarm to Awaken the Age (Jingshi zhong), both published in 1903 in Tokyo, where Chen had been studying for about a year. He subsequently, in 1905, joined Sun Yat-sen’s Alliance in Tokyo and wrote extensively for the first issue of The People’s Journal. Shortly afterward Chen committed suicide in protest against Japanese press reports that denigrated the patriotism of the Chinese students in Japan. His unfinished novel Lion’s Roar (Shizi hou) was published posthumously.⁶

The revolutionaries complained a great deal about the Manchus qua Manchus but seldom in a systematic fashion. Their condemnation of the Manchus, even in a tract so unremittingly hostile as The Revolutionary Army, was usually scattered throughout a broader condemnation of the Qing regime, one that criticized the Qing, for example, for being corrupt, oppressive, or incapable of standing up to the imperialists. However, a sampling of the revolutionary literature of the early post-Boxer years shows that their critique of the Manchus may be summarized in a seven-point indictment. The specifics come largely from the writings of Zou Rong, Chen Tianhua, and Zhang Binglin, supplemented by other publications of the period. Except for Chen’s novel Lion’s Roar, all of these sources appeared prior to the formation of the Alliance in mid-1905.⁷

The Seven-Point Indictment against the Manchus

First, the Manchus were an alien, barbarian group who were different from the Chinese and did not belong in China. “Why do I find fault with the Manchu people [Manzhouren]?” Zhang Ji asked bluntly in the Jiangsu News in 1903. “Because China belongs to the Chinese people [Zhongguoren].”⁸ This stance was what distinguished the anti-Manchu revolutionaries from the anti-imperialist reformers, whose foremost concern was to exclude the imperialist powers (and not necessarily the Manchus) from China; so far as the reformers were concerned, the Manchu rulers were no less “Chinese” than their subjects. For revolutionaries such as Zhang Ji, the Manchus most definitely were not “Chinese” and they had no more right to be in China than the imperialists had.

The revolutionaries differentiated the Manchus from themselves terminologically in two ways. One was to refer to them by epithets traditionally applied to the various “barbarians” on the periphery surrounding China’s civilized core. Thus, Zou Rong asserted,

What our compatriots today call court, government, and emperor, we used to call Yi, Man, Rong, and Di [barbarians of the east, south, west, and north] as well as Xiongnu and Dada. Their tribes lived beyond Shanhaiguan and fundamentally are of a different race from our illustrious descendants of the Yellow Emperor. Their land is barren; their people, furry; their minds, bestial; their customs, savage.⁹

Other labels of a similar sort that were commonly used to designate and denigrate the Manchus were “Donghu” (Eastern Barbarians), which Zhang Binglin often used, and “Dalu,” as in the Alliance membership oath, which combined “Dada” (Tartar) with lu (caitiffs), an archaic term used in the Northern Song period to refer to the Khitan.¹⁰ As for the corresponding terms of self-reference, those revolutionaries who equated the Manchu “other” with barbarians generally identified themselves as “Chinese,” which they usually rendered, as Zhang Ji did, as “Zhongguoren” or, as Liang Qichao had done in his 1898 China Discussion commentary, as “Zhina” or “Zhinaren,” from the Chinese reading of “Shina,” the prevalent Japanese term in the Meiji era for China.¹¹ Interestingly, they hardly ever referred to themselves as “Hua” and/or “Xia,” the traditional terms for the people of the civilized central core when they were being contrasted with the barbarians of the periphery.

The other way the revolutionaries differentiated the Manchus from themselves was by drawing upon the imported doctrine of social Darwinism, which Liang Qichao had helped to introduce. According to their understanding of those teachings, as exemplified in Chen Tianhua’s Lion’s Roar, the world’s population was divided, on the basis of location and skin color, among five large racial groups (zhongzu), or peoples: yellow, white, black, brown, and red; and each of these five peoples was in turn divided into a number of races (zu) and further subdivided into yet smaller groupings such as ethnic groups (minzu) and tribes. Thus, for example, the white people, living in Europe and North America, were made up of three races: Aryans, Teutons, and Slays. Similarly, according to Zou Rong, the yellow people, in East and Southeast Asia, were composed of two races (renzhong): those of China (Zhongguo) and those of Siberia. The Chinese race included the Han (Hanzu)—with Koreans and Japanese as subgroups of the Han—as well as Tibetans and Vietnamese; the Siberian race included the Mongols, Turks, and Tungus, with the Manchus (Manzhouren) as a subgroup of the Tungus.¹² Chen Tianhua generally referred to the Manchus as “Manzhouren,” but for Zou Rong and many others, the usual term was “Manren,” which Liang Qichao had popularized. The most widely used corresponding term of self-reference in this instance was, again following Liang Qichao, “Hanren.” Chen Tianhua, in Lion’s Roar, thus rephrased Zhang Ji’s slogan: “China belongs to the Han people [Hanren].”¹³ The term “Hanzu,” which is how the Han are classified today in the People’s Republic, was seldom used; even more rare was the correlative term “Manzu” for the Manchus. The range of terms that were used to identify Manchus and Han and their relative frequency of use will become clear in the course of this study.

Second, the Manchus had committed a number of heinous crimes against the Chinese people, particularly in the course of their conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. Their barbarous actions marked the Manchus as the ancestral enemies of the Han, and though those deeds happened a long time ago, they demanded to be avenged. The worst of such crimes were the savage massacres of defenseless civilians at various cities in central and south China as the Manchus marched through in 1645. Citing the recently reprinted chronicles of the slaughter at Yangzhou and Jiading (both in Jiangsu), Zou Rong claimed that the Manchu troops had been “let loose, burning and plundering” and that “wherever the cavalry of the thievish Manchus [Manren] reached, there was murder and pillage.” Nor, according to Zhang Binglin in 1903, were these atrocities attributable to only a few individual Manchu commanders; instead, every Manchu person had been responsible and thus culpable. Therefore, “when the Han race [Hanzu] wants revenge against the Manchus [Manzhou], they want revenge against their entire group.”¹⁴

Third, the Manchus had barbarized China by imposing their savage customs upon their Han subjects. Unlike previous foreign conquerors of China who had assimilated the ways of the Chinese, the Qing had forced the Han to adopt their alien Manchu customs, notably their male hairstyle and their official dress. As Zou Rong noted indignantly,

When a man with a braid and wearing barbarian clothes loiters about in London, why do all the passersby cry out [in English], “Pig-tail” or “Savage”? And if he loiters about in Tokyo, why do all the passersby say, “Chanchanbotsu” [lit., “a slave with a tail”]? Alas, the dignified appearance of the Han official has vanished utterly; the dress instituted by the Tang has gone without a trace! When I touch the clothes I wear, the hair on my head, my heart aches! . . . Ah, these queues, these barbarian clothes, these banner gowns [qipao], these peacock feathers, these red hat buttons, these necklaces. Are they the costume of China’s cultural tradition, or are they the loathsome dress of the nomadic and thievish Manchus [Manren]?¹⁵

Fourth, the Manchus had set themselves up as a privileged minority separate from and superior to the Han. According to Zou Rong, “Although it has been over two hundred years, the Manchus stick with the Manchus and the Han stick with the Han; they have not mingled. Clearly there is a feeling that a lower race does not rank with a noble one.” That is, the Manchus did not consider the Han their equal. As an example of the continuing failure of Manchus and Han to intermix, Zou referred to the provincial garrisons, where Manchus stationed in various major cities lived in their own quarters and were residentially segregated from the Han. Chen Tianhua, in Lion’s Roar, cited a ban on intermarriage as another device by which Manchus kept apart from Han. The revolutionaries, furthermore, claimed that the Manchus, from their own separate world, lorded over and indeed lived off the Han. Echoing Liang Qichao’s earlier criticism, Chen Tianhua, in A Sudden Look Back, charged, “They require that the inhabitants of the eighteen provinces collectively provide for their five million people. But up to now they themselves have not farmed or labored. All they do is sit and feed off the Han people [Hanren]. Is this not absolutely hateful?”¹⁶

Fifth, the Manchus subjugated the Han in the manner of a foreign military occupation. They maintained their domination over the Han by keeping their banner soldiers separate and concentrating them in a few strategic places around the country. Chen Tianhua, in Lion’s Roar, commented on the careful thought the early Qing rulers had given to the placement of their troops:

Aware that the Jurchen, by being dispersed, had opened themselves to be killed by the Han [Hanren], they took the several million Manchus [Manzhouren] that they had brought to China and stationed one-half of them in Beijing, where they are called the “palace guard” and the other half in the provinces, where they are called “provincial garrisons” [zhufang].

Zou Rong drew attention to the term used for these provincial encampments:

Suppose we try to explain the meaning of the term zhufang. It is as if they are terrified and are constantly fearful lest the Han people [Hanren] rebel against them, and so they hold them in check like bandits. Otherwise, whom are they defending [fang] against? And why do they need to be stationed [zhu] somewhere?

The obvious intent of these provincial garrisons, as a Jiangsu News article in 1903 summed up, was “to...