Imperial China

10 Key excerpts on "Imperial China"

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  War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900-1795

  • Peter Lorge(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  The traditional Chinese state (after 221 bce) has not been commonly characterized as martial or even imperial in the sense that it encompassed diverse lands and peoples who did not share its culture. It has most usually been portrayed as a civil-oriented bureaucracy, staffed by scholar-officials who qualified for their positions by passing rigorous exams, dominated by Confucian beliefs, and held together at the most basic level by a common Han Chinese culture which spanned most of the Chinese ecumene.3 While this picture is substantially correct in its particulars, it is incomplete and does not explain how the Chinese empire was repeatedly reconstituted in the last millennium of imperial history. By contrast, empires were more sporadic in South Asia, as shown by the Mauryan (322–184 bce), Gupta (320–550 ce) and Mughals (1526–1857);4 or in Europe, where, after the Romans, no one was able to build an empire of comparable territorial or cultural span for the lifetime of even a single conqueror. Rather than attempt to explain why South Asians and Europeans were so inept at South Asian and European empire building respectively, I will attempt to explain instead why the Chinese, Mongols and Manchus were so skilled at Chinese empire building.

  First and foremost, all of the successful imperial Chinese dynasts were extremely skilled in the use of war in state formation and maintenance. Chinese empires were not created by the cultivation of virtue, a fundamental cultural orientation to political order, or ideological pleas for ethnic unity; they were created by decades of war and political strife. Organized violence was applied toward political goals intelligently and ruthlessly, with the targets of that violence almost exclusively the power elite, the men and women who held significant political, military, cultural or economic power. (The actual effects of that violence, however, fell most often upon the farmers and ordinary people in the path of armies.) Although this has been most apparent during the rule of “alien” conquerors like the Mongols or Manchus, it has been equally true of the Han Chinese dynasts as well. All imperial dynasties were conquest dynasties.

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  Renewal

  The Chinese State and the New Global History

  • Wang Gungwu(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • The Chinese University of Hong Kong

    (Publisher)

  It is easy to show that the area marked on the map of China today is, and has been, home to several em-pires and many tribes, ethnicities, nations and proto-nations. On the ground, it is just as easy to refer to different Chinese communities, societies and cultures and to open up the question as to who are the people to be included when we talk about the Chinese. The ideal of a world history that is universal and embedded in civilization is something that Chinese can accept. Chinese think-ers, mainly represented by generations of Confucian literati, have claimed that their ideas are universal and that claim can provide the basis for envisioning the broad sweep of human history. Ancient ideas about a cosmic order that was displayed through moral au-thority were meant to explain what makes us human. Thus the big-picture historians, from Sima Qian and Ban Gu of the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) to the likes of Liu Zhiji in the seventh to eighth centuries, Sima Guang in the eleventh century and Zhang Xuecheng in the eighteenth, 9 were comfortable in portraying a China-based universalism that was embodied in the world as they knew it. Each in his own way expressed a vision of that universalism through the word tianxia , a concept that first referred to the realm of the moral and civilized world. When history is seen as a process of constant change tied to the power and wealth of tribes, kingdoms, empires and states, it is also something that Chinese can understand. Chinese historians have always seen China’s history as a record of efforts by rulers to bring 10 | RENEWAL order out of anarchy, including efforts that contributed to civiliza-tion. If kingdoms and empires fought endlessly without some vision of an ideal order, the results would undermine faith in any kind of universalism. The Chinese saw the need for a stable centre. They conceived of the idea of Zhongguo ( 中國 , central state) as a political order that also served as the source of moral authority.

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  The Cambridge History of China: Volume 9, The Ch'ing Dynasty to 1800, Part 2

  • Willard J. Peterson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part One of Volume 9, which has the subtitle The Ch'ing empire to 1800, includes assessments of the four individuals who reigned as the Ch'ing emperor /huang-ti/ khan from 1644 to 1795. “Empire” is routinely used to characterize the territories that came under the Ch'ing government’s control. Whether we think of empire with the negative implications that the term has acquired in historiography from the twentieth century on, or as a con- ventional translation of the long-standing, positive Chinese term t'ien-hsia, all under Heaven, there are three problematic aspects to be noticed when we consider the historical developments antecedent to the Ch'ing dynasty’s “empire.” The first problematic aspect is that there was no settled boundary, not even the Pacific shore, for the territorial limits of the succession of empires treated in The Cambridge history of China volumes. They cannot be regarded together as constituting a single empire under a succession of different dynastic names, even though by convention they are all referred to as “China” in the titles of the volumes. The boundaries of the areas controlled under the Han dynasties of the two Liu families (see Volume 1), under the T'ang dynasty of the Li family (see Volume 3), under the Sung of the Chao family (see Volume 5), and under the Ming dynasty of the Chu family (see Volume 7) had significant differences in every direction. The capitals of these five dynastic families were in different places. The origins and backgrounds of the five families were radically different. On the other hand, each of these five empires ruled populations of roughly fifty million persons or more. (By late Ming the population of the empire was in the range of two hundred million.) They each adopted the rhetorical claims entailed by using the title huang-ti (emperor) and t'ien-hsia (all under Heaven, or empire). They each contributed to the evolving technology of governance using imperial institutions.

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  Rise of the Revisionists

  Russia, China, and Iran

  • Gary Schmitt(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • AEI Press

    (Publisher)

  Moreover, the CCP now openly celebrates China’s imperial past. Xi announced his new national plans at the national museum that now proudly exhibits China’s imperial history:

  The “revival” narrated in the museum exhibit is also built on a new kind of memory of China’s imperial past (from roughly 221 BCE to 1911). In the Mao era, China’s long dynastic history was usually denigrated as a time when the Chinese people suffered under the yoke of feudalism and the aristocratic, land-owning class—in league with the ruling imperial houses—oppressed the peasants. Today, this Maoist view of the imperial past has been replaced with a much more positive and lustrous image that reflects China’s new global, “imperial” aspirations in the present . . . what is being “revived” in China today is the greatness and ancient glory of China’s past lost to Western and Japanese imperialism. The restoration of Confucianism . . . both in Party and popular discourse, parallels this revisionist view of the imperial past.

  7

  What Is the Imperial Past? The Height of Chinese Power

  To understand what the CCP is attempting to reclaim, one must understand China at the height of its power. Modern China’s boundaries are loosely based on those established at the peak of the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1636 until 1911. The Qing dynasty was founded by the Manchus, a nomadic tribal people from the Asiatic steppe, who toppled the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), reconquered lost Ming lands, and expanded the Chinese empire.

  To expand outward from the Han heartland, successive emperors mounted military campaigns. Kangxi, the first great Manchu/Qing emperor, pushed the empire north, establishing new borders with Russia, fighting the Mongols, and stationing troops in Tibet.

  China had the unique ability to “Sinify” both peripheral territories and its own invaders, such as the Manchus. The Manchu ruling elite maintained a distinct identity from the Han Chinese, but they also adopted important dimensions of traditional Chinese political culture. They did this in part to pacify the majority Han population and in part because the Confucian political-social structure seemed an efficient means to rule an empire.

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  China's Development

  Capitalism and Empire

  • Michel Aglietta, Guo Bai(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  3 and even potential foreign intrusions were contained most of the time. The claim of the emperor over the whole territory was absolute. And that was not just any territory. The imperial Chinese territory had no borders: it can be every inch of soil “under the heaven.” In the Chinese perception, whenever the Chinese government succeeded in incorporating a territory into the political and cultural order of Imperial China, it was considered part of the country. And, once it was integrated, the emperor would be the ultimate owner of this piece of land. This concept rooted out the possibility of unrestricted independent power of any locality, especially toward the later stages of the empire. In the early eras of Imperial China, central government still faced serious threats from overwhelmingly powerful localities. Some of them even enjoyed recognition from the central government. Han Gaozu, for example, rewarded his old comrades with large territories to govern. In the Tang dynasty, military towns also enjoyed strong autonomy. But, as imperial institutions evolved to their maturity, these cases became rarer over time. In the year 969, the first emperor of the Song dynasty eliminated the power of all the generals of the remaining autonomic military towns over a banquet. After that, independent local authorities in China totally died out.

  The emperor also had total control over taxation. No one else had the legal capacity to impose formal fiscal claims. Throughout Imperial China, fiscal revenue depended mostly on agricultural and poll taxes. In the later period the monopoly of salt also brought in considerable income. The composition of fiscal income reflects the agrarian economy of Imperial China as well as the political intention of the ruling house. Anchoring farmers as the major providers of fiscal revenue posed the least political threats to the emperor’s regime. Scattered, organically organized, small land-owning families had much less possibility of challenging the central regime than magnate families that possessed concentrated wealth and power. To illustrate this point, the European states could serve as a perfect counter-example. Confronted with continuous fiscal shortage because of heavy military expenditures, European states tended to seize as much fiscal resources as they could. However, as local aristocrats or clergies usually claimed land, agricultural tax collection was not always effective. Hence the ruling houses of Europe frequently relied on commercial taxes or fell prey to public debts. The result was either the loss of political independence of their regimes to the urban bourgeoisie and financiers, or endless expansion for new unclaimed resources. Chinese rulers suffered from neither of these outcomes. Even when China suffered fiscal crises, the government could still largely maintain the structure of its fiscal revenue. Thanks to the relatively small burden of military spending, Chinese royal houses were usually able to solve the problem of fiscal deficiency by shrinking expenditures. The most frequently applied measures included cutting administrative costs and subsidies for the royal family, as well as suspending large-scale constructions. Higher taxes would also be imposed in times of financial difficulty. Owing to an effective bureaucratic system and firm control over land, the imperial Chinese governments more or less succeeded in meeting their financial needs under such a land-based tax regime. The Song dynasty might be an exception. With constant military threats from the north, the Song dynasty relied on commercial sources, which provided over half of its administration’s fiscal income (Wong 1997

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  The Ambivalence of Creation

  Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China

  • Michael J. Puett(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4

  The Creation of Empire: The Emergence and Consolidation of Imperial Rule in China

  In 221 B.C. the state of Qin overtook Qi, the last of the remaining states, and created the first unified empire in Chinese history. This was the culmination of a lengthy process that had started with the reforms of Shang Yang in the mid-fourth century B.C. and continued through the gradual growth of Qin economic and military power over the course of the third century B.C. Nonetheless, upon declaring the formation of a new dynasty, the Qin chose to emphasize the moment as a point of rupture—of radical discontinuity from the past. And although the Qin empire would in the end last for only fourteen years, the institutions forged by the first emperor would ultimately have tremendous longevity. Indeed, by the time empire became successfully consolidated under the reign of Wudi (r. 141—87) of the following Han dynasty, the state to a large degree resembled that which had been initially created by the Qin.

  During this period, from the first emperor’s establishment of empire to the consolidation by Han Wudi, the debates traced in the previous two chapters intensified. Did imperial institutions mark a radical break from the past? If so, in what ways, if any, could be they be considered legitimate? In this debate, the arguments that had developed over the previous two centuries were invoked and reworked with a greater sense of immediacy and urgency—by figures at the imperial court and by those outside it. Ultimately, the voices favoring imperial centralization won and formed an imperial ideology.

  The Creation of Empire: The Qin Dynasty

  After 221 B.C., the Qin expanded the state system that had developed over the previous century and a half to rule over all of China. The Qin divided all of its lands into a system of commanderies under the direct control of the central court, formalized a universal legal code, and greatly expanded both the power of the state and the area of its domination. In direct contrast to the decentralized kingdom of the previous Zhou dynasty, the Qin created an empire.1

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  China from Empire to Nation-State

  • Hui Wang, Wang Hui, Michael Gibbs Hill(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Looking at the larger trends, however, this type of multipolar state of affairs was not at all stable. Beginning in the seventeenth cen-tury, the process of empire building contained tensions between forces for diversity and uniformity, but the process toward the convergence of systems was nonetheless a long-term trend. The multiple centers of impe-rial power were expressed in two major ways: first, in areas occupied by Han Chinese, the Qing government continued to employ the version of China’s Modern Identity and the Transformation of Empire 125 centralized administration ( junxian) used during the Ming dynasty. In these areas, the central government held absolute authority, but this au-thority did not penetrate into the foundational level of society, as patrilin-eal clans and rural gentry continued to play extremely important roles throughout the Qing. 23 Second, during the Qing, the order of subordina-tion and relationship of lord and vassal (chenfu guanxi) between the em-peror on the one hand and Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, and southwestern tribal states on the other was established within a multicentered frame-work of power, in which the former (the emperor) had no right to inter-fere directly in the latter’s internal affairs. At the same time, the latter could maintain their own unique laws, religious faiths, and right to self- determination. The disintegration of the patrilineal clans and rural gen-try is even more closely related to the Taiping Rebellion and modern nation-building movements in the nineteenth century.

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  Chinese Visions of World Order

  Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics

  • Ban Wang(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  30 * Lewis and Hsieh imperial project. The grand narrative of China’s modern historiography depicts the Han state, established in 202 bce in East Asia, as a well-delineated block of territory ruled by a people called Chinese. These Chinese people fought along their northern border with another people from the steppe called the Xiongnu and conquered peoples in the Tarim Basin. The narrative also makes the unexamined assumption that little change has occurred since that time, so that the Han Empire can be regarded as the prototype of modern China. It attributes at least two modern concepts to the East Asia of the second century bce: one people governs one state, and states are mutually exclusive in both political and ethnocultural terms. Consequently, this narrative assumes that both the core people and the core region of the Han state can be treated as a coherent unit that remained largely unaffected by its interaction with outsid-ers, and that this unit is fundamentally identical to the later Chinese state. The late imperial adoption of “Han” as a rubric for the newly invented ethnic group that supposedly defined a Chinese nation-state facilitated this conflation of the two realms. Our research challenges this narrative and the ideology on which it is based, rejecting the received national narrative on two grounds. First, by conflating without question the organizing principles of ancient empires with modern nation-states, we lose the capacity to fully explore the nature of the Han state and imperial power. Second, the modern narrative depends upon ignoring sub-stantial amounts of material preserved in the two Han chronicles, Shi ji ( 史記 ) and Han shu ( 漢書 ) . In this chapter, we aim to demonstrate that the Han Empire, and those that followed it, was something quite different from a modern nation-state, and that the Han polity as an imperial form can be usefully analyzed in terms of the category tianxia .

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  Market in State

  The Political Economy of Domination in China

  • Yongnian Zheng, Yanjie Huang(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Economic prosperity also led to the development of trade and commerce and a concentration of private wealth. 37 Mean- while, the imperial state was increasingly marginalized in economic life, with its ideological and moral foundations in a state of crisis. Wang Mang’s efforts could be considered as attempts to bring the state back in on an unprecedented scale. The reform was also consequential for later developments in the next few centuries. As Wang Ming’s failure highlighted the emperor’s limited ability to enforce radical Confucian doctrines, emperors of the later Han chose to coopt rather than confront the increasingly potent locally based elite family clans, leaving the grassroots markets and households in the hands of local magnates. As the institution of the emperor declined, the late Han central government was frequently captured by powerful family clans and eunuchs’ cliques. This was paralleled by the decline of local fiscal organizations, as the landowning class captured most of the agrar- ian economy’s surplus and reduced most imperial subjects to private dependents. 38 35 Ibid., pp. 628–230. 36 Ibid., p. 632. 37 Ibid., pp. 601–605. 38 Hsu Choyun, Han Agriculture: The Formation of China’s Agrarian Economy (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1980), pp. 152–153. The State and Market in Imperial China 155 As the late Han state finally collapsed, China entered a period of disunity, punctuated by only a short period of unification under the Jin Empire (265–317 AD). This long period of territorial fragmentation is often termed the Chinese Medieval Age (200–750 AD). 39 Despite the rise and fall of several dynastic houses, the imperial state was never able to unify and integrate the territory politically, nor to exercise full control over the economy. Constant interstate wars and a lack of central authority continued for about three centuries (320–580 AD). In many parts of Northern China, a state of depopulation and destruction prevailed for centuries.

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  The First Emperor of China

  • Li Yu-Ning(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction The long history of China has produced many outstanding rulers, but few as significant as Ch'in Shih-huang, the first emperor of China. When he ascended the royal throne of Ch'in as King Cheng in 246 B.C., the territory of China was divided among several rival kingdoms, the last of a large number of states which had been engaged in almost uninterrupted warfare for centuries. Through a combination of warfare, diplomacy, and intrigue, King Cheng successively annihilated the rival six states, destroying the last in 221 B.C. After unifying All un­ der Heaven, he put an end to the feudal system based on he­ reditary titles and landholding and established a centralized, bureaucratic government in its place. He also unified the cur­ rency, the system of weights and measures, cart axles, and the written language. He created the title Emperor (Huang-ti), which was used by all subsequent rulers of the Chinese empire, and declared himself the First Emperor of Ch'in (Ch'in Shih- huang-ti) as an expression of his hope that his dynasty would last forever. And although the Ch'in state crumbled within only fifteen years, the foundations which he had laid persisted, with various modifications, over two millennia. In traditional Chinese historiography, Ch'in Shih-huang was usually portrayed as a brutal tyrant, inhumanely impressing hundreds of thousands of people into forced labor to fulfill his grandiose ambitions and ruthlessly enforcing political and ide­ ological uniformity to secure control over the minds and actions of everyone within the empire. The Confucian historians of xiii xiv FIRST EMPEROR OF CHINA China's past condemned the Legalist emperor who had burned the classics and buried Confucian scholars alive. The few writ­ ers who had words of praise for the man who had unified China and created the imperial system tended to be mavericks, and their influence on the conventional view was minimal.

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