Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...Falling tax revenues led to failures to pay the army promptly. Troop desertions encouraged border penetration by hostile tribes. A flow of silver from the West brought unexpected stresses in the Chinese economy. Poor state granary supervision and harsh weather conditions led to undernourishment and a susceptibility to pestilence among rural populations. Random gangs of the disaffected coalesced into armies whose only ideology was survival. By 1644 all of these elements combined in such a virulent fashion that the last Ming emperor committed suicide.

Those who brought order out of this chaos were... tribesmen from across China's northern frontiers who called themselves Manchus. Their victory was based on their success in forming a system of military and administrative units and the nucleus of a bureaucracy long before they were ready to conquer China. With these institutions in place, and with large numbers of surrendered or captured Chinese serving these tribesmen as political advisers, soldiers, craftsmen, and farmers, the Manchus were ready to seize the opportunity to invade China when it came in 1644....

The conquest of as vast a country as China could be achieved only by incorporating millions of Chinese supporters into the Manchu ranks, and by relying on Chinese administrators to rule in the Manchus' name.... Most Chinese accepted the new rulers because the Manchus promised... to uphold China's traditional beliefs and social structures. If the Manchu conquest had ever opened the possibility for social upheaval, it was soon over....

The main architect of the Qing consolidation was Emperor Kangxi, who reigned from 1661 to 1722... strengthened the institutions of rule that his Manchu forebears had tentatively designed... restoring an effective national examination system, improving the flow of state information through reliable and secret communications channels, attracting the support of potentially dissident scholars through state-sponsored projects, and easing the latent tensions between Manchus and ethnic Chinese in both government posts and society at large.... Although commerce and agriculture both flourished during his reign, they were not adequately taxed, a failure that became a permanent flaw of the dynasty....

With hindsight we can see that the Ming dynasty... was past its political peak by the early seventeenth century; yet in the years around 1600, China's cultural life was in an ebullient condition that few, if any, other countries could match.... The works of the short-story writers and the popular novelists... point to a new readership in the towns, to new levels of literacy, and to a new focus on the details of daily life... a growing audience of literate women.... _The Golden Lotus... the central character (who draws his income both from commerce and from his official connections) is analyzed through his relationships with his five consorts, each of whom speaks for a different facet of human nature.... A moral fable of... greed and selfishness... yet it also has a deeply realistic side, and illuminates the tensions and cruelties within elite Chinese family life as few other works have ever done....

For many these were indeed glorious days. As long as the country's borders remained quiet, as long as the bureaucracy worked smoothly, as long as the peasants who did the hard work in the fields and the artisans who made all the beautiful objects remained content with their lot—then perhaps the splendors of the Ming would endure....

Once the news of Emperor Chongzhen's suicide in Peking was confirmed, a group of senior Ming officials named the prince of Fu as his successor, and he was enthroned as "emperor" in the Yangzi River city of Nanjing.... Over the next few months, when the prince of Fu should have been preparing Nanjing's defenses, his court was torn by the bitter quarrels, recriminations, and inefficiencies that had so plagued Emperor Wanli, including internecine struggles for power between pro- and anti-eunuch factions....

While the Ming generals and senior officials bickered, a Manchu army advanced south down the line of China's great man-made inland waterway, the Grand Canal, and besieged the wealthy commercial city of Yangzhou.... The Ming troops... held out there for one week. But they were finally defeated by the superior cannon power and the remarkable courage of the Manchus, and the city was sacked for ten terrible days as a warning to the rest of China. The defenders of Nanjing, by contrast, put up almost no resistance, and the city surrendered to the Manchus in early June. The prince of Fu was captured and sent to Peking, where he died the following year....

The Manchus had seized Peking in 1644 with startling ease, and by 1662 had killed the last Ming claimants, but the succession of military victories did not mean that they had solved the problem of how to rule China. Dorgon... now had to adapt these institutions to the task of controlling a continent-sized country.... In most areas of governmental and intellectual organization, the Manchus were content to follow Chinese precedents. The six ministries... were retained intact, although the leadership of each ministry was placed in the hands of two presidents, one a Manchu and one a Chinese bannerman or a civilian Chinese.

A similar multiethnic dyarchy of four men (two Manchus and two Chinese) held the title of vice-president in each ministry.... The senior positions known as "grand secretaries" were also perpetuated. There were seven grand secretaries serving together in the early yearsof Shunzhi's reign: two were Manchu, two were Chinese bannermen, and three were former senior Ming officials who had recently surrendered. Accomplished Chinese scholars who offered their loyalty to the Manchus were given staff positions in the various ministries and in the Grand Secretariat.... The national examinationson the classical literary tradition were reinstituted in 1646....

Manchu power was spread very thinly over China's vast territory, and though the Qing established military garrisons in most of the key provincial cities, the new dynasty survived basically by maintaining a tenuous balance of power among three components of its state. First were the Manchus themselves... who had their own language and their own aristocratic rankings.... The Manchus tried to maintain their martial superiority through such practices as hunting and mounted archery; and they emphasized their natural cultural distinctness by using the Manchu spoken and written language. Though for practical reasons they had to let Chinese officials use Chinese for administrative documents, all important documents were translated into Manchu. The Manchus also kept to their own private religious practices... to which the Chinese were denied access.

Second came the other bannermen, both Mongol and Chinese, most of whom were from families that had surrendered well before the conquest of 1644.... It was the Chinese bannermen who played the greater part in ruling China. They had their own elaborate hierarchies, based partly on noble titles granted by Nurhaci or Hong Taiji and partly by the date on which they had surrendered.... Their support was invaluable... without these bannermen, there would probably have been no conquest and certainly no consolidation.

Third came the ethnic Chinese.... Some of them, like Wu Sangui, were active collaborators... some defied the Manchus as active resisters and died... some... chose passive resistance. But most, seeing the way the wind was blowing, passively collaborated with the new order.Those from wealthy backgrounds tried to make sure that they could hold on to their ancestral lands and, if successful, proceeded to enroll their sons in the state examinations and to apply for lucrative bureaucratic office....

In the south, the Manchus initially made no attempt to establish a strong presence. Instead, once the Ming claimants were dead, they let Wu Sangui and two other Chinese generals who had long before gone over to the Manchus administer the huge territories as virtually independent fiefdoms....

There was certainly an "upper class"... and the Manchus chose to perpetuate the system that they encountered when they conquered the country. Upper-class status came from an amalgam of four factors: wealth, lineage, education, and bureaucratic position.... Agricultural land... large amounts of silver ingots... large libraries of classical works, collections of paintings, jade, porcelain, bolts of silk, large homes, holdings in urban real estate, or interests in commercial ventures ranging from pawnshops to pharmacies Lineage... bound extended families together in a network of mutual support.... Marriages between the children of powerful lineages were carefully negotiated.... The dominant role of education in Qing China was the result of the power and prestige attached to holding office in the bureaucracy, entrance into which was governed almost entirely through competitive examinations run by the state. In normal times few people rose to high office via a military career, and fewer still just because their families had money or imperial connections.

Qing rulers perpetuated the Ming curriculum... based on memorization and analysis of a group of prescribed texts attributed to the sage Confucius, or to some of his early followers, and a small number of approved commentaries.... Classical Chinese... was different grammatically and structurally from the everyday spoken language. Hence if a family had the money to send their sons to a good teacher who had himself passed the higher examinations... their children had a better chance.... Finally, even though it might be risky to hold bureaucratic office in a faction-torn court, or in a countryside threatened by bandits or civil war, it was still possible in a few years of officeholding to make enough money from salary, perquisites, special fees, and perhaps outright graft to repay all the costs one had incurred in obtaining the position, and retain a hefty surplus to invest in more land and in educating one's own children. Furthermore, the mere fact of prior membership in the bureaucracy was enough to bring a measure of protection from other local officials whom one could meet as social equals after retiring and returning home to enjoy the fruits of one's labors....

The Oboi regents might employ intimidation or force to coerce the local gentry of Jiangsu into paying their taxes on time, but the Manchus conspicuously failed in their attempt to have an efficient, up-to-date survey made of the landholdings of the wealthy Chinese, a survey that alone might have enabled the Manchus to institute an equitable land-tax system.... The failure to reform the land-tax system left those families who had been able to accumulate large landholdings during the era of turbulence in the position of acquiring yet larger holdings in the years that followed. Some modern Chinese historians have argued that there was essentially an alliance between the Manchu conquerors and the Chinese upper class that led to the perpetuation of a set of "feudal relationships" in the countryside....

In the crucial realm of taxation and rural administration, finally, Kangxi failed to make constructive changes. He seems to have accepted the position that no comprehensive new survey of landholdings was possible under existing social circumstances.... In 1712 he froze the assessments of able-bodied men registered as working a given area of agricultural land and decreed that however much the population increased in a particular area, the state would not thereby raise that area's taxes. Local officials could thus report population increases accurately, without fearing... a raised assessment.... China's land-tax system was now doubly frozen: land in the provinces remained registered according to the... survey made in 1581 during Emperor Wanli's reign, and the numbers... based on the 1712 figures. This was seriously to impede any attempt by Kangxi's successors to rationalize China's finances...

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