Wouldn't the Mongols count as a superior force? Or is the question more about technology?
This question seems to be conflating technological and cultural influence with military force. Both the Mongols and Manchus were powerful enough to conquer China, something that despite European colonialism never happened like with India. Although that could perhaps be attributed to intent just as much as capability, it still stands that the only non-Chinese people to rule China as a whole were the Manchus and Mongols, so I don't see how much credibility there is to the idea that the British were the first power China has ever faced with overwhelming military advantage. The Opium Wars were probably the worst defeats the Qing dynasty had ever experienced, but I wouldn't call them the first time China had ever met a "vastly superior military force". Considering that the Manchus basically annexed China as a whole and expanded their territory to include Tibet, Xinjiang,and Mongolia, I don't think the British were even the most successful at fighting China. Militarily speaking, China even bounced back faster than some of the dynasties. The Ming never rose again, the last vestiges were squashed in Taiwan, and if you want to look at it from an ethnic standpoint, no Han Chinese person governed China for nearly 300 years. In comparison not even a hundred years after the Second Opium War, the Chinese volunteer army was able to expel UN forces from North Korea, albeit with huge losses, but ratio wise how different is that really from a small Mongol army defeating a larger one several times its size?
Follow up question: How did this loss affect their diplomacy with other European powers, if at all? Did the other European powers start demanding more favorable trade deals after it was shown that the Chinese could be beaten, or were the Chinese already viewed as weak prior to the opium wars?
I think we need to look at this from the perspective of the empress dowager Cixi, who became empress in a coup in 1861, and her rationale behind the coup. Following the death of the Xianfeng emperor, the emperor Tongzhi became the emperor at the age of five, and Cixi saw the same men who led China to disaster in the opium wars surrounding her son and leading China to ruin. She took action and led a coup that ousted the more reactionary conservative court factions, and began some degree of modernisation programs within China, which would've been unheard of before the opium wars.
The Chinese mindset before the opium wars can be seen as 'all under heaven' in that China saw itself as the paramount power in the world, the Middle Kingdom indicates this arrogance felt by any emperor of China, they were the strongest power, and particularly in the 1700s and several prior golden ages, this was truth. Following the defeat in the opium wars there was a move towards modernisation, and acceptance of a reduced status, however it would take several further hammer blows to throw China fully into disarray.
I would point towards two specific points of evidence that indicate this changed mindset, in particular the appointment of Robert Hart, a northern Irish, British diplomat, as the Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs service, this inclusion of a westerner within what amounted to a Chinese government ministry and one of such vital importance considering the increased role of trade within China, and the income it brought to the government, can be seen as a pragmatic abandonment of the traditions that more or less would've prevented a westerner from being appointed to that post. Secondly, the inclusion of western troops and generals in China to help put down the Taiping rebellion, which again would've been unheard of previously, and we see General Gordon of the Sudan donning Chinese garb and helping the Qing Dynasty reassert control over its central provinces and reform its army.
However this is not to say that the old attitudes in China had disappeared, rather the psyche changed from being one of unparalleled success and brilliance to one whereby China's brilliance had been stolen by the west and had to be retaken, and this manifested itself in xenophobic attitudes in the imperial court and in the provinces. We see various anti-missionary riots from the Tianjin massacre, and the Yangzhou riot, and there were particular rumours spread about the missionaries themselves, that they would steal the eyeballs of children. However this will all culminate in the Boxer rebellion, wherein the court itself allied with the boxers, an anti-foreign group in 1899, discontent had been growing within China particularly after the Sino-Japanese war that was followed by foreign incursions and concessions across China, Qingdao, and Kwangchow.
However we do need to consider the boxers in a larger context, in that they were the result of a large famine across the northern provinces of China, which resorted to banditry, gradually they became organised around repulsing foreigners, which had been something added to the Chinese psyche after the defeat in the opium wars. This event needs to be looked at carefully in that it is clear that foreigners were not the reason for the boxers rising up however it gave them a cause to rally around and something to blame for their dire situation. The government support equally shows a desire for national independence that was part of the overall Chinese psyche, and we see it later in Sun Yat-sen's three principles of the people. The government had been able to prevent Italy from joining the nations with concessions along the Chinese coast, and thus there was a sense at court that they could resist the foreigners.
However I must apologise for the order of events, but now to mention the self-strengthening movement, this began in 1861 in response to the Opium wars by empress Dowager Cixi, she established the customs service, and made attempts to introduce trains however in the end this amounted to little, however there were steps towards reform. A larger event can be seen during the reign of the Guangxu emperor, who instigated the 100 days reform, as an effort to speed up the modernisation of China. Now I must stress before the opium wars such an act would be unthinkable, to adopt the ways of western barbarians, however the opium wars made this a possibility. Even the self strengthening movement was a revolutionary move towards a new China, in an age of reactionary court politics. Now the 100 days reform failed, because of a Coup instigated by Cixi, however, there is not merely the question of modernisation to be addressed, Guangxu was being influenced by the thinker Kang Youwei, who she hated, and called a 'mad fox,' thus the coup might not be related to modernisation but rather a chance for Cixi to take back control from this ambitious scheming man. Equally the coup came at a point where Guangxu was due to meet with Japanese Prime Minister, Itō Hirobumi, and potentially appoint him as a foreign advisor. This would give the Japanese even greater power within the Chinese government, and could potentially be a threat to the dynasty. Guangxu's rule was also the point at which China suffered defeats at the hands of the Japanese that surprised the world, and led to a scramble for concessions across China Thus the coup whilst it was supported by conservatives it is far too simplistic to see it in terms of modernisers vs. conservatives. Indeed following her assumption of power once more, Cixi did make reforms towards making China a constitutional monarchy and banned foot binding, she was more of a progressive in that sense, but I suppose this is rather off topic.
In an overall sense, the Chinese experience of modernisation can be seen in two schools of thought, modernisers and crusaders, I suppose. Modernisers wished to perform a Japanese style restoration of Chinese power through mastery of western technology, whereas warriors wished to retake China's power through force. However the largest effect on the psyche, can be seen in the development of these two schools of thought as opposed to in the past where China was the unquestioned master of the world and of all things. I think that's the crux of your question and I greatly apologise for my dithering around in getting to it, but that is an overall view of the changes. Sorry mods if this is all wrong and the syntax is off but I gave it a whirl.
I used two sources for this, Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi, a fantastic volume that gives you a very different impression, of her rulership compared to most mainstream scholarship that seems to see Cixi as a purely conservative ruler when her view was far more nuanced. The second, a larger volume, John Keay's China, a history, another good book but far more of an overall story of Chinese history stretching back to the Shang dynasty and ending during the civil war, it is like Spence's search for modern China but for people with slightly less time.
/u/christudor and /u/Starcfc have written quite good answers from the perspectives of the ruling dynasts and senior bureaucrats, but 'the Chinese' were far more than just the their government, and their opinions were not always aligned. Indeed, with the Taiping Rebellion breaking out in 1851, it's arguable that the divergence in opinion between rulers and populace was perhaps at its most extreme. I'm going to be focussing on the Taiping, as that is where my main interest lies. When looking at the Chinese people rather than the Qing government, there is a twofold question when asking how the Opium Wars affected the 'dominant Chinese psyche': the first in how the Chinese viewed their Manchu overlords, the second in how they viewed China's place in the world. The Taiping Rebellion is also quite usefully situated temporally, as the movement's leader started preaching the year after the Treaty of Nanjing, and the Second Opium War was fought during the later stages of the rebellion. I will admit freely that this was the opinion solely of a significant portion of southern and southeastern China, and that attitudes in places more inland or more proximate to the capital would not have been identical.
Firstly, it must be asked to what extent the Opium Wars impacted the south Chinese idea of the legitimacy of Manchu rule. The Tiandihui (天地會 – 'Heaven and Earth Society') had been established in 1762 as an explicitly anti-Manchu organisation, and was still highly powerful in southern China in the 1840s. Indeed, a Heaven and Earth Society leader, Luo Dagang (羅大綱), actually converted to Taiping Christianity and supplied a large amount of manpower during its early days. The question is whether a causal link can be established between the First Opium War and heightened Tiandihui activity in the south, and if it was the practical or the ideological implications of the weakening Qing that were responsible.
The answer is, unfortunately, hard to actually produce. Entries in the Dong Hua Lu (東華錄), a collection of daily records by local officials, suggest that Tiandihui banditry proliferated, and Spence (1996) relates that the Taiping gained local confidence by combatting these bandits. Reilly (2005) argues that the Taiping had already clearly expressed their opposition to the Manchus by this point – how far one is willing to accept Reilly's suggestion that the Taiping opposed the imperial constitution in general is not entirely relevant in this case – and so this apparently self-defeating action of fighting ostensible allies may indicate that the apparent uptick in banditry was more opportunistic than idealistic. Again, there's a bit of a lack of information to work off.
With the Taiping, proclamations (at least those that I've read, which is admittedly not many) made little to no reference to the Western victory in the First Opium War as justification for the Manchus' illegitimacy. Rather, the Taiping made their appeals in a mixture of nationalist, religious and legalistic terms. The Taiping Imperial Declaration and Three Character Classic both argued that the imperial institution itself was a blasphemous act, as the emperors, in creating the title of 皇帝 (Huangdi), had arrogated to themselves the position of 上帝 (Shangdi), a Protestant term for God, which was also the name of the Chinese head deity in the pre-Confucian classics. From a nationalist perspective, one proclamation claimed that the use of the term 'Manchu dog' was not an insult but a statement of literal fact, as the Manchus were apparently transfigured dogs. In the most extreme and obvious expression of this sentiment the name of the Xianfeng emperor was consistently written with an appended 犭 radical, meaning 'canine' or 'bestial'. The concept of 天命 (Tianming) – the Mandate of Heaven – was also repeatedly appealed to in writing, this being the traditional idea that dynasties must end, heralded by natural disasters and weakening government authority (Ball (2016) posits that the former was almost always a consequence of the latter because the most common form was river flooding). As far as the Taiping were concerned, then, the Opium Wars (even the Second, which was contemporaneous with their rebellion) had little to do with the internal corruption of China that the Manchus had both perpetuated and exacerbated.
But what of the Taiping attitude to the Westerners? Well, the effect of the First Opium War was, to be honest, virtually nonexistent. Indeed, both the Taiping and the Qing treated Western representatives, citizens and nations as inferior consistently up until the arrival of Hong Rengan (洪仁干) in Nanjing (南京) in 1858. The Hermes (UK), Cassini (France), Susquehanna (US) and Rattler (UK) diplomatic missions to the Taiping capital at Nanjing were all met with presumptuous statements from the Taiping about their status in the world, even though the majority of China was outside their control. At the same time, the Qing retained much of their holier-than-thou attitude basically until the Second Opium War saw the destruction of the Summer Palace. One of Hong Rengan's most obvious changes, effected even before conflict again flared up in 1859, was making the senior Taiping leaders refer to Westerners as 'brothers' just as they would fellow Taiping rebels, a term which the Qing would never have employed to refer to foreigners. If the Second Opium War changed anything, at most it would have changed the Taiping opinion that the West would support them against the Manchus. In the event, the more significant change for the Taiping was probably the West then turning against them. After the fall of Nanjing in 1864, Hong Rengan escaped with Hong Xiuquan’s son, the newly-crowned Heavenly King Hong Tianguifu (洪天貴福) southwards, and his last sighting before his execution by the Qing in November was by an Englishman named Nellis, who was told that ‘I [Hong] have never met a good foreigner’.
The problem with my above example is that Hong Rengan was a distinct anomaly within the Taiping movement, as he had experience working with missionaries in Hong Kong, thus making him the only man in the Taiping senior leadership with existing foreign contacts, and was the first man to propose modernisation within the movement (and indeed the only leading figure during the rebellion to do so). Li Xiucheng’s (李秀成) conciliatory attitude towards the Western residents of Shanghai before his attempts to capture the Chinese sector of the city may suggest a more widespread acceptance of the westerners, but again, he was somewhat less devout of a believer in the Taiping creed than many of his predecessors were. On the whole, the effect of the Opium Wars may well simply have been to demonstrate Western military capacity and thus create a demand for technology and expertise. The Taiping were joined by a number of westerners, such as the aforementioned Nellis, as well as Augustus Lindley, who published a history of the rebellion in 1866, and for a while Henry Burgevine, an American who was a short-lived predecessor of Chinese Gordon as commander of the Ever Victorious Army (常勝軍). Yet again, however, there was little fear of foreign exploitation in exchange for assistance.
For the Taiping, at least, the Opium Wars were actually sort of irrelevant to their worldview. Their view of the Manchus had been established long before, and their view of the outside was reformed independent of Western military action. There is the question, of course, of what senior Han Chinese in the Qing establishment may have thought about the West thanks to the wars.
Zeng Guofan (曾國藩), the Qing leader on the western front against the Taiping and arguably a reluctant backer of the Qing at best (so much so that he was subsequently considered a possible usurper of the throne) had sort of the opposite response to that of the Taiping. Rather than welcoming foreign inventions (particularly weapons), he called them unnecessary next to moral fibre. More importantly, the Taiping view of the West was not just as an ally but also as a partner, whereas Zeng expressed great fears that Western assistance against the Taiping (which, it must be said, was provided by the very powers – Britain and France – that had destroyed the Summer Palace) would lead to them exacting more out of China. In the event, of course, Nanjing fell to Zeng’s Chinese forces and the West got little in return.
Again, we must be wary not to extrapolate. Zeng’s comments about foreign assistance were a refutation of recommendations from his brother, for example. To be honest, the vast majority of Chinese were ambivalent about the conflicts – Platt (2012) notes that many Chinese hid their queues (single braid for men mandated by Qing law) under their hats under the Taiping, so that the rest of their hair could be shaved off quickly to avoid reprisals when a city was recaptured. For the more opinionated, however, the Opium Wars actually meant little for their view of China's place in the world. To the Taiping, defeat by the foreigners was not a sign of the weakness of China as a nation but a symptom of the corrupt Qing regime, and the legitimate Taiping would be eagerly supported by their Christian brothers. Zeng’s position was arguably again a private indictment of the Qing. His fears were not for China as a nation – his belief in the continued superiority of Confucianism and its moral values suggests as much – but as a state.
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