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Intro and Historiography

A difficulty with discussing the period between the death of the Qianlong Emperor in 1799 and the outbreak of the Taiping War in 1851 is that it’s one we haven’t fully made sense of, even – or indeed, especially – in the wake of the reassessment of the High Qing period as part of the ‘New Qing Imperial History’. The Qing’s transition from probably the most stable and prosperous empire in the Early Modern world in 1795 to a state fragile enough to almost shattering to regional rebels in 1850 is something that it has often been agreed deserves more attention, but has sadly still not received much, especially compared to interest in the Kangxi-Yongzheng-Qianlong period before it, and the Taiping and post-Taiping period afterward. While change has been happening, especially as regards our view of the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820), much of the Daoguang reign (1820-50) remains under-studied, or at least underappreciated. Not to put too much stock in this, but if you compare the Wikipedia pages for the Qianlong Emperor to those of the Jiaqing or Daoguang Emperors, the dip in actual information and breadth of coverage is quite striking. A browse through the Oxford Research Bilbliography for both the Qing to 1840 and the Late Qing shows little that covers the Daoguang period at any length.

So, much as it would be easy to talk about just the 1840s, I’d find myself repeating quite a lot of things from two previous answers (this one and this one) if I did, owing, not least, to how relatively little there is to say. So, as well as consolidating that, it’s worth going back to 1796 and seeing where the Qing went after the Qianlong Emperor’s retirement, and looking for the roots of the issues that beset them in 1850.

To do that, we need to start with a bit of a historiographical review, and by a bit I mean a lot. The traditional view, of course, is that violent contact with the West in the form of the Opium War (or even the opium trade that had been ongoing previously) proved to be the beginning of a fatal upheaval for the Qing Empire, with one key short-term result being the Taiping uprising, which itself could only be halted by foreign intervention. While not the first to criticise this approach, Philip A. Kuhn was perhaps the first successful proponent of an alternative model in Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China (1970). In openly Braudelian terms, Kuhn posited that a deep undercurrent of political stability pervaded most of Chinese history, with the apparent disruptions of the dynastic cycle merely ripples on the surface, not affecting the overall flow. In turn, the exogenous crisis of the Opium War could itself only have superficial effects, and any explanation of the end of the imperial system in 1912 would have to find its roots in domestic upheavals. Kuhn did not situate this upheaval solely in the Taiping period, however, but rather fittingly sought a more longue durée explanation, which saw the Taiping crisis as the climax of a process of societal militarisation that found its roots in the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796-1804. Kuhn’s work would be drawn upon by the historiographer Paul A. Cohen in Discovering History in China (1984) as among the first examples of a trend towards a ‘China-centric’ model of Chinese history that downplayed Western influence and which acknowledged that the dynamics of history played out in China, just like anywhere else.

Kuhn’s model in Rebellion and its Enemies is of course quite narrowly-focussed, but its underlying thesis of terminal decline would prove highly influential, cemented by his joint chapter with Susan Mann Jones in Volume 10 of the Cambridge History of China (1978), titled ‘Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion’. Kuhn and Jones paint a picture of gradually unfolding disaster: a bloated, venal bureaucracy dominated by patronage networks; the pressures of rapid increases in population; costly wars against sectarian rebels; rising gentry influence in rural areas at the expense of government authority. While the accession of the Jiaqing Emperor may have offered an opportunity for combating the corruption that had accumulated under the Qianlong Emperor, the attempt stopped at removing his father’s old favourite, Heshen, at the top of the patronage pyramid, and displacing his key cronies, without actually targeting the root causes of corruption. The end conclusion was a striking one: the realm of public interest was increasingly being eroded by private interests, as contracted labour supplanted corvée, scholars sought private employment over bureaucratic careers, and the bureaucrats themselves turned official assignments into money-making schemes. Despite the rejoinder that the period needed to be understood looking forwards from the eighteenth century, and not backwards from the 1840s, one does get the sense that this was because a retrospective view obscured the full extent of the imperial crisis, rather than creating a crisis where there was none.

Unsurprisingly, Kuhn and Jones’ work has proved to be quite enduring, as, although the end product is not even 60 pages long, the breadth of the study nevertheless made it quite hard to actually contest its conclusions without producing an equally magisterial rebuttal. As such, serious reassessments have only really come about in the last decade or so, and even then primarily for the Jiaqing reign, not the Daoguang period. Said reassessments have nevertheless shown quite effectively that the Jiaqing reforms were more wide-reaching than Kuhn and Jones had asserted, and successful at arresting the problem of bureaucratic venality during his reign, yet at the same time the process of longue durée decentralisation described in Kuhn's original monograph also appears to have been vindicated. I’ll get into this in more depth once we go into the historical side of things.

But assessments of the Daoguang Emperor’s reign have been largely rooted in the period of the Opium War and its attendant issues, such as the currency crisis, and much of this research predates 2010. As such, any assessment of the efficacy of the Qing state during the Daoguang reign must be based in large part on older materials focussed on exogenous crises, such as, most prominently, the Opium War. Surprisingly, one of the key works in this area, James Polachek’s The Inner Opium War from 1992, actually advances a view of the Jiaqing reign that lines up quite well with post-2010 scholarship, but seems not to have made much of a splash at the time. The focus is, it must be said, a narrow one: Polachek concentrates almost entirely on bureaucratic factionalism and its relevance to the Opium War. Still, it is notable, and I will be drawing heavily on Polachek’s view of Qing politics later. One other possible reason for the lack of impact is that Polacheck’s work came to be overshadowed by that of a Chinese historian, Mao Haijian, whose seminal 天朝的崩潰 Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty (1995) argued that the Qing’s mishandling of the Opium War was indeed a fundamental structural failing of the Qing state – again, something to be discussed later. Alongside all of this is a controversy among economic historians as to the root causes of the economic crisis in China that reached its climax in the 1840s, with the traditional view of opium as the culprit having been contested by Lin Man-Houng’s focus on global market forces, itself questioned by Richard von Glahn and Werner Burger on the basis of more up-to-date data and on numismatic evidence, respectively.

All this to say that any assessment of the state of the Qing during the Daoguang reign has to be done with care in the absence of a complete up-to-date historiographical framing to actually give it some sense of form in context with prior and subsequent developments. It must also be done with a focus on the Opium War and developments relevant to it, because, frankly, there isn’t that much else to go on. Still, it is very possible to produce some sort of synthesis looking at the Qing state across the early 19th century.