Why is there such antipathy to 'New Qing History' among mainland Chinese scholars?

Ah, the New Qing History School. What an interesting little chimera it is.

For the uninitiated, 'New Qing History' refers to a wave of revisionist historiography that emerged in the late 1980s/early 1990s as the re-emergence of interest in the Manchu language, combined with growing interest in Qing administration in Inner Asia (that is, regions beyond the traditional core provinces of China), led to a reassessment of the nature of the Qing Dynasty as a whole. Rather than just another invader-turned-Sinicised-Confucian-empire, it became apparent that the Qing state actively sought to maintain distinctions between their Han Chinese subjects and their Manchu warrior-administrator caste, that styles of Qing rule outside China adapted to local traditions rather than through imposing an apparently 'universal' Chinese model, and that these understandings would in turn have serious implications for how we understand Qing politics and society.

However, it must be said that the 'New Qing History' is quite a blanket term for a variety of distinct approaches that defy simple categorisation. For example, William T. Rowe in China's Last Empire (2009) suggests that we see a distinction between an 'Inner Asian turn' circa 1990 and a 'Eurasian turn' circa 2000: the former characterised by a focus on the relative effects of the Qing's Inner Asian leadership, but nevertheless linking the Qing into the Ming and potentially the Yuan; and the latter characterised more by discussions of the Qing internally, by engagement in comparative approaches with other Eurasian states of the Early Modern period like Russia, France, Iran, Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, whereby the distinctness of the Qing leadership demonstrates the level of discontinuity from the Ming. But this seems like a tendentious reading, and it isn't fully clear where Rowe even draws the line.

Rather, it seems more reasonable to approach the 'New Qing' corpus as really being a diverse and concurrent range of approaches and conclusions, united primarily not by a common adoption of a single approach, but rather a common rejection of traditional Sinocentric views of the Qing. Instead of Rowe's separation of Inner Asian and Eurasian focusses into two chronologically distinct paradigms, Peter Perdue in China Marches West (2005) suggests a more reasonable characterisation of the post-1990 historiography as dividing into two parallel strands: a 'Eurasian similarity thesis' arguing for seeing the Qing as fundamentally similar to the other Eurasian empires of the day, both involved in and subject to the same global trends, and focussing on socioeconomic structures, with an ultimate eye towards Ming-Qing continuities; and an 'Altaic school' stressing the unique Inner Asian origins of the Manchu leadership, with a focus on ideology and ruling elites, and in turn the discontinuities between Ming and Qing. Again, though, there is a degree of tendentiousness: Pamela Crossley, whom he cites as an Altaicist, frequently invokes Eurasian comparisons in A Translucent Mirror (1999), her monograph on Qing ideology. Simply put, characterisation is not easy. There are plenty of other issues (most notably the case of ethnicity) where historians under the 'New Qing' umbrella have found disagreement, but I shall avoid digressing there.

All this to say that any reference to the 'New Qing History' as a coherent movement rather than as a broad historiographical shift must be treated with a degree of scepticism, and in fact quite possibly the most frequent users of the term are Mainland historians themselves in their construction of this historiographical boogieman. But I think I've skirted the main issue enough by this point. Why do mainland historians care so much? Well, I sure hope this doesn't push the historiography exemption too far, because let me tell you, it will skirt the line.

Let's begin with the basic point: Han Chinese nationalism has underpinned the modern Chinese state and how it functions to a greater or lesser extent since 1912. Particularly since the 1980s and the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping, there has been an erasing of minority languages, of minority religions, even of minority ethnicities all as part of an agenda that promotes an essentialised view of the dominance of Han Chinese culture. In addition, the modern People's Republic has a vested interest in retaining control of the territory encompassed by the Qing Empire, which means that there is an ideological imperative to assert that these territories are legitimately 'Chinese', and not holdovers from a specific previous dynasty – and one of foreign origin at that – which could, moreover, be construed as colonial/imperial holdings.

The New Qing paradigm fundamentally rejects the notion that the Manchus became 'Sinicised' as a result of ruling China. This produces a certain difficulty if the prevailing – or at least promoted – belief is that there is some inherent superiority or at least desirability to Han Chinese culture. That the Qing's conquest of China failed to in turn produce a cultural conquest of the Manchus is damning to that narrative of cultural supremacy. While it is true that the Qing's foreignness had at one stage led to their demonisation, the increasing desire to retain Qing territory in Inner Asia meant that historical precedents would need to be sought in order to legitimise those retentions, and so attempts to claim the Qing as converts to the Chinese way have been made.

On the matter of those imperial holdings, to quote Perdue,

The teleology of nationalist history implied that the Qing had merely fulfilled the mission of its predecessors to encompass all the territory that “naturally” belonged to China. The modern Chinese state then inherited this space and made it the basis of China’s imagined community. Modern textbook accounts that stress the continuity of the Qing with earlier dynasties implicitly assume that this remarkable territorial expansion made little difference.

By presenting the Qing acquisition of the region not as the product of an inevitable process of cultural attraction, but rather a series of military conquests of largely unwilling peoples who only latterly came to accept Qing overlordship, that narrative of cultural supremacy is further shaken, and another problem exists: it calls into question the legitimacy of the conquered regions belonging to any Chinese state, Qing or not. Further, by denying that the Qing were, as it were, a Chinese nation-state, the extent to which there is genuine continuity between the Manchu-led Qing and modern, Han-nationalist China is also challenged.

Within my own preferred area of Late Qing studies, the New Qing paradigm also heavily problematises the narrative of the Century of Humiliation. This is not to say that foreign powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries did not approach China in an outright exploitative manner, they did. But to acknowledge that 'China' too was engaging in a colonial/imperial project at the same time is a serious counter-narrative to what has traditionally been asserted. Even worse, to argue that what China was doing was basically equivalent to pretty much every other Early Modern empire, including the forerunners to China's imperial exploiters of the 19th century, is genuinely troubling when the prevailing narrative presents China as simply the one-way victim of foreign incursion.

I don't purport to have covered all the reasons why Mainland Chinese historians have objected to the various approaches generically called 'New Qing'. For example, the abstract to the article you cite in your question implies certain problems with periodisation, as while for the author the dividing line between 'ancient history' 古代史 and 'recent history' 近代史 is placed in the Qing period, it is likely because of foreign interactions in the 19th century, not anything unique to the Qing endogenously. Nor do I wish to give off the impression that every mainland Chinese historian rejects the New Qing paradigm, only that most of those more publicly-facing and politically savvy have done so. But, simply put, the 'New Qing history', in all its admitted diversity, is on a certain level a fundamental counter-narrative not just to the historical narrative pushed by the modern Communist state, but indeed a counter-narrative to that state as it currently exists.

For some further reading, aside from chapter 14 of Perdue's work, which covers the broad historiography of the Qing conquests of Inner Asia, there's also this short article by Mario Cams which explores a dimension I didn't get into, which is the assertion that the 'New Qing History' imposes Western dynamics onto a Chinese context. For something a bit snarkier, you can have a look at this page of various jottings by Dr. Pamela Crossley, which includes a few rebuttals to mainland detractors of the New Qing approach.