It would, I would suggest, be more than accurate to say that there was a popular dimension to anti-Manchuism, and that it was not strictly an elite phenomenon. The problem with discussing it is that working-class Chinese voices rarely come through in the sources directly. Elite anti-Manchuism is much easier to discuss because, in contrast, elites wrote a lot more and things that elites wrote survived much more easily. We don't have essays by Chinese farmers arguing that enforced miscegenation of Han and Manchus was necessary to preserve Manchu bloodlines through the inevitable upcoming race war between whites and East Asians, but we do have them from elite writers like Liang Qichao. Instead, we often have to apply a layer of interpretation to mass action, and that requires that there is some anti-Manchu action to analyse. In periods when there were not enough tensions to boil over into open action, we may not really be able to say how far there were such tensions, if any at all.

A critical article in the development of the modern paradigm of Qing studies is Mark Elliott's 1990 piece 'Bannerman and Townsman', which discusses a rather striking episode in 1841, during the Opium War, when the commander of Zhenjiang's Banner garrison, the Manchu Hailing, instituted a draconian and increasingly erratic state of martial law that saw Han Chinese civilians more or less indiscriminately subjected to corporal punishment on suspicion of treachery. While the event mainly illustrates Manchu prejudices against the Han, we may detect a few signs of anti-Manchu sentiment as well. After the British captured the city on 21 July, the story apparently circulated that a monk in the city had gone over to them at the encouragement of a junior officer and informed them of a weakness in the city's defences, explicitly to stop the bloodshed now being committed by Hailing against those in his charge. Later local traditions asserted that Hailing, rather than committing suicide after the walls were lost, in fact fled to the countryside, or was killed by a mob. These by no means indicate the existence of a systematic form of anti-Manchu sentiment, especially considering the much more immediate and contingent issues surrounding Hailing's behaviour, but the episode as a whole is a potent indicator that there were ethnic tensions in at least one direction.

The Taiping give us a much more unequivocal example of mass anti-Manchu sentiment in action, helpfully supplemented by a handful of individual accounts collected by missionaries. The most evocative I think is this one, written originally by Stanislas de Clavelin in December 1853 and translated by Clarke and Gregory:

“Finally, concerning the Tartars, when we consider the evils that they have caused us, and the abasement to which China has sunk under their government, one cannot dream of entering into an agreement with them; let them return to graze their flocks, or else prepare themselves for a war of extermination. And besides they are idolators, incorrigible idolators. Would the Heavenly Father forgive us for thus forgiving them?"

The sentiment expressed here by Clavelin's interlocutor is overtly genocidal – the Manchus must be destroyed because God commanded it so. And indeed, the Taiping acted on this basis. Just nine months before Clavelin's visit, the Taiping army had massacred the entire Manchu garrison and their families – 30,000 people at least – on capturing Nanjing. The garrisons at Hangzhou and Zhapu met similar fates in 1860. Indiscriminate massacre of captured Manchus was commonplace, from which it ought to be reasonably evident that the anti-Manchu invective in Taiping propaganda and other official texts percolated quite far down. Perhaps that ought to also be taken in conjunction with the fact that most of the Taiping leadership lay outside the traditional state-recognised gentry elite, and were largely people of working-class backgrounds developing ideas for a broadly working-class audience. Simply put, Taiping anti-Manchuism was hardly an elite phenomenon.

Nor, I would suggest, was this anti-Manchuism an exclusively Taiping-generated phenomenon. Proclamations by leaders of the Yunnanese revolts of 1856-73 frequently stressed the notion of Manchu rule as illegitimate, although often on a somewhat contingent basis citing specific Manchu misdeeds rather than there being an inherent illegitimacy to Manchu rule. In 1867, Du Wenxiu, ruler of the principal rebel polity, the Pingnan Guo (also known as the Dali Sultanate), issued proclamations which included the following statements:

The reason for this expedition is to chastise the Manchus, who took our land for more than 200 years, treating the people as horses and oxen, regarded life as expendable like the trees and grasses, injured my brothers, and tormented the Hui.

In the province of Dian-nan, the Hui, the Han, and the non-Han have been living among one another for over a thousand years. Friendly towards each other, helping one another in times of need, how could there be divisions between [us]? But since the Manchus usurped the throne for more than two hundred years, our people have been maltreated.

The army has three purposes: first we must root out the Manchus, then conciliate the Han and, thirdly, weed out the wicked [collaborators].

Du also made a point of explicitly using Ming titles and court dress, as well as very explicitly rejecting the queue edict, indeed making it mandatory to grow one's hair out rather than shave the forehead (with an equivalent policy applying within the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom). At the same time we ought not to regard the Yunnanese rebels as having had the same kind of totally exclusionary approach to anti-Manchuism that the Taiping held. Indeed, Manchus even held government office within the Dali state. Instead, the objective seems to have been the erosion and eventual destruction of Manchu political and cultural influence on Yunnan, which had apparently taken the form of implicitly pro-Han forms of ethnic discrimination for which the Manchus were scapegoated, and not the destruction of the Manchu people as the Taiping seem to have advocated.

Assessment of popular anti-Manchuism in the period between the Taiping and 1911 revolts is hard to gauge, and I don't believe it is possible to do so at great length, at least not with the material known to me. While we have plenty of detail on elite writings (Chapter VI of Pamela Crossley's Orphan Warriors is sobering reading, and so too are some passages of Edward Rhoads' Manchus and Han), we simply don't have as much a sense of how the general Han Chinese public viewed the Manchus, either as (ostensible) overlords or as neighbours.

As such, after the Taiping, our next point of reference is the 1911 Revolution, and here we see a lot more scattered instances of anti-Manchuism, but still potent cases nonetheless. At one extreme was Xi'an, which saw its entire Manchu population of 20,000 massacred; at Nanjing, untold numbers of Manchus were killed from a garrison of a little over 2000 (which, accounting for dependents, probably meant a total of at least 8000 soldiers and civilians), although there remained at least some survivors to whom clemency was granted. At the other, many Manchu garrison quarters came away unscathed. But this could not be said for Taiyuan, where perhaps 20 to 25 Manchus were killed in an overnight attack and the Manchu quarter was sacked; despite an agreement to disarm in exchange for protection, the Manchu garrison at Zhenjiang was evicted in early November and harried by republican militias and mutineers, with at least twenty killed in the city and unknown numbers outside. Hundreds died in fighting at Jingzhou and Fuzhou, although there was unusual and unexpected mercy in the latter case when the local revolutionaries took over and provided medical aid to the survivors.

Nor were Manchus outside established garrisons particularly safe, as, on the day of the Wuchang Uprising on 10 October 1911 an unknown number of Manchu soldiers attached to the otherwise-Han Wuchang garrison were killed by mutineers exclaiming 'Slay the Manchu officials and the Bannermen!' The Hubei Military Government explicitly stated that its role was to 'elevate the Han and exterminate the Manchus', and, according to Edward Rhoads, 'wiped out four leading Manchu families in Wuchang and confiscated their property', along with a number of other targeted anti-Manchu acts including systematically stopping people in the streets and subjecting them to tests to determine if they were Manchus: if their head was the wrong shape or they spoke with the wrong accent, they were executed. Targeted anti-Manchu violence was brief owing to a foreign diplomatic intervention on 13 October, but still resulted in the deaths of between four and eight hundred Manchu soldiers and civilians, almost certainly a majority of those who had been in the city.

Now, in all of the above cases, most of the massacring was carried out principally under the auspices of the heavily-radicalised military, rather than the population at large. But even so, it seems an unavoidable conclusion that anti-Manchuism was generally widespread, even if the exact nature of how it manifested – in Taiping-style genocidal mode in Wuchang and Xi'an, or Yunnan-style anti-government mode in Jingzhou – varied from one place to another.