After Tamerlane (20 page)

The most immediate threat to the Manchus' survival was their lack of real control in South China. Anticipating K'ang-hsi's determination to crush them, the Feudatories rebelled openly in 1673–4. General Wu, the most powerful of the three, contemptuously offered the Manchu court a territorial partition that would have left it only Manchuria and Korea.
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A more real possibility was the division of China along the Yangtze, denying North China and the imperial government its vital foodbowl, and reducing Peking to a rump state precariously balanced on the flank of Inner Asia. After a prolonged struggle, K'ang-hsi had gained the upper hand by the early 1680s, partly because Wu had died (of dysentery) in 1678
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and partly, perhaps, because the feudatory generals held little appeal for Ming loyalists in the south and the scholar-gentry preferred imperial continuity, even under the Manchus, to warlord rule. By 1683, too, K'anghsi had finally liquidated Koxinga's rebel state, and the drastic policy of evacuating the coastal belt
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(to deny the rebels its resources) that had been pursued for more than twenty years could now be reversed. Foreign trade, closely restricted for the same reason, was opened up once more.
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In the later 1680s, with South China more or less pacified, K'ang-hsi was able to turn to Inner Asia.

No Manchu emperor was likely to underestimate the danger of a new steppe challenger repeating the Manchu gambit: building a frontier state based on the fusion of steppe and agricultural economies and strong enough to subvert the loyalty of the ethnic-Chinese population. In the 1670s the Kalmyk (or Oirat) ruler Galdan began to assemble a steppe empire of menacing size. From his original base in Dzungaria, lying west of Mongolia, he conquered the oases and trading cities of eastern Turkestan. In 1688 he invaded Outer Mongolia and threw down the gauntlet to Peking.
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At the same time, the Russian presence along the northern edges of Mongolia and in Amuria (north of Manchuria) foreshadowed a profitable alliance between these interlopers in the Chinese realm. Perhaps K'ang-hsi was fortunate that this double Inner Asian challenge came too late to coincide with the struggle inside China proper. But no Chinese emperor could have been better prepared for the mental and physical stress of a frontier war. K'ang-hsi was a passionate hunter, and claimed to have killed over a hundred tigers, dozens of bears and leopards, and nearly
a hundred wolves. He regarded the chase as practice for war, and his frequent expeditions to the frontier zone, in search of sport and to visit his troops, gave him first-hand knowledge of the theatre of conflict, and of the tactics and logistics needed for Chinese victory.
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Neither the Russians nor the Manchus had at first much idea of each other's strength or objectives. In the mid-1650s, Moscow had begun to grasp that the mysterious eastern potentate ‘Prince Bogdoy' was more than just a minor ruler and must be treated with as much respect as the Ottoman, Iranian or Mughal emperor.
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The Russians persisted in hoping that the Manchus would agree to diplomatic relations and the opening of trade. There was already a growing Russian commerce with Central Asia and India through Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga. Embassies had been exchanged regularly with the Kalmyks and Mongols since the 1630s. K'ang-hsi was willing to sidestep the rigid protocol governing Chinese diplomatic relations and meet the tsar's envoys informally; but he was also determined to expel Russian influence from East Asia. In 1684 he warned the Mongols to cease trading with the Russians. In 1685 his army razed Albazin, the most advanced Russian outpost in the Amur valley. The Russians returned, and Galdan's conquest of Outer Mongolia in 1688 threatened Peking with a long, exhausting frontier war. But the Russo-Kalmyk alliance failed to materialize, and in 1689 at Nerchinsk in south-eastern Siberia K'ang-hsi surrounded the Russian negotiators with a large army and forced them to renounce the whole vast area north of Manchuria – a defeat for Russian expansion that was not reversed until 1860. In 1690, Manchu armies used artillery to defeat Galdan in battle.
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Six years later, after a further shattering defeat, Galdan committed suicide. The final consolidation of Chinese overrule in Inner Asia, with the conquest of Sinkiang or East Turkestan, was not completed for some sixty years. But K'ang-hsi had restored Peking's authority in mainland East Asia. This great triumph, followed up by the Yung-cheng (r. 1723–35) and Ch'ien-lung (r. 1735–96) emperors, was the vital geopolitical precondition for the domestic achievements of Ch'ing rule and, in the longer term, for its tenacious resistance to European diplomatic and commercial demands in the nineteenth century.

Indeed, this grand strategic victory opened the way for an exceptionally dynamic period in Chinese history. The Yung-cheng emperor completed the transition from the clannish regime the Manchus had brought with them to a revived and strengthened version of Ming absolutism. The Manchu ‘bannermen' – the private princely armies

that had played a key role in the seizure of power – were brought under imperial control or pensioned off.
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This averted the threat of factional warfare at times of dynastic succession. A new and more flexible Grand Council supplanted the Grand Secretariat and the censorate as the centre of decision-making.
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A third innovation, the ‘palace memorial' system, encouraged a stream of confidential information about the misdeeds of provincial authorities. Careful renovation of the examination system was part of K'ang-hsi's reconciliation with the Chinese literati. It was the crucial bond between the imperial centre, the scholar-gentry of the provinces, and the county magistrate (
hsien chih
) whose
yamen
(or office) was the eyes and ears of the imperial
government. So long as the scholar-gentry aspired to bureaucratic advancement through the examination system, with its classical syllabus and Confucian ideology, and while China was governed from walled cities with an ultra-loyal Manchu army in reserve, rebellion was unlikely to spread far or last long. The early emperors also insisted upon frugal expenditure to ease the weight of taxation. With large tax surpluses, and having beaten, cowed or reconciled their enemies, the Ch'ing emperors had found the formula for external security and internal peace.

This was a favourable setting for economic progress and cultural revival. By some estimates, China's population increased threefold between 1723 and 1796 under K'ang-hsi's successors. There was a large increase in the area under cultivation, which may have doubled between 1650 and 1800.
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Ethnic Chinese (Han) settlers colonized forested regions in the south and south-west. The state repaired damaged waterways and built new ones.
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New food crops like maize (brought by the Portuguese) and sweet potatoes (brought to Fukien in the eighteenth century) supplemented rice; and cash crops like tea, indigo and sugar were grown for export, especially in coastal provinces like Fukien and Kwangtung. State officials in the frontier province of Hunan on the middle Yangtze promoted double-cropping with advice, tax incentives and the supply of seed.
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Eighteenth-century China saw the end of serfdom, abolished by the Yung-cheng emperor,
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and a new freedom to buy and sell land. The number of market towns rose steadily. In the Kiangnan region on the lower Yangtze, where water communications had favoured the growth of large commercial cities, cotton cloth was manufactured on a large scale by village-based artisans. Shanghai exported textiles to inland regions up to 800miles away, and iron goods, silk and porcelain were widely traded.
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This was a sophisticated mercantile economy in which paper money was supplied by private enterprise and credit was based on the sale of contracts for the future supply of salt to the government – a commodity for which demand was exceptionally stable. China's part in international commerce may have been relatively small, but its internal trade may have been as large, if not larger, than that of contemporary Europe.
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But perhaps the most striking feature of Ch'ing rule was that it
promoted an exceptionally vigorous phase of cultural renewal. K'anghsi himself liked to converse with the Jesuits at court (their mission had survived the dynastic upheaval). He even learned how to play the harpsichord. But he rejected the idea of a regular traffic between China and Europe. ‘China has no matters of common concern with the West' was his crisp conclusion.
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Westerners, like the Jesuits, were welcome to come. But they had to stay and adapt themselves to Confucian ethics: they could not expect to come and go as they pleased. And when the Pope sent a message asking him to send back Europeans suspected by Rome of heresy, K'ang-hsi refused – adding sarcastically that he would cut off their heads and send them instead, so that the Pope could see that they had been ‘reformed'.
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The Pope's response is not known. K'ang-hsi's main concern was with Chinese culture. He and his successors sponsored the collection and publication of classical literature; K'ang-hsi himself commissioned an encyclopedia. Literacy levels rose, and the volume of printed literature increased to meet the demand.
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Novels, poetry, histories, biographies, gazetteers, encyclopedias, anthologies and works of antiquarianism were published. This was a gentry culture that propagated the values and traditions of the Confucian classics: the search for harmony within society and with nature; the importance of hierarchy (especially between generations) and ritual or codes of behaviour for preserving social order and cohesion; the need for self-control and the subordination of personal desires. Through literature and art, and the state's provision of official ‘cults' and sacrifices as a focus for local popular religion, the influence of Confucian culture was diffused more widely and deeply than ever before.
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China's political and economic integration was thus matched by a growing cultural unity achieved in the last era before the more intense and then violent engagement with the West.

But there were limits to the Ch'ing achievement. Much of China beyond its great system of waterways remained locked in localism – though no more so, perhaps, than large parts of contemporary Europe. More serious was China's notorious failure to revive the naval power renounced some three centuries earlier. Chinese merchants and settlers in South East Asia had no claim on imperial protection, and savage massacres of Chinese in the Spanish Philippines drew no response from Peking.
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European fascination with China – however ignorant
and ill-informed – had no counterpart in Chinese intellectual circles, a measure perhaps of cultural self-confidence and the prestige of an unbroken classical tradition of exceptional range and subtlety. In some respects eighteenth-century China was turning even more markedly inward: the Yung-cheng emperor reversed in 1727 the limited tolerance granted to Christian missionaries since Mongol times.
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Even when European ideas were imported, they appeared unworkable or irrelevant in the Chinese context.
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A good example is the idea of perspective in painting. Chinese artistic theory did not ‘fail' to invent perspective: it rejected as invalid a single fixed perspective, stressing instead the multiplicity of viewpoints from which an object or landscape might be viewed.
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But perhaps a deeper problem (from the point of view of technological and scientific change) was the underlying conservatism of Ch'ing society, which vested enormous social power in its bureaucracy and in corporate bodies like guilds and lineage or clan authorities, who played a key role in maintaining a hierarchic social discipline. Ch'ing rule may have added an extra twist to what were, no doubt, entrenched social tendencies. After all, for all its championing of Confucian culture, this was at bottom a ‘Manchu
raj
' – imperial rule by an alien dynasty and its racial henchmen, who were segregated by residence and marriage laws from the Han majority. Like other colonial regimes in world history, the Manchus found that the price of stability was alliance with those who enjoyed local dominance, and the careful avoidance of social or political risk. Thus the
timing
of Manchu consolidation between 1680 and 1750 was highly significant. On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China's distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further towards a ‘limited
raj
' in which central government abandoned almost all initiative to local (and usually conservative) forces. When China's eighteenth-century ‘economic miracle' turned sour, the scope for political change was correspondingly narrow.
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