New Qing History

New Qing History
The New Qing History is a historiographical school that gained prominence in the United States in the mid-1990s by offering a wide-ranging revision of history of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty of China. Orthodox historians tend to emphasize the power of the Han people to "sinicize" their conquerors in their thought and institutions. In the 1980s and early 1990s, American scholars began to learn Manchu and took advantage of newly opened Chinese- and Manchu-language archives. This research found that the Manchu rulers were savvy in manipulating their subjects and from the 1630s through at least the 18th century, emperors developed a sense of Manchu identity and used traditional Han Chinese culture and Confucian models to rule, while blending with models from other ethnic groups across the vast empire, including those from northern China, the Eurasian Steppe, and Inner Asia (or Central Asia).
According to some scholars, at the height of their power, the Qing regarded China (proper) as only a part, although a very important part, of a much wider empire that extended into the Inner Asian territories of Mongolia, Tibet, Manchuria and Xinjiang. However, Mark Elliott, a prominent scholar of the New Qing History school emphasizes that while it is a popular view in many places that the New Qing History separates the Qing dynasty from China, he thinks this is a misunderstanding. Instead, the school simply raised a question about the relationship between the Qing dynasty and "China" - with the word "China" put in brackets, because the concept of "China" has been changing, not a fixed one. The school hoped to understand the concept of "China" during the Qing dynasty, and how it was used during the period, which is a question worth studying, and not that Qing dynasty is not China.
Some scholars like Ping-ti Ho have criticized the approach for exaggerating the Manchu character of the dynasty, while scholars like Zhao Gang have argued from the evidence that the Qing dynasty self-identified as China. Some Chinese scholars accuse the American historians in the group of imposing American concerns with race and identity or even of imperialist misunderstanding to weaken China. Still others in China agree that this scholarship has opened new vistas for the study of Qing history. Inspired by New Qing History studies, the name "New Ming History" has also appeared which refers to the emerging Ming-centred studies that give emphasis on the Inner Asian characteristics under the rule of the preceding Ming dynasty. Some scholars have argued that the Ming regarded "China" as only a part of the Ming empire and as an ethnocultural space (rather than a political entity), challenging the prevalent perceptions of the Ming.
The use of "New Qing History" as an approach is to be distinguished from the multi-volume history of the Qing dynasty that the State Council of the People's Republic of China has been writing since 2003, which is also occasionally called "New Qing History" in English. Nevertheless, this state project, a revision of the 1928 Draft History of Qing, was said to be written pretty much to refute the New Qing History.
Views
Prominent scholars who have been associated with the New Qing History, including Evelyn Rawski, Mark Elliott, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Laura Hostetler, Peter C. Perdue, Philippe Forêt, and others, despite differing among themselves on important points, represent an "Inner Asian" and "Eurasian" turn. They date the founding of the empire from 1636, when the dynasty was proclaimed, rather than from 1644, when the Qing took control of the Ming capital Beijing. The historians argued that "Manchu" identity was deliberately created only after the takeover of China and that the new racial identity was important but "fungible," easily exchanged for others. The first rulers of the dynasty played the Confucian role of Son of Heaven but at the same time, often behind the backs of their ethnic Han ministers, adopted other roles to rule other ethnic groups. Some argued that the Qing saw itself as a Manchu or a universal empire, a multi-national polity, which with Han China as only the most central and economically important component. According to Mark Elliott, New Qing historians merely raised a question about the relationship between the Qing dynasty and "China" and encouraged studying the concept of "China" during the Qing dynasty, by carefully looking at the Qing archives and original materials in order to see how such concept and terminology were used and understood at that time. This does not contend that the Qing dynasty is not China.
The military expansion of frontiers were sometimes expensive and drained resources from the rest of China. Some seemed to have argued that the Manchu-ruled Qing was more comparable to the Ottoman, Mughal, and Romanov (Russian) Empires across the Eurasian landmass than most earlier Chinese dynasties. They argued that the Qing Empire was not only a victim of imperialism but also practiced imperialism itself. For example, Peter C. Perdue had described the Qing as a "colonial empire" that ruled over a collection of peoples and deserves comparison with other contemporary empires, whereas traditionalist historians reject the comparison of Imperial China to imperialist powers. Some of the New Qing historians followed Evelyn Rawski calling the Qing "Early Modern," rather than "late imperial," on the grounds that the Manchus created a centralized empire (with a much larger territory and population) that the Ming could not have created.
Mark Elliot points out that the most critical academic propositions of the New Qing History are the following:
Discovers the Inner Asian dimension under Manchu rule
Advocates the use of non-Chinese historical materials (especially Manchu-language documents)
Pays attention to the context of global history
Origins
The origins of the New Qing History lie in Inner Asian Studies. A Harvard historian, Joseph Fletcher, studied the languages and culture of Central Asia. He was among those to discredit the idea that nearly all Manchu documents were translations from Chinese and that they would add little to the record. He wrote in 1981, "Qing scholars who want to do first-class work in the archives must, from now on, learn Manchu and routinely compare the Manchu and Chinese sources for their topics of research." Beatrice Bartlett, a Yale historian who had studied Manchu with Fletcher, reported in an article, 'Books of Revelations', that the archives in Taiwan and Beijing revealed many secrets, which required knowledge of Manchu.
The Grand Council of the Yongzheng emperor, for instance, operated only in Manchu until the 1730s, and many other important edicts and memorials did not have Chinese translations. Official use of Manchu, she argued, did not decline during the 19th century. She concluded that the archives of Manchu materials were more likely to be complete, as they were less likely to have been raided, weeded or lost.
The New Qing History took on distinct form in the mid-1990s. In 1993, Crossley and Rawski summarized the arguments for using Manchu-language materials, which they and others had explored in the newly opened archives in Beijing and were beginning to use in their publications. Evelyn Rawski's presidential address, "Re-envisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History," at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in 1996, particularly criticized the question of the "sinicization" of the Qing that had been raised by Ping-ti Ho in his 1967 article "The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in Chinese History." Rawski's thought was based on a Manchu-centric concept of history and indicated that the reason the Qing rulers could successfully govern China for nearly 300 years was not the result of sinicization, adopting the characteristics of Han Chinese rule and culture, but by their focus on retaining the characteristics of Manchu culture. They used such characteristics to strengthen relations with other nationalities to build a multiracial empire that included Manchu, Han, Mongol, Tibetan, Uyghur and other nationalities. For better governing his multiethnic empire, for instance, the Kangxi emperor located his summer residence in the Chengde Mountain Resort, north of the Great Wall. That became the historical core of city of Chengde, which the Qianlong emperor enlarged considerably, including a replica of the Potala Palace in Lhasa.
In response, Ping-ti Ho published "In Defense of Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski's 'Re-envisioning the Qing'". He argued that the pattern of Chinese history was for a conquest dynasty to adopt Chinese ways of rule and culture and attacked Rawski for Manchu-centrism.
The school that is now known as the "New Qing History" developed after the debate. In 2011, historian Huang Pei published a monograph that developed the objections stated by Ho Ping-ti.
There are differences among the scholars in the loose group. For example, Evelyn Rawski's Re-envisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History in 1996 regarded the Qing as a Manchu empire, with China being only one part. Nevertheless, Pamela Kyle Crossley sees the empire not as a Manchu empire but as a "simultaneous" system in which the rulership is not subordinate to the Chinese or any other single culture. She criticized the new "Manchu-centered" school for romanticism and a reliance upon disproved theories about "Altaic" language and history, but she seems to include herself in the Qing empire school, which she calls "Qing Studies." Mark Elliot states that while he agrees with such views to some extent, because he thinks it helps to make people more acutely aware that the Qing Empire and the Republic of China (or the People's Republic of China) are different political entities with different political goals, but he admits that he also worries about drawing too sharp a line between Qing dynasty and China. He wrote that it was under the Qing that "China" transformed into a definition of referring to lands where the "state claimed sovereignty", rather than only the territories inhabited by the people of the Central Plains (or the Han Chinese) by the end of the 18th century. Evelyn Rawski also wrote in 2015 that while the term Zhongguo (i.e. China) was "never part of the formal name of a Chinese state until the twentieth century", the Manchus who founded the Qing dynasty succeeded in expanding the meaning of Zhongguo (China) to encompass the territories of the Qing empire, thus "creating the foundation for the modern concept".
American historian Richard J. Smith reported that an interpretive "middle ground" had emerged between the views of Rawski and Crossley, on one hand, and Ho and Huang, on the other. Smith indicated that based on the idea that "Qing empire" and "China" might not be the same thing the Qing had to be placed in a context that included Inner Asia in general and that saw China in a global field. The less "sinocentric" view, Smith continued, which placed less emphasis on "sinicization," had won over most China scholars in the West (and increasingly also in China), in spite of debates over "matters of degree." Nevertheless, he pointed out "China proper” (often designated 内地 meaning "inner territory" in Chinese) refers to the core eighteenth provinces of the Qing dynasty, but from a Manchu perspective, however, the concept of “China” (Chinese: Zhongguo; Manchu: Dulimbai Gurun) embraced the entire empire, including Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
Responses
The arguments put forward in the New Qing History inspired debate on a number of specific points, including the concept of "China" during the Qing dynasty.
Regarding the concept "China"
The scholar Zhao Gang responded against the revisionist historians by noting that some claimed that the Qing used only "China" (中國) to encompass only Han people (漢人) and "China proper" and pointed out that in fact that China proper and Han people were not synonymous with "China" in the Qing view according to Mark Elliott's own work. The Han dynasty used Zhongguo (中國) to refer only to Han areas, but the Qing dynasty reinvented the definition of Zhongguo (中國) to refer to non-Han areas as well. Zhao Gang cited Qing documents with Qing being used for the Manchu term Dulimbai Gurun (a direct translation of "中國", Zhongguo; "Middle Kingdom") in Manchu texts and Zhongguo in Chinese texts to refer to the entire Qing including Manchuria, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet as "China", in official documents, edicts, treaties, in texts like the Treaty of Nerchinsk, Convention of Kyakhta (1768), a 1755 pronouncement by the Qianlong Emperor, and a Manchu language memorial on the conquest of Dzungaria, and Qianlong's arguments for the annexation of Xinjiang, and in Qianlong's sinicization policies in parts of Xinjiang.
Elena Barabantseva has also noted that the Manchu referred to all subjects of the Qing empire regardless of ethnicity as "Chinese" (中國之人), and they used the term Zhongguo (中國) as a synonym for the entire Qing empire but used "Hanren" (漢人) to refer only to the core area of the empire, with the entire empire viewed as multiethnic.
William T. Rowe wrote that the name "China" (Chinese: 中國 or 中華) was apparently understood to refer to the political realm of the Han Chinese during the Ming dynasty, and this understanding persisted among the Han Chinese into the early Qing dynasty, and the understanding was also shared by Aisin Gioro rulers before the Ming-Qing transition. The Qing, however, "came to refer to their more expansive empire not only as the Great Qing but also, nearly interchangeably, as China" within a few decades of this development. Instead of the earlier (Ming) idea of an ethnic Han Chinese state, this new Qing China was a "self-consciously multi-ethnic state". Han Chinese scholars had some time to adapt this, but by the early 19th century, the notion of China as a multinational state with new, significantly extended borders had become the standard terminology for Han Chinese writers (such as Wei Yuan). Rowe noted that "these were the origins of the China we know today". He added that while the early Qing rulers viewed themselves as multi-hatted emperors who ruled several nationalities "separately but simultaneously", by the mid-19th century the Qing Empire had become part of a European-style community of sovereign states and entered into a series of treaties with the West, and such treaties and documents consistently referred to Qing rulers as the "Emperor of China" and his administration as the "Government of China".
Joseph W. Esherick observes that while the Qing Emperors governed frontier non-Han areas in a different, separate system under the Lifan Yuan and kept them separate from Han areas and administration, it was the Manchu Qing Emperors who expanded the definition of Zhongguo (中國) and made it "flexible" by using that term to refer to the entire empire.
Other points
Scholars have disagreed on whether or how much the Manchu rulers used new forms of imperial ritual to display new forms of empire or continued rituals from the Ming to show that they saw themselves as heirs of a Han Chinese empire. Roger Des Forges' review of David M. Robinson's Martial Spectacles of the Ming Court criticized scholars of conquest dynasties and New Qing History and disagreed with the idea that the "Royal hunt" was a differing factor between Han Chinese and conquest dynasties. He noted that the martial themed Ming dynasty Grand Review was copied by the Qing and disagreed with those who sought to present it as a Qing feature. He praised Robinson in differing from scholars who selected certain Ming and Qing emperors to contrast their difference and for not conflating Han with "Chinese" and not translating the term "Zhongguo".
The New Qing History, according to Tristan G. Brown, writing in 2011, did not explore the example of Islam and Muslims to test their argument that the early Qing emperors aspired to be universal monarchs. Brown finds that an inscription by the Qianlong emperor showed that he wanted to incorporate both Xinjiang and Islam into his empire and that this inscription, along with the "inventive structural duality of Chinese-Islamic architecture with Central Asian Turkish-Islamic architectural forms," makes the "most compelling case" that New Qing History is also applicable to Chinese Islam.
Criticisms by Chinese scholars
In the journal Chinese Social Sciences Today, an official publication of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li Zhiting, a scholar working on the National Qing Dynasty Compilation Committee, charged that "'New Qing History' is academically absurd, and politically does damage to the unity of China...." He sought to "expose its mask of pseudo-academic scholarship, eliminating the deleterious effect it has had on scholarship in China." Li went on to charge that the "whole range of views [New Qing History scholars] express are cliches and stereotypes, little more than dusted off versions in a scholarly tone of the Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism of the 19th century". American scholars such as Evelyn Rawski, Mark Elliott, Pamela Kyle Crossley, and James Millward, Li continued, "view the history of China from an imperialist standpoint, with imperialist points of view and imperialist eyes, regarding 'traditional' China as an 'empire', regarding the Qing dynasty as 'Qing dynasty imperialism'."
Zhong Han, a Chinese scholar and researcher of Manchu and early Qing history, argued that the so-called “simultaneous emperorship” makes no sense, and about New Qing History's "apparent intermixture of scholarship and politics". The school, as Zhong put it, looks at the Qing dynasty "as if it were the owner of an apartment building, in which each unit is occupied by an individual ethnic group. The Han Chinese, but an occupant of one unit, is no more entitled than others". For Zhong, it is totally groundless to view the Qing as a Western-style colonial empire, let alone separating Qing and China. Distasted of accusations such as Qing dynasty was not analogous to China, Zhong employed much evidence to make his points, using not the Han language literature but also Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan sources to support his point that there is no question that the Qing dynasty identified itself as China.
Major works
Pamela K. Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
James A. Millward, Ruth W. Dunnell, Mark C. Elliott, and Philippe Forêt (eds.), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde. London: Routledge, 2004.
James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
See also
Sinicization of the Manchus
Later Jin (1616–1636)
Conquest dynasty
Qing dynasty in Inner Asia
Names of the Qing dynasty
Debate on the Chineseness of the Yuan and Qing dynasties
References
Further reading
Biran, Michal (2017) "The Non-Han Dynasties," in M. Szonyi, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Chinese History (Oxford: Willey Blackwell): 129–143. Reviews the historiography of non-Han dynasties, highlighting the New Qing History.
Crossley, Pamela. "Beyond the culture: my comments on New Qing history," Chinese Social Science Today November 24, 2014
Fan, Xin. "The anger of Ping-Ti Ho: the Chinese nationalism of a double exile." Storia della storiografia 69.1 (2016): 147–160.
Wu, Guo (2016) “New Qing History: Dispute, Dialog, and Influence”. The Chinese Historical Review. 23 (1).
Qing dynasty
Case studies
Historiography of China
Manchu studies
Schools of thought
Sinology