Restless Empire by Odd Westad Read Free Book Online

were also gradually defeated in the 1860s and early 1870s.At tremendous cost to the empire, the Nian in east central China, Muslim rebels in Yunnan and Xinjiang, and local insurgents all over south China were gradually overpowered or forced into mountain areas or wildernesses, where some of them would survive to fight another day under other banners.
    The people who had led these rebel movements had often been inspired by a mixture of Chinese and foreign ideas. They were “new” men, of a kind that the empire had not seen before. But if the rebels were a new breed, so were those who defeated them, men like the Hunanese general Zeng Guofan and his protégé, Li Hongzhang. First and foremost, they had battled the rebels not on behalf of the Qing but in order save their home provinces and thereby save China. They wanted to recreate China’s greatness by learning from the West, while keeping a Chinese state and society in line with their traditions.
    T HE EXTENSION OF W ESTERN-LED TRADE into China in the early nineteenth century led to a clash between the Chinese and the British empire that seriously weakened the Qing state. While some Chinese benefited from this waning of central power, others suffered as vital services disappeared. But at the same time as the Qing’s troubles multiplied, a metamorphosis in economic and social relations within China was beginning. Carried out mostly from below, it originated from the strength and vitality of Chinese society coming out of the eighteenth century and the effects of the Western incursions in the nineteenth. These processes of change would have seemed far less painful if it had not been for the cataclysmic wars of the time. It was the wars and the misery that followed in their wake that split Chinese society open and made it more vulnerable to economic exploitation and social devastation.
    In the first part of the nineteenth century, much of China’s foreign relations and a reasonable amount of China’s internal politics were ripe for change. In Europe and North America, a transformation in scienceand technology had helped create mighty military forces, which—in terms of power—favored the West over all other societies. In the early decades of the century, the Europeans had spent almost a generation tearing their own continent apart in the wars that followed the French Revolution. When these wars were over, China and Japan were at the top of the list of countries the leading Western states wanted opened to trade. There is also little doubt that both in China and Japan some sections of society were very well equipped to link into the trading networks that Western companies were setting up in the Indian Ocean and in the western Pacific. In China—and especially in the south—there were small groups of people who knew much about the changes that were taking place elsewhere in Asia and who wanted to profit from them.
    The fact that the Qing could overcome the Taiping and other rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century is of central significance for understanding China’s international affairs in the decades that followed. The Qing project showed that it had a good deal of life left. To many Chinese, the empire represented stability and certainty, even if they disliked the Manchus. The mix of “self-strengthening” (meaning mostly Westernization) and appeals to tradition and “Chineseness” that the Qing came up with after the defeat of the rebellions against them appealed to many, not least because several of the new initiatives were led by non-Manchu military heroes. And even in retreat the Qing were still more feared by the general population than rebels and foreigners combined; their immense brutality when threatened had been seen over and over again in China for more than 200 years.
    D URING THE PERIOD OF THE Q ING’S maximum weakness in 1856, as Taiping troops were advancing north, the Western powers chose to continue their wars against China in order to force further