Mining Chinese historical sources at scale: A machine learning approach to Qing state capacity

We have seen to this point a number of fictionalized treatments in late-Edo Japan of the Opium War, and I have inserted commentary into the discussion, but one work which I did not bring up at that time and which is also concerned with the Opium War I would now like to add. This work did not deal with the Opium War as its main or central theme, but was written as a daily chronicle of the subsequent anti-Qing revolution known as the ‘Taiping Heavenly Kingdom’ (or Taiping Rebellion). It was a piece of fiction in which the story line went as follows: Seeing that the ferocity of the Taiping military force would not in the end succumb to the Qing armies alone, the British — the Qing dynasty’s trading partner ever since the Opium War — dispatch a great armed force to aid the Qing court ‘unaware as it is of their [i.e., British] ulterior motives,’ and the joint Qing-British army destroys the Taipings.

This study examines questions and model answers of history Abitur tests for the higher education entrance qualification in the German state of Baden- Württemberg between 2016 and 2020. Research methods are to analyze the question types and historical sources quantitatively and examine the model answers qualitatively to shed light on the procedure and strategies for writing answers. Exam topics mainly cover the development of democracy in modern and contemporary German history. A test set consists of three historical primary sources and four question sentences, and the exam time comprises 270 minutes. The four questions deal with historical source analysis, explaining a historical event or policy, and reviewing a historical thesis. The model answers to the questions on primary sources consist of ‘introduction of the presented historical sources’, ‘a description and summary of given sources’, ‘interpretation in a historical context’, ‘discussion on the arguments or intention of the source author’, and ‘summary’. The test requires students’ narrative ability to paraphrase and quote. In South Korea, in comparison, the CSAT history tests use multiple-choice questions that mainly require memorization of knowledge. This study argues that ‘Essay writing’ and ‘Analyzing historical sources’ should be more emphasized in Korean tests. The limitation of this study is that it analyzes tests of one out of 16 German states, while the scope and form of exams vary by state.

In 1842, British guns and ships defeated the Qing dynasty of China in what has since been known as the Opium War. Given the superiority of Western armament, one might have presumed that the experience would have prompted the Qing government to acquire the new technology which played a significant role in its defeat. Yet, the Qing government only did so after another Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s. Historians blame that delay on the Qing government being in its decline, inept in facing up to the technological challenge. That argument culminated in John King Fairbank's Western stimulus-China response model and dominated the Modern Chinese History field before it gave way to the skepticism bred by the distrust of "Orientalism". The contemporary China historian is more likely to seek an explanation for Qing China's woeful experiences in the hands of foreign powers in the internal socio-economic or political dynamics. Nevertheless, elements of political ideology, sometimes referred to as Confucianism, education, politics, and economy have not yielded an explanation either for Qing China's technological backwardness or for its tardiness in taking up the new technology coming from the West. This book is driven by an urge to break that impasse. While, like many China historians, I do not accept that the technological imbalance of the mid-nineteenth century between China and the West necessarily reflected backwardness that may be generalized to many other aspects of Chinese culture, I begin from the position that that imbalance is undeniable. China historians, much like some of the Qing dynasty officials they criticize, do not seem to appreciate the fact that the history of technology has to be studied in relation to its techno-scientific settings.

A discrete mathematics course often teaches about precise logical and algorithmic thought and methods of proof to students studying mathematics, computer science, or teacher education. The roots of such methods of thought, and of discrete mathematics itself, are as old as mathematics, with the notion of counting, a discrete operation, usually cited as the first mathematical development in ancient cultures [7]. However, a typical course frequently presents a fast-paced news reel of facts and formulae, often memorized by the students, with the text offering only passing mention of the motivating problems and original work that eventually found resolution in the modern concepts. This paper describes a pedagogical approach to teaching topics in discrete mathematics and computer science intended to place the material in context and provide direction to the subject matter via student projects centered around actual excerpts from primary historical sources. Much has already been written about teaching with primary historical sources [6, ch. 9]. Here we focus on a list of specific pedagogical goals and how they can be achieved through design of student projects based on primary sources.

While there are a handful of defined methods for working with primary historical sources in archaeology, few archaeologists take these as their main points of departure or rely upon them too rigidly. This is to do both with the highly variable nature of the historical and archaeological material available for certain African contexts, and also with how archaeologists conceive of the relationship between these two bodies of evidence: as antagonistic, supplementary, entangled and subjective, mutually creative, and so on. Some methodologies focus on the potentials for consonance and dissonance between written and material sources. Others utilize oral traditions to provide insights into chronology, memory, historical and political dynamics, and the material aspects of these. Still other approaches focus on how historical and archaeological sources offer complementary perspectives on the local and the global, events and processes, and other shifts in scale. While these methods are diverse and contingent, they are united insofar as archaeologists take their cues from objects and from preoccupations with time and space. Archaeologists see their work concerning primary historical sources not as filling in gaps in written records but as addressing the partialities of the records themselves by engaging with an array of complex questions about meaning, authority, and materiality

Why would anyone think of teaching and learning mathematics directly from primary historical sources? We aim to answer this question while sharing our own experiences, and those of our students across several decades. We will first describe the evolution of our motivation for teaching with primary sources, and our current view of the advantages and challenges of a pedagogy based on teaching with primary sources. We then present three lower-division case studies based on our classroom experience of teaching discrete mathematics courses with student projects based on primary sources, and comment on how these could be adapted for use with other lower-division audiences.

Author(s): Perdue, Peter C. | Abstract: After the First Opium War (1839–1842), British and American merchants negotiated with Chinese officials in Shanghai to work out the framework of the new treaty port regime. One key player in these negotiations was Wu Jianzhang, a Cantonese merchant who became circuit intendant of the Shanghai region. Wu, however, also had links to Cantonese sailors and anti-Qing secret societies. When the Small Swords Society took Shanghai in 1853, he found himself entangled in conflicting responsibilities and networks. Foreign traders and Chinese officials regarded Wu, like other middlemen on the Chinese coast, with a mixture of respect and distrust. Wu’s situation, however, was not unique to the mid-nineteenth century. This article compares Wu to other intermediaries who played similar roles in the sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, in order to show the ways in which Wu, his predecessors, and those who followed in his footsteps connected China to the wider world by navigating the treacherous waters of diplomacy, war, and commerce. The work of John K. Fairbank, who in the 1950s pioneered the study of such people as Wu Jianzhang, can find new meaning in the twenty-first century, enabling us to understand the transnational implications of China’s local social history. Keywords: Shanghai, Opium War, treaty ports, hong merchants, Canton, Fujian, Taiping rebellion, Small Swords Society, Qing dynasty, China coast, Wu Jianzhang

This article examines how steam technology influenced Chinese culture and society after the First Opium War. The steam engine had been the heart of the Industrial Revolution in the West. Machine tools and technical drawings were the essential elements in the process of building it. Yet the Chinese technological tradition lacked these two elements. Although the Chinese misunderstood the steam mechanism when they witnessed British steamships during the First Opium War, they soon learned from trial and error how the mechanism worked as well as the importance of machine tools and technical drawings. In the 1860s, to build steamships and produce modern weapons, the Qing government established modern shipyards and arsenals, importing machine tools and hiring foreign technicians to train Chinese workmen. However, the fiscal strain caused by the Taiping Rebellion and a shift in government policy caused the Qing government divert funds from supporting domestic shipyards to purchasing foreign warships. As well, the lack of institutions that could pool capital made both private entrepreneurs and government projects reluctant to employ steam technology. Nevertheless, the introduction of the corporation allowed for the capital investments necessary to develop steam technology in the late Qing. This article concludes that employing steam power led to revolutionary changes in Chinese technology, culture, and society.

1860년대와 1870년대 중국의 청 왕조는 아편전쟁과 태평반란과 같은 일련의 심각한 난관들로 인해 전례 없는 통치 위기에 직면했다. 이런 상황에서 조선 왕조는 청의 통치 위기를 어떻게 인식하고 직면했을까? 그 당시 중국-조선 관계는 어떠했나? 본 논문은 조선왕조실록(朝鮮王朝實錄), 일성록(日省錄), 승문원일기(承文院日記)와 같은 정부 간행물과 김윤식의 운양집(雲養集), 박규수의 환재총서(瓛齋叢書), 김평묵의 중암집(重菴集), 이건창의 명미당집(明美堂集) 및 황현의 매천야록(梅泉野錄)과 같은 관련 인사들의 전집을 살펴보면서 서술 분석 과정에서 수직적 비교 방법을 사용해서 청나라에 대한 조선의 인식 변화를 조사하였다. 본 논문이 주장하는 바는 다음과 같다. 조선은 청나라가 내적 난관으로 인해 직면했던 위기감와 동일한 위기감을 느끼고 있었으며 양국 운명이 밀접하게 얽혀 있다고 인정했다. 또한 존중심에 대한 조선 백성의 요구가 증가하여 전통적 사대(事大)관계를 불안하게 했다.

One of the greatest Chinese peasant rebellions, the Taiping (Great Peace) Rebellion was directed primarily against the feudal rule of the Manchu dynasty and secondarily against foreign capitalism, which had been making steady inroads into the economy, society, and politics of China ever since the country's defeat in the first Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanking.

Changes over Time in Qing History: The Importance of Context Paul Cohen When I received my doctorate (1961), it was not uncommon for westerners to see Qing China as sui generis, something fundamentally different from the countries of the west. China was a static, unchanging civilization. It was a strange place, hard to understand. And it existed in a state of isolation, hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. China, most western students seemed to agree, would benefit greatly from becoming more like us. American interpretations of nineteenth-century China tended, in the 1950s and 1960s, to lean heavily on the concepts “western impact” and “Chinese response.” The central question, as enunciated by John Fairbank, was “Why did China not respond to foreign encroachment earlier and more vigorously?” Because this was the key question, there was a strong tendency to characterize the non-western-related aspects of nineteenth-century China (state, society, economy, thought) in terms of their “remarkable inertia” (Fairbank). An influential perspective that went hand in hand with the impact-response approach was modernization theory, in particular that aspect of the theory that emphasized the division of China’s long history into traditional and modern phases (modern generally referring to the period of significant contact with the modern west). This approach was based on the assumption that Confucianism and modernity were fundamentally incompatible and that the traditional order had to be torn down before a new modern order could be established. Around 1970, however, this pattern of thinking began to be challenged by an emerging body of scholarly opinion that, in defining the relationship between “modern” [End Page 10] and “traditional,” questioned the implication that they were dichotomous, mutually antithetical conditions. We now began to see China as having undergone mammoth changes prior to the western onslaught (Kuhn), and as the old picture of an unchanging or cyclically changing China was discarded, we started to take a much closer look at developments within China. This more China-centered approach had several identifying features: its starting point was China, not the west; it attempted to cope with the complexity of the Chinese world by breaking it down into smaller spatial units (see Skinner’s concept of macroregions); it took seriously phenomena that were taking place in the lower strata of Chinese society (making possible the study of popular history and culture); and it was highly receptive to the techniques and strategies of disciplines other than history (e.g., anthropology). The China-centered approach began to take hold around 1970. It resulted, among other things, in a very different understanding of Chinese history in the nineteenth century. The consensus of earlier American scholarship had been that the great divide between the modern period of Chinese history and the traditional period was the Opium War. A growing consensus after around 1970 shifted to the view that the true watershed event of nineteenth-century Chinese history was the Taiping Rebellion (see Kuhn and Rowe). Although there are countless issues in the late Qing for the probing of which a China-centered approach remains appropriate and desirable, there are many other issues where this is plainly not the case. Illustrations would be scholarship that poses questions of a broadly comparative nature (such as the work of Wong and Pomeranz), or that examines the behavior and thinking of non-Han ethnic groups within the Chinese realm (e.g., Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans) or the migration of Chinese to other parts of the world. Such work — and there are many other possible examples – raises questions about the boundaries of “Chinese history” in the late imperial era and, indeed, in some instances the very meaning of the word “China.” Similar questions have also been raised, explicitly or implicitly, in studies of the environment, medicine and health, gender, women, publishing, and a host of other topics, which have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. [End Page 11] A principal new context in which Qing China has come to be seen in the past few decades has been that of Eurasia as a whole (see Lieberman, Perdue). The facts relating to the Qing haven’t changed, Kent Guy reminds us. “What has changed is the context, political and...

For all an era of domination under the Manchu immigrants Qing history is recognized as a part of Chinese history with a scheme of “unitary multi-national state.” Beyond the traditional Hanhwa idea, which refers to Sinicization of non-Han groups, this involves a new idea of historical formation of the ‘Chinese Nation’ out of historical unifying process of Han and non- Han ethnic groups including Manchus. The Qing fashioned its national identity as a ruling group through a unique organization called the Palgi (Eight Flags) system, and assumed the leadership of broad nomad area from Manchuria to Central Asia. The Qing also constructed a governance system in China where majority of population was Han Chinese based on the traditional Chinese culture. However, the problem of the Palgi system became salient through the Opium War and the Taiping rebellion, and the Qing Dynasty formed a virtual Manch-Han coalition government for its modernization push through the Yangwu and the Bianfa movements. Yet, the coalition regime collapsed by the revolution of 1911. The new republic promoted the “Five Nation Republic” scheme, which included various non- Chinese groups within the Qing Empire as its citizens. This was not because the Han and non-Han ethnic groups had a common identity as the “Chinese people,” but because they wanted to form the territory of the new Republic following the broad areas of Qing Empire. The problem is that the scheme accepts those non-Han ethnic groups on the Sinicization premise which supposes full cultural enlightenment of Chinese authenticity, and denies the political recognition that they got under the Qing Empire. This means that the framework of China’s “unitary multi-national state” needs close review process.

We investigate changes over time in the distribution by province of current post and province of origin for Qing military officers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this period, the Qing faced a variety of military challenges, including domestic conflicts and foreign incursions. The most important was the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), which is already known to have led to large changes in the composition of the Qing military leadership. In turn, senior Hunan-origin military officers leveraged their networks to dominate officer appointments in the coastal provinces. We examine how the Taiping Rebellion, the First Opium War and other crises affected the allocation of officers between provinces, and the recruitment of officers from different provinces. For the analysis, we use the quarterly rosters of military officers Zhongshu beilan, which have been transcribed into a database as part of the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing Jinshenlu (CGED-Q JSL). We show that the allocation of officers by province did not change during the First Opium War, but changed dramatically after the Taiping Rebellion, with a substantial increase in the share of officers allocated to the southeastern coastal provinces, reflecting heightened importance of maritime defense. We also show that there were two phases to the increase in the share of Hunan-origin officers, one at the end of the eighteenth century, and the other, better-known one following the Taiping Rebellion. Finally, we show that exceptions to the rule of avoidance in the appointment of senior military officers became more common for all types of officers from the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, and that afterward, low-, mid-, and high-level officers followed different trajectories. We conclude with an assessment of the implications of our findings for our understanding of the Qing in the nineteenth century.

The 1840s and 1850s were a tumultuous time for the Qing Dynasty in China, largely as a result of the First and Second Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. For centuries, China had adhered to the principles of Confucianism, and the nation remained very much inward looking, regarding the rest of the world, particularly the West, as barbarians. It was becoming clear to Chinese officials and intellectuals, however, that China had to enter the modern world, primarily through adoption of Western technology, science, mathematics, and military capability; the alternative was to remain vulnerable to the effects of Western imperialism. It was in this context that in 1860 Feng Guifen wrote and distributed Essays of Protest, which included “On the Adoption of Western Learning.” The purpose of the collection was to propose reforms that would strengthen China and render it less vulnerable to outside influences.

- This research to determine the effect of the Taiping rebellion using the historical methods through four steps, ie heuristics, criticism, interpretation, and historiography. The purpose of this research is to reveal the meaning of the Taiping Tianguo rebellion in socio-political. Taiping Tianguo (1851-1864) occurred at the end of the Manzu empire and established by Hong Xiuquan who then called the King of Heaven. Hong Xiuquan take Christianity and take advantage of the Christian theory of the equation as a weapon, by mobilizing millions of poor peasants against the feudal power of the Qing Empire. Taiping Tianguo rebellion is an uprising heaviest experienced Qing dynasty. As a result of this rebellion economic conditions, political, social and Qing dynasties that have been weakened by the dominance of Western nations getting worse. Taiping rebellion can only be extinguished after surviving for 13 years. Western nations have a stake because it helps the Qing dynasty to crush the rebellion. The collapse of the Taiping rebellion also caused by the Hong Xiuquan who only rely on individual strengths and ignore the vision at the beginning of missions. Key w ords : Taiping Tianguo, Hong Xiuquan, Dinasti Qing