Myth of ethnic conflict and ethnic revolutions, 1644–1911

Abstract

There has been a long-entrenched view that China’s Qing Dynasty was a ‘Manchu Dynasty’, which imposed alien conquest on China’s majority of the ethnic Han. Such a view has made the Manchus allegedly responsible for all the social evils from the 1840 Opium War onwards on the one hand and all the ‘anti-Manchu’ sentimentalities and movements, such as the Taipings and Republicans, automatically legitimate and revolutionary on the other. This article challenges this stereotype and argues with historical evidence that the ‘Manchu rule’ was a myth. Social conflicts in late Qing were mainly between the Han Chinese themselves. It is time to end the ‘Manchu rule’ as an easy pretext to conceal the true social issues and problems in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century China.