Resisting Marginalization in Late Qing China: Local Dynamics in Jining’s Initial Modern Transformation, 1881–1911

Abstract

From the mid-19th century, China began to experience drastic changes such as bureaucratic corruption, popular insurgence, the waning of the central imperial power, and the decay of the Grand Canal, which had been the lifeline for the whole empire during the late imperial period. The abolition of grain tribute shipping, the withdrawal of the canal and canal-related hydraulic system, and then the disruption of the canal channel in the north resulted in the decline of most urban centers along the canal’s course, including Jining, a great canal metropolis in southwestern Shandong province. Furthermore, the overwhelming intrusion of Western capitalist-dominated globalization dramatically turned these interior urban centers into hinterlands. Jining found itself downgraded to a peripheral status but did not decline like most northern cities and areas. This paper examines the extraordinary undertakings by Jining’s powerful and open-minded elites who largely constrained the locality’s decline and vigorously worked towards its modernization in the last decades of the Qing. This local story illustrates an example of a partially successful Western urban transformation in inland China.