Conquest Dynasties Research Articles

“ACCOMMODATING BARBARIANS FROM AFAR”: POLITICAL AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN MING CHINA AND TIBET

The Ming was a Han dominated dynasty established after the overthrow of the Mongol Yuan, a foreign conquest dynasty. After putting an end to the century of so-called “upsetting hat and shoes” <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection3_in1.tif"/> rule of the “barbarians”, the Ming court often boasted of “emulating the way of the past sage kings” <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection3_in2.tif"/> and took as its responsibility to recover and to reestablish the world order of a Chinese dynasty. Although the Ming inherited many of the former Yuan dynasty's institutions, it also made some fundamental changes. One of the important changes was rebuilding the “distinction between Chinese and barbarian” <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection3_in3.tif"/> that had been broken by the Mongols, and the establishment of Ming legitimacy and identity as “Chinese rule” <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection3_in4.tif"/>. From this identity, the Ming court once again held up the long-standing Han dynastic policy of “accommodating barbarians from afar” a basic principle for its interactions with surrounding ethnic groups. Not only was this a change from the previous dynasty's structure of rule as a great Mongol Ulus, but it also caused tremendous changes in the relationship between the Ming central government and other ethnic groups on its frontier.

Historical Trauma: &lt;em&gt;Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China&lt;/em&gt;

In April 1644 the reigning emperor of Ming-dynasty China committed suicide as massive rebel armies invaded Beijing. By the end of that year the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), led by Manchus, had defeated the rebel armies and remnant Ming forces in and near the capital and had seated a new emperor on the throne in the Forbidden City. They had taken control of northern China and were well on their way to imposing their authority in the south as well. The Qing, like the earlier Yuan (Mongol) dynasty of the thirteenth century, was a conquest dynasty, achieving power through invasion from the north. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Manchu tribal leaders had put together, through conquest and alliance, an ever larger and more efficient military machine that also included Mongols, Koreans and Han Chinese (in what we now call southern Manchuria). The collapse of the Ming, the spread of violence across much of China in the early seventeenth century and the final attacks of the Qing forces caused great suffering. Whole cities were razed when their residents did not submit; men were killed, women raped and children enslaved. Men were ordered to shave their pates and grow queues in the Manchu style, and some committed suicide rather than do so. This historical trauma was recorded extensively by literate Chinese.1 [End Page 67] However, the Qing conquest overall was accepted by the Chinese landholding gentry. Historians generally agree that in spite of widespread Ming loyalism and resentment against the new "barbarian" overlords, the Qing ability and willingness to maintain the basic socioeconomic order led the "gentry" class to cooperate. Tellingly, family heads who refused to accept service under the Qing encouraged or acquiesced as their sons and nephews participated in the revised examination system and pursued careers in Qing officialdom. Rulers like the great Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722) understood the need to appeal to this critical social elite. In the Confucian tradition, populations could be categorized according to standards similar in some ways to modern racial thinking. Certainly, the distinction between the "civilized" (Chinese) and the "barbarous" (foreigners) was central. At one extreme, it was held that barbarians were innately animal-like and could never become civilized. However, the mainstream view essentially held that this distinction was not immutable: barbarians could become civilized ("transformed"—jiaohua, xianghua) and indeed were even expected to do so. Also, rulership was legitimized by the "Mandate of Heaven," which was bestowed on the basis of virtue, not racial purity. Anyone, theoretically, could claim the Mandate and an orthodox place in the succession of emperors. The Qing dynasty's claims to legitimacy were virtually unquestioned through the eighteenth century, but that authority began to fray in the nineteenth. As the Qing government suffered a series of defeats and humiliations at the hands of the British, French, Americans, Germans and other Western powers, and in 1895 at the hands of the long-despised Japanese, and as domestic reforms were stymied by conservatives, calls for radical change increasingly were heard. The scions of the old gentry elite were then being educated in modern schools located in east-coast cities and abroad, where they learned modern racial thinking, that is, the mainstream Western view that humanity was divided among several major, essentially immutable breeding populations. Generally these were referred to in five, color-coded categories: Whites, Yellows, Browns, Blacks and Reds. This order also represented a hierarchy of intelligence and morality that justified rule by Whites—temporary and tutorial rule in some views, permanent rule over uneducable peoples in other views. The present essay cannot pursue this subject. Suffice it to say [End Page 68] that Chinese thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century accepted some of the basic premises of racial thinking, tending to equate the intelligence of Whites and Yellows and sometimes predicting a racial war between them for world supremacy.2 Chinese thinkers also understood...

Historical Trauma: Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China

In April 1644 the reigning emperor of Ming-dynasty China committed suicide as massive rebel armies invaded Beijing. By the end of that year the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), led by Manchus, had defeated the rebel armies and remnant Ming forces in and near the capital and had seated a new emperor on the throne in the Forbidden City. They had taken control of northern China and were well on their way to imposing their authority in the south as well. The Qing, like the earlier Yuan (Mongol) dynasty of the thirteenth century, was a conquest dynasty, achieving power through invasion from the north. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Manchu tribal leaders had put together, through conquest and alliance, an ever larger and more efficient military machine that also included Mongols, Koreans and Han Chinese (in what we now call southern Manchuria). The collapse of the Ming, the spread of violence across much of China in the early seventeenth century and the final attacks of the Qing forces caused great suffering. Whole cities were razed when their residents did not submit; men were killed, women raped and children enslaved. Men were ordered to shave their pates and grow queues in the Manchu style, and some committed suicide rather than do so. This historical trauma was recorded extensively by literate Chinese.1 [End Page 67] However, the Qing conquest overall was accepted by the Chinese landholding gentry. Historians generally agree that in spite of widespread Ming loyalism and resentment against the new "barbarian" overlords, the Qing ability and willingness to maintain the basic socioeconomic order led the "gentry" class to cooperate. Tellingly, family heads who refused to accept service under the Qing encouraged or acquiesced as their sons and nephews participated in the revised examination system and pursued careers in Qing officialdom. Rulers like the great Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722) understood the need to appeal to this critical social elite. In the Confucian tradition, populations could be categorized according to standards similar in some ways to modern racial thinking. Certainly, the distinction between the "civilized" (Chinese) and the "barbarous" (foreigners) was central. At one extreme, it was held that barbarians were innately animal-like and could never become civilized. However, the mainstream view essentially held that this distinction was not immutable: barbarians could become civilized ("transformed"—jiaohua, xianghua) and indeed were even expected to do so. Also, rulership was legitimized by the "Mandate of Heaven," which was bestowed on the basis of virtue, not racial purity. Anyone, theoretically, could claim the Mandate and an orthodox place in the succession of emperors. The Qing dynasty's claims to legitimacy were virtually unquestioned through the eighteenth century, but that authority began to fray in the nineteenth. As the Qing government suffered a series of defeats and humiliations at the hands of the British, French, Americans, Germans and other Western powers, and in 1895 at the hands of the long-despised Japanese, and as domestic reforms were stymied by conservatives, calls for radical change increasingly were heard. The scions of the old gentry elite were then being educated in modern schools located in east-coast cities and abroad, where they learned modern racial thinking, that is, the mainstream Western view that humanity was divided among several major, essentially immutable breeding populations. Generally these were referred to in five, color-coded categories: Whites, Yellows, Browns, Blacks and Reds. This order also represented a hierarchy of intelligence and morality that justified rule by Whites—temporary and tutorial rule in some views, permanent rule over uneducable peoples in other views. The present essay cannot pursue this subject. Suffice it to say [End Page 68] that Chinese thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century accepted some of the basic premises of racial thinking, tending to equate the intelligence of Whites and Yellows and sometimes predicting a racial war between them for world supremacy.2 Chinese thinkers also understood...

The last emperors: a social history of Qing imperial institutions

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) was the last and arguably the greatest of the conquest dynasties to rule China. Its rulers, Manchus from the north, held power for three centuries despite major cultural and ideological differences with the Han majority. In this book, Evelyn Rawski offers a bold new interpretation of the remarkable success of this dynasty, arguing that it derived not from the assimilation of the dominant Chinese culture, as has previously been believed, but rather from an artful synthesis of Manchu leadership styles with Han Chinese policies.

China under Jurchen Rule: Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History (review)

Reviews 547© 1997 by University ofHawai'i Press Hoyt Cleveland Tillman and Stephen H. West, editors. China under Jurchen Rule: Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History. Foreword by Herbert Franke. SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1995. xxi, 385 pp. Hardcover $59.50, isbn 0-7914-2273-9. Paperback $17.95, ISBN 0-7914-2274-7. As "a pioneering work" that encourages further research on the Chin period (1115-1234) (p. 19), this volume is certainly a welcome contribution to the ongoing study of China's conquest dynasties. The Foreword by Herbert Franke and the Introduction by the two editors highlight its "outstanding achievement" (p. xxi), not only in examining a period between the Sung and the Yuan, but also in placing "the culture of the Chin era in Chinese cultural history" (p. 19). A corrective to the old notion that the cultural life of the Chin was "barbarous," a "void," or an "unproductive transitional phase" (pp. xx-xxi), this is even more ofan achievement considering the scarcity of Chin sources, a fact that owes mainly to the destruction and general disruption of civil culture as a result ofwarfare between the forces ofthe Chin and the Sung and die Mongols, and the disempowerment of the Chin literati. Throughout the volume, Chin culture is discussed in terms of two kinds of cultural relations. The first kind, between the Jurchens and their Chinese contemporaries , is examined in terms of the sinicization ofthe Jurchens along with "elements ofJurchen tribal organization and lifestyle," which, throughout the century ofJurchen dominance in North China, helped the Chin to maintain "a mixed system ofrelatively pluralistic and polyethnic character" (p. 24). Second, a discussion ofJurchen-Khitan and Jurchen-Mongol relations and a briefcomparison of the Chin with the Manchu Ch'ing address the issue ofmutual influence ofpreceding and subsequent dynasties. Efforts are made to integrate the Chin into the Chinese society and culture with which it coexisted, to evaluate the conquest dynasty in the context ofmainstream Chinese history, to recognize the legitimacy of a nonHan dynasty, and to make use of scanty primary source materials to construct a cultural history of a people for whom (as with many other non-Han peoples) a written historical record in their own language is incomplete. All ofthese discussions , although specific to Chin culture, offer valuable general theories and methodological approaches to the study ofall of China's conquest dynasties. Well-organized, the volume's three essays in part 1 survey the cultural and institutional history ofthe Chin in the context of Chinese history overall; three essays in part 2 examine the Chin religion and Confucian thought, and four essays in part 3 discuss literature and art in relation to sociopolitical and cultural developments. 548 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1997 In chapter 1, Hoyt Tillman traces the evolution of the Chin away from Jurchen tribal practices and toward Chinese imperial institutions. Claiming that "Jurchen interaction with Chinese institutions is indicative of their attitudes and policies toward Chinese culture, and institutional changes are often more concrete and better documented than cultural interaction" (p. 23), Tillman uses the institutions of the Jurchens to study their cultural history. Moving away from the T'ang political culture, which the Liao had inherited, the Chin made a shift "in cultural judgement to adopt Sung models" (p. 38), and there were further significant institutional differences arising largely from the Chin tribal heritage. As for the Mongols, Tillman found, the Chin dealt with them "in much the same way that Chinese regimes had brought steppe tribes into the Chinese political order as vassals" (p. 24). In chapter 2, James Liu introduces a new explanation for the rise of neoConfucianism in the Southern Sung in context of the alien invasion. He declares that "invaders from the northern borderlands had never set their eyes on the Yangtze until the Jurchen," who became, in the early twelfth century, "the first steppe or pastoral-nomadic nationality in Chinese history to cross the Yangtze" (p. 39). The Jurchen confrontation with the Southern Sung "had long-range effects on the Southern Sung government." The most important was the rise of "neo" Confucianism. The...

A Survey of Recent Research in Western Languages on the History of Early Medieval China

The last several decades have seen great strides in the study of early medieval Chinese history among scholars working in the European languages. A body of work significant both in quantity and quality has taken shape in fields as diverse as social history, the history of technology and medieval Buddhism and Daoism. This article will review recent work in the field, focussing on major trends in research. I will confine my discussion to original studies in the Western languages and, for the most part, to studies produced in the last 15 years. In a provocative recent article, Jennifer Holmgren addresses a number of difficult and controversial issues in the early medieval history of China (Holmgren 1989). One of these is the question of terminology, a particularly knotty problem for scholars in an underworked field who need continually to combat the distortions and misconceptions spread innocently by writers of general histories who still lack an adequate body of secondary studies on which to draw. It is the expression conquest dynasty that arouses Holmgren's particular ire, but I will suggest that two other terms have played an even more pernicious role in distorting our view of the Period of Division: these are nomad and tribesman. The prevalent misuse of these terms is rooted in the difficulty that some seem to have in conceiving for those who came to China from the steppe any possibility of a cultural state intermediate between that of tribally organized nomads and ersatz Chinese, between civilization and a stereotyped vision of barbarism. In the many centuries in which they lived within China, non-Chinese changed in a number of ways without simply being remade as Chinese. Ceasing to be nomads, many became what we might call ranchers. The tribal organization of their ancestors slowly decayed, giving birth to new and distinctive forms of patronage and association. Rather than

The Appointment of the Local Officials in South China during the Yuan _??_ Period

What was the change for Chinese officials in south China from the downfall of Song _??_ dynasty to the establishment of Yuan dynasty? Although we know the names of loyalists to former Song dynasty, due consideration should be also given to the appointment of the Chinese to the local offices under the conquest dynasty. Some Chinese literati _??__??_ including the successful candidates for the imperial examination _??__??_ in Song period, remained to be the officials under the Mongolian rule. Some wealthy powerful locals _??__??_ began to annex political, financial and social power in their native places. Therefore, many upstarts appeared in South China.Worrying about the influence of the former dynasty, Yuan government took precautions against the local governers. However in many cases, the government could not obtain satisfactory results. Problems of the appointment had grown hard to solve easily. First was the redundancy of the local officials. In Shi-zu's _??__??_ reign, Ahmad _??__??__??_ wielded power in the government and appointed merchants and unqualified people as officials. Second was the wealthy powerful locals. They often engaged themselves in illegal activities especially concerning the landownership and payment of tax and corvé taking advantage of being appointed as officials. Third was the succession of the position by their descendants. To solve the problems stated above, Yuan government had to reexamine the appointment system.In the early and middle Da-de _??__??_, era in Cheng-zong's _??__??_ reign, high-ranking officials in South China such as Zhu Qing _??__??_, Zhang Xuan _??__??_ and Hu Yi-sun _??__??__??_ lost their position and were accused to death. In 1301 (Da-de 7), two Special Pacification Commissioners _??__??__??__??_ were representatively dispatched to each six areas in China proper in order to watch local administration. They arrested a great number of officials amount to 18, 473 for bribery, and cleared many people from the false charge. An act was decided to issue in the same year, though it is now not sure whether the act was actually put in force. Officials in the Provincial Secretariat _??__??_ were ordered to move to another province because they often did evil by means of the territorial relationship. It was just the same time when the following generation reached to the age to get position in the office.In 1315 (Yan-you _??__??_ 2), the government conducted the first imperial examination, which was naturally welcomed by the Chinese Confucian scholars. It was carried out not only for meeting the earnest desire of Confucian scholars but for solving the problem of supply and demand of the local governers. The central government wanted to evade taking wealthy powerful locals, and assign the tallented governers including the Chinese, Mongolians and central Asians.Finally the author emphasize the various efforts for the appointment system in Yuan period contributed to establish the bureaucracy in Ming _??_ dynasty.

Ming-Qing Studies in Japan: 1984

Until recently many studies in Ming and Qing history have been concerned with trying to elucidate social and economic processes of development in land relations. This has led to a thinning in the ranks of scholars in fields other than social and economic history and to an ossification of other research topics. The Qing dynasty has generally been seen both as an alien conquest dynasty and as the last native, "Chinese-style" autocratic dynasty in an agricultural society. Although the Qing did have this dual quality, few have examined the issue comprehensively. It would be no exaggeration to say that the two sides have been severed and researched independently. The tendency to treat the period before the Manchus entered China separately from the period after, and the fact that few scholars have examined the eight gū;sa (banners) system of banner lands and imperial villas as research subjects in social and economic history, provide but one reflection of this problem.

Political Recruitment in the Chin Dynasty

Being a conquest dynasty, the Jurchen Chin (1115-1234) adopted many Chinese institutions to rule both the Chinese and the Jurchen. Among the policies employed to stabilize the regime, political recruitment was remarkable in its flexibility as compared with the more rigid policy of the Ch'i-tan Liao (907-1125). It was so designed that talented Chinese and Jurchen personnel were channeled into the bureaucracy, without jeopardizing the predominant position of the Jurchen minority. Practices of recruitment included civil service examinations, the yin privilege, hereditary selection, and transfer from the military to the civil service. This essay probes into these practices and the dualistic character of Chin political recruitment.

Chinese Communist Assessments of a Foreign Conquest Dynasty

Chinese Communist evaluations of China's foreign conquest dynasties, like those of earlier Chinese historians, have been hostile, at least on the most vulgar level of historical writing. This comes as no surprise, for the conquest dynasties occupied all or part of China by military force and often governed badly. For the Chinese Communist historians these conquerors carry the additional onus of being feudalists, or worse, feudalists who allowed the feudal economy to stagnate. This attitude is particularly marked in the treatment of the more recent foreign dynasties, the Khitan Liao dynasty (916–1124), the Jurchen Chin dynasty (1115–1234), the Tangut Hsi Hsia dynasty (1032–1227), the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) and the one discussed here, the Mongol Yüan dynasty (1220–1367).