ABSTRACT
The emergence of a multi-state system in China Beginning with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese elite began the experiment of fashioning Japan into a nation-state. Eight decades on, an up and coming Chinese elite commenced a similar project in China. Why it took over eighty years for an elite committed to promoting progress for the masses of China to emerge tells us much about the difficulties involved in successfully launching nationalism.1 To understand why elites from the Tokugawa period were willing to embrace the European nation-state system soon after coming under military pressure from Western nation-states while Chinese elites were not, some discussion of the way the Qing social order operated is essential. After an invasion from the north established a Manchu dynasty in China in the mid-seventeenth century the Manchu rulers followed a time honored practice of successful invaders of the massive Chinese empire: they co-opted the basic system of government and control practiced under the Ming dynasty that they replaced. They embraced the ideology of Confucianism as a way to control the populace. Given the relative size of the invader populace and the relative size of China they had precious little choice. Like previous dynasties in China they had no interest in promoting progress among the masses; their goal was building an administrative bureaucratic and military architecture permitting them to clamp down on local rebellions, tax the populace, and ward off threats to their regime, whether these threats emanated from neighbors or close neighbors like Japan or from diehard Ming dynasty loyalists who wanted to re-establish a domestic dynasty. To this end the Qing conquerors amalgamated their form of military organization – the Eight Banners that increasingly became staffed by native Chinese over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – with the Confucian examination system. Why was the Confucian examination system so strongly entrenched in China? It had three characteristics that made it attractive to dynasties long before the Manchus seized power: efficiency; loyalty; and cultural homogeneity. First and foremost it was a parsimonious mechanism for ruling a vast sprawling empire. A
striking example – for the year 1649 – illustrates this point: it is estimated that China had about one civil official per 1,000 persons and a tiny military of about 80,000 soldiers to police a population of 100 million persons. In short, the Chinese administrative structure was highly efficient. One of the main reasons why so few could control so many is because the civil service elite was mainly drawn from the ranks of the gentry – mainly landowners but in any case highly educated individuals – who kept a lid on political dissent at the local level. Why were the gentry so willing to cooperate with the center of the empire, in the case of the Qing, the Forbidden City in Beijing? The reason is the examination system organized around learning the Confucian classics, the writings of philosophers cum political advisors like Mencius and Xun Zi who were disciples of Confucius (Kung Fuzi). Under the complex system of examinations students competed for slots in the bureaucracy. Vast riches were theirs if they succeeded in running the gauntlet of successive layers in the examination ladder (moving from local to provincial to state to imperial). Since the gentry were the main competitors in the examination “hell” they were basically committed to supporting the regime in Beijing. In other words the examination system bought loyalty from the elite. A third reason why the Confucian system of examinations was so deeply entrenched in China is the Chinese character writing system that employs thousands and thousands of characters (called kanji in Japanese that also employs the characters). The fact that China had one single writing system that all participants in the examination system had to memorize – and write essays and documents with – overcame the problem of spoken language drift and language diversity in China. Spoken Chinese has many variants – Mandarin originally spoken mainly in the north, Hunanese, Cantonese, and so forth – that truly constitute separate languages, with different tonal structures, different grammar, and so on. In other words this diversity mimics the diversity of spoken languages in Western Europe. This said, all of the variants could be represented by a single writing system. In this cultural dimension China was unlike Europe where an alphabetic system meant that some form of a spoken language like German, French, or Spanish would end up forming the basis for a unique written language. There was a solid basis for a homogeneous language, the official language that was part and parcel of the examination system. What were the key tenets of classical Confucianism? More a philosophy than a religion, Confucian principles clustered around ethical behavior designed to promote peace and harmony. Rituals were supposed to buttress basic rules of proper behavior, laying the groundwork for individual virtue. Individual behavior should be internalized through a constant pursuit of virtue which – in principle – should be the basis for government. A good official was supposed to exude virtuous behavior by practicing benevolence. Exchange of gifts – mutual obligation – should cement relationships between inferior and superior in the social order. Five hierarchical bonds – ruler to minister; father to son; husband to wife; elder brother to younger brother; and friend to friend – are crucial to maintaining harmony at the social level. The “mandate of heaven” governs the fate of
dynastic rule; a regime forfeiting its legitimacy by jettisoning virtue naturally surrenders its right to rule. The golden rule – do unto others as they would do unto you – should be adhered to. The rectification of names – ideally language being carefully constructed so it corresponds to reality – should rule speech and writing. Finally, the greatest cultural ideal is to pursue the life of a learned gentleman. While these principles are relatively straightforward mastering the way they were to be utilized in actual governing and in punishing criminals and rewarding good behavior involved layers and layers of debate and learning. This was the basis for the perpetuation of the examination system: as reality changed the idea was that the interpretation of the Confucian rule structure should evolve with it. After all, this idea was built into the rectification of names. This was not the only factor shaping the way the examination system operated in reality. The other was the growing competitiveness of the system. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries population growth – especially among the gentry – far outstripped the number of allocated positions in the imperial bureaucracy. It is estimated that in the cohort of examination takers born in 1761, the cohort required three decades of brutal test taking in which the chance of successfully securing a provincial level (second level) certification was one in fifty, or less, yielding a mere one in ten probability of actually securing an appointment. In effect, having devoted three decades to taking examinations a candidate was unlikely to actually obtain a lucrative appointment in the bureaucracy.2 Why were students so willing to undergo this competition? The reason was simple: the economic and social benefits for oneself – and for one’s lineage – were great. The official salary was substantial. On top of it the opportunity to rake off bribes from petitioners seeking “benevolence” was significant. To boot, an imperial official was treated with great deference, a veritable “prince” in the land. To repeat: the Chinese administrative system was a meritocracy. Wealth in the form of owning land was important at the local level, thus buttressing the prestige and political muscle of the gentry within local communities. So land ownership was important. But even more important was the investment that a member of the imperial bureaucracy – or even someone who failed to secure a post in the hierarchy of examinations – had made in terms of forgone opportunities undertaken to master the Confucian classics and their interpretation. The contrast with Japan is striking. In Japan the samurai elite was not a meritocracy; it was based on birth. Moreover, the samurai had little chance of becoming wealthy and they certainly did not own land. In short, the investment made by a samurai in becoming educated – in the very same Confucian classics that the gentry in China cultivated – failed to have the economic and social payoff that it did in China.3 In my opinion it is the fact that the Chinese elite had far more to lose by abandoning the dynastic system than did the samurai in destroying the Tokugawa bakuhan system of confederation government that is the key to understanding why the Qing dynasty staggered on seventy years – from 1839 until 1910 – under
repeated blows delivered by foreign powers, beginning with the English, ending with the Japanese.4 By the early twentieth century China had not only submitted to the humiliation of the treaty port system – which after the Sino-Japanese War ushered in direct foreign investment in China’s treaty ports, notably in Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangzi River delta – it had also made valuable territorial concessions, including the loss of sovereignty over Hong Kong and Macao in the south, and in the north Shandong province conceded to Germany and the Manchurian railroads conceded to Russia (both Shandong and the Manchurian railroads eventually fell into Japanese hands). It was no wonder that Westerners and the Japanese began to contemplate the “carving up of the Chinese melon.” After all, other empires were in the process of dwindling away, notably the “sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire. Why were the Western powers – England, France, Germany, the United States – and later Japan so successful in bringing China under their direct and indirect imperial control? Part of the reason lies in the military force equation. Despite its vast size, two things made China an ineffective military power in the nineteenth century: one was the relative price of exerting military force due to China’s failure to embrace heavy industry and develop its infrastructure; the other was the low rate of conversion of the revenues of the Qing dynasty into maintaining a military establishment. It had been possible for the Qing to rule all of China with a relatively small military establishment. Indeed, as we have seen, China was unusually efficient at governing a large landmass with a very modest budget devoted to administration and police control. The source of this efficiency was the examination system. The new nation-states of Western Europe, North America, and Asia (Japan) were embracing the latest techniques and equipment of industrial warfare. They had much higher rates of military conversion because they were frequently going to war, or preparing to go to war, with each other. This made it relatively easy for them to bully China and bully China they did. Adding to China’s military woes were domestic rebellions brought on directly or indirectly through contact with Western ideas. Notable was the Taiping Rebellion that may have cost up to twenty million lives. The leader of the rebellion was Hong Xiuguan, one of the many failed candidates in the examination gauntlet. Hong commenced studies with a Christian missionary, ultimately becoming convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus. So deluding himself, he declared himself the ruler over the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace in 1831. He gathered a number of restive followers who flocked to his banner that included demands for the ending of foot binding of women, redistribution of land, and suppression of opium. He and his disciples advocated a new examination system in this case modeled on the Christian Bible. Exhorted by Hong a massive rebellion exploded in the Yangzi River delta, lasting from 1850 to 1873 when the Taiping finally went down in the flames of military defeat. In order to crush the rebellion the Qing called on the services of Western militaries – particularly the British – further revealing to foreign powers their inability to control their own territory.
