Coda

‘Men and women of the eighteenth century – before the West arrived in force – were already creating the conditions of China’s modern society’, historian Philip Kuhn wrote in his classic study of the Qianlong reign, when the Qing empire was the most productive and populous in the globe. ¹ Examining a sorcery scare that engulfed the empire, from the emperor, his bondservants and bureaucrats on down to the itinerant monks and beggars in remote provinces, Kuhn discerned under the sheen of prosperity brewing ethnic animosity, awareness of resource scarcity, fear of precarity, as well as the erosion of social mores that gave life stability and meaning. The ‘conditions of China’s modern society’ that Kuhn spoke of were the dark forces of disquiet that removed people from traditional moorings and availed them to be reshaped into modern individual selves and subjects.