In a long review of Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (2019) James Millward argues for rethinking the course of Chinese history as a succession of different polities rather than as a succession of dynasties within one polity. The first four sections of the article are devoted a review of the book. I'm reproducing most of the fifth section, which outlines Millward's suggested narrative.
First, it would stop treating China as a politically continuous entity thousands of years old. Rather, bear in mind that PRC just had its seventieth birthday — that makes it 173 years younger than the United States, for example. The exceptionalist and nationalistic narrative of Chinese political continuity is not a new one: it derives from the foundational Records of History by Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), who locked in a historiographic model that represents China as a linear succession of legitimate dynasties, each comprised of a succession of legitimate emperors, each state writing its predecessor (and enemy) into its own origin story. This is a powerful conceit, and the best proof that the historian’s brush can be mightier than the sword. But we should recognize it as rhetorical rather than empirical.
Of course, let’s not ignore the great cultural continuity of the Sinic sphere, rooted in classical Chinese written language and early Chinese literary, historical and philosophical texts. The Chinese classical tradition served as cultural foundation not just for China-based states, but for Chinese-character using societies in Vietnam, Korea and Japan and to lesser extent other places in Southeast, Northeast and Inner Asia. The role of Chinese classical culture in East Asia is in fact strikingly reminiscent of the Greco-Roman linguistic and cultural tradition in the Mediterranean and Europe, and of the Arabic- and Persian-language Islamic tradition of much of Asia and north Africa. Thus, just as we discuss the commonalities of Christendom and the Islamicate, which linked cultures over space and time in the absence of continuous political unity, we might similarly talk about a Sinicate, or Chinese cultural ecumene, rather than an uninterrupted unitary “China.”
Second, a new paradigm for modern Chinese history would recognize that the PRC came to power by acquiring (not “inheriting”) the bulk of the ethnically diverse Qing empire. Qing included, but was not confined to, the peoples and territories formerly under Ming rule. Though Qing imperial discourse and institutions owed much to Chinese culture and the Ming, it was not limited to these but included Inner Asian elements as well. Writers should not use “Qing” and “China” interchangeably (as Mülhhahn and many others do) any more than we would use “Ottoman” as a synonym for “Turkey.” And if written at all, the term “Qing China” would mean not the whole empire, but rather the ethnographically Chinese former Ming territories that Qing incorporated, in distinction from Qing Inner Asia or Qing Taiwan.
Third, get rid of the ahistorical “tributary system” notion. Drop it from textbooks. Instead, historians should clearly define the varied institutions and arrangements employed by the Qing empire in domestic administration and foreign affairs. The Qing administered former Ming territories and new Han settler colonies with the junxian system, whose county magistrates and yamen offices are familiar to readers of Chinese history. But besides this, in Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Taiwan the Qing put local non-Chinese elites in charge of indigenous non-Chinese administrative systems, under military governance by the Qing eight-banner system, its officials predominantly Manchu and Mongol, not Han. Chinese-style administration expanded later in tandem with Han settlement, but remembering that Qing in fact employed “one country, many systems” in successfully governing its empire, without endeavoring to Sinicize administration or culture of Inner Asia, provides useful perspective on the PRC struggles with Hong Kongers, Uyghurs, Tibetans and other peoples of its peripheries. Qing Korea and Qing Tibet were special cases: in both, the Qing stationed small garrisons of troops, but did not implement military rule as it did in Mongolia or Xinjiang. The Qing exerted sovereign claims in Tibet and Korea, tried to manage lama selection in Tibet and intervened militarily in both places upon occasion, but generally remained more aloof from local affairs than it did in territory it directly administered.
Nor was late imperial foreign policy conducted according to a one-size-fits-all “tributary system.” Asian international relations did not fit the Westphalian model, to be sure, but rather involved a variety of flexible, porous, overlapping and nested hierarchical relationships.[1] “Tributary trade” was not the rule; it also took place in border enclaves or via transnational merchant networks. “Tribute” (a mis-translation of the Chinese word gong) should be understood simply as diplomatic gift exchange. Asian inter-polity relations were not in fact so different from those early modern Europe, since the idealized Westphalian understanding of orderly international relations among a community of equal, independent states did not really emerge until after Napoleon, if ever. And there is certainly no historical precedent for a future East Asia caught up in a neo-tributary system centered on the Chinese Communist Party.
Fourth, a new paradigm would view the aftermath of the Qing fall (1912) more in line with how we treat the that of the Tsarist (1917), Hapsburg (1918), Ottoman (1922) empires, albeit with different ultimate results. As with the other contemporaneous imperial disintegrations, the Qing collapse occasioned multiple declarations of independence from its former imperial territories: the Ming lands, Tibet, Mongolia and, somewhat later, from two Eastern Turkestan Republics in southern and northern Xinjiang. Hong Kong and Taiwan had already been removed from the Qing ambit by other imperial powers. Japan had likewise effectively ended the Qing protectorate in Korea in 1895. For four decades after 1912, Chinese and Chinese-Muslim warlords, two militarized political parties (GMD and CCP), Japanese-sponsored Chinese regimes, and Japan itself vied for power in respective pieces of the former-Qing East Asian mainland. Ultimately, and, to many, surprisingly, the PRC party-state gained a military victory in the former Ming lands. The Soviet Union then relinquished to PRC the Eastern Turkestan Republic in northern Xinjiang (which Stalin had turned into a satellite), but not the Mongolian People’s Republic. The PRC took control of Tibet in two stages, the first (1951) mainly through diplomatic means, the second (1959) by main force. Britain handed the Hong Kong colony it had seized from the Qing empire over to the Chinese Communist Party in 1997. Taiwan, a Qing imperial territory, then a Japanese colony, was governed by a Chinese republic based on the Chinese mainland only from 1945–49, before the full GMD military occupation in 1949. It threw off its Leninist single-party system in the 1990s and has now become a democratic republic in its own right.
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