HIS 251 Spring 2002

Leung, 1/28/2002

A Review of Nineteenth-Century China: Empirical Information

From R. Vohra, Chs. 1-3
Empirical knowledge - to be more precise, accurate empirical knowledge - is the foundational raw material for sound interpretation. Therefore, for all students of history, regardless of your career objective, you must learn to respect not only interpretive ideas, but also the empirical knowledge you gain from all sources, but chiefly from your reading. Of the various media from which we may obtain empirical knowledge, the reading of texts and the viewing of actual photographs and pictures (and by that I do not mean stills from movies or even documentaries) remain the most informative, if not the most exciting or stimulating. Gaining empirical information and knowledge first allows you to raise questions about, and maybe even critically evaluate and challenge, the interpretive ideas that other people (including your professors and the authors of the books that you read) put in front of you. Without working at obtaining empirical information for yourself, you may become a very passive learner, which means that you merely assimilate and take for granted what your professors "teach" you in class, or you may become an unsound one who can "talk" a lot but does not resort to evidence, and whose arguments will therefore be ultimately hollow. The responsibility and purpose of empirical knowledge and information is therefore to provide confidence and solidity for our interpretative ideas.

In this course, your professors have shared a lot of interpretive ideas with you, some of which are their own thoughts and viewpoints. The same goes for the scholars who authored the books you have been asked to read carefully. We hope that you find these thoughts and ideas to be illustrated and corroborated by the empirical information that you can find in these books, but it is up to you to locate it, learn it, and use it. The following is just a list of suggestions of "things" that you should be looking for and learning. I would suggest that as you review your reading, you take down in note form, the answers to the following questions. You should be able to find in "Vohra" (one of the textbooks for the course) the information that would allow you to answer these questions quite fully; in a few cases you might embellish the answers with information from your lecture notes. Please remind yourselves about these questions consistently while you read, because not all of the information that answers each question may be in one place in the textbook and you may find yourselves in situations where you come across, in either Vohra or your lecture notes, a piece of information that may be relevant to a question that you had dealt with a little while back. In that case it would be helpful for you to be able to go back to the earlier question and add to your note the new information you have come across "more recently." If you are down-loading this list of questions from Dr. Joshi's web-page, you could re-format the questions in a way that is convenient for you to use. You could, for instance, separate them, and leave space in between questions for you to put down your "answer notes." In that way, you should be able to learn - and, yes, memorize - this empirical information in a more well-organized way than if you "just read the book." I also suggest that, later, you might want to think about these questions and consider how, in your mind, some of these questions may be "more, or less, important" than the others for your understanding of the big picture of this history; setting up your own hierarchical scheme of questions is an important and very effective learning device. At the end of the day, so to speak, your goal should be to have enough of the essential empirical information on your mind and at your fingertips to be integrated with the interpretive ideas that you have also learned about this subject, and that the empirical material serves to make your interpretive ideas and arguments more meaningful.

I: Chapter I of Vohra:

A: On "Traditional China"
 

Where are the "provinces" of China located? What are their names? Which ones make up Manchuria, and where are they located? What is Mongolia? What is "Chinese Turkestan," and "China Proper?" Where is Tibet and what is its "Chinese" name?

What is the general shape of the historical relations between the Han people and the non-Han peoples? What role does the "Great Wall" play in this history?

What, according to Vohra, are the basic teachings of "Confucianism?" What other schools of ancient philosophy affected the shape of Chinese traditional thought?

How did "Confucianism" evolve into an overarching system of political-ethical ideas? How did this ideological system relate to the building of the Chinese (Han) Empire and how did it affect the traditional ways of governance and the making of "social order"- in China specifically and in East Asia in general?

What other systems of values and ideas, including religious ideas and their systematic integration or synthesis, affected the shape and the evolution of "Chinese thought" over time? What kinds of political and social institutions in China influenced, supported and set the parameters for these ideological systems? How did "Neo-Confucianism" take shape? What did it reflect about the historical evolution of Chinese society?

Most importantly, when and where did all these developments take place?
 

B: On the "Manchu dynastic period"
 

What are the "dates" of the Manchu dynasty? What is the most basic "ethnic problem" in China during the Manchu (Qing) dynasty?

How was the structure of government shaped in the Manchu period? In what ways did this structure reflect the problem of the contention between centralism and regionalism?

What was the structural shape of Chinese society in the traditional period (including the Manchu era)? What affected the shape of the "gentry" class?

How did education play a role in shaping Chinese society? What are the problems that developed in China's political society? What are the characteristics of China's traditional systems of laws and its legal order?

What was the general shape of "China's" (or the Chinese empire's) relationship with the world surrounding it? How did the Chinese empire relate to European peoples since the 1600's? (This goes into chapter 2.)
 

II: Chapter II of Vohra

A: On China: Relations with Western powers in this period
 

How did the "Guangzhou system of trade" develop? What were its chief characteristics? Why and how did Britain become China's main European "trading partner"?

Why and how did the British government attempt to "open" diplomatic (government-to-government) relations with China?

What were, and what resulted from, the following three British diplomatic missions: Macartney, Amherst, and Napier?

What was the opium trade like? Who was sent by the Manchu emperor to deal with the "opium problem" in Southern China? What did he do?

What incident(s), besides the disposition of opium, precipitated the "Opium War?"

What were the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing at the end of the "Opium War?" What was its "date?" What other treaties followed immediately on the heels of the Treaty of Nanjing and what were their terms?

What were the more immediate circumstances (e.g. the Chapdelaine incident and the Arrow incident) and the more deep-seated factors, according to Vohra, that led to the renewal of hostilities in the latter-1850's? What were the results of the first phase of the so-called "Second Opium War" and what were the terms of the agreement (ostensibly) reached in Tianjin in 1858 to temporarily cease hostilities? Why did these terms of agreement not hold? and how did hostilities resume? What were the terms of the Beijing Convention that were agreed to at the end of the "Second Opium War?"
 

B: On China's "domestic" problems:
 

What were the ways in which the results of the "Opium War(s)" impacted Chinese society, economy and culture?

How did the Taiping Tianguo (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace) movement begin? How did it make use of "borrowed" Protestantism (Christianity)?

What were the "social" programs of the Taiping Movement and what ideologies did it reflect? In what ways were these programs limited? In what ways did they fail?

How did the Taiping Movement decline and collapse? (Vohra is incredibly brief about this subject, perhaps because he tended not to focus as much on China's internal developments in mid -19th century as he could/should. Read Vohra, pp.39, 53.) If you wish learn more about the Taiping Movement and other rebellions in mid-19th-century China, you might resort to: Immanuel Hsu; The Rise of Modern China, and/or Jack Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1800's to the 1980's, or even Jonathan Spence's fairly recent book, God's Chinese Son, which is a study of Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion.
 

III: Chapter III of Vohra

Who were the main political "players" in the Manchu-Chinese government at the time of the Beijing Treaty of 1860? How did they come to power? Who among the Han officials rose to prominence at this time and what was their basis of power?

What were the early institutional reforms that the Manchu-Chinese government promoted under the aegis of the "Tongzhi Restoration" (the attempt to revitalize the strength of the Manchu state and at the same time deal more effectively with the Western Powers)? How was this interrupted and affected by the continued conflict between China and the European powers in the early 1870's? How did these flash points of conflict relate to the issue of "treaty revision" and what were the results of this process of treaty revision?

How did the development in the 1870's and early-1880's reflect what Vohra calls the "dismantling of the Chinese world-order"? (both from within - i.e., that the Chinese government lost control over its own territories and its social order, and from without - i.e., that "China" became encircled by a colonial system on its borders, or in other words, what used to be a core-tributary relationship between China and its immediate neighbors by then had turned into an Asian system in which China's neighbors were colonized by Western powers and China's earlier influence on these neighbors was drastically weakened or outright eliminated?)

What roles did Russia and Japan play in this development?

What was happening in Korea? And how did that bring China and Japan to war with each other in 1894-1895?

What were the institutional reforms that the Manchu state embarked on in the 1860's to the 1880's? (On pp. 67-71, Vohra describes these reforms at length; you should summarize them.) What were the central purposes of these reforms? What were the social and economic dimensions of the so-called "Self-Strengthening reforms"? What factors accounted for the failure or the very limited effects of these reforms?

What impact did "Western knowledge" and Western ideas have on Chinese intellectuals during this late-19th-century period of reforms?