CONCLUSION

FOR MOST ordinary Chinese, the end of the Great Qing probably changed very little about their lives in the short term. One woman who experienced the revolution as a factory laborer in Shandong later recalled that the reality of the transition for her was simply the unit of currency: after the revolution the money was denominated in silver dollars and cents rather than Qing copper cash, but the buying power of her wages remained unaffected. 1 For others, however—elite males, in particular—this was a cultural event of profound and disturbing significance. An occasional scholar committed suicide as a quixotic act of loyalism to the departed dynasty, and well into the 1920s pockets of men throughout the new nation refused to cut their queues and adopt modern hairstyles, out of a mix of deference to the Qing and filiality to fathers and grandfathers who had proudly worn their hair this way. More broadly, the end of the Qing brought with it a crisis of masculinity that manifested itself in a mannered nostalgia for such mundane, morbidly erotic, and now politically incorrect vestiges of the old culture as the female bound foot. 2

The Great Qing empire was something qualitatively different from the successive Chinese or alien conquest dynasties that had preceded it. As a multinational, universal empire of a distinctively early modern Eurasian type, it had with astonishing success expanded the geographic scope of “China” and incorporated non-Han peoples such as Mongols, Jurchens, Tibetans, Inner Asian Muslims, and others into a new kind of transcendent political entity. Gradually, Han Chinese literati came to accept this new definition of China and to identify it as their fatherland. 3 But when a new kind of social Darwinist nationalism appeared on the scene in the late nineteenth century, arguing that the proper basis of a nation-state was a racial or ethnic homeland, this seemed to imply that the fledgling Republic of China was the proprietary domain of the Han Chinese alone.

What, then, would be the fate of the various non-Han peoples who had come to accept their identity as subjects of the Qing? Almost immediately, certain communities of Mongols announced their intention not to be a part of the Chinese republic. 4 As early as 1913 efforts were made to establish a sovereign homeland in the northeast for the “Manchu” people, and various “Manchukuos” were intermittently declared, up to and including that grand failed imagined community established as a client state by Japan in 1932 and headed by imperial China’s “last emperor,” Aisin Gioro Puyi. 5 As evidenced by the problems of Tibetan, Muslim, and other separatist movements still confronted by the government of the People’s Republic in the early twenty-first century, this is one legacy of Qing history that was never satisfactorily resolved during the entire century following the empire’s demise.

The passing of imperial China brought one further change of subtle but very real significance. The emperor as the Son of Heaven—the universally acknowledged legitimating center of political and social action throughout the breadth and duration of the empire—had been removed. In place of his expressed will, the far more manipulable and contestable interests of “the people” (min ) would now be invoked. 6 Anxiety over this issue, as much as personal ambition, no doubt prompted some Chinese to support the periodic imperial restoration attempts that punctuated the early Republican era. The problem of how to stabilize and legitimate political action would remain a nagging worry in the new order yet to be constructed.

Viewing the Qing as a fairly typical example of an early modern land-based Eurasian empire, we could argue that its final expiration in 1911 arrived just about on time. 7 The Romanov empire collapsed only a few years later, in 1917, and the Ottoman empire was progressively dismembered during the decade or more before its official demise in 1922. In the technologically transformed world of the twentieth century, these early modern models of political organization appeared to suffer from, among other failures, a drastic diseconomy of scale.

If, on the other hand, we view the Qing empire in the context of imperial China’s long-standing dynastic cycle of prosperity and decline, where periods of political breakdown often set one aspiring “empire” against another (for example, the era of Northern and Southern Dynasties between the Han and the Tang, and that of the Five Dynasties between the Tang and the Song), then perhaps 1911 is less of a marker than it might appear. The chaos and violence of that year was not very profound, at least in comparison with the decades that would follow, and no centralizing political entity of any real effectiveness immediately emerged to take control. Thus, the end of the Qing “cycle” may not have truly come until the Nationalist Revolution of 1927, or the Japanese occupation of 1937, or even the Communist “liberation” of 1949.

One of the persistent political features of the Qing empire was the relative smallness of the formal state apparatus compared with the size of the society and economy. In this system of government-on-the-cheap, many quasi-governmental tasks were farmed out to indigenous elites (gentry, local headmen and militia leaders, commercial brokers) or groups (lineages, villages, guilds). The Yongzheng reign of the late 1720s and early 1730s represented an effort to reverse the shrinking density of state personnel on the ground and “regovernmentalize” policy implementation, but this initiative was reversed or at least neglected under subsequent reigns. This low but efficient governmental presence might have actually been a sound way to do things, so long as the Qing could maintain the image and conditions of universal empire, with relatively little in the way of outside threats. But by the mid-nineteenth century the empire had become merely one of many antagonists in a predatory international war of all against all, and under these competitive circumstances a larger, more powerful, more interventionist state apparatus came to appear necessary for political survival.

The reforms of 1898 were an abortive initial attempt to grow a modern state, but the New Policies of the first decade of the twentieth century represented a truly new beginning. From that moment down through at least the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s (and perhaps until the post-Mao era, when second thoughts about having too big a state took over), China experimented ever more ambitiously with big government, radically and wrenchingly reversing the shrinkage of the state that had begun as early as the Southern Song dynasty in the thirteenth century. Seen in the context of this dramatic decades-long state-building project of the first half of the twentieth century, China’s political reordering during and after the 1911 revolution was actually a fairly orderly affair that built on the New Policies state and sustained its growth.

A related way of viewing the achievements of the late Qing empire would employ the concept of “public” (gong ), increasingly articulated in Qing and republican discourse as a middle ground between governmental (guan ) and private (si ). At least from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, if not slightly before, the range of undertakings—in philanthropy, defense, infrastructure, and economic development—that were created and legitimated in the name of communal interests seems to have dramatically and progressively expanded. The agents of change were nongovernmental elites, initially at the local level but progressively acting in concert on an ever-expanding geographic scale. This process may be seen as a disguised form of state expansion, one that far outran the capacity of the enfeebled imperial administration to respond to the ever-greater managerial demands of the society and economy. And here again, 1911 did little to alter the trajectory of change. State expansion at the local level, including the development of representative political institutions as well as managerial bureaus in all areas of public activism, went on apace throughout the early republican era, despite the continued progressive disintegration of the central administrative apparatus. 8 From this perspective, both the Nationalist and the Communist revolutions may be seen in part as increasingly successful attempts to reassert formal governmental control over a de facto state expansion that had been going on for a century or more, transcending (and largely ignoring) the 1911 watershed. 9

Between the mid-seventeenth and early twentieth centuries a remarkable entity known as the Great Qing Empire occupied an expansive and expanding space on the Eurasian continent. This was by no means the inward-looking and hermetic “Celestial Empire” that Westerners once believed it to be. On the contrary, its history was intimately intertwined with global historical processes in diverse ways that we are just beginning to comprehend. And, to a greater degree than we once assumed, it was qualitatively different from the dynastic empires that preceded it and from the states that were still to come on this piece of territory. Yet its history profoundly and inescapably set the conditions for the polity and society we know today as “China.”