Visitors to historic sites around China see not only palaces and pagodas but also scores of men and women in period dress posing for photos. To the uninitiated, one flowing robe looks like any other—graceful, if impractical. But for some donning the historic threads, they are a display with political undertones: a celebration of Han traditions and a rejection of the “foreign” Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty whose final emperor abdicated in 1912. It is a view that has gained currency, to the consternation of the Communist party.
Event Context
Clothing is the most superficial part of the anti-Qing thinking now growing more prevalent. Discourse about the dynasty and its misdeeds has long featured in online forums, summarised as the “1644 historical view”, referring to the year that the Qing overthrew the Ming. (The Ming rulers were Han, China’s dominant ethnic group, whereas the Qing were Manchus, a smaller minority group from the north.) Social media have helped the 1644 view spread to more mainstream audiences.
Team Analysis
In fact the 1644 view is far from novel. An early proponent of something like it was Sun Yat-sen, celebrated as a father of modern China. As a leading voice for the overthrow of the Qing at the turn of the 20th century, he railed against the Manchus as outsiders.
Sensitivity over how to interpret all of this illustrates how hard it is for the party to examine its own history. Never mind serious debates about Mao’s rule; even century-old dynasties are too hot to touch. The party commissioned an official history of the Qing and was close to completing it as a mammoth 106-volume project. But now it seems to have been scuppered by leaders because of disagreements about “new Qing” contamination. “It is very clear that the state was ruled by people who were not identical to the bulk of the population, so it’s hard to fit it into the kind of Chinese nationalism that the party wants,” says David Porter, a scholar of imperial China at McGill University in Montreal. “It’s easier to criticise Western historians for going the wrong way.”
The anti-Qing voices probably do not add up to anything significant for China’s contemporary politics. They are not about to coalesce into a movement that challenges party rule. They are discomfiting, not destabilising. They underline how the space for public disagreements in China has narrowed. Other countries have plenty of historic controversies, too. China stands out for its inability to lead a full-throated debate about them. The party is too thin-skinned for that.
For their part, nationalists are guilty of over-simplifying Chinese history. Romanticising pre-Qing epochs as pure expressions of Han strength omits that China was a multi-ethnic, even cosmopolitan, entity during one of its most glorious periods, the Tang dynasty more than a millennium ago. An honest accounting of this record would argue for China’s leaders today to be more tolerant and open, and to be confident of what such permissiveness would yield. Just do not hold your breath.
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
source
In China’s official narrative, the country suffered a “century of humiliation” of foreign invasions, starting with the first opium war in 1840 and ending only with Mao’s rise to power in 1949. But the 1644 view—cheekily expressed by some online as “three centuries of humiliation”—argues that subjugation began with the Qing conquest. According to this school, the Qing were anti-Han interlopers and, making matters worse, feckless in repelling forces from abroad.
Dredging up all this history is uncomfortable for the party. The territorial boundaries claimed by modern China—including Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Taiwan—were brought into the Chinese empire by the Qing, not the Ming. Grievances about the Manchus also cut against the ideal of ethnic harmony advanced by the party. Although much of what forms modern Chinese identity is derived from Han traditions, it is unseemly to talk openly about the dominance of this one ethnic group, which accounts for 90% of the Chinese population. The party looks askance at “Han chauvinism”, believing, with reason, that it may lead to more resentment from non-Han groups.
Late last year, the communications arm of the Zhejiang provincial government—known for penning strong opinion pieces—became the first official body to wade into the discussion. It formally condemned the 1644 view, labelling it a harmful distortion. Too much blame, it argued, was placed on the Qing for China’s troubles: the Ming had also been plagued by economic and social problems. The Zhejiang authorities warned that it was an opening for hostile Westerners to push the “new Qing history”, which emphasises the unique Manchu identity of Qing rulers.
That appears to have been the opening shot in an official rectification campaign. Since then censors have deleted social-media accounts critical of the Qing and scrubbed many such videos and comments. In recent days the censors have been busy again. A forthcoming film, “The Belief”, is intended as a nationalist tribute to the naval expedition in 1683 that facilitated the Qing’s annexation of Taiwan. But many online commentators have been more sympathetic towards the conquered—Han loyalists of the Ming dynasty based in Taiwan—than to the Qing soldiers sent to subdue them.
106 volumes too many
