Download Chinese dynasties and modern China Appendix

Chinese dynasties and modern China Appendix:
Dynasties and Fragmentations
Belal E. Baaquie and Qing-hai Wang
Department of Physics, National University of Singapore
Singapore 117542
April 12, 2016
Abstract
There is a reasonable level of details that has been preserved of China’s history,
with all the caveats taken into account. The study of China’s history is particularly
interesting since it has an unbroken civilization that goes back many millennia and its
unification going back about 2,200 years. In this Appendix, we briefly summarize the
history of China from its first unification in 221 BC to its latest unification in 1949.
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Qin and Han dynasties: Unification
For the first time, the characters in the Chinese language were standardized. Currency,
weights and measures, and the length of the axles of carts to facilitate transport on
the road system throughout China were also standardized. This made possible an
extensive network of roads and canals connecting the provinces and improved trade
between them. Qin Shihuang undertook large scale construction projects, including
the construction of the 5,000 km Great Wall. He also greatly expanded the empire,
extending the Chinese territory to the South China Seas.
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The Qin dynasty failed in its second generation as Qin Shihuang did not appoint
his successor – leading to a succession problem that could not be solved. Four years
after the fall of the Qin dynasty, Liu Bang, who was a rebel leader who, according to
some historians, served as a lowly official of the Qin dynasty, founded the long lasting
Han dynasty in 202 BC. The Han dynasty lasted for over four centuries, from 202
BC to 220 AD. The Han dynasty continued the system of governance instituted by
Qin Shihuang, with officials being appointed based on the recommendations of society’s
leading personalities.
The Western Han dynasty (202 BC-8 AD) expanded China’s territory to Central
Asia. It solved the succession problem of the second generation, which arose in 180
BC and another major crisis of succession in 154 BC. This dynasty peaked around
Emperor Han Wu Di’s time, 151 BC-87 BC. The Eastern Han dynasty (25 AD-220
AD), was called ‘Eastern’ due to the shifting of of the Han capital further east. The
Han dynasty had no major crisis in the early years and peaked around 58-88 AD. By
the end of the Han dynasty, the population of China had reached 60 million.
The Han rulers came to the conclusion that the Qin dynasty fell because they did
not have public support and hence a concerted effort was made to make Confucianism
the official ideology and to unify the people around it. Confucianism thus gained
ascendancy over other contending beliefs such as Daoism and went on to become the
cultural basis of Chinese society. There was considerable technological progress during
this period, and in particular the two great inventions of paper and ceramics were
made. There is also strong evidence that porcelain was invented during the Eastern
Han Empire
In the late Eastern Han period, the Emperor devolved power to the regional Governors, with a military under their direct command. The succession of Governors reverted
back to the old hereditary system. This gave rise to powerful centrifugal forces that
finally led to the fall of the Han dynasty and threw China into a prolonged period of
fragmentation.
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1.1
Fragmentation (220 AD-589 AD)
After the fall of the Han dynasty, due to political corruption, social chaos and widespread
civil disorder, China was divided into three warring and independent kingdoms. There
is a view that the 300 years of fragmentation was largely due to the invasion of China
by various ethnic groups from the north and west. The fragmentation was also partly
due to the instability caused by the inability of the Han dynasty to decide how the
officials who administer the Empire will be appointed, and which was finally solved by
the Sui dynasty.
The Western Jin dynasty unified China in 280 AD only for a few decades, including
a 16-year civil war. It was militarily weak and moved its capital southwards to Nanjing
and were defeated by non-Han Chinese ethnic forces.
During this period, there was a major influx of invaders who were ethnically nonHan Chinese, including Xiongnu (Huns), Xianbei, Di, Qiang, Jie, and others. They
were nomadic people originating from the steppe-lands bordering northern China and
had their own Turkic language. These ethnic groups were collectively called “barbarians” by the Han Chinese.
This period of fragmentation was a great melting-pot of different ethnic invaders
with the Han Chinese, who gradually assimilated these ethnic groups. The various
ethnic groups conquered parts of China and established their rule. In the later part of
this fragmentation period, south China was ruled by a series of dynasties founded by
Han Chinese, while the north was ruled by non-Han Chinese dynasties.
The fragmentation of China continued till 589 AD. During the period of fragmentation, there was technological progress – most significant being the invention of
gunpowder and the wheelbarrow. Buddhism gained adherents throughout China with
Confucianism continuing to hold sway as well.
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2
The Sui and Tang dynasties
The Sui dynasty (581 AD-619 AD) reunified China in 590 – after about 300 years
of wars, disintegration and fragmentation – but failed to continue past the second
generation due to succession problems. One of the biggest achievements of the Sui
dynasty was the solution it provided for the appointment of the officials. It introduced,
in 605, the system of imperial written examinations for choosing scholars to be
administrators and bureaucrats, the so called “Mandarins”. This system of choosing
the officials restored the integrity of the organizational basis for governing a unified
China, and which continued more or less unchanged for 1,300 years, till 1905.
The Sui dynasty is also remembered for constructing the Grand Canal linking the
Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers – a feat second only to the making of the Great Wall –
and thus enhanced the connection between north and south China.
The Sui dynasty was succeeded by the powerful Tang dynasty that ushered in
a golden period of great economic progress and the flowering of literature, art and
culture in general. Buddhism reached its high point in China under the Tang dynasty
and subsequently went into decline.
The Tang dynasty (618 AD-907 AD) consolidated the Mandarin system of
administration so as to thwart the power of regional aristocrats and warlords. As
the Mandarins were career bureaucrats drawn from the entire country, they had no
independent local or regional base of power. The scholar-bureaucrat system provided
the Emperor with the grass roots contacts throughout the country. The system of
Mandarins prevailed in China until the 1905, when it was abolished. One of the main
problems of the Mandarin system was endemic corruption of the officials, which if
unchecked, could bring down the dynasty
The Tang dynasty solved the succession problem of the second generation by overcoming a crisis in 626. The only Empress in the Chinese history was Wu Zetian, who
ruled the Tang dynasty between 690-705. The dynasty’s power and prestige peaked
around 713-755. Its defeat, in 751, at the hands of the Turkic speaking people of
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Central Asia’s steppe-lands stopped its westwards expansion.
During the middle and late Tang dynasty, the military was composed mainly of
mercenaries and leaders who were non-Han Chinese (other ethnic groups or foreigners),
recruited to guard and govern the borders. This led to the rise of local warlordism that
grew unchecked and resulted in a civil war during 755-763. This weakened the dynasty
significantly and marked the onset of its slow economic and political decline. Domestic
rebellions – led mostly by the warlords – corruption, palace intrigues and economic
decline led to its decay and finally its overthrow in 907 at the hands of one of the
warlords.
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Fragmentation (907 AD-1368 AD)
This long period of fragmentation went through many stages, with the proliferation
of dynasties and kingdoms, some more powerful than others. None of the dynasties
or kingdoms of this long period were powerful enough to establish unquestioned and
absolute central power that is the salient feature of a unified China. This period of
fragmentation had many changes, and the main ones are discussed below.
For over 50 years after the overthrow of the Tang dynasty, China was fragmented
and ruled by many forces, including a number of non-Han Chinese ethnic groups such
as the Turkic speaking tribes, Huns and others, and was divided into Five Dynasties
and Ten Kingdoms (907-960).
3.1
Song Dynasty (960 AD-1279 AD)
The Song dynasty, founded in in 960, could never fully unify China. During the period
of the Song dynasty, China always had three Emperors, with the country being divided
between the three dynasties Northern Song, Liao and Western Xia dynasties. The Liao
and Xia dynasties were ruled by a non-Han Chinese ethnic groups. The emperor of
the Northern Song dynasty died suspiciously in 976 and his brother became the second
emperor. The Song dynasty was at the peak of its power around 1022-1063.
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The Song dynasty tried to control the power and growth of warlordism by instituting
a new system of military leadership. The soldiers and officers were professionals but
the generals and high ranking officers were not professional soldiers. Instead, they were
appointed by the Song Emperor, who used the bureaucrats from the civil service to
lead the military. Although this system removed the threat of warlords to the dynasty,
it made the Song dynasty militarily weak.
The Song dynasty was under attack from powerful enemies from the north and
the west. The militarily weak Song dynasty could not crush these enemies and would
usually bribe the invaders to buy peace. Under the pressure of these attacks, the Song
dynasty moved its capital from northern to southeastern China. During the Southern
Song dynasty period, China was also split between the Jin dynasty, established by
ethnic Manchus from the north, and the Western Xia dynasty, established by another
non-Han Chinese ethnic group.
The Song dynasty was the only dynasty which did not unify China but had a
booming in economy and culture also flourished. In particular, the manufacture of
porcelain reached its peak of excellence during the Song period.
3.2
Mongolian occupation (1279 AD-1368 AD)
All three dynasties were overthrown by Mongolian invaders. The great Mongolian
warrior Genghis Khan and his successors conquered all of China. The Mongolians
rulers were largely occupied with their far flung empire straddling Asia and Europe
and paid scant attention to their rule of China. The Mongolian rulers maintained many
of their own traditions, including living in yurts, but fashioned their rule according to
the norms of the Chinese dynasties, and called their rule the Yuan dynasty. However,
it was a Mongolian caste-based rule, with four or five castes with the Mongloians on
top and the Chinese at the bottom. The lack of effective governance led to widespread
dissatisfaction and the occupation lasted 88 years, during which period the Mongolians
greatly expanded the territory of China.
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4
Ming dynasty (1368 AD-1644 AD)
The Mongolian occupation was overthrown by Zhu Yuanzhang – the founder of the
Ming dynasty – who started his life as a peasant and later on was a monk and even
became a beggar before joining the rebellion. The Ming dynasty ushered another long
period of a unified China and brought great prosperity to China, raising its economy
and technical capabilities to new heights. Buddhism enjoyed royal patronage.
The second generation succession problem of Ming dynasty led to a civil war that
was only solved in 1402 when Emperor Zhu Di, a usurper who seized power from his
nephew, sacked the Ming capital at Nanjing and moved its capital to Beijing. Some
historians hold that Zhu Di, seeking legitimacy by having neighboring kingdoms pay
homage to him, supported naval expeditions. The famous Admiral Zheng He was an
emissary of Zhu Di and led voyages of exploration, using enormous Chinese boats,
into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and the east coast of Africa. In 1424, Zheng
He traveled to Palembang in Indonesia. In 1430, Zheng He made a seventh and final
expedition into the Indian Ocean.
Ming is the only dynasty that officially interacted with the ‘outside’ world. However,
the Ming dynasty found the expeditions of Zheng He very expensive and, since the
importance of trade to China’s economy was almost negligible, the dynasty soon turned
inwards, stopping all further expeditions to other nations.
Similar to the Song, the Ming rulers didn’t trust the generals, and so they appointed
civil servants and bureaucrats to lead the army – which greatly weakened the military.
The Ming’s enemy were the Mongolians in the early years and later on the Manchus.
The Ming dynasty fell largely due to their internal corruption and fighting against the
Manchus – both of which proved to be too costly.
The Ming dynasty peaked around 1402-1424 and ruled with no major disruptions,
with China’s population rising to 100 million. Estimates for the late-Ming population
vary from 160 to 200 million.
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5
Qing dynasty (1636 AD-1911 AD)
In 1636, a Manchu leader Huang Taiji began driving Ming forces out of Liaodong and
declared a new dynasty, the Qing. In 1644, the Ming capital of Beijing was sacked by a
peasant revolt, with the Ming emperor committing suicide. The leader of the peasant
revolt was Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official. He was defeated by the Manchus,
who went on to establish the Qing dynasty.
After the Manchus conquered China, they adopted (and then improved) almost all
the laws and policies inherited from the Ming. Recall that Han was a continuation
of the Qin and so was the Tang a continuation of the Sui. In this sense, Qing was a
continuation of the Ming dynasty. To rule China, the Manchus adopted many Chinese
customs and practices and were finally assimilated by the Chinese. In an attempt to preserve their identity, the Manchu’s banned Chinese from migrating north to Manchuria
and onwards; there is an opinion that Siberia was populated by the Russians due to
this ban.
There were disputes in the succession of the throne in the first few of generations,
however, the Manchus restrained themselves from bloody in-palace fighting. Meanwhile, they went on to unify China in 1644. Qing was long lasting partially due to a
system of succession in which the new Emperor would be secretly chosen by the reigning Emperor, the decision being revealed only after the old Emperor’s death. This
system brought an end to the endless palace intrigues that were always directed at the
crown prince, leading to a systemic instability.
The Manchu’s defeated the Russians and signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.
The Qing dynasty also defeated the Mongolians and absorbed them into the dynasty,
by giving the Mongolians a higher rank in the army than the Han Chinese and through
inter-marriage. Mongolians were not allowed to migrate into China. The Qing dynasty
thus secured its western and norther borders and enjoyed a relatively peaceful rule.
The Qing was a multi-cultural empire and lasted almost three centuries, and formed
the territorial base for the modern Chinese state. The Qing dynasty peaked around
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1684-1799, having more than 100 years of a golden age.
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Fall of Qing; Foreign interventions (1840 AD-
1911 AD)
The end of the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796) marks the decline of the Qing
dynasty, with a weakening economy and a loss of centralized political control. The
Manchus were a martial ethnic group, and they continued to exercise control over the
Qing army during the early Qing dynasty. With time, the Manchus became corrupt,
including their army. The later Qing armies were drawn from the militia and lead
mainly by Han Chinese, who were not trusted by the Manchus. With the weakening
of the Qing rule, these generals later became warlords.
China’s population rose to about 400 million, but government revenues were low
due to inability to collect taxes and further weakened the government. All forces of
fragmentation gained ground, with corruption becoming widespread and the frequency
of rebellions increasing. The Qing dynasty had only 20,000 civil servants (mandarins)
administering a vast territory. Each county had only three officials, a Magistrate,
a Chief of Police and a record keeper – and all had low salaries. Given the severe
shortage of manpower for carrying out their administrative functions, the officials were
invariably corrupt and this further weakened the system of governance.
The Qing ruling dynasty was too atrophied to meet the challenges posed by the
rising industrial colonizing powers. There were reformers such as Kang Youwei (1858
– 1927), who understood the urgent need for change and wanted to transform China
into a constitutional monarchy and follow the footsteps taken by the Meiji in Japan.
All these attempts were rejected by the ossified scholar-bureaucrats and sclerotic ruling
Empress Dowager Cixi, ruling on behalf of the Qing child Emperor Guangxu.
A weak and flailing China soon became the target of all the predatory colonizing
powers, both from the West and of Japan. China had erstwhile faced invaders from
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the north or the west that were all land based. Indeed, China had a long historical
experience with land based invasions. This is probably why China did not develop a
powerful naval fleet and can partly explain why Admiral Zheng He’s expeditions did
not continue. Chinese navy had been always been weak. The main reason was probably
that there was no real threats from the ocean before 1840. Both the late Ming and Qing
dynasties explicitly banned merchants from undertaking trade across the oceans. The
government thought that it was too troublesome to control the pirates, especially when,
unlike sea faring nations like Japan and Great Britain, China was almost economically
self-sufficient. The Song dynasty gave commerce via the ocean great importance, but
the entire military of the dynasty was weak, including its navy. China would pay a
heavy price for its lack of a powerful navy.
China had been invaded by many external powers, starting from the attacks of
“barbarians” during the time of the Zhou. During the Song dynasty, China was invaded
by the Manchus from the north and by another non-Han Chinese ethnic group from the
west. But in all these cases, the invading forces had a level of technology and economy
far inferior to China, and for this reason all these invaders were assimilated by China
without any trace of the invaders being left.
There had been minor military skirmishes between European powers and China,
starting from the Ming dynasty. The first major military encounter that China had
with an invading and colonizing power – one that had a higher level of technology and
a superior economic system than itself – was with Britain, starting with the Opium
wars. A new feature, compared to previous invasions of China, was that the military
actions of the colonizing powers were all launched from the east, using their naval
power. China soon succumbed to these naval attacks, having very little in terms of
naval power.
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6.1
The First and Second Opium Wars (1839 AD-1842
AD; 1856 AD-1860 AD)
The East India Company, with the backing of the British military, grew opium in India
and sold it in China from the 1750’s onwards. The Qing rulers, alarmed by the rapidly
increasing opium addiction and loss of silver in exchange for opium, banned its sale.
The British military, in response, attacked the Qing forces and swiftly defeated them
(1839-42).
The Qing rulers were forced, in 1842, to sign the first of many unequal treaties
that granted the British immunity from China’s laws and granted colonial privileges
to Britain. China was forced to allow the British to have a monopoly trade in opium,
open up five treaty ports, and secede the Hong Kong Island for over a century, till
1997. The failure of the treaty to satisfy British and French goals of further increasing
the export of opium and further concessions on China’s sovereignty led to the Second
Opium War (1856-60), with the Qing rulers being forced pay ‘damages’ and sign more
unequal treaties.
6.2
The Sino-Japanese war: 1894 AD-1895 AD
The war was launched by Japan, using its naval power, primarily for the control of
Korea – a vassal state of the Qing dynasty. The Chinese navy was completely unprepared for this attack; the Empress Dowager – given into pleasure seeking and unbridled
corruption – is said have to built her Summer Palace in Beijing by siphoning off the
funds meant for the navy’s warships.
After a series of humiliating military defeats, China sued for peace, surrendering
suzerainty over Korea and losing the island of Formosa, now called Taiwan, to the
Japanese in 1895.
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6.3
The Boxer Uprising: 1898 AD-1901 AD
By the end of the nineteenth century, China was being carved up into various ‘spheres
of influence’ by the colonizing powers. The so called Boxer uprising in northern China,
also called the Righteous Harmony Society Movement, was a violent anti-foreigner,
anti-imperialist and patriotic peasant movement. It was an uprising primarily against
foreign colonization, spheres of influence, unequal treaties, Catholic and Protestant
missionary evangelism and the opium trade. Its primary targets were missionary evangelists and the colonizers. The Boxer uprising was doomed to failure as it was an
uprising of a rag tag band of rebels with no leadership, no military training and no
modern weapons. An exception was the well trained and well armed Kansu brigade,
which was sent by a Qing general to help the Boxer uprising.
An eight-nation alliance of all the major imperialist powers, namely the British
Empire, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, France, United States, Germany, Italy
and the Austria-Hungary empire combined to crush the uprising that was spearheaded
against their presence and control over China. The imperialist alliance, with an army
numbering over 20,000, sacked, occupied and looted Beijing, Tainjin and other cities
for over a year and executed and tortured thousands upon thousands of rebels.
The Empress Dowager had supported the uprising and for this, among other punishments, China was fined war reparations of 450 million taels of fine silver, one tael
for each Chinese. This was more than the government’s revenue for a full year. [One
tael is about 40 grams.]
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Fragmentation(1911 AD-1949 AD)
The Boxer uprising and China’s defeat at the hands of Japan was a wake-up call to
the larger Chinese population, leading to many political upheavals led notably by Sun
Yat Sen. Eventually, the Qing dynasty abdicated in 1911 and Sun Yat Sen established
the Republic of China in 1911 in Nanjing.
By 1911, the fragmentation of China was in an advanced stage, with the colonial
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powers having “concessions” in Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai, where China had been
forced to surrendered its sovereignty to these powers. The Kuomindang (KMT), led
by Sun Yat Sen, held sway in the south. North China bwas in control of warlord
Yuan Shikai, who had earlier collaborated with the eight-nation alliance in crushing
the Boxer uprising – killing thousands of rebels. A state of civil war existed between
Yuan Shikai and the Kuomindang from its outset.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded in 1921 by Chen Duxiu, Li
Dazhao, Mao Zedong and others. The CPC entered into an alliance with the Kuomindang in 1922. However, a civil war between the Kuomindang and the CPC broke out
in 1927 and resulted in the CPC carrying out a protracted peasant based guerrilla war.
During the Long March of the CPC, a retreat to escape from the military encirclement
and annihilation campaigns of the KMT, the leadership of Mao Zedong was established
in 1935 at a historic meeting at Zunyi. The civil war continued until a period of temporary alliance (1937-1945) to fight the Japanese army, which had invaded Manchuria
in 1931 and occupied Beijing in 1937.
The end of World War II in 1945 resulted in the total defeat of Japan and which
led to the civil war resumed in 1946. The CPC had an army consisting of 1.27 million
regulars and 2.68 million militias. In contrast, the KMT had an army consisting of
4.3 million soldiers and officers, of which 2.2 million were well-trained and had many
mechanized divisions.
A series of epic and gigantic battles took place that would determine the future
of China. For example, the Huaihai campaign, one of the greatest battles in the
history of modern warfare, took place in late 1948 and early 1949, with about a million
soldiers fighting on each side. During the three decisive year long military campaigns
of Liaoshen, Huaihai, and Pingjin, from 1948 to 1949, the CPC annihilated 144 regular
and 29 non-regular KMT divisions, including 1.54 million veteran KMT troops, and
shattered the KMT army. This finally resulted in the military defeat of the KMT
in 1949, which fled – with over one million troops – from the mainland of China to
Taiwan.
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References
1. The Cambridge History of China, Vol 1-15. (1978-2009).
2. Wikipedia entry: Dynasties in Chinese history,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties in Chinese history.
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