China

Political institutions

The Qing had come to power because of their success at winning Chinese over to their side; in the late 17th century they adroitly pursued similar policies to win the adherence of the Chinese literati. Qing emperors learned Chinese, addressed their subjects using Confucian rhetoric, reinstated the civil service examination system and the Confucian curriculum, and patronized scholarly projects, as had their predecessors. They also continued the Ming custom of adopting reign names, so that Xuanye, for example, is known to history as the Kangxi emperor. The Qing rulers initially used only Manchu and bannermen to fill the most-important positions in the provincial and central governments (half of the powerful governors-general throughout the dynasty were Manchu), but Chinese were able to enter government in greater numbers in the 18th century, and a Manchu-Han dyarchy was in place for the rest of the dynasty.

Imperial Chinese throne of the Qianlong emperor (reigned 1735–96), red lacquer carved in dragons and floral scrolls, Qing dynasty; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; photograph, A.C. Cooper Ltd.

The early Qing emperors were vigorous and forceful rulers. The first emperor, Fulin (reign name, Shunzhi), was put on the throne when he was a child of six sui (about five years in Western calculations). His reign (1644–61) was dominated by his uncle and regent, Dorgon, until Dorgon died in 1650. Because the Shunzhi emperor had died of smallpox, his successor, the Kangxi emperor, was chosen in part because he had already survived a smallpox attack. The Kangxi emperor (reigned 1661–1722) was one of the most dynamic rulers China has known. During his reign the last phase of the military conquest was completed, and campaigns were pressed against the Mongols to strengthen Qing security on its Central Asian borders. China’s literati were brought into scholarly projects, notably the compilation of the Ming history, under imperial patronage.

The Kangxi emperor’s designated heir, his son Yinreng, was a bitter disappointment, and the succession struggle that followed the latter’s demotion was perhaps the bloodiest in Qing history. Many Chinese historians still question whether the Kangxi emperor’s eventual successor, his son Yinzhen (reign title Yongzheng), was truly the emperor’s deathbed choice. During the Yongzheng reign (1722–35) the government promoted Chinese settlement of the southwest and tried to integrate non-Han aboriginal groups into Chinese culture; it reformed the fiscal administration and rectified bureaucratic corruption.

The Qianlong reign (1735–96) marked the culmination of the early Qing. The emperor had inherited an improved bureaucracy and a full treasury from his father and expended enormous sums on the military expeditions known as the Ten Great Victories. He was both noted for his patronage of the arts and notorious for the censorship of anti-Manchu literary works that was linked with the compilation of the Siku quanshu (“Complete Library of the Four Treasuries”; Eng. trans. under various titles). The closing years of his reign were marred by intensified court factionalism centred on the meteoric rise to political power of an imperial favourite, a young officer named Heshen. Yongyan, who reigned as the Jiaqing emperor (1796–1820), lived most of his life in his father’s shadow. He was plagued by treasury deficits, piracy off the southeast coast, and uprisings among aboriginal groups in the southwest and elsewhere. These problems, together with new pressures resulting from an expansion in opium imports, were passed on to his successor, the Daoguang emperor (reigned 1820–50).

The early Qing emperors succeeded in breaking from the Manchu tradition of collegial rule. The consolidation of imperial power was finally completed in the 1730s, when the Yongzheng emperor destroyed the power base of rival princes. By the early 18th century the Manchu had adopted the Chinese practice of father-son succession but without the custom of favouring the eldest son. Because the identity of the imperial heir was kept secret until the emperor was on his deathbed, Qing succession struggles were particularly bitter and sometimes bloody.

The Manchu also altered political institutions in the central government. They created an Imperial Household Department to forestall eunuchs from usurping power—a situation that had plagued the Ming ruling house—and they staffed this agency with bond servants. The Imperial Household Department became a power outside the control of the regular bureaucracy. It managed the large estates that had been allocated to bannermen and supervised various government monopolies, the imperial textile and porcelain factories in central China, and the customs bureaus scattered throughout the empire. The size and strength of the Imperial Household Department reflected the accretion of power to the throne that was part of the Qing political process. Similarly, revisions of the system of bureaucratic communication and the creation in 1729 of a new top decision-making body, the Grand Council, permitted the emperor to control more efficiently the ocean of government memorandums and requests.