China from Ming to Qing

The Ming Dynasty in 1500s

Passing rule from father to son again produced incompetent leadership. It was in 1506 that Zhengde, fourteen-year-old son of Ming emperor Hongzhi, inherited power. Hongzhi had warned that his son Zhengde was too inclined toward a love of ease and pleasure. And Zhengde became a ruler interested in entertainments such as music, wrestling, magicians and acrobatics, interested also in riding, archery and hunting, and without much interest in the affairs of state.

Zhengde became ill and died in 1521, at the age of thirty-one, and having had no sons, rule passed to one of his adopted sons, Jiajing, who was fifteen. The dowager empress and a Grand Secretary ruled for awhile. The power of the eunuchs was curbed and wealth that eunuchs had accumulated was confiscated - 70 chests of gold and 2,200 chests of silver from one eunuch alone. The economy was restored. But eventually Emperor Jiajing came of age and the Grand Secretary died. Then the government faltered as Jiajing focused on Taoism and immortality. He spent money on Taoist temples, but his spiritualism did not make him a worthy ruler at least in the eyes of eighteen of his concubines. In 1542 they conspired to strangle him while he slept. They failed. All were executed but the concubine who had warned the empress.

Emperor Jiajing did little to improve China as a military power. Frontier military colonies had only about forty percent of the number of men originally intended to guard against the Mongols and others. Interior regiments were no more than ten percent of their prescribed strength. The government was not giving military men adequate pay or rations. Death and desertions thinned the army, and many of those who were recruited into the military were unwilling to risk their lives in combat.

The Mongols in the northeast had united under a descendant of Genghis Kahn and were making raids into China. In one month in 1542 they burned homes, stole cattle and horses and massacred, it is written, more than 200,000 people. In 1550 the Mongols advanced to the gates of Beijing and looted and burned its suburbs. Assaults came also from Chinese (reputed to be Japanese) linked to illegal trade with foreigners. These men had established bases on the coast and raided or took over villages and towns up river.

It was a private army, organized by Qi Jiguang, that eventually defeated the raiders from the coast, while Jiajing pursued his Taoism. Jiajing withdrew from governing for long periods, and his Taoist search for everlasting life through potions led to his death by poisoning in 1566. Jiajing's son, Longqing, was also little interested in affairs of state. But he did expel Taoists from the court, and his minister, Zhang Juzheng, made peace with the Mongols. Longqing ruled to 1572 and was succeeded by Wanli, who ruled to 1620, for forty-seven years - the longest reign in China since the early Han dynasty seventeen centuries before.

China under Emperor Wan (Wanli)

Wanli became emperor at the age of ten, and his reign began under the leadership of his mother and Zhang Juzheng. They restored discipline and efficiency in government. Finances were stabilized, and attacks at China's border were repelled. But after Wanli came of age, and Zhang Juzheng died, the recent history of Chinese emperors repeated itself. Wanli increasingly withdrew from state affairs. Government posts were left unfilled, and people languished in prison without trial because there were no judges to try them. Wanli allowed the eunuchs to acquire influence at court. The eunuchs took tax money intended for the state treasury for themselves. Wealth was not being saved, or sufficient grain stored for relief in hard times. When an area was devastated by earthquake, flooding or drought, Wanli would order relief, but little if any relief would materialize. And desperate people were turning again to banditry and rebellion.

High taxes continued to oppress all but the upper classes. Millions of middle men were involved in tax collection, taking their cut before passing the collected wealth to the court. In some provinces half of the revenue went to support the local nobility. Some with surplus money were lending it out as usurious rates, and Wanli was spending great amounts of state money on palaces and other luxuries for his family. Wanli, meanwhile, had grown so fat that he could not stand.

China was doing well artistically, but there was little intellectual leadership advocating political and social reform. The intellectuals were supporting serenity through withdrawal or a return to traditional obedience and worthy authoritarian rule. Unlike the bourgeoisie in Europe, there was little interest among thinking Chinese in better ways of doing work through improved tools - while thinking laborers were without the means to improve their tools.

China's gentry, traditionally Confucianist and into both farming and government service, had become more alienated from government and had been turning more to Buddhism and to patronizing Buddhist monasteries. This was encouraged by factional fighting among the Confucianists and by the risks that came with power in the hands of eunuchs. Confucian scholars disliked the decline in Confucianist standards. Confucianists were splitting into numerous factions. Numerous private Confucianist academies arose, while few if any Confucianists were finding fault with monarchy or authoritarianism itself. Confucianists continued to see salvation in adherence to proper ethical conduct rather than a change in institutions. And they continued to see commerce and the crafts as matters for inferior people.

The degree of withdrawal from state affairs by Wanli amounted to benign neglect for commerce and trade. China was producing ceramics, silk and cotton cloth. A genuine money economy was developing, and China's growing cities had a few affluent merchants. China's agriculture was advancing - with some new crops such as maize, sweet potatoes and peanuts from the Americas. This contributed to China's rise in population - to over 100 million - double what it had been around 1368, when the Ming Dynasty began. But not much wealth was being invested in economic growth. Rather than wealth being invested in business growth, much of it was being used in safer lending at usurious rates. In addition to government using business as a source of wealth, and the Confucian view of commerce as dishonorable, wealthy Chinese - gentry and wealthy merchants - were spending a lot of money on consumption. Businessmen as well as the landed wealthy tended to see land as a better investment than business growth. Much of industry was handicraft in the hands of peasants, and when their productivity increased it would be siphoned off by landlords. Also, government sponsored handicraft guilds laid down rules that inhibited competition and growth. Industries were often forced to sell to the government at prices that were too low. Business growth was hampered also by common people unable to increase their consumption. And government continued to impose limitations on foreign trade, including forbidding Chinese merchants to go to sea.

Europeans to China

Instead of Chinese merchants going to Europe, European merchants came to them. In the middle of Wanli's reign, Dutch and English traders arrived off the coast of China. The Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, arrived in China at Macao in 1582. He adopted the name Li Mateo and made himself more amenable to the Chinese by adopting the dress of a Confucian scholar, and he made Christianity more palatable to the Chinese by linking it with Confucian thought. He settled in Nanjing, and having learned Chinese and the classical Chinese literature, and showing deference to China's system of authoritarian rule and privilege, Ricci was accepted by China's scholars and nobility.

In early 1601, Ricci received permission to go to Beijing , where he presented the court with a harpsichord, a map of the world and two clocks that chimed. He introduced himself to the court as Wanli's humble subject and as familiar with the "celestial sphere, geography, geometry, and calculations." Ricci aroused interest and awareness of technical advances in the West. Permission to function in China allowed Ricci to expand Christianity there, and, by 1610, China had more than 300 hundred Roman Catholic churches.

The Last of the Ming and the Arrival of the Manchu

Wanli died at the age of fifty-seven - old for someone as heavy as he. His successor was his grandson, Tianqi, who was fifteen and illiterate. The withdrawal of emperors from governmental affairs continued. Emperor Tianqi enjoyed carpentry while his court and administration was being tyrannized by a eunuch, Wei Zhongxian, who dismissed anyone from government service whom he thought might be disloyal to him.

Rebellion occurred in 1624, led by six Confucianists who were attempting a moral revival of "pure" Confucianism. They were known as the Six Heroes. They were dreamers interested in moral revival rather than organizing an armed opposition, and, like the Confucianist Wang Mang centuries before, they paid for it with their lives. They were tortured and beaten to death, and seven hundred of their supporters were purged from their government positions.

Some in China concluded that Wei Zhongxian's terror and Tianqi's passive acceptance indicated that the Ming dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Tanqui died in 1627 and was succeeded by his feeble younger brother, Chongzhen, and during Chongzhen's reign heaven seemed to be intervening against the Ming, as China suffered (with other parts of the world) from unusually bad weather: low temperatures, drought and flooding from too much rain. Also a trade depression had developed in Europe in the 1620s, which had some impact on China. All over China people were in rebellion. Militarily the emperor remained weak. And more raiding was underway from the north - not from the Mongols this time but from the Manchus, raiding from what is now called Manchuria.

In Manchuria were Chinese who had brought with them Chinese-style agriculture. In that part of Manchuria called Jilin were the descendants of the semi-nomadic Ruzhen who had established the Jin dynasty in northern China in the 1100s. By the early 1600s, one among them, Nurgaci, had brought adjoining Manchu tribes under his rule. His son and successor, Abahai, ruling from the town of Mukden, gave the name of Manchu to his subjects. He allied himself with Mongol tribes, made a treaty with the Koreans and was set for an assault on China.

The Manchu were making incursions into northern China at the same time as people in China were rebelling against their emperor, Chongzhen. In 1644 a rebel Chinese force swept into Beijing. Chongzhen hanged himself. In the coming seven years the Manchu fought battles outside of Beijing, the Manchu gaining hold of military garrisons at strategic points, and Ming supporters taking refuge in Taiwan, which did not submit to the Manchus until 1683. The Manchu's took power in Beijing and eventually over the whole of China. ( Details provided by scholar/reader.) China's emperors now belonged to a Manchu family called the Qing family, a dynasty that was to rule to the 19th century.

A few Chinese chose death rather than serve the Manchu, but other Chinese filled the Manchu government bureaucracy. The Manchu were never more than two percent of the population in China, but helping them rule was Confucianism's view of arbitrary authority being other than an imposition by violent conquest. Manchu rule in China promoted the study of the classics and the veneration of ancestors, including the idea that a ruler rules by virtue of his goodness, connected with the heavens. Meanwhile Manchu emperors kept military power out of the hands of Chinese and in the hands of their fellow Manchu. They guarded against their fellow Manchu being swallowed by the Chinese by forbidding Manchu from marrying Chinese. They forbade them from engaging in commerce or labor and obliged them to military service dedicated to maintaining Manchu power.

With the peace that the Manchu imposed upon China, prosperity and population growth returned, and trade with Europe increased. One Manchu emperor, Kangxi, ruled sixty-one years, - from 1661 to 1722 - and would be considered one of China's great emperors. He won praise from Jesuits in China for his "noble heart," his intelligence, his excellent memory, his taste in reading and his being an "absolute ruler over his passions."

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