The Literati Rewriting of China in the Qianlong-Jiaqing Transition

Datos Bibliográficos

ID15028071
AutoresMatthew W Mosca (0000-0003-1056-0047, autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen32
Número2
Páginas89-132
Fecha de publicación2011-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLate imperial China (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0884-3236 • E-ISSN: 1086-3257
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/late.2011.0012
OpenAlexW2045384143
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas13

The Literati Rewriting of China in the Qianlong-Jiaqing Transition1 Matthew W. Mosca (bio) Qianlong’s death in 1799 and the fall of the powerful grand councilor Heshen (1750–99), at a time when armed unrest was rising and the government’s capacities diminishing, has long been recognized as a major turning point in Qing history. One characteristic of this period, as Philip Kuhn explains, was that Han literati in and out of office gained more freedom and felt more responsibility to speak out about matters of administration and statecraft. Kuhn places this development in the context of a constitutional agenda centered on “defining the part of the community that properly participates in national politics.” Under Qianlong and his predecessors, political power had increasingly been centralized among “insiders” at the highest levels of government, leaving the literati elite disengaged from national political affairs. With the emperor’s death and the resurgence of literati activism under his son Jiaqing, private scholars began to reevaluate state policies—what Kuhn calls an “invitation to inquisitiveness, the suggestion that questions of high policy were the proper business of men outside government.”2 This paper argues that the change identified by Kuhn may have had an even deeper impact on Chinese history than he has suggested. For the Han literati, Inner Asian affairs were, par excellence, the sphere of the empire’s politics most dominated by bannerman insiders, where their right to inquire, still less [End Page 89] to participate, was most starkly circumscribed. Correspondingly, Qianlong’s passing marked a greater shift in this field than elsewhere. From the 1790s onward, Han literati increasingly asserted their intellectual sovereignty—their right and duty to formulate plans for administration and defense—over Inner Asia as well as China Proper. In other words, this period marked not only a change within the history of China Proper,3 but a definitive widening of the concerns of China’s literati elite that would condition their response to the collapse of the Manchu Empire in 1911. The Qing state continued to govern the conquered lands of Ming China under the ordinary junxian system of territorial administration. This Qing China, however, was now only one component within a larger Qing Empire, alongside lands the Chinese political elite of Ming times regarded as unambiguously foreign. By 1912, the Republic of China claimed all of these regions as its inalienable territory. This has led Joseph Esherick to propose the “Atatürk counterfactual”: the question of why the Republic’s Han Chinese leadership did not seek to create out of the collapsed Qing polity a homogeneous Chinese nation-state on the basis of the Ming frontiers, analogous to the emergence of Turkey from the sprawling and diverse Ottoman Empire, but instead struggled to keep all the lands of the regime they replaced.4 Answers to this question can certainly be sought with profit in the political and ideological ferment of the early twentieth century, but the ambition of Han Chinese leaders after 1911 to rule all former Qing territory is in part the political incarnation of an intellectual transformation that had occurred roughly a century before during the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition, when a proprietary attitude toward all territories subject to the Manchus, not simply those within the junxian system, became widespread among the literati.5 The political order of the Qing Empire provincialized the Han bureaucracy. In the Ming they had been imperial, formulating the agenda of government in all parts of the realm, albeit at times in competition with other stakeholders. Under the Qing their situation was different. Only the emperor’s highest echelon of advisors, selected primarily from the corps of Manchu, Mongol, and (to a much lesser extent) Chinese bannermen had the privilege of serving [End Page 90] as omnicompetent administrators transcending internal boundaries between administrative systems. Thus, only bannermen required expertise about both China and Inner Asia. Local elites aiding in the empire’s administration, such as Tibetan clergy and aristocrats, eastern Turkestani begs, and Mongol jasaghs, were by contrast provincial: regionally circumscribed political and cultural legitimacy limited their role to specific zones of the empire. Within the Qing order, the regular Han bureaucracy recruited from the ranks of the

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