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hardcover $35.00
Belknap Press
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
More reviews by Stephen Maire
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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China's Last Empire by William Rowe
The burden of history sits heavily and uneasily on the Qing. It is not just that the Qing was the last dynasty or the the Qing marks China's encounter with the West, but more importantly, both the Nationalist and Communist Chinese regimes that emerged from the revolution that overthrew the Qing seek to explain and justify their own existence as a response to Qing failure. CHINA'S LAST EMPIRE is the concluding volume to the Belknap Press's history of imperial China; in this volume Michael Rowe not only takes on the challenge of dealing with this freighted history, but promises a revisionist interpretation of Qing history.
For there to be revisionist history there needs to be history to revise. Before about 1970, the "standard" history could be defined generally as that of John King Fairbank, the dean of China scholars. Until then the typical English introduction to Chinese history was through Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig's two grand histories: East Asia: The Great Tradition and East Asia: The Modern Transformation. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, a new generation of scholars were coming to the fore and offering alternative views. This new scholarship was at that time called "revisionist". Within a decade there were revisions to the revisions that often turned towards and were supportive of the history as presented by Fairbank.
By 1989, the various interpretations and "revisions" of Chinese history of the late Qing and Republic were so numerous that Daniel Little could author Understanding Peasant China and examine four topics of this period where argument and revision had raged and assess the merits of each view. In the years since, the situation has not become any simpler. At some points in CHINA'S LAST EMPIRE, Rowe presentings as many as four distinct interpretations of an aspect of Qing history.
Given how much time Rowe spends presenting various historians' interpretations of Qing history is CHINA'S LAST EMPIRE history or historiography? Perhaps more to the point, should a general history of imperial China need to address the arguments of historians or need it only present the history? Finally, and significantly, what is revisionist in Rowe's history given all the revisionism that has come before?
Bearing in mind how much both the Nationalists and Communists need the history of the Qing to be read in specific ways to support, justify and endorse their own place in and view of Chinese history, one cannot separate historiography from history in the case of the Qing. The history that one elects to accept has significant political implications. As a simple example consider the impact of China's economic encounter with the West. In one view, contact with the West provided technology to and commercialization of the economy needed to stimulate economic growth and reverse significant declines in per capita income. Hence, the West and capitalism were "good" for China. The converse argument holds that the West (and Japan) were exploitative and sought to strip national wealth from China creating a false sense of growth and further impoverishing the country. It is possible to argue both sides; clearly one's political inclinations will lean one towards one argument or the other.
For an author not to make the general reader aware of these arguments would be a disservice given the implications of one interpretation or another. At the same time, Rowe needs still to recount the history and not simply bury the history with the historiography. Rowe successfully achieves a balance between the two and gives fair presentation to the many historical arguments while keeping the history in focus.
One of the pleasures of the Belknap series has been the subtlety and substance of the historical arguments that the authors have made in the various volumes. Rowe's argument is no less subtle or substantive, but does take a bit more to tease out, in part because it is somewhat obscured by the historiography and the many contesting interpretations of the history of this period that compete with his own argument.
Rowe advances two significant points that can be seen as revisionist. First, that the Qing was aware of, and actively addressing well before it fully revealed itself, the economic crisis of the late nineteenth century. Second, that critical or seminal points in late Qing history are not the traditional or commonly seen events, but often rather very different events.
By the second half of the nineteenth century China and the Qing faced a significant economic crisis. At its simplest it can be said that population growth was rapid while production lagged causing a sharp drop in per capita income. Population rose rapidly in the early Qing, rising from 150 million in 1700, roughly 50 years into Qing rule, to nearly 350 million a century latter. Fifty years latter, roughly 1850, the first war with England had been fought and the Taiping rebellion is underway and population was up by a further 100 million to roughly 450 million. As a predominantly agrarian economy rising income had depended in the past largely on bringing new land under cultivation. By the late Qing, there was little new land available and real per capita income was in decline. This is a simple presentation and there are no shortage of significant qualifying conditions and other events that have a bearing here. In the traditional interpretation, this economic crisis arises suddenly and unexpectedly; the Qing are confused, have made no preparations and essentially driven into inaction by the crisis. In Rowe's view, the Qing understood what was happening and were active in addressing it. Moreover, Rowe characterizes the Qing as a functioning government using the tools available to deal with the impending crisis and not a dynasty in the late stages of dynastic of ineptitude and incompetence. This portrayal of the Qing as an active actor at this late point of the dynasty is clearly revisionist.
It is tempting, and common, to see late Qing history revolving around the Opium War of 1841. Here, in its first major military conflict with the West, Chinese armies are defeated and the West secures concessions that lead to be beginning of the treaty port system. "Modern" China comes into being as the West breaks out of the confines of the Canton factories and secures points of entry at a number of major Chinese cities throughout the empire. Upon reflection and consideration, the ethnocentric qualities of this interpretation become rather obvious. The prospect that a thousand or so westerners brought modernity to 450 million Chinese by virtue of their presence in five Chinese cities is clearly overstated. Rowe advances for consideration several alternate seminal dates. His strongest argument is reserved for 1895 and the Sino-Japanese War. Shifting the focus of the seminal point of the dynasty away from the initial Western impact to a more Sino-centric view marks Rowe's history as revisionist.
In contrast to some of the earlier volumes in this series which were organized topically, CHINA'S LAST EMPIRE is fairly straight-forward history. While the general reader might feel that there is too much historiography and the specialist feel that Rowe is taking to strong a position, Rowe has been honest in presenting the reader with competing interpretations while staking out and intriguing position on the ability of the Qing, making the volume an engaging and fitting conclusion to the series.
Stephen Maire
09/02/2010
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Stephen Maire is a Director of garment manufacturing and trading company. He has lived in East Asia for more than twenty years. |
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