AHC: Better 19th Century for Qing

[John Fredrick Parker]

With no PoDs prior to 1834, how could the humiliations, rebellions, and demographic catastrophes that hit China in the middle part of the 19th century he averted - especially the Taiping Rebellion, or any calamity of its level?

And before anyone suggests the seemingly easy answer:

It's not that simple. Hong Xiuquan didn't possess some mass hypnosis device that broadcast hatred of the Qing to everyone in South China; there was already massive pent up resentment of the Qing, and their declining legitimacy in the face of humiliation at the hands of Western powers presented an opportunity for local elites to build up power centers around themselves. Once the war reaches Jiangnan, anti-Manchu nationalism is a much stronger pull for the Taiping than their weird religious stuff ever was, and resistance to the Manchu had a long history before Hong Xiuquan ever put brush to paper. I remember hearing one professor explain that the opening of new treaty ports gutted the porter trade, where young men would transport goods to the markets in Guangdong, and left many young men unemployed.

 

[Tyler96]

With some tweaking you could maybe stop the outbreak of the Opium War- but I'm unsure how much that helps given China's dire internal problems, and there'd still be plenty of scope for a war later on given pro-war sentiment among the British trading community.

Getting someone different on the throne (...given a POD of 1834 or later I suppose a different son of Daoguang?) might make for a slight improvement, but I doubt you can find someone omni-competent enough to get a handle on all China's issues.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

@Tyler96 Mind you, preventing the First Opium War isn’t the main priority of the OP, but making the rest of the 19th Century in China more stable generally (which, considering the Taiping Rebellion period being what it was, seems like it shouldn’t be that hard). Even if war with British traders still comes, and if it’s still a defeat, that’s not necessarily a deal breaker, so long as said defeat isn’t as destructive to imperial legitimacy, and/or the court is able to learn more effective lessons.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

The Qing were, in some ways, in a healthier state between the Taiping Rebellion and the Sino-Japanese War than is often allowed. That's a far fry from saying they were healthy, of course. But if you look at the resolution of the Ili Valley crisis, that shows that the Chinese were able to successfully renegotiate an unequal treaty and actually get disputed territory back. Now, to be fair that was also dependent on the Russians and British overestimating their strength; but the fact remains that by the end of the 1880s it was not totally unreasonable to think that Britain's future partner in the east would be Beijing not Tokyo.

The fundamental problem is the fractured authority of the court. The various armies and fleets were, at various times, quite strong. But they had no central authority which meant that they couldn't support each other, and also meant that there was huge incentive for commanders to embezzle and plunder in the knowledge that no one above them was in a position to check that supplies were getting through.

This can't be totally corrected. Your best bet for a stronger China is for the Qing to fall- not because they were intrinsically incompetent, but because a government under the Taiping/Zeng Guufan/Li Hongzhang would be able to sweep away old structures and reform from the ground up in the manner of the Meiji rebels.
But assuming that the Qing don't fall, you need to support the Self-Strengthening Movement. It would be easy to say 'kill Cixi!', but in the early post-Taiping days she actually worked effectively with Prince Gong.

So I'd suggest, instead, hold off on the death of the Tongzhi Emperor. That threatened Cixi's influence at court, and she had to align with the conservatives to get a candidate she controlled onto the throne. Keep her son alive and free from smallpox, and you could see a loose alliance between Cixi, Prince Gong and the more able viceroys that would be far stronger in the face of the reactionaries at court.

I don't think you'd see a truly successful reform program, but it might be enough to keep the Qing alive. You can picture the Sino-Japanese War being a embarrassment rather than a humiliation, as it becomes clear that the Dragon is stronger but unable to bring that strength to bear against the more effective Japanese. That might soften the peace treaty enough to avoid the Triple Intervention, and in turn the Boxer Rebellion .

I think it'd be an unstable China that might still see the Qing fall- but the dynasty wouldn't clearly be doomed.

 

[Green Painting]

Why? OTL Qing was already wanked to a ludicrous degree. They should have fallen to the usual dynastic cycle, had it not been for the support of foreign powers, and extra resources created by the new trading ports.

Though, I do consider the Late Qing Reforms after the Boxer Rebellion to be an incredible feat. Infrastructure projects were built, modern institutions were founded, and the nation seemed to be in a more stable state compared to the period prior to or after that.

The only thing: it came way too late.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

@SenatorChickpea Would you say then that the Taiping Rebellion didn’t have a massive negative impact on the stability and institutional health of the Qing Empire?

The only thing: it came way too late.

Well then, I suppose the question is “How could it have come earlier?”

 

[SenatorChickpea]

No, just that it wasn't necessarily a fatal- or even crippling- blow. In some ways, one of the worst legacies wasn't even the destruction and loss of life but the fact the revolt wasn't put down by the Qing themselves but by the semi-autonomous Confucian gentry like Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzheng. Now, the provincial rulers were often more talented (or at least more able to get hold of their administration) than even the Qing reformers, so their emergence wasn't a complete problem- but it did set the stage for the gradual decline in central authority.


Is it a stronger Qing you want, or a stronger Imperial China? Because in that case I'd go with Japhy's old POD of Zeng installing himself on the throne at the end of the Rebellion.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Is it a stronger Qing you want, or a stronger Imperial China? Because in that case I'd go with Japhy's old POD of Zeng installing himself on the throne at the end of the Rebellion.

A stronger China in general; more specifically, I guess you could say one where prospects for modernization and reform in the latter 19th Century has the most potential, and secondarily where the potential for warlordism is weakest.

On a related note, considering how pivotal the “Century of Humiliation” narrative is in China’s modern political regime and culture, you would think there would be more out there on how said “humiliation” (or any grains of truth thereof) might have been at least curbed, even with a fairly late PoD.

 

[samcster94]

Why? OTL Qing was already wanked to a ludicrous degree. They should have fallen to the usual dynastic cycle, had it not been for the support of foreign powers, and extra resources created by the new trading ports.

Though, I do consider the Late Qing Reforms after the Boxer Rebellion to be an incredible feat. Infrastructure projects were built, modern institutions were founded, and the nation seemed to be in a more stable state compared to the period prior to or after that.

The only thing: it came way too late.

Yup. I always found it interesting the Qing were ruled by a Manchurian family, who were an ethnic minority, who at least early on, had their own language.

 

[oca2073]

Basically impossible. Whatever happened, the Chinese were in a pretty rude shock, a paradigm shift in worldview was needed. For two millenia they had thought of themselves as the centre of the universe, with all barbarians being ranked according to how close or far they came to themselves as the centre of all under heaven. They had no competitors due to the nature of geography, ocean to the east, north is cold steppe and desert, the west is the Tibetan plateau, in the south inhospitable jungle. Suddenly these pesky Europeans were coming in with superior ways of doing basically everything and the Chinese authorities kept themselves in denial for as long as possible in order to save face and maintain political stability and legitimacy. Of course it ended badly.

The best case scenario is to have China split politically in the mid 19th century, and due to the lack of a Heaven's mandate and sheer competition between multiple states, it forces them to work with the Europeans to compete against one another. But I guess that's just another kind of humiliation.

 

[Monter]

Maybe you could have Yixin (OTL Prince Gong) becoming Emperor in 1851 instead of his feeble brother, and of course not dying suddenly like most of the late Qing emperors, a strong leadership could do wonder for the declining empire.

 

[RousseauX]

Basically impossible. Whatever happened, the Chinese were in a pretty rude shock, a paradigm shift in worldview was needed. For two millenia they had thought of themselves as the centre of the universe, with all barbarians being ranked according to how close or far they came to themselves as the centre of all under heaven. They had no competitors due to the nature of geography, ocean to the east, north is cold steppe and desert, the west is the Tibetan plateau, in the south inhospitable jungle. Suddenly these pesky Europeans were coming in with superior ways of doing basically everything and the Chinese authorities kept themselves in denial for as long as possible in order to save face and maintain political stability and legitimacy. Of course it ended badly.

The best case scenario is to have China split politically in the mid 19th century, and due to the lack of a Heaven's mandate and sheer competition between multiple states, it forces them to work with the Europeans to compete against one another. But I guess that's just another kind of humiliation.

but then how come China had a modern European army and European ships in the Beiyang fleet and factories and railroads in the Yangtze delta a few decades after the first opium war?

Seems like they adapted pretty fast, it's just that the actual implementation of modernization was problematic just like 90% of countries which tried to industrialize very quickly

 

[oca2073]

but then how come China had a modern European army and European ships in the Beiyang fleet and factories and railroads in the Yangtze delta a few decades after the first opium war?

They bought European hardware, but refused to reform to European methods. Thus they lost to a considerably worse equipped Japan that did learn from European methods.

 

[RousseauX]

They bought European hardware, but refused to reform to European methods. Thus they lost to a considerably worse equipped Japan that did learn from European methods.

Can you go into some details about this?

The Beiyang army for instance was trained based on European textbooks

Could it be that crash modernization is pretty difficult to accomplish very quickly, and -no- country other than Japan has ever done it effectively?

 

[oca2073]

Can you go into some details about this?

The Beiyang army for instance was trained based on European textbooks

Could it be that crash modernization is pretty difficult to accomplish very quickly, and -no- country other than Japan has ever done it effectively?

Compare Japan's wholesale Meiji reforms and China's piecemeal reforms, attempting to copy the Europeans in some select aspects only. (convinced in their superiority in almost everything else) Basically select military reforms aren't enough. You have to do education, military academies, officer culture, science, industrialization ect. The Chinese didn't attempt it until the Hundred Days Reforms, but it was too late by then.

Crash modernization is difficult which is why it needs to happen early and take decades. A PoD later than 1834 is too late. It needs to start preferably in the 1790s around MacCartney's diplomatic outreach.

 

[RousseauX]

Compare Japan's wholesale Meiji reforms and China's piecemeal reforms, attempting to copy the Europeans in some select aspects only. (convinced in their superiority in almost everything else) Basically select military reforms aren't enough. You have to do education, military academies, officer culture, science ect. The Chinese didn't attempt it until the Hundred Days Reforms, but it was too late by then.

But China did try to copy western education, the problem is lack of government funding to institute it nation-wide since a lot of it went to indemnities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongwen_Guan

military academies too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baoding_Military_Academy#Predecessors

 

[RousseauX]

Crash modernization is difficult which is why it needs to happen early and take decades. A PoD later than 1834 is too late. It needs to start preferably in the 1790s around MacCartney's diplomatic outreach.

So why do you think the self-strengthening movement was doomed to fail?

And if your answer is something to do with Chinese culture or "inward looking", please back this up with evidence, because it seems to me that just like every other society on earth there's reactionary and progressive elements in China when it comes to modernization. The failure doesn't seem to be rooted in Chinese worldview: it seems to be circumstantial.

 

[Monter]

China did send many students and diplomats to study abroad, did join the Westphalian system (abandoning the so called "middle kingdom" mentality), set up academies, arsenals, shipyards, etc.
Many of those endeavors failed or blew on the Qing's face, but the "they believed they were superior all the way!" stereotype wasn't one of them.

 

[oca2073]

But China did try to copy western education, the problem is lack of government funding to institute it nation-wide since a lot of it went to indemnities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongwen_Guan

military academies too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baoding_Military_Academy#Predecessors

Too little too late. These reforms only were attempted after they lost the Opium Wars. For this to work, the Chinese need to recognize European superior methods PRIOR to even fighting a single war preferably. And even after losing the wars, the Chinese authorities only attempted reforms with centralized institutions, their mindset was still to accept as little European influence as possible. Unlike Japan that had a mindset to admit as much European influence as possible. That goes to cultural mindset and historical factors beyond the change of a PoD later than 1834.

The first emperor that had an interest in Western "stuff" was Guangxu and I don't think an earlier emperor would have been interested rather than considering them as inferior barbarians.

 

[oca2073]

China did send many students and diplomats to study abroad, did join the Westphalian system (abandoning the so called "middle kingdom" mentality), set up academies, arsenals, shipyards, etc.
Many of those endeavors failed or blew on the Qing's face, but the "they believed they were superior all the way!" stereotype wasn't one of them.

This all happened after the Opium Wars and the students were told to learn and specialize in military affairs, the authorities had zero interest for other European ideas. (barbarians) Which brings us back to the cultural and ideological problem with the authorities. Not necessarily the students, or other open-minded Chinese, the authorities that ran things weren't all that interested.