Could early military defeat prevent Qing military complacency?

@Maoistic: Most of what you said is... plain wrong. From just the first page:

China's lack of modernisation has to do with the lack of colonies to exploit and constant invasions by European powers
There is much dispute over what led Early Modern Europe to gain an insurmountable economic edge over Qing China. The two big theses are the old theory of the "high-level equilibrium trap," which (to simplify a lot of very complex historical and economical argument) says that the cost of labor was sufficiently low in China to reduce the advantages of investing in capital over increasing labor output, and the California school thesis, which argues that China ultimately failed to keep up due to their lack of colonial relationships and because European coal was located in a rather more advantageous region than the desolate hills of northwestern China.

All being said, "constant invasions by European powers" was a minor factor in Chinese economic development. For one, there never were "constant invasions" of China by any sort of Europeans before the nineteenth century as opposed to what can best be termed occasional border skirmishes; for another, no European navy or army ever reached any of the great metropolises (Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, etc) of China's lower Yangzi economic core before the First Opium War.

So no, there wasn't any "military complacency", China's military was just falling behind because of a rising Europe and the lack of a colonial empire.
To cite Victor Lieberman's second volume of Strange Parallels and William Rowe's Saving the World, Qing China very clearly had no serious military threat for most of its existence and was indeed militarily "complacent" as a result. Consider, first, that after the Zunghar genocide of the 1750s, the Qing faced no political or military challenge whatsoever save kingdoms protected by harsh terrain (Burma, Nepal) and internal rebel groups (an administrative challenge, not a military one). Second, consider that following the collapse of Southern Ming, the Qing did not face any enemy force with even remotely comparable resources (with the arguable exception of Russians, but the Qing-Russian "war" was more of an extended border skirmish by frontier units).

As Rowe notes, "Eighteenth-century China faced few of the war-related fiscal pressures of contemporary Europe, and the prevailing political situation, Confucian ideology, and economic theory all combined to dictate that state financial comfort be translated as fully as possible into a policy of low taxation."

The Ottomans were repeatedly getting their face punched in by the late 17th century and were noted for their lack of military modernisation.
Gabor Agoston's Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire kills that trope quite decisively. It is now agreed that the Ottomans were not particularly behind in military technology compared to their European foes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To quote Gaborston, p. 200-201,
Available evidence suggests that it was neither the Ottomans' "inferiority" in military technology nor their supposed shortcomings in ordinance production that brought on their first significant military failures at the end of the seventeenth century, and led to disastrous and humiliating defeats at the hands of the Russians in the latter part of the eighteenth. Such factors as double-front engagements and overstrained communications were obviously of greater significance... More importantly, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a thriving manufacturing sector in an empire where the economy as a whole experienced the contractions plaguing the entire Mediterranean region.​
Logistics and economics, not technology. (And do note that it is almost universally agreed that the 17th-century Qing were less

the difference is that the Chinese didn't have surplus resources to create more powerful artillery like Western Europe did, much less at the speed Europe was doing it.
High Qing China's GDP was not much less than Europe on the verge of industrialization. Europe had more, but the margin wasn't that big.
 

Maoistic

Banned
High Qing China's GDP was not much less than Europe on the verge of industrialization. Europe had more, but the margin wasn't that big.

I'm going to address this first and later address the rest. You're only counting Europe itself with the exclusion of the colonies in America, Russian Asia and India. Count those and it becomes incomparable. Moreover, GDP is not an indicator of technology unless you seriously believe that Japan hadn't surpassed China technologically by the 1890s. An agrarian society can havee a bigger GDP than a proto-industrial or industrial society, doesn't change how it is technologically inferior.
 
You're only counting Europe itself with the exclusion of the colonies in America, Russian Asia and India. Count those and it becomes incomparable.
Russian Asia was mostly ice and trees. European India was not very large in the 1750s, at the height of Qing rule, and certainly did not include more than a small fraction of the subcontinent's production. As for the Americas, I don't have any good estimates of GDP, but I feel it is telling that Spanish America had less than 4% of Qing China's population. Even if we assume that American workers were far more productive than Qing ones, it isn't nearly enough to make anything "incomparable."

Moreover, GDP is not an indicator of technology
You talked about "surplus resources," not technology, and made the ludicrous claim that the Spanish Americas (which had ten million less people than the single province of Zhejiang) was more productive than the entirety of China.
 
By falling behind I mean technologically.




They were well aware seeing how the constantly prohibited the spread of Christianity, limited European trade and even tried to ban it. Wills mentions this.




How do you fail to see the point that 1) Europeans were having military confrontations with the Chinese during the Qing dynasty, 2) Europeans were defeating the Chinese in battle? Sure, you may say that it wasn't a confrontation with and defeat of the Qing itself, but it's still a defeat of Chinese forces with the Qing being forced to humiliatingly rely on Dutch allies to defeat its enemies. And yes, it can be characterised as begging.




You argue like Vegeta fights. Yes it does and I'm amazed you think that's not the case. Why wasn't the equal and mighty Qing Empire capable of defending a wealthy sacred island? Why were its ships being constantly captured or sunk by the Europeans? And yes, they are military confrontations, whether you like it or not. And by the way, Wills also mentions how the Portuguese defeated Chinese pirates with several junks in Macau despite being outnumbered, although this is during the Ming era. All this are early military defeats that shows European superiority being seen by the Chinese and especially the Qing, reinforcing my argument that Tonio Andrade is wrong in blaming "military complacency" as the cause of Qing's lack of military modernisation.




The Dutch example is a perfect one that shows Chinese capitulation. The fact that Macau recovered also shows Chinese incapability of driving Europeans out even when they were impeding trade and impoverishing the colony. That is not even mentioning how the Portuguese and Dutch navigated Chinese waters nonchalantly to trade with the Japanese, another sign of Chinese impotence and capitulation to European naval force.





Yes it does, and only your poor cognitive skills prevent you from understanding this.





There is nothing vague about the Ming sending ships to Malacca to drive away the Portuguese, engaging the Portuguese in naval battles and failing to do any lasting damage. And the Ming didn't "try", they straight up did and tried to make Malacca their vassal state again. They failed since the Portuguese kept Malacca for some 100 years until the Dutch got them out of there.

So now you're throwing in the prohibition of Christianity? Now I'm even more confused as to what you even mean by "draining" the Qing Empire. Please explain what you mean. Do we have any officials or other people in the Qing Empire talking about it? What exactly does Wills say? Can I get an actual quote?

Defeating some ships and an island is not the same thing as defeating the entire empire. A defeat of a teeny fraction of china's "forces" on their own does not demonstrate that the entire Qing empire was quaking in its boots, capitulating to European demands, and unable to take advantage of American cash crops because they had to deal with "constant invasions" by European ships that hindered them greatly and constantly distracted them. Asking for Dutch aid as a trade isn't at all humiliating and frankly, I don't trust your "characterization" of it as begging at all.

I don't dispute that Europeans had better ships and seamanship than the Chinese. None of your examples prove the specific claims you make that I typed above. Again, I could just as easily say that it didn't matter that much to them.

Giving someone a shitty version of what they want in a fair trade is capitulation to you? What? Do you think the Qing should shoot themselves in the foot by showing people they're complete liars in order to show "dominance" or something? It was easier and more cost-effective to acquire the aid of the Dutch for sea problems. That is not "capitulation. And did you actually bother to read the page I cited for the Macau example? The only reason it survived is that Macau's bribe to the governor-general succeeded and he recommended to the court that they be exempted. Furthermore, their future was only secured when the governor-generals extortion was reported to the court by Shang Kexi causing him to be imprisoned and commit suicide. They weren't "incapable". You also keep saying that the Chinese "capitulated" and were "impotent" when I can again say that the Qing just didn't care enough because it wasn't very relevant.

Yeah, I concede, it's probably not a good example, and in any case, there was far more parity between Europe and China around the 1510s and 1520s. It wasn't until the 1570s that Europe decisively surpassed China in naval technology at least.

???

You say I have poor cognitive skills, ask people what they're smoking, ask me if I'm serious, and heavily misrepresent the Mings interaction with the Portuguese and then when someone merely brings up what actually happened and then asks for a source you immediately concede? When your claim that Europe's "increasingly heavier artillery couldn't have been possible without America's large reserves of volcanic sulphur used for gunpowder." was proven wrong, you then misrepresented your original claim by saying that "It was just a small example to show how gunpowder components were indeed extracted from America even from that early on.". How can you possibly be so arrogant and insulting in your debating when your arguing is so bad?
 
I'm not sure I'd use Macao as evidence of Ming complacency or lack of technological prowess. Everywhere else in Asia, the Dutch and Portuguese seized major trading ports. In China, they built a trading station far, far away from the Chinese heartland. Compare Macao to Shanghai.
 
Man, there was so much deviation and all this talk about specific points in the Barbary wars and all that. And then someone decided to compare Europe (multiple countries) with China (ummm... one country). And someone thought the Ottomans were actually relelvent.

This is fine and all, but what about the OP? I'm curious as to see if a defeat large enough for the Qing to reform that wouldn't destroy the mandate of heaven thing.
 
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