Well it seems like a good way to give China some breathing room by preventing the opium wars is to prevent the opium trade by avoiding British india. They'd still have access to indian opium but they wouldn't be able to force indian farmers to grow opium at below market prices, so there'd simply be less of it.
WI: China has a better 19th century
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Well, then. I assume that the scholars of legal history and comparative law have been incorrect for... it must have been centuries by now.
Part of the problem can be summarized as
something something the trajectory of dynasties something something historybabble something something cycle of dynasties something something
China has had multiple comprehensive beatings that could arguably only be called not "existential threats that were carried out" through semantics
or hairsplitting. The Chinese equivalent of The Time of Troubles is basically a step in how the Chinese dynastic cycle works.
The Qing dynasty replaced the Ming dynasty replaced the Yuan in a way that don't quite compare to, say, Bernadotte replacing Holstein-Gottorp
replacing Hesse replacing Palatinate-Zweibrücken replacing Vasa.
Going back well before the nineteenth century, to the early part of the Qing dynasty (I'm not sure exactly how far back you need to go,
maybe even less than a century) China did have a powerful army serving the central government and was reasonably up to date.
Going back just a little bit further, we're att the end of the Ming dynasty, which at the time did not, or it wouldn't have been nearing its end...
Also, there is the issue of size, population and "shān gāo, huángdì yuǎn, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away".
Central control of China is not as easy as the various Chinese dynasties have pretended it is, and some of the places that end
up far from the centrum are far bigger and more important than their 18th-19th century Russian equivalents-in-distance.
Strictly speaking, it is not being pedantic to reply to "I am not sure if this happened before the American Revolution, during it or just after it"
with "It was before it".
And, no, it was not clear, or the phrase "missed or misphrased some step" would not have been employed. It was phrased as if
the Latin American revolutions lead the merchants to start cultivate and trade in opium rather than to step it up and concentrate more on it.
It's not the cost of building railroads that is the big hurdle...
And weren't a lot of non-European/Anglo-American/colonial railroads actually built and owned by the British (and occasionally other Europeans)?
Unless/until the Indians realise "Hey! The British want to tea which they can only get in China, China has developed an opium problem* and WE
grow THE BEST opium- KA-CHIING!".
Or they could cut out (being) the middle man and break the Chinese tea monopoly.
The deceptively easiest way to avoid the Opium War is to have Charles II not marry Catherine of Braganza who brought tea-drinking to the court and made it fashionable.
Which requires them to sacrifice their own food security for profit, and later on textile production as well as just appropriating agricultural produce at below market prices, which was an equation the British were a ok with but I have trouble seeing any Indians liking. Breaking the Chinese tea monopoly is a potential outcome but wouldn't this also help China as Europeans are less interested in buying so they're less interested in selling.
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Only if they want to produce and sell as much as the British did, which, with (presumably) a larger number of smaller producers making more
independent decisions, one would assume that they as a collective wouldn't have.
(Any increase by those who wanted to would not make up for the non-increase by those who didn't.)
Even if I don't trust an Indian opium trader and land-owner to be less interested in making a profit than a British-in-Indian one.
(In theory, if your neigbours* aren't pressured to grow opium, but keep growing food and producing textiles, you can almost safely
try to squeeze out as much opium as possible from your property/tenants, as you can buy food from your neighbours with the profits.
It's not a good business plan, but it is one that exists.)
*As in the other land-owners and merchants in your immediate area, not at state level.
But, yeah, less Indian opium produced and traded to China, but not little enough for China, as that was situation
(and in comparison with later, minuscle amount) when they banned it the first time.
Breaking the tea monopoly was a separate suggestion, not just a potential outcome, and the whole point was to "help" China
by avoiding the Opium War.
The question here is whether it in the end actually helps China...
Optical_Illusion
Banned
Eh? Who in this thread said those words "I am not sure if this happened before the American Revolution, during it or just after it"? It certainly wasn't me.
'It's not the cost that is the big hurdle . . .' but money makes the world go round, and there were a lot of rich Chinese merchants with great British connections. An appendix to the Examinations about railroads, and a crazy charismatic loser hallucinates being George Stephenson's younger brother and goes to build a rail line to the Black Sea.Well, then. I assume that the scholars of legal history and comparative law have been incorrect for... it must have been centuries by now.
Part of the problem can be summarized as
something something the trajectory of dynasties something something historybabble something something cycle of dynasties something something
China has had multiple comprehensive beatings that could arguably only be called not "existential threats that were carried out" through semantics
or hairsplitting. The Chinese equivalent of The Time of Troubles is basically a step in how the Chinese dynastic cycle works.
The Qing dynasty replaced the Ming dynasty replaced the Yuan in a way that don't quite compare to, say, Bernadotte replacing Holstein-Gottorp
replacing Hesse replacing Palatinate-Zweibrücken replacing Vasa.
Going back well before the nineteenth century, to the early part of the Qing dynasty (I'm not sure exactly how far back you need to go,
maybe even less than a century) China did have a powerful army serving the central government and was reasonably up to date.
Going back just a little bit further, we're att the end of the Ming dynasty, which at the time did not, or it wouldn't have been nearing its end...
Also, there is the issue of size, population and "shān gāo, huángdì yuǎn, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away".
Central control of China is not as easy as the various Chinese dynasties have pretended it is, and some of the places that end
up far from the centrum are far bigger and more important than their 18th-19th century Russian equivalents-in-distance.
Strictly speaking, it is not being pedantic to reply to "I am not sure if this happened before the American Revolution, during it or just after it"
with "It was before it".
And, no, it was not clear, or the phrase "missed or misphrased some step" would not have been employed. It was phrased as if
the Latin American revolutions lead the merchants to start cultivate and trade in opium rather than to step it up and concentrate more on it.
It's not the cost of building railroads that is the big hurdle...
And weren't a lot of non-European/Anglo-American/colonial railroads actually built and owned by the British (and occasionally other Europeans)?
Unless/until the Indians realise "Hey! The British want to tea which they can only get in China, China has developed an opium problem* and WE
grow THE BEST opium- KA-CHIING!".
Or they could cut out (being) the middle man and break the Chinese tea monopoly.
The deceptively easiest way to avoid the Opium War is to have Charles II not marry Catherine of Braganza who brought tea-drinking to the court and made it fashionable.
Well, I'm not sure if "the scholars" had been busy studying the Russian laws, especially those of pre-Petrian time, for "centuries" and had the uniform view on the subject and even less sure that you read all of them and can make sweeping statements like one you did. For example, https://www.socionauki.ru/journal/articles/364732/points to a number of the principal differences with a conclusion that the traditional Russian legal system can't be linked to the Roman-German one:
1. The Roman law had been based upon "natural law" while the Russian law was fully based upon the will of a ruler not restricted by any laws.
2. There was no notion of the separate public and private rights. Actually, in the early XVIII (reign of Peter and his immediate successors) there was no comprehensive notion of any "rights" for any social group.
3. The legal professionals had no role in creating the Russian laws.
Actually, neither "Russian Truth" nor "Sudebnik" of Ivan III had been a systematized legal system but rather an assembly of the behavioral rules without any underlying "ideology" or systematic approach to the subject. If anything, Peter was just adding to the already existing legal havoc. An argument (made by some authors) that "Russian Truth" had some crimes identified similarly to the Roman Law is hardly convincing: of course, murder and theft had been considered crimes all over the world so how about the Roman influence on Ghengis' Yasa?
Situation started changing somewhere in the late XVIII century when CII ordered to start systematic codification of the existing legislative material.
Well, this view of the problem is exclusively yours and has nothing to do with what I was saying.
It seems that you did not quite get what was said. A serious beating could be a prerequisite (not a "must") for a nation that is lagging behind the attacking outsiders and is looking for reversing the situation. Quite obviously, China was not beaten by an outsider since the Manchurian conquest of the XVII and the conquerors felt themselves quite comfortable against the outside threats all the way to the XIX (AFAIK, the only "Western" military opponent they did have in between the conquest and the 1st OW were few hundred Russian Cossacks during the Albazin War of 1685-87). The numerous internal rebellions had been defeated and the Qing dynasty was successful against its opponents in Asia (pretty much as Ivan IV was quite successful against his Eastern opponents until he faced the Western ones). So why change something which works?
Quite irrelevant to the issue.
Even in the late XVII the Qing army was not quite "up to date". In 1686 over 3,000 Chinese troops with a powerful artillery could not take the earthworks of Abazin fort defended by 800 Cossacks (not exactly the advanced western-style troops) and forced it to capitulation by starvation. During the Nerchinsk talks they got what they wanted by bringing up to 15,000 troops close to Nerchinsk. Between that point and mid-XIX the Russian-Chinese border was reasonably quiet because both sides were OK with the existing situation especially after the trade (furs for tea) was regulated by the agreement of 1727. But, taking into an account that a considerable part of the Banner Armies even in the XIX century were the archers and that they became the hereditary soldiers with a little training soon after the 1680s, "up to date" hardly spreads to the XVIII century except for the even more backward opponents (Ten Great Campaigns of the XVIII).
And in the XIX the Banner Armies were not effective even against the domestic Taiping rebels and the government had to allow the governors to raise their own armies.
Anyway, the question was not about how and when exactly the changes should happen but what should be changed (without ASBs being involved) to put China in a better position vis-a-vis the Western threat. Surely, China would need a much more modern army controlled by the central government. Could they keep their armies updated during the XVIII-early XIX centuries instead of sticking to what they already had? If the governors during and after the Taiping Rebellion could raise more modern troops and even arrange for some more or less modern military production, why the effective government could not do the same thing during the XVIII - early XIX?
Yes, China was big an had a lot of population but inability to control the remote regions was a byproduct of government's weakness. Comparative importance of the remote areas of the Russian empire is a matter of opinion but the government managed to keep them under control with much lesser human resources than Chinese government had in its disposal and with the logistics being quite complicated.
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No, that was me. The same person who pointed out that it is not going full pedant to reply to that vague statement
with a clearer one that does not contradict it.
And there you stumbled upon one of the big hurdles.
"Here is a test on your knowledge of the Four Books and Five Classics, and could you also write an essay on how this
thing the guys whose products and creations officially are of no interest or use to us have started doing is awesome
and should be adopted despite the canals, rivers and roads that have been perfectly good for centuries."
No amount of money to build railroads will make up for lack of support for doing so from those in power.
What about Byzantine law, supposedly one of Yaroslav's sources?
Then again, refreshing my memory/checking the books, applying the groupings may have been anachronistic.
(Not to mention that the disagreements appear to have started being published right after or while I studied the subjects,
and so obviously would not have made it into the literature or gained much attention during the lectures.)
Again then again, the point stands, while Russia (pre- and post-Peter) may not have been a literal part of Jus Commune,
it was not foreign to it the way it would have been to the Chinese (and vice versa, Russian law and legal procedures
would not be as foreign to western Europeans).
I'm not sure the traditional German legal system can be linked to the Roman-German one in the "relevant Roman influence" way either...
That said...
1. Roman/Civil law has as one of its defining points that it is top-down, based on the laws as written/imposed by the rulers.
2. You may have to give an example, because I can't tell what you're trying to say. Is it a natural law versus positive law thing or something else?
3. Which, again, is one of the things that differentiates Roman/Civil Law legal systems from Common Law legal systems. It is law made by
law-makers, not by practioners.
The same is true for much of Europe during the same period.
When put that way, not convincing at all.
But if the argument is not "theft is a crime in Russian Truth and in Codex Justinianus, ergo the former is based on the latter", but
"this section of Just Measure is a translation of this section in the Byzantine Nomos Georgikos", it's more convincing.
Which is less than a century of the first French codification under Napoleon and within less than two of the first modern one, in Bavaria.
You brought up the Time of Troubles, and I remarked that China has had repeated ones.
Exactly.
They were not lagging behind their usual/traditional enemies and the unusual ones weren't really threatening.
Yes, that was what I said. In the earliest part of the Qing dynasty, they did have a powerful army serving the central government and was reasonably up to date (again, not lagging behind those it expected to fight). By the late 18th century they didn't, and, heredity and archers aside, it is not easy to pinpoint when it stopped qualifying as powerful. (Wikipedia suggests 1730s, but that is before some of the successful campaigns.)
It seems that one of the issues were, paradoxically, that the army turned professional - hereditary soldiers getting paid because they were hereditary soldiers regardless
of doing anything soldiery (and more importantly, for practising to do so), rather than a group of citizens with a (hereditary) duty to do military service.
As for what should be changed there's a tangle of things that probably depend on each other, and presumable some that are beyond China's control.
The sources may be biased one way or another, but the word corruption keeps popping up and that raises the questions if and why the corruption in
China was by itself worse than elsewhere, or if it's more the circumstances and comparative scale (i.e. the same amount of corruption will have
worse effect if more people and more wealth is involved). I'm not sure how much more China could do to fight it
Is there any 18th century window where one or more European powers can appear to be a credible threat and has an interest in being one, or
is there some neighbour that can be raised to be one? (Raiding/invading nomads and pirates aside, unified China is not as much the biggest fish
in the pond as a big fish with small pieces of pond with other fish around it, and possibly some surplus fins.)
They could have kept their armies updated (the Indians did, more or less, I believe) but there wasn't any real incentive until too late.
And then we get tangled up in things like the Confucian view of soldiering, the attitude towards and interest in developments and
inventions outside China (again) and so on, and what starts turning into how again.
It sort of feeds into each other, a highly-populated distant region is harder to control to begin with.
It's also not just a question of if you can control a place, but what happens if you lose control and what it
takes to control them.
It's cheating in regards to the comparative distances, but when I think about remote areas of the Russian empire, I think of places like Yakutsk,
where I have a hard time picturing a 18th century loss of control as much of a threat to Russia or something that would be rapidly noticed.
How important was, say, Krasnodar to Russia in 1800?
How far from St. Petersburg and how big where the most important cities at the edge of the Russian Empire?
What would be the Imperial Russian equivalent of Guangzhou and Guangdong?
Regarding the legal part, your argument is not convincing being seemingly mostly based upon the schema “Byzantine Empire existed, ergo Russians did borrow their laws”. Anyway, the “law” as a profession or science had been absent in Russia until well after the reign of Peter and this is quite different from the Western Europe. Unlike France, there was no “nobility of the robe”, no places where the law had been taught (like the Law School in Bologna or Sorbonne), etc.
Now, as far as the ToT is involved, there is a fundamental difference between Russia and what you think is its Chinese equivalent. In the case of Russia attempt of conquest was made by a more advanced neighbor and was defeated by a surge of nationalism. However, it became clear that a serious modernization is needed to avoid repetition of the situation. OTOH, China was conquered by the invading lower level culture (not the first time) so the victors did not see any reason for fundamental modernization of their military system. Also, AFAIK, while adopting the culture of the conquered, they were putting themselves aside, which made nationalist issue quite different from the case of Russia or Japan.
Loss of Krasnodar in 1800 would not be important because there wes no town with that name. However, loss of Ekaterinodar (to whom?) and its region would be very important because of its strategic position: it would endanger communications with the Caucasus and mean that something very bad happened to the Kuban Cossacks. Yakutsk, by 1630s, was very important place and its voyevode was the top regional official: it was an administrative center of the whole Lena Region and starting from 1855 center of the Yakutsk governorship. Putting your imagination aside, both cases would be noticed as soon as information reaches the capital. So, bad example in both cases.
If you are so interested in the distances, you can use a map. Distance from St-Petersburg even to the Volga region is quite big and travel to the Pacific coast would take anywhere between 6 months and a more than a year depending upon the number of travelers, size of a luggage, etc.
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'No amount of money will make up for lack of interest from those in power' No. Interest from those in power means a lot. Some Emperor or willful concubine likes model railroads, changes the examinations, could happen.
It's based on the observations/claims that Kórmchiye Books and Merílo Právednoye (regardless of how unimportant they may be in practice)
contains translations of Byzantine law, that Byzantine law was one of the influences (which is not the same as "borrowing their laws"),
and going back towards the now anachronistic start of the tangent, that Russias legal system is still generally placed in the Civil law group
(which on consideration I should I have remembered/realised would be a later development).
Point taken regarding the state of legal education.
I think that was part of the point being made.
Also, equivalents, as there has been one at almost if not all dynasty changes.
Thank you. Krasnodar was picked at semi-random looking at the map and asking google for distances to find something at
comparable distance to Guangzhou, with Krasnodar being the first definitively then-Russian tried
(semi-fun fact: googling the distance between Moscow and Tblisi persisted in giving me the distance between me and
a New York bakery called Moscow & Tblisi).
Lost to the same nebulous Enemy that Guangzhou would be lost to presumable, possibly the suddenly and implausable rebellious
Kuban Cossacks, the way that local rebels would be the likely culprits in Guangzhou.
Saying that loss of control in Yakutsk would be noticed as soon as the information reaches the capital is dodging the question,
as the issue was how long it would take to do so (in the 18th century) - and how much of a threat to the rest of Russia loss of
control in Yakutsk would be seen as (in the 1700s). Then again, you gave a low estimate of six months.
A direct and serious threat to the heart of Russia, or not quite that serious considering the distances, size and economic
importance (compared with Guangzhou)?
Yes, Yakutsk is a bad example/comparison because of the distances involved.
I was looking/asking for a good example. Ekaterinodar was important, but was it, comparatively, as big
and important as Guangzhou?
And I think I've forgotten where I was going with this... that Guangzhou was comparatively bigger and loss of control would be worse
(and easier tregardless of central government strength) than the available equivalent-in-distance Russian cities?
To get back to the starting point from which we drifted to something completely different, the point was that for a backward country (Russia of the XVII, China of the early XIX) a way “to do better” was to have a strong central government capable and willing to maintain a strong army (and to conduct the necessary reforms) and that this can be achieved without fully “opening” the country to the West as far as freedom of a foreign trade is involved and without submitting to the wishes of the foreign powers (nomenclature of the goods, form of payment, etc.).
If anything, an excessive trade openness proved to be (in the case of Russia) counterproductive because, with a short interruption between Tilsit an 1811, Russian manufacturing had been systematically killed by the foreign (mostly British) competition leaving the country as a supplier of the raw materials and consumer of the industrial products all the way to the reign of AIII with its high import tariffs (and of course, it was too late because the main export item remained grain but at least domestic industrial development started). Rather ironically, this new system actually resulted in a greater economic openness because it was encouraging the foreign investments into the Russian industry but this would not be the case for China of the time of OWs.
So for China to accommodate the British wishes and avoid the OW would mean what? Allow expansion of the opium imports? Change payments in silver to the purchase of the military equipment? But without a centralized attempt to build a modern army this equipment would be pretty much useless (IIRC, they already had some before the 2nd OW and definitely had more before the war with Japan). In OTL more and more power was going to the provincial rulers and we know that this did not work. OTOH. Japan within the same time frame was quite successful and it did have a strong central government.
To answer your question about the major ports, in the XIX Russia had St-Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Riga and steadily growing in importance Odessa. On a comparative scale the ports on the Pacific were not important even in the early XX. However, to address what seems to be your question, a potential British threat to the Russian holdings on the Pacific coast triggered Muraviev’s Amur expedition into the Chinese territory which later resulted in a major border review (Aigun Treaty) allowing communication by Amur an in a short run supplied Russian ports on the Pacific with the garrisons allowing to repel the British-French attacks during the CW. In other words, an adequate attention had been paid to the remote points which were only marginally important economically.
Without Amur route available travel (as in “bringing the troops and supplies”) from East Siberia to Petropavlovsk was taking more than 4 months. With this route opened and Siberian Military Flotilla available it took few weeks.
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Aww... I was going to do that!
The counterpoint is that 17th century Russia sort of knew that it was backward. Certainly a sufficient number
of people in charge thought it was, and even some of the guys who were forcibly shaved presumably agreed that
a stronger army, a better bureacracy and a chilly chin might probably be somewhat preferable to being ruled
by Poles or Swedes. (Didn't 17th century Russia also start in the position of "not that much of a centralised
bureaucracy and administration"?)
Meanwhile early 19th century China - at least a sufficient number of people in charge - was still telling itself
that whatever weakness of the central government there may be right now, it was still Top Nation, and there
was strong institutional resistance to change what had obviously worked perfectly well, with only a few hiccupses,
since practically forever.
If you pardon the hyperbole.
And, as I think I mentioned, the Opium War appears to have just barely begun to shift that, since attempts at
serious reforms (such as the Hundred Days' Reform, instigated by no one less than the Emperor) were still
ruthlessly stomped as late as after the Sino-Japanese War.
It's hard to think of an event that wakes* and shakes up China enough that isn't worse the Opium War.
*Cf. Napoleon and the sleeping giant
I think we've already established that it would mean not having a better 19th century.
Which is why, I think, we're looking in the wrong place when we get stuck on the Opium War itself.
Two possibilities that (still) spring to mind is:
Opening earlier/not closing and accepting other things than payment in silver well before opium becomes a lucrative option
or maybe even before England gets hooked on tea. The difficulty is, as always, to find goods that China is willing to
(let their merchants) buy, but a more balanced trade should improve the situation for everybody, or at least China and
various European nations.
An earlier loss of the tea monopoly, a century or so might be enough, shifting a large part of the production and trade
to still not-British India and possibly Southeast Asia. But it still leaves China without more incentive to reform than OTL.
Not to mention whether tea was something that gave the Chinese government actual revenue instead of just more
wealth to the tea merchants and that it may take disaster or rebellion to encourage the tea producers to move elsewhere,
It's also about the size of a Chinese province, or two of the more central/populated/Chinese ones.
One thing I thought of when the hereditary soldiers were discussed, was the difference with Japan,
which turned its warrior class into bureaucrats while telling them "you're still totally awesome fighty guys".
The question was whether Russia at the time had any city that could be compared to Guangzhou in importance, size
and distance from the capital.
I mean, if 18th-19th century Russia loses control of St. Petersburg to rebels or to foreign traders making shady deals
with local officials without the government noticing in time to do something about it, something is very, very wrong,
so it doesn't really compare.
Odessa seems reasonable for distance, at least.
To be followed up with, I think, to which extent actual central government control matched what the
central government its control was. And possibly what they could do about it when there was no actual
rebellion going on.
(Off towards another sidetrack but still on the subject of government control, at the time of the Second
Opium War, the New York City Police had what some have called a civil war...)
One uncertainty factor here is to which extent the Chinese government, the guys actually running
the day-to-day business in the capital, knew/realised its weakness and gradual loss of control.
China could remove corrupt officials and smash individual shady merchants, but if they could do enough
for it to matter and how much information about it reached the proper authorities is another question.
Weren't there a couple of incidents with Britain that almost made them go to war in the early 19th century (1801 and 1808 IIRC)? If the Qing go to war and are repeatedly defeated earlier this means they can also reform decades sooner, perhaps even before the Meiji Restoration.
Errrrr.... I’m afraid that your idea of the XVIII Tsardom and post-ToT developments is more than a little bit off. Shaving the beards and other similar exercises belong to the reign of Peter I and well before that time possibility of ending up being ruled by the Poles was too close to zero to be taken seriously. Russia already conquered a big chunk of the PLC territory (left bank Ukraine) and returned all territories lost during the ToT. Swedes ended up holding Ingria but that was it. “Westernization” of the army started in 1632 and by 1682 Tsardom’s army had 33 “soldiers” (aka western style) regiments and 25 dragoon and reitar regiments (down from a wartime size: in 1663 it had 50-60,000 modern infantry in 55 regiments).Aww... I was going to do that!
The counterpoint is that 17th century Russia sort of knew that it was backward. Certainly a sufficient number
of people in charge thought it was, and even some of the guys who were forcibly shaved presumably agreed that
a stronger army, a better bureacracy and a chilly chin might probably be somewhat preferable to being ruled
by Poles or Swedes. (Didn't 17th century Russia also start in the position of "not that much of a centralised
bureaucracy and administration"?)
Now, as far as the size of a bureaucracy is involved, the obvious question s comparing to what? Tsarist bureaucracy at any point had lesser numbers of bureaucrats by at least an order of magnitude (but most probably at least two) than the SU so it is safe to say that it was not too much of it at any point. But the central apparatus was there in the form of the numerous ministries (prikazes) . At the time of Ivan IV there were 10 of them and during the following reigns their number varied between 10 and 20 . Alexey eliminated some old ones and created 9 permanent ones (there were also temporary ones). Pretty much each and every ruler was doing some consolidation, elimination and creation of the new ones. With the exception of the form Peter was following the traditional pattern all the way to 1718-19 when he replaced the existing mess with 12 collegiums.
But the apparatus had been centralized from the very beginning and so was ruling of the country.
AFAIK, your “hyperbole” is not a hyperbole at all. 😂
And this is the root problem which caused the following disasters.
I think that I already expressed the same opinion more than once. China, with all its underlying ethnic, religious and other problems, had to start drastic changes well before the OW.
Agree, none of the realistic options is really good. But the government still could try not to lose its power to the provincial governors and in theory it could start inviting the foreign specialists (Russian model since the first Romanovs) to do modernization. The problem would be in the attitudes: AFAIK, the Chinese had a condescending attitude to the foreigners and how an army could be trained by the officers who are considered to be the lesser human beings?
I’d say that the Chinese hereditary soldiers had been close to the Janissary (on the later stages of their existence) and Russian Streltsy than to Samurai class at least in the terms of “spirit”.
St-Petersburg was, with few interruptions, a capital for most of the XVIII and XIX so the government located there surely would notice the blood thirsty foreign traders trying to capture it. 😂
Odessa was founded only in 1794 and started getting to prominence in 1810s when it was made porto franco. In 1814 it’s population was 20,000 which was considerable by the Russian standards but it was not the critically important port. Not sure if any port was but the biggest was St. Petersburg.
As for your point about the true scope of the governmental control, I quite agree that this was a huge problem and in that area analogy with Russia would not work except for the corruption. One country had an all-powerful government (*) and another ceded too much of its power to the provinces.
_____
(*) “All-powerful” strictly in the terms of its absolute control of all military and police forces and a complete freedom to issue any laws and regulations. Indirectly, an emperor had a lot influence over non-serving noble class because government owned the bank from which the estate owners had been getting loans with their estates as a collateral. However, in practical terms the bureaucracy was only marginally controllable and the same goes for information it was provided.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]
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In OTL the serious modernization reforms began in 1901, and considering the rest of the Chinese 19th century
I'm not sure if a few earlier defeats would help or speed up the process all that much.
It might butterfly Cixi, but her necessity for the lack/slowness of reforms may have been exaggerated.
You were the one who continually talked about unnumbered Peter and the Time of Troubles, and thus my mind blocked out the chronological disrepancy.
The obvious bureaucracy to compare with is Qing Dynasty China’s, as the issue was reforming and overseeing the 17th century
Russian bureaucracy versus reforming and overseeing the 18-19th century Chinese bureaucracy.
Yet you spent two paragraphs correcting the Russian part.
On the other hand, various Indian rulers did take in foreign specialists and look how that turned out...
(although that was not exactly those specialists' fault* and they were not actively invited or recruited straight from foreign parts).
*can't really blame the defectors for what the ones they defected from get up to later.
We do seem to keep rephrasing and restating that, and I’m not entirely comfortable with the solution to China’s problems
being “Stop being China”.
Nevermind how exactly that that was a big part of defeating the Tai-Ping.
The Chinese military(-ish) nobility stopped being comparable to the samurai as a class somewhere around Song (when they
were replaced in importance by the scholar-officials) at latest, I think, which obviously is well before the arrival of the hereditary
soldiers who were so because they were Manchu. The difference I was thinking about was that neither of them turned into
bureaucrats the way/to the ame degree the samurai did and that there seems to have been some degree of active opposition to
or dismissal of the possibility of the idea, from both sides.
(Of course, it helps that Japan did not have the same degree of nomads-bandits-rebels issues as China, and that there was no separate scholar class.)
I was thinking of the sneaky ones usurping/cultivating local officials and merchants, leeching off
revenue and bringing in contraband without opposition, but as the point was that doing so in
the capital rather than a distant city would be quickly noticed, so nevermind.
@Lord High Executioner I don't think Cixi was as bad as her reputation suggests. IIRC the Qing had a decent-ish navy in the late 19th century, only losing to the Japanese because of their horrendous corruption. Weren't most of their shells filled with cement rather than gunpoweder? Even so, they managed to severely damage four Japanese cruisers during the Battle of the Yalu River. If only their shells had the correct material...
Back to the main topic, an Opium war analogue in 1808 or so could spur forward a stronger Self Strengthening Movement analogue in the 1850s/60s.
Back to the main topic, an Opium war analogue in 1808 or so could spur forward a stronger Self Strengthening Movement analogue in the 1850s/60s.
Exactly... her reputation is not uniformly bad, and she appears to have had good points that aren't actively negated by the bad points.
My main source points out that while "she ordered just roughly twenty political murders" rings hollow as praise, she was influential in
keeping China stable and was far from unpopular.
The anecdote/example I recall was about having a cavalry officer in charge and using cavalry tactics...
I, as noted, have my doubts. Can you recall what the war scares were? Roughly the same as Opium War or something else?
Also, I think Opium War 1808 (and 1801) might run into the War of 1812 issue. (Although looking at wikipedia's numbers,
it looks as if Britain didn't spend more effort manpowerwise in Opium War 1839.)