Some Interesting Insights from Chinese History Book

Normally, the end of year is the time of reflection. What is a better way to reflect by reading some historical books?

As a big fan of classical Chinese history books, I read the narratives surrounding the transition of power from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty(some writing app suggested using the phrase “dive into”, but I refused). The stories are captivating, intriguing, motivational, and most significantly, the patterns of conduct can illuminate subjects that extend beyond emperors and officials, clan leaders and military commanders. It’s about how the established power(usually) fails to deal with the challenger and be replaced by it. Not only the political power, but the economic power also.

So, what happened?

Between 1570s and 1640s, the Ming Dynasty in China was eventually replaced by the Qing Dynasty. It’s a special change in Chinese history that Qing was actually ruled by a minority ethnic, rather than the majority Han people.?

(To avoid confusion, I’ll call the rulers and ruling ethnic of the Qing Dynasty, basically the people/clan/family/ethnic, “Qing people”, though they bore different names over time. )

The Qing Dynasty, founded by Nurhaci with 13 inherited armories and a good family, finally was able to beat Ming with over a hundred million population.?

What made it possible?

How did the challenger come into being?

There will always be potential challengers for every established power.?

For Ming, there were several nomads in the north, as well as rebels within. The common feature shared by them is poverty. The nomads were pretty much less developed in economic, culture and even military aspects. The rebels were made up of peasants who could not make a living anyway.?

If the Qing founder was not as wise and smart as he really was, then there would be another clan leader who stood out to build another military power as good as Qing.?

The development of the challenger

But why did Ming allow the Qing people to grow up?? It was only a family at the beginning. Should be really easy to just kill them all right?

If the Emperors look from the rear mirror, they would. But unfortunately, there was none then. Much to the contrary, the Ming actually helped Qing people grow up at the beginning, manipulating them to fight against other clans in North East China, though you couldn't call it China at that time.

After the first surviving period, Qing people became powerful enough to fight against Ming directly, instead of being the hunting dogs.

What do you think will the emperors or the political elites have to do with the Qing people? To launch a general assembly, to equip the soldiers with the latest and best guns, swords and armories and attack??

No. The logic was quite clear: after hundred years of development, Ming became really powerful in all aspects. The emperor and officials couldn’t even think about thinking about a real challenger existing. They have a more urgent agenda to deal with, for example, the emperor wanted to call his biological father “father” in formal documents. That may sound weird to most of us, but the issue was actually about the Emperor’s power over the officials. To the emperor, that's the “to be or not to be” question.?

It is safe to assume that both parties were fighting for their survival. Just different survival tasks.

Not only the emperors though. Officials were not functioning well to fight against the Qing people either. The central government officers cared more about pleasing the emperors and killing their opponents, making everything about political factions. The generals were busy getting rich from both of the clans and the military aid. They might even let the enemies grow in order to get more money from the emperor. When somebody in the government did try to assemble resources for the attack/defense of Qing, other officers thought it too expensive. They even killed a successful but greedy navy general whose strategic guerrilla warfare basically stopped Qing from making a meaningful attack at all.

In general, the whole ruling system in the Ming Dynasty didn’t care to allocate enough resources for the fighting, while the Qing people were sparing no efforts to expand.?

The ultimate(?) collapse of the existing power

Ming was not conquered by Qing, to be accurate. It was dragged down by the rebels, made up of peasants in extreme poverty. The last emperor committed suicide after the collapsing of his own dynasty. He is the only one who did this in Chinese history.

But was Ming’s dying unavoidable? Seems likely. The same logic mentioned above worked: from the emperor and the officials, they would not realize there would be a real challenger until it became one. And they would not be able to do everything they could to stop it, as they had a more “urgent” agenda. The established power functioned less well as the new one. It was that simple.?

So, if it were not Qing, there would eventually be another group taking over Ming.?

The other examples

The US/China story looks extremely like the one mentioned above. Though China is not powerful enough to replace the US right now and it is experiencing more troubles and becoming less efficient than before. But we can still try to make a comparison:

When China was opening up in the 1970s, the U.S actually helped China by providing private investment and other methods. The Americans did this due to 1) the so-called free-trade economic policy(which was benefitting the U.S even more), or 2) some other priorities misleading the political elites to misjudge/ignore the potential threat, as they needed China as the geopolitical ally to fight against the USSR.?

Even now, as China hawkish is the only consensus in the U.S, you can still see that either Biden or Trump before had a more urgent agenda, let alone other powerful law makers. And it seems that China has become undestroyable right now, especially the EVs and the tech giants.?

Another example is the Japan semiconductor industry and other manufacturing industries conquering the U.S in the 80s. Even now, Japanese firms are quite competent in some areas.?