∵ Zhong Han’s Critique of the New Qing History

The present volume under review is a judicious rebuttal of revisionism held by five American Qing scholars, namely, Pamela Crossley, Mark Elliot, Peter Perdue, Evelyn Rawski, and Edward Rhoads, whose works and arguments are generally attributed to the so -called “New Qing School” (referred to hereafter as NQS). As a young scholar whose expertise covers archaeology, history, and ethnic studies, Zhong Han 鍾焓 shows in this book an admirable ability in using Chinese, Manchu, and English sources to make his points.

with her text mainly based on Han language materials from the Chinese First Historical Archive in Beijing. She makes almost no use of the Manchu materials that were not available in translation. Rhoads shows little, if any, interest in the Manchu materials, perhaps due to the subject of his study, which exclusively deals with the late Qing period. In Zhong's view, several journals and newspapers in Manchu language printed before and after the 1911 Revolution, which would undoubtedly have helped understand the Manchu mentality in the climate of the anti-Manchu revolution, are entirely neglected by Roads. How unfortunate! Crossley, as she herself claims, has used the "Manchu Archive" [Manwen laodang 滿文老檔] and the "Old Manchu Archive" [Jiu Manchou dang 舊滿 洲檔], which recorded the Manchu past before moving into China Proper. (p. 31) While the latter was not made available until the 1960s, the former was opened to the public early in the 1930s, both being essential sources for Qing specialists in China and Japan. While using these Manchu language materials, Crossley cannot make useful comments or necessary corrections to either Han or Japanese translations of the said documents. She draws extremely little out of the newly available Manchu sources. Hence Zhong has reason to doubt, as he should, if Crossley even possesses a sufficient reading knowledge of the Manchu language materials. Elliot uses Manchu sources more widely than the rest. Unlike Crossley, he references Kangxi 康熙 , Yongzheng 雍正 [1723][1724][1725][1726][1727][1728][1729][1730][1731][1732][1733][1734][1735], and Qianlong's 乾隆  Manchu remarks on memorials submitted by officials. However, the Chinese translation of all the Manchu memorials of the three emperors was published in the 1990s. Elliot distrusts the Han language rendering, even though scholars widely recognize the accuracy of the translation.1 Moreover, for Zhong, the Manchu materials Elliot cites often appear to be casual and incomplete. (pp. 32-33) Elliot should have used his Manchu language skill to correct, amend, and criticize the translations which he mistrusts, yet he did not do so. Thus in Zhong's opinion, the NQS scholars, though having pronounced the importance of using non-Han sources, did not make any break throughs or more significant contributions than the old-fashion Qing historians. (pp. 37-38) The undeniable fact is that Qing scholars, whether old or new, could not but mainly depend upon the most substantial quantities of the Han Chinese source materials. Zhong makes considerable efforts in examining Crossley's arguments. Unfortunately, he finds her inclined to anchor her theses to misreadings and erroneous assumptions, which render her conclusions groundless. (p. 48) Whatever language one uses, they must not misread it; yet Zhong finds in Crossley's work a string of gross misinterpretations of the sources. For instance, she misidentifies Tong Dali 佟達禮, whom she says was "clearly one of the Jerched (Jürčed) from the Sanwanwei 三萬衛 who the Ming government permitted to settle in Liaodong." (p. 54) Here she mistakes Sanwanhu 三萬戶 (30,000 Jerchen households) for Sanwanwei (30,000 Ming guardsmen). Tong Dali, far from being a newly settled Jürčed in Liaodong, was a fully Sinicized Jürčed in the early Ming , who served as a military officer to chase the retreating Mongol remnants, and then helped to pacify the native Jürčed in Manchuria.2 More surprisingly, without substantial evidence, she claims that Tong was related to the Manchu royal family by remote kinship. (p. 54) In fact, according to the highly respected modern historian Zheng Tianting 鄭天挺 , the Ming court was fully convinced that the Tongs who had lived in Liaodong for generations were Han Chinese by origin.3 Liaodong had been a land of cohabitation by the Hans and the Jürčeds for centuries. Under the influence of the Han culture, the Jürčeds were Sinicized. No matter how many of them might have become Sinicized, known as Nikan, who joined the Han army in the Eight Banners; the Tongs, even if they had Jerchen (Jurchen) origin, were Han in a cultural sense. Significantly, Liaodong inevitably emerged as a Sinicized society, and yet Crossley is unwillingly to see it as it was. Instead, she prefers the terms "urbanization" or "tribalization" to "Sinification," disregarding the fact that the Manchu social institution was a clanbased "hala mukūn," not at all tribal or urban. (p. 59) More absurdly, Crossley cites the Tongs' request to restore their Manchu ancestry during the Kangxi reign to argue that the Qing court started the transforming itself from cultural identity to ethnical identity, and the process of ethnicity was completed in the late Qing China. (p. 60) However, as Crossley tries painstakingly to establish, the conscious formation of Manchu ethnicity does not hold water. The Tong request was an individual case, which only two Tong families made.4 Though granted, it never really achieved the intended elevation for the Tongs from Hanjun 漢軍, or Han Militia, to one of the Manchu Eight Banners. The two families were only upgraded to a higher banner within the Hanjun.5 Hence, her theory of ethnicity identity, as Zhong puts it, appears "to chase the wind and clutch at shadows." (p. 57) Crossley's reading knowledge of Chinese written language is supposed to be better than that of her command of the Manchu language. But to Zhong's great surprise, Crossley cannot comprehend some elementary Chinese words and sentences correctly. For instance, in her article, "Manzhou yuanliu kao and the Formalization of the Manchu Heritage," she misreads "the Changbai mountain and the Amur River" [baishan heishui 白山黑水], which refers to Manchuria, thus being wrongly translated as "Changbaishan 長白山 in the region of Amur." (p. 86) She appears to be unaware that the mountain is geographically far away from the river to the north. Equally surprising for Zhong is to see another sample of her translation: "The Jin annals for the Moho peoples of the Tang period include more than ten biographies of Bohai kings, who for generations have literary scripts and rituals." (p. 71) Here she mistakes the verb "chuan" 傳 [pass on] for the noun "zhuan" [biography], so she has altered the original text, which should have read "the Bohai kings, after ten generations, came up with literary script and rituals." Her misunderstanding now generates grave errors: for "the Bohai kings acquired script and rituals before the Jurchens of the Jin dynasty," she reads as "the Bohai kings were the ancestors of the Jurchens." (p. 71) Here she misreads "in advance" [xian 先] as "forefathers". It seems that her preoccupation with establishing a Bohai-Jurchen-Manchu genealogy had misled her. She also arbitrarily translates Emperor Qianlong's edict as "the dynasty has accomplished all the tasks and assumed all the symbols of a legitimate empire." What the Emperor said was that "The dynasty, having made Beijing as capital and accomplished the unification of China, rules the country so impressively and legitimately that no previous dynasties could be on par with it." (p. 72) We cannot but wonder if any accurate interpretation could come out of misreading.
Bias easily results in anachronism. Crossley unhesitatingly assumes that Nurhaci and the Ming emperors were heads of two independent states. The  御批歷代通鑒輯覽], wrote un-mistakenly that "this work begins from the very ancient time to our dynasty, a history of 4,559 years."7 That is the history of China, which includes, not excludes, the Qing dynasty, though NQH tries to argue otherwise. Thus, the so-called "Northeast regionalist sentiment," as Crossley puts it, appears grossly exaggerated.
That Qianlong "excluded the Hanjun from banners" and made them commoners had nothing to do with ethnic identity. Instead, the action was, first of all, to tighten up control of all the Banners in the wake of continuous imperial centralization from the Yongzheng Reign onward, and secondly, above all, to resolve the problem of the increasing poverty of the Manchu bannermen. Crossley erroneously calls the Hanjun "turncoat officials" [erchen 貳臣]. As Zhong points out, more than half of the turncoat officials were not at all Hanjun bannermen, and none of the Hanjun bannermen later being designated by the Qianlong Emperor as turncoat officials, was Nikan, or the Han Chinese who earlier submitted themselves to the Manchu authorities. (pp. 122-123) They never served in the Ming government, so there was no question of being turncoat officials. Here Crossley makes a mistake saying that various Han Chinese, such as the Nikans, in the Banners belonged to Hanjun.
"Simultaneous emperorship," after having been conceptualized by Crossley and the like, becomes a key concept of NQH, which in plain language means the Qing ruler has a "split personality." (p. 130) The ruler played a different role for different ethnic groups: he was an Emperor, or Son of Heaven, for the Han Chinese; Clan Leader for the Manchu Bannermen; Qayan for the Mongol Princes. This so-called "rule of combination," previously expounded by the Japanese scholar H. Okada, as Zhong indicates, is rejected by the Mongolian expert C. P. Atwood. (p. 130) Zhong makes a lengthy rebuttal by supplying numerous literary sources to support Atwood. (pp. 131-134) Briefly, the Qing ruler first and foremost identified himself with "Emperor" (Son of Heaven, or Huangdi 皇帝) simply because he intended to be a universal ruler of China, assuming the legitimacy of the Mandate of Heaven. Prior to his entrance into the Pass, Huang Taiji 皇太極 [r. 1636-1643] in 1636 assumed "emperorship" in the Chinese tradition, and the word had already been rendered into the Manchu language as "hūwangdi" in 1629 as it appeared in the Manchu archive. The honorable title for the late Nurhaci had also been changed from "nenehe han" to "taidzu xôwangdi." Even though Huang Taiji did not use "xôwangdi" exclusively, there is no doubt that after entering into the Pass, his successor Shunzhi 順治 [1644-1661] made "Emperor" his supreme and sole title. The Shunzhi Emperor, who replaced the Ming dynasty with the Qing, became to be a highly Sinicized ruler. What is the evidence of it? This reviewer incidentally located the Essentials of Imperial Governing [Yuzhi zizheng yaolan 禦制資政 要覽] issued by the Shunzhi emperor, in which he unmistakably declared in preface that "I, the emperor, will run the imperial institution only", and the contents of the book are filled with Confucian values.8 It states explicitly that "the cardinal principle of righteousness runs through every chapter [of the book]. I use this work to exemplify the deeds of faithful officials, filial sons, virtuous men, and incorruptible clerks."9 The Emperor meant what he said, as shown in the distribution of a large number of copies to his bureaucrats high to low, with the top echelons receiving the exquisite "butterfly-style" edition.10 Emperor Kangxi unquestionably identified himself as the Chinese ruler of China. In the text of 1689 Nerchinsk Treaty with Russia, the Qing ruler signed as 8 See Yuzhi zizheng yaolan 御製資政要覽 (Yangzhou: Guangling shushe 2016). 9 See Preface to Yuzhi zizheng yaolan, 1a-5b. 10 Professor Xin Deyong 辛德勇 of Peking University possesses various versions of this work, and I must thank him for showing them to me.
"dulimbai gurun-i enduringge xôwangdi" in Manchu language, and "Zhongguo dasheng huangdi" 中國大聖皇帝 [the Great Sage Emperor of China] in Han language. The Russians as well regarded Qing as China. Kangxi as the Emperor of China can also be seen in his four available posthumous decrees. As Gan Dexing 甘德星 indicates, posthumous decrees were the key documents for power transition; in them, Kangxi addressed himself as "the Chinese Emperor," explicitly declaring that he was the ruler of China and the ruled were all Chinese.11 Moreover, Kangxi deliberately placed the Qing dynasty in the geneal ogy of Chinese dynastic history. Hence there is no doubt that the Qing was China, and the homeland was China Proper rather than Inner Asia. Kangxi believed he was the Chinese ruler of China, and so did Yongzheng, Qianlong, and the rest. The effort to separate the Qing dynasty from China was fruitless, and the idea of "simultaneous emperorship" is not tenable. Instead of simultaneous emperorship, "simultaneous languages," principally Man and Han, were expressed in the Manchu language as "bithe i emu obure dasan." (p. 153) In the different languages, simultaneously carried out though were the same messages and values. During the Qianlong reign, when the Qing regime flourished by incorporating Inner Asia, simultaneous languages became a symbol of political universality and pluralism in ethnic cultures. It helped to claim the Qing's inheritance to all under Heaven, corresponding to the political belief of traditional Chinese monarchism. Nevertheless, the Han language remained the principal, as Zhong demonstrates: the face of a Qing coin bears the inscription "the universal treasure of the Qianlong reign" [Qianlong tongbao 乾隆通寶], in Han language. (p. 154) The Manchu and other ethnic languages appear on the opposite side of the coin. The Qing rulers, for the sake of enhancing their imperial power, emphasized Man-Han unity and promoted universal kingship in traditional Chinese fashion. They certainly would like to be addressed as the emperor of China rather than far less prestigious title of the "feudal lord" supervising different ethnicities.
NQH denies that the Qing dynasty was analogous to China, and denounces such a claim as modern Chinese chauvinism. Distasted of such accusations, Zhong employs much evidence to make his points, using not the Han language literature but Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan sources. (pp. 161-172) There is no question that the Qing dynasty identified itself as China. The word "China" in Manchu language first appeared before the Qing settled in Beijing in 1644 to refer to the Ming dynasty in the south; however, afterward, it was used to signify the Qing. As Zhong mentions, during the transition period from the Ming to the Qing, the Portuguese priest G. de Magalhães    Weiers et al. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982), 199-203. of the internationally recognized boundary of modern China. Suppose the Qing is indeed being likened to a colonial power, the interpretation of its collapse gives rise to a new discourse: its minorities could have each had the right to establish an independent state, as those post-WWII former Western colonies did. But imperial China, historically unlike capitalism-based imperial power, had a four-thousand-year unique tradition, and Emperor Qianlong stated straightforwardly that his dynasty was in line with that long tradition. Thus the power transition from Qing China to Republican China is indisputable. Moreover, it seems incomprehensible that China could not be a multi-ethnic nation like most nations in the world, including the United States of America. Professor Zhong Han has written a very important book. It covers a wide range of issues raised by NQH, and effectively challenges all their key arguments and assumptions. The author reminds us that we should not uncritically accept the revisionism of NQH. Understandably, given its highly specialized nature, the first edition of this book has issued only few hundred copies for limited circulation. This book should be reprinted in a large quantity to benefit the reading public. The author needs only to revise editing and to eliminate misprints, since the contents are sound.