Great Lecture Hall of Chinese History---A Brief History of the Qing Dynasty

Author: Xia Jiade
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-31
Features: The nearly two hundred years of Qing history can be broadly divided into two periods: the early period before the Opium War of 1840 and the later period after 1840. The early Qing period can be further divided into three stages: the stage in the Guandong region before 1644, the prosperous stage before 1796, and the stage of decline from then until 1840. The Guandong stage, although only a part of the Ming Dynasty in Chinese history, was the rise of the Qing Dynasty and had a significant impact on the development of the national situation at the time. In the prosperous stage, the suppression of the Revolt of the Three Feudatories and the implementation of the policy of replacing corvée tax with land tax marked political unification, stability, and economic recovery and development. The stage of decline began with the outbreak of the White Lotus Rebellion in five provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Hubei. The later Qing period can also be divided into three stages: the stage of the "Celestial Empire's" dream shattered, the stage where the conservative faction both allied with and struggled against imperialism, and the stage where the entire court completely submitted to the exploitation of imperialism. , the Second Opium War began to shatter the Qing rulers' long-held dream of being the sole supreme power; before the Eight-Nation Alliance's attack on Beijing, the Qing conservative faction led by Empress Dowager Cixi, while allowing some officials to engage in Westernization, opposed any substantive reforms. After the Hundred Days' Reform, they even attempted to use the Boxer Movement to achieve their own supreme goals; following the Boxer War and the Boxer Protocol, the Qing rulers had essentially become the docile tools of imperialist exploitation and plunder in China.