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Manchus And Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928 (Studies on Ethnic Groups in China)

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On 12 February 1912, three day after the Qing dynasty abdication, Sun Yat-sen, who had just stepped down as the president of the newly formed Republic of China, traveled to the tomb of the Hongwu emperor near Nanjing and solemnly announced to the spirit of the founder of the Ming dynasty that the Qing conquest of China had been avenged and that finally, after 268 years, the shameful occupation of China by the "Eastern Barbarians" (Donghu) had come to an end. Sixteen years later, Chiang Kai-shek, successor to Sun Yat-sen and commander of the National Revolutionary Army, let one of his generals loot and plunder the Eastern Mausoleum of the Manchu emperors, desecrating the bodily remains of emperor Qianlong, who had lived from 1711 to 1799, and of Empress Dowager Cixi, who had established near-absolute power over the dynasty from 1861 to her death in 1908.

Who were these "Eastern Barbarians", and what role did the ethnic factor play in the last years of the Qing dynasty and the early Republican era? To what extent and in what ways were Manchus and Han, after more than two hundred years of Manchu rule over China, still significantly different from each other? What happened to the Manchu rulers and to the broad masses of the Manchu people during the revolution as well as afterwards? This book answers these questions by examining how the late Qing court and early Republican regime dealt with the issue of Manchu-Han relations. It also shows how the Manchus were transformed from a hereditary military caste--which they were for most of the Qing period, as members of the Eight Banner system--into the ethnic group that they are today
Anti-Manchuism, narrowly defined as ethnic opposition among China's Han majority toward the "alien" Manchus, figured prominently in the critique of he Manchu's Qing regime in the years immediately following the antiforeign Boxer uprising of 1899-1900. The revolutionaries' critique of the Manchus may be summarized in a seven-point indictment. First, the Manchus were accused of being an alien, barbarian people who were different from the Chinese and did not belong in China. Second, the Manchus had committed a number of heinous crimes against the Chinese people, particularly in the course of their conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. Third, the Manchus had barbarized China by imposing their savage custom upon their Han subjects. Fourth, they had set themselves as a privileged minority separate from and superior to the Han Chinese. Fifth, the Manchus subjugated the Han in the manner of a foreign military occupation. Sixth, they practiced political discrimination against their Han subjects. Seventh and last, the Manchus, despite their pretense of accommodation, were fundamentally at odds with and hostile toward the Han people.

And in a way, the revolutionaries were right on most of these counts. Although they had absorbed much of Han culture, the Manchus were, as charged, an alien people who in some respect were still manifestly different from the Han; their men, for example, did not use Han-style surname, and their women dressed differently from Han, built their hair in bat-wing shape, and did not bind their feet. The Manchus had, as charged, barbarized (i.e., Manchufied) the Han when they successfully imposed their hairstyle upon Han men and their costume upon Han officials. The Manchus were, as charged, a privileged minority separate from and superior to the Han; they were administratively and residentially segregated, they were barred from marrying Han, and they were stipendiaries of the Qing state who were prohibited from any employment other than soldiering, serving as officials, and, in some regions, farming. The Manchus did, as charged, constitute a foreign occupying force; they were a hereditary military caste and were garrisoned within their own walled citadels that were strategically distributed throughout the empire. The Manchus did, as charged, receive preferential treatment that was denied to the Han; they were dealt with more leniently under the law, and they had more opportunities to enter and advance in government service.

So who were the Manchus? During the Qing, the question of Manchu identity was inextricably interwoven into the history and structure of the banner system, resulting initially in three concentric circles of meaning. First, in the narrowest as well as the earliest sense, the Manchus were the Manzhou, descendants of the Jurchen, whose scattered tribes in what was later called Manchuria were unified by Nurhaci beginning in the 1590s and organized by him in 1615 into the Eight Banners. In 1635, Hong Taiji bestowed upon them the name Manju, from which is derived the Chinese transliteration Manzhou. To distinguish them from later additions to the Manchu banners, they were also known as the Old Manchus (Fo Manzhou, in Chinese). They and their descendants were the core elements of the banner system. It was their ancestral language and their equestrian lifestyle that constituted the essence of the "Manchu way".

Second, in a broader (and slightly later) sense, the Manchus were the Eight Banner Manchus. These included not only the Old Manchus but also the New Manchus (Yiche Manzhou), the nearby Tungusic and Tungusized Mongol peoples who were added to the Manchu banners after the Qing invasion of China proper in 1644. Finally, in the broadest sense, the Manchus were the banner people (qiren), particularly when they were contrasted to the Han. Hong Taijin had enlarged the Eight Banners by creating two new contingents in 1635 and 1642 respectively, the former made up of Mongols and the latter of captured or surrendered Han Chinese. Thus, in this sense, the Manchus embraced all three ethnic components of the banner system--the Manchu banners, the Mongol banners, and the Hanjun--as well as the bondservants. In short, the Manchus as banner people can be characterized as a hereditary military caste, not unlike the samurai of Tokugawa Japan.

How did this multiethnic military caste ("the banner people") transform into a distinct ethnic group ("the Manzu") that they are today? The transformation was already well under way in the late Qing era. Membership in the banner system was based on birth and was closed to new recruits. Thus, regardless of their ethnic origins, all members of the Eight Banner system shared a common status and a common identity that set them hereditarily apart from the rest of China's population. Manchus were segregated from Han in four important respects: administratively, occupationally, residentially, and socially. As opposition to the Qing increased after the Boxer fiasco, Empress Dowager Cixi was forced not only to initiate the comprehensive program of reforms known as the New Policies (Xinzheng) but also to face up to the "Manchu issue". But the reforms were too little, too late, and did not "eradicate the boundaries between Manchus and Han", as demanded by both reformers and revolutionaries. Indeed, the elimination of ethnic slots and the dyarchy system, which many reformers had recommended as an effective way of reducing Manchu-Han differences, had the opposite effect: it made the imbalance among high officials more, rather than less, favorable to Manchus at the expense of Han. During Zaifeng's regency, the Qing government became even more dominated by a coterie of Manchu princes, whereas ordinary banner people faced increasingly dire livelihood.

The 1911 Revolution, which brought down the Qing dynasty in Beijing, was accompanied by ethnic violence against the Manchus in many banner garrison cities. However, the abdication agreement that the Qing dynasty negotiated with Yuan Shikai was surprisingly favorable to the Manchus. The young emperor Puyi was allowed to keep a semblance of his former title and to continue to live at one of his palace complexes; he was even granted an enormous annual pension. As China plunged into the decade of political and military disorder known as warlordism, the Articles of Favorable Treatment that had maintained some aspects of the banner system fell into disuse, and Puyi took refuge with the Japanese, who soon put him on the throne of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Whereas the early Republic recognized "the unity of Manchus, Han, Mongol, Muslims, and Tibetans as one citizenry", Chiang Kai-shek asserted that China was ethnically homogeneous and he denied that the Manchus constituted a separate ethnic group. It became even more urgent for individual Manchus to hide their ethnic origins and blend into the Han majority. In the census of 1953, taken soon after the collapse of the Nationalist rule, less than 2.5 million (half the estimated number of banner people in the late Qing) identified themselves as Manchus. The Communists formally recognized the Manchus (Manzu) as one of what came to be more than fifty minority ethnic groups, while some banner people (such as the Xibe in Xinjiang) were recognized distinct ethnic identities. Manchu is now a thriving ethnic identity: the language, almost extinct one or two generations ago, is experiencing a kind of cultural renaissance, and the number of people who identify themselves as Manchus has risen to almost ten million in 1990.