Twilight of the Sleeping Lion — The Dusk of the Qing

The Qing was once said to be called the ‘sleeping lion’ by the peoples of Europe. With its vast territory, immense population, and long history, this empire was thought to be unbeatable once it awoke—a name carrying both awe and expectation. Yet in the mid-19th century, the Qing, defeated in the Opium War, was made to realize from both within and without that the lion was no longer young. From outside, the pressure of the great powers mounted; from inside, the discontent of the people boiled over. The great empire that had stood at the center of the East Asian order under the name of China tilted slowly but surely. This is the story of the half-century and more it took for the Qing—struggling again and again to recover within that twilight—to close the curtain on an empire that had endured for two thousand years.

A Great Empire Shaken from Within

Defeat in the Opium War badly damaged the prestige of the Qing. Forced to pay indemnities and open its ports, it found foreign power reaching even into the country’s interior. The heavy burden eventually pressed down on the lives of ordinary people, and discontent began to smolder across the land. That discontent burst into a great flame in the Taiping Rebellion, which began in 1851.

Its leader, Hong Xiuquan, raised the banner of a Christianity he interpreted in his own way, drawing in the poor and those who suffered discrimination. They called themselves the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom—a new state—and in 1853 occupied Nanjing, renaming it Tianjing and making it their capital. They are said to have raised ideals bold for the time, such as sharing out the land and softening the distinctions between men and women, and some see in this the buds of something modern. On the other hand, the war itself was long and fierce, and the lives lost over more than a decade of fighting are said to have reached an immense number.

The regular army of the Qing alone could not suppress this great upheaval. In the end, it was militias organized in the provinces by powerful Han Chinese figures such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang that put the rebellion down. In 1864, Hong Xiuquan died, Tianjing fell, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom perished. Yet this victory carried an ironic meaning. The fact that it was provincial strongmen, not the central regular army, who saved the empire clearly reflected the weakening of the Qing central government and the dispersal of power to the provinces.

The Dream of Self-Strengthening and the First Sino-Japanese War

Having weathered civil war, the Qing now sought to rebuild itself. What began around 1861 was a reform known as the Self-Strengthening Movement. At its center were Li Hongzhang and others who had quelled the Taiping, along with Prince Gong and the central court. Its slogan was ‘Chinese substance, Western function’—the idea of keeping China’s traditional system and thought as the core while adopting only Western technology to strengthen the country.

Under this movement, the Qing built arsenals and shipyards, organized a new-style navy, and sent students abroad. A modern fleet known as the Beiyang Fleet came into being, and from the outside it seemed the sleeping lion was at last waking. Yet the Self-Strengthening Movement left untouched the workings of politics and the foundations of society. A reform that tried to transplant only technology is said to have had its limits.

Those limits became plain to everyone in the First Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1894. In this conflict with Japan over interests in Korea, the Qing was defeated in many places, including with its prized Beiyang Fleet. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki the following year, in 1895, the Qing ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan and took on an enormous indemnity. The shock of being defeated by Japan—another East Asian country, and one once regarded as peripheral to the Chinese order—was especially great. The self-strengthening effort, pursued for more than thirty years, came to have its results severely called into question.

From the Boxers to the Xinhai Revolution

Defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War further accelerated the carving up of China by the great powers. Each country vied for rights to ports, railways, and mines, and the territory of the Qing was pressed in upon as if it were being sliced apart. The people’s backlash against this situation burst out in a distinctive form in the Boxer movement around 1900.

The Boxers were a group gathered from people who felt that foreign religion, railways, and industry threatened their lives, raising the banner of ‘support the Qing, expel the foreign.’ As their movement spread, the great powers, citing protection of their own nationals, sent an allied force and entered Beijing. Part of the Qing court tried to ride this movement, but as a result the Qing was driven into an even more disadvantageous position, accepting heavy indemnities and the stationing of foreign troops under the settlement of 1901. A movement to expel foreigners instead drew foreign power in all the more deeply—the plight of the Qing deepened further still.

At this point, more and more people came to think that there were limits to however much one tried to rebuild the Qing. Among them, Sun Yat-sen aimed to overthrow the Qing dynasty itself and build a new republic, drawing together revolutionary factions across the land. Then, on October 10, 1911, sparked by the uprising of part of the army at Wuchang in Hubei province, the fire of revolution spread from place to place. Many provinces declared their independence from the Qing one after another, and in January of the following year, 1912, the founding of the Republic of China was proclaimed with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president. Before long the strongman Yuan Shikai mediated, and in February of that year the young Xuantong Emperor abdicated, and the Qing dynasty quietly came to an end.

Thus the imperial rule that had lasted more than two thousand years finally ended, and a republic was born in Asia. Yet this was not the beginning of stability. The revolution had toppled the Qing, but the shape of the new nation was not yet settled, and it soon entered a long era of turmoil marked by Yuan Shikai’s dictatorship and the rivalry of regional warlords. What would hold the nation together after the collapse of the center of the Chinese order—the answer to that question was not yet visible to anyone. The empire once called the sleeping lion withdrew from the main stage of history without ever waking.