By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Chinese Empire from 1647 to 1911 was built by means of a liberal borrowing by the invading Nurhaci and Hongtaiji --from their traditional enemy, the Ming empire. They succeeded in their conquest and went on to rule China as the Qing dynasty from 1647 to 1911.

In only several decades, they worked out not only a formidable multiethnic military and political system but also a comprehensive ideology of mission that would put most modern corporations to shame. The ideology, while in fact newly cut from whole cloth, was claimed to be a revival of the ideology of the Jurchen Jin empire of five hundred years before. The military and political system too was a newly minted creation, a hybrid of diffusion and innovation from scratch described by the innovators as a regenerated version of the Mongol and Jin empires. The new system enabled Dorgon in 1644 to overthrow the Ming dynasty with relative ease.

In fact China offers the classic, extreme case of repeated template regeneration. That is, in the last 2,200 years, China 's periods of cohesion were regularly separated by lengthy periods of marked decentralization and loss of complexity. Thus the regenerated Sui- Tang state (AD 581-906) grew from the chaos of the first dark age in Chinese dynastic history, the Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties period (220-581), did not fully replicate the preceding Han state (206 BC-AD 220). However, later regenerated states-the Song (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644)-were faithful copies of their pre-dark age predecessors, the Tang and Song. The key was widespread literacy and the existence of accessible historical records that provided a sufficiently detailed blueprint for the preexisting system to be more or less fully reconstructed.(1)

The Jurchen (Nurhaci and Hongtaiji) however, had little information about any of those historical empires and showed no real interest in getting it. Yet in only several decades, they worked out not only a formidable multiethnic military and political system but also a comprehensive ideology of mission that would put most modern corporations to shame. The ideology, while in fact newly cut from whole cloth, was claimed to be a revival of the ideology of the Jurchen Jin empire of five hundred years before. Yet even the military and political system, all where a newly minted creation, a hybrid of diffusion and innovation from scratch ‘described’ by the innovators as a “regenerated version” of the ‘Mongol and Jin’ empires.

Or as recently summed in the introduction to “Empire at the Margins” (ed. Crossley/Siu/Sutton, 2006) in the Qing narrative, the conquest empire is created by the enlightened,” Jurchens suffering the miseries of lawlessness, by eastern Mongols suffering the depredations of Lighdan Khaghan, by Koreans suffering from banditry on the northern borders and economic disorders resulting from Ming weakness, and by Chinese suffering the social and economic dislocations of the debased Ming regime. For these narratives to continue to have meaning, the peoples ob­jectified by the narratives must continue to display their narrative hallmarks: the Chinese, it is assumed, continue to advance civilization (with the emphasis on "civil"), the Manchus and the Mongols of the Eight Banners assist the Qing court in the military dynamics of the civilizing mission, while the western Mongols, Islamic peoples of Gansu, Qinghai, the Western Frontier, the Tibetans, and some of the peoples of the Southwest continue to resist.” (Introduction, p. 11).

In fact the Ming and Qing empires depended upon the erection of strong subject-object relations between the state and inhabitants of the empire, which ranged from the stark segregation, or "quarantine," of subject peoples and Qing regulations against intermarriage between peoples and differential educational policies. (Idem p.11).

However the reason why, the Jurchen presented themselves as a “regenerated version” of the ‘Mongol and Jin’ empires in order to prevent the unification of Mongolia under any single leader by aiding challengers and subverting incumbents. Particularly as for western Mongolia, concerns where thatg roups in the region might attempt to play the Qing and Romanov empires against each other, which some Khalkha leaders had attempted in the 1660s. Emerging leaders in the west might attempt to enlist the Tibetan clergy in their cause and thereby regain influence in eastern Mongolia. Thus although the Qing- Kangxi , emperor had not returned to the battlefields in Mongolia after the defeat of Galdan (1697)  the Qianlong emperor put the full weight of the empire behind a successful-but prolonged-campaign to eradicate the political and cultural independence of the old Oyirod territories. As was characteristic of many Qianong policies, these were not simply military campaigns but encompassed a major cultural offensive to seize, reshape, and manipulate the language and symbolism of identity throughout Mongolia. (Charles Bawden, Modern History of Mongolia1968; Joseph Fletcher, "Ch'ing Inner Asia, in Late Ch'ing, Pert I. Vol. 10 of The Cambridge History of China, edited by John K. Fairbank, 35-106, 1978).

However during the Min and early Qing period,all the warlike peoples who lived north of the Great Wall and increasingly penetrated western China were regarded as one kind or another of "Mongol." (See Chi a Ning, "The Li-fan Yuan in the Earlv Ch'ing Dvnasty." Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins Universitv, 1991).

Detailed reports from informants such as Xiao Daheng (himself of distant Mongol descent) or Ye Xianggao however, described a complex valiety of cultures north of Beijing, and a variety of economic milieux: some Mongolian-speaking communities were not nomadic but agricultural; many groups who migrated with "Mongols" were speakers ofTurkic or Tungusic languages, others called themselves the  "Four Oyirods" (dorbon oyirad), many were even descendants of Han. See also, Huang Qingzhigungtu (1761), which was compiled by Fuheng et al. and reprinted in the Siku quanshuin 1782, the Mongols and Muslims (both Sino-:"Muslims and Turkic Muslims) were referred to as subjects (min), but the Tibetans here are  still categorized as barbarians (fan).

The later features of the Qing construction of Mongol culture were based on Buddhism, chakravartin rulership, hunting, holding court in giant yurts, seasonal sacrifices, and Mongolian literature,nearly all produced in the eighteenth century under Qing auspices whenit was increasingly important to introduce Mongolian into the "simultaneous" literary productions that had previously consisted of Manchu and Chinese exclusively. (Pamela K.Crosbey, Making Mongolians, in "Empire at the Margins, 2006, p.73).

Qianlong representations of "Mongols" and "Mongolia" had become indispensable to the structure of Qing rulership. The Qing, as a conquest dynasty, generated another set of perceptions, practices, and precepts for the management of ethnic relations in China. (James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual, 1995, chapter 2).

The seventeenth-century Qing-Manchus, thus expanded their empire far beyond the frontiers of the Ming, absorbing Mongolia, parts of Tibet, and finally all of eastern Turkestan by conquest and alliance. Themselves susceptible to Chinese opprobrium as uncivilized, the Qing rulers defined their empire as a multiethnic hierarchy with themselves at the center. The Qing emperor, head of the Aisin Gioro clan, stood as supreme overlord, dominating his many subordinate lords (and their peoples). This imperial construct stipulated submission and tribute to the center as the duties of Chinese, Turkic, Mongolian, Tibetan, and other subject lords (including the lesser Manchu clans), granting them in turn a measure of autonomous rule over their own peoples. To prevent alliances against them, and to maintain social order, the Manchu hegemons delineated and tried to maintain the cultural and physical boundaries that separated the subordinate peoples from one another. Though leaning toward a "natural" division (by language, pastoral or agricultural life, climate, martial character, etc.), this strategy does not take a specific stand on whether differentness is inherent or learned but rather allows for wide variety under the emperor's benevolent rule. (See James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, Stanford University Press, 1998).

Where in the 13th Century however, the 'Chinese'', were able to produce advanced teqniques for making porcelan, by the late eighteenth and' early nineteenth centuries China lost the technological lead it arguably had held before. (Christopher Cullen, The Dragon's Ascent, 2001, p. 127).

This decline was partly relative; the Industrial Revolution had thrown up a tumult of ingenuity that spread across much of Europe. Theories as to why this happened abound. One suggests that the rigidity of an imperial examination process that channelled intellectual energy into literature and neglected the sciences had an impact on technological inventiveness. Another maintains that a sharp growth in population made it cheap to hire workers, thereby inhibiting the development of labour-saving machinery. A third points out that deforestation deprived China of adequate supplies of wood, its primary energy source. A fourth theory had it that the regular military campaigns along China 's northern and northwestern frontiers diverted funding and focus away from peacetime pursuits. The Chinese government, for its part, blames its slide from technological pre-eminence on the rapaciousness of Western powers that attacked Chinese ports, peddled opium to its people and occupied parts of its territory. All of these theories would seem to contain a measure of validity. However, the work of Angus Maddison, a leading economic historian, shows that the decline, in terms of individual prosperity, started long before the eighteenth century.

In fact the zenith of Chinese prosperity was in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-906), an era that is also regarded as a golden cultural age. Some of the most moving poetry dates from that era and the ceramic likenesses of courtesans, horses and camels fashioned then remain unsurpassed in their beauty. In those days, the country had several cities with a population of over half a million, whereas Europe 's proudest urban centres could boast of only tens of thousands of residents. The Tang was also an age of internationalism. The Silk Road ran from the central city of Chang'an, or modern-day Xi'an, to the central Asian cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and beyond. The ports of Quanzhou and Guangzhou on the south coast were heavily engaged in trade, mostly with southeast Asia. Foreigners were present in numbers that were not to be equalled until the first half of the twentieth century. Not only did some 25,000 Turks, Afghans, Tajiks, Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians reside in Chang' an, but non-Chinese even occupied senior administrative, military and commercial positions. In southern trading cities, foreigners may have been even more numerous than in Chang' an. Perhaps as many as 100,000 non-Chinese may have lived in them during the first half of the Tang, before xenophobic massacres in 760 and 879 drove numbers down.

By 1400, Chinese were still richer on average than Europeans and the size of their economy was also larger than that of Western Europe. At that time, Chinese earned an average of $500 each (calculated at 1985 values) spread across a population of 74 million people, meaning that gross domestic product amounted to the equivalent of 37 billion 1985 dollars. Western Europeans, by contrast, were earning $430 per head and had a population of 43 million, so their overall economic output was worth $184 billion. In 1820, however, China 's per capita income remained at around $5°0, but Europeans were by then earning on average some $1,034 each. By 1950, the difference was even more dramatic. The Chinese were by then earning around $454 per capita, less than they had done in the fifteenth century. Europeans, by contrast, were pulling in an average of $4,902 each. Even though Europe's population was still smaller than China 's, the value of its economic output was larger by several multiples. Thus for hundreds of years the country was locked in a cycle of growth without development. Its people, on average, were living the same lives in 1950 as they had done a millennium earlier, in spite of obvious changes in technology. (See Joe Studwell, The China Dream, 2002).

But what is it that really made 'China' is that it was one of the great hydraulic societies such as those that grew up along the banks of the Sumer, the Nile and the Indus. The connection in all of these places between civilisation and rivers flowing through arid but fertile areas is irrigation. The political structure needed to organise people for digging canals and fair use of water resources also lends itself to other types of construction, city planning, state religion, education and a class with leisure who can pursue mathematics, science and philosophy. It is not down to chance, therefore, that some of the earliest scientists also blossomed in such areas. A premium was put on historical records because through these, rulers could study how their ancestors had dealt with floods and consider how they themselves might be able to guard against them.

The construction of the Zhengguo Canal, the first to be built in China, laid the foundations for the rise to power of the state of Qin. It was completed by the Qin in 246 BC and irrigated about 200,000 acres in the Wei Valley north of Xian and led to such prosperity and population increase that the state of Qin became the first to unify China.

Not recomended for its complete accuracy but nevertheless a list of 'Chinese dynasties' see:

In fact Dynasties were often established before the overthrow of an existing regime, or continued for a time after they had been defeated. In addition, China was divided for long periods of its history, with different regions being ruled over by different groups. At times like these there was no dynasty ruling a unified China.

One example of the potential for confusion will suffice. The conventional date 1644 marks the year in which the ManchuQing dynasty armies occupied Beijing and brought Qing rule to China proper, succeeding the Ming dynasty. However, the Qing dynasty itself was established in 1636 (or even 1616, albeit under a different name), while the last Ming dynasty pretender was not disposed of until 1662. The change of ruling houses was a messy and prolonged affair, and the Qing took almost twenty years to extend their control over the whole of China.
 

1) Eric Hobsbawm distinguished between three types of invented traditions which each have a distinctive function: a) those establishing or symbolising social cohesion and collective identities, b) those establishing or legitimatising institutions and social hierarchies, and c) those socialising people into particular social contexts; the first type has been most commonly referred to and often taken to imply the two other functions as well (Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger eds.,The Invention of Tradition,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983: 9).

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