China and Imperial Decay and Decline

The rhythm of imperial decay and decline, peasant rebellion, and fragmentation, followed by a counter-rhythm of attempted and then actual restoration and revitalization, is a very old one in China (Fairbank, pp. 100-103). It can be clearly traced back at least nearly two thousand years, to the decline of the Han Dynasty and the eventual flourishing of the Tang Dynasty, and suggestively similar patterns can be found nearly fifteen hundred years earlier still, in the decline of the Shang and the rise of the Chou.

Moreover, this rhythm is so established in traditional Chinese historiography that it is in some sense self-fulfilling. A dynasty's eventual loss of the Mandate of Heaven, and a period of turmoil followed by the assumption of that mandate by a new dynasty, is something that the scholar-gentry class that dominated Chinese affairs understood and expected, and which therefore shaped their own response to times of disorder. When once a dynasty reached a certain point of incapacity, easier to

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tself of barbarian origin. But Western imperialism in China was qualitatively unlike anything in previous Chinese experience, and if it did not by itself cause the upheavals of nineteenth and early twentieth century China, it progressively shaped the form they took, and even more the responses of Chinese leaders and thinkers to the problem. The Taiping Rebellion is a premonitory example. Peasant rebellions shaped by secret societies and religious fanaticism were nothing new; the White Lotus movement a generation and a half before the Taiping outbreak shared these characteristics, and had much in common with with the Taipings. But the Taiping movement gained much of its initial impetus from the humiliation of the Opium War and the first Unequal Treaties, which deeply shook the prestige of the imperial government. It is noteworthy that the Taipings arose in just the south coastal regions of China where Western influence was strongest. Moreover, though Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, the prophet of the Taiping movement, evidently did not actually read the Protestant religious tracts he later used till six years after he obtained it (Fairbank, p. 183), once he did, the apocalyptic Old Testament imagery he found there lent an unpreced
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Approximate Word count = 1662
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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