EnclavedMicrostate在2022-02-07~2022-02-13的言论

2022-02-13 作者: EnclavedMicrostate 原文 #Reddit 的其它文章

—– 127.1 —–2022-02-07 03:29:59+08:00:

So, this is not purely a question about political popularity in a vacuum thanks to the clarification you’ve added. Indeed, when you interrogate the specifics, it ends up kind of turning into two separate questions, one about the popularity of the Qing, and the other about empire and decolonisation.

With regards to the former, the answer is difficult and complex. There were no opinion polls assessing the popularity of the monarchy, nor any way of really definitively breaking down which regions were more or less pro-Qing than others. We can, quite fairly, say that at least among elite intellectuals – note, these were not a hereditary nobility as such – there was a broad opposition to the Qing monarchy as it had then existed, in the sense of an absolute monarchy unconstrained by any form of constitutional law, and operating with an implicit pro-Manchu ethnic bias. But this did not lead to a single uniform response.

Over the course of the 1890s and 1900s, in effect two political tendencies, not entirely in opposition nor entirely in concert, emerged: Republicanism and Constitutionalism. Constitutionalism does not necessarily mean constitutional monarchism; rather, Constitutionalists sought to establish the rule of law in China, with a government ultimately based on a binding constitutional document or documents that clearly delineated the powers and responsibilities of various branches of government, and which transcended any individual act of arbitrary power. This could be achieved under a monarchy, but also under a republic, and many Constitutionalist leaders of the later Qing carried over into the early republic with considerable influence. The most prominent of these figures was Liang Qichao, who had been one of the major leaders in the abortive Constitutionalist reform movement of 1898, and escaped to Japan after the crackdown against the reformers initiated by Dowager Empress Cixi. Republicans, on the other hand, were not necessarily committed to any sort of deeper philosophical basis of government and statehood; they mainly just wanted the Qing gone and a new, Han Chinese-dominated regime installed in its stead.

These two tendencies ended up appealing to slightly different groups. Both, of course, had considerable appeal among globally-connected intellectuals who wanted to see China ‘modernise’ along the lines of Japan, but when it came to penetrating further down the social scale, there were some differences. Republicanism became especially prominent in the Qing military, which was effectively the centrepiece of the empire’s ‘modernisation’ efforts. But Constitutionalism, or dimensions thereof, managed to gain a certain broad-base appeal, most prominently in Sichuan, where 1910-11 saw considerable controversies and protests – eventually boiling over into the final set of crises precipitating the revolution – over the role of foreign loans in railway construction, amid a general spread of a sense of ‘popular sovereignty’ whereby those outside the traditional system of government demanded a greater say in its running. But that doesn’t translate directly to agitating for the Qing to be overthrown.

The broad conclusion in recent historiography on 1911 – though with some versions of the argument going back to at least 1975, when Edward Rhoads’ study of Guangdong in 1911 was published – is that the fall of the Qing was mostly to do with a series of disastrous, credibility-incinerating decisions made in 1911, rather than the unintended yet predictable effect of the New Policies instituted after the Boxer Uprising. As Rhoads and others have argued, the New Policies did successfully open up avenues for Han Chinese elites to participate more directly in government, and ultimately did succeed in creating elected provincial assemblies in 1909 and a national assembly in October 1910, although for the time being their role would be principally advisory. On the whole, by acceding to constitutionalist demands, the Qing effectively won over, or at least appeased, the elites agitating for political reform. When Sun Yat-Sen’s republicans tried to launch a revolt in Guangdong in April 1911, it failed to win over much support at all and ultimately proved an utter disaster, and the Revolutionary Alliance was left in disarray for several months, undergoing a major schism.

Ironically, had the Republicans just waited a month, things might have gone differently. Zaifeng, the Prince Regent and father of the young Xuantong Emperor, had been courting controversy ever since November 1910, when he had declared that the Qing would not create a parliament with real political power until 1913, such that the National Assembly would sit for a full four-year term. Many elites, including a caucus within the National Assembly, called on the Qing to establish a parliament by 1911, which Zaifeng adamantly refused to commit to. Then, in December, Zaifeng refused to ratify a bill passed by the Assembly legalising queue-cutting and also making it mandatory for civil servants, police officers, and members of the military. In May 1911, he assembled a cabinet whose thirteen members included only four Han Chinese, compared to nine Manchus of whom seven came from the imperial Aisin Gioro clan, which proved to be one of the last straws on the camel’s back when it came to the credibility of the Qing court’s commitment to reform. While the immediate spark that lit the revolutionary fire would be a bungled bomb plot in Wuchang by a revolutionary cell in the army sympathetic to the Sichuan railway protestors, it was the failure of the Qing court firstly to firmly commit to political reform on a timetable desirous to the reformists, and then to apparently make a mockery of the whole process, which rapidly alienated not just reformist elites, but indeed to some extent a reform-minded public.

One thing I have generally only touched on in the above answer is anti-Manchuism, in part because it is somewhat hard to work into a relatively potted summary, and in part because it does deserve its own discussion. The simple fact is that the foreign origin of the Qing is an unavoidable aspect of late Qing political discourse. While many Constitutionalists believed that the Aisin Gioro clan could retain control of the throne under a constitutional monarchy, they nevertheless called for the dissolution of wider structures of Manchu-centric ethnic sovereignty. Some of an overtly Social Darwinist tendency, especially Liang Qichao, went a step further and advocated for the forcible miscegenation of Manchus with Han Chinese so as to subsume the former into the latter. More broadly, Han Chinese anti-Manchuism was rooted in the notion of Manchus as an ‘inferior’ people whose apparent position of dominance over the Han was aberrant not because any such ethnic hierarchy was unjust, but rather because the Han ought to be in charge over the Manchus and indeed all other minority peoples encompassed by the Qing Empire. The ethnic issue was thus one in which there was very little middle ground between Manchu privilege and Han supremacism.

So, were the Qing popular when they fell? The answer is, quite decidedly, no. The Qing had built up their goodwill among reformist elites in the 1901-1909 period by appearing to commit to a programme of political reform with the end goal of establishing a constitutional monarchy, but a combination of Zaifeng’s own political intransigence and the unresolved – and potentially insoluble – question of Manchu status led to the Qing torpedoing that built-up credibility in 1910-11. The Aisin Gioro clan did not lose all of its supporters, even among elite reformists – for instance, Liang Qichao’s mentor Kang Youwei publicly supported the short-lived ‘Manchu Restoration’ of 1917. But it was, at the end of its tenure, at a decided low ebb in popularity, even if not one that can be meaningfully quantified.

—– 127.2 —–2022-02-07 03:30:03+08:00:

It’s hard to speak of a significant north-south division in revolutionary sentiments; while the areas immediately closer to Beijing didn’t revolt, many northern cities, most notably Xi’an, did. Xi’an stands out also as a particularly violent case, with some 20,000 Manchus in the Banner quarter being massacred by the rebels. But, looking at The Mad Monarchist’s (probable) blog post in question, a simple north-south divide isn’t the point they seem to be going for. Instead, their argument seems to be that the 1911 Revolution should, in theory, simply have detached the Han Chinese – and indeed any other rebelling populations – from Manchu rule, with the Manchus free to retain their own government in Manchuria itself. Now, this is broadly a moralistic argument, and one which is not really my job as a historian to discuss. But I can discuss the reasons for why that didn’t happen.

Firstly, we need to appreciate that an independent Manchu state under Aisin Gioro rule was not really a practical possibility even if it had been desirous for the revolutionaries. Manchuria or the Northeast (the terminology here is… complicated and worth its own question) simply was not majority-Manchu, for one. Since the 1850s, there had been a considerable migration of Han Chinese settlers as the Qing opted to do away with its previous policy of quarantining Han settlement amid a perceived need to bolster Qing control of the region amid major Russian encroachments, and to redevelop its economy in the wake of the collapse of the government monopoly on wild ginseng due to over-harvesting. Critically, these settlers were not only an overall numerical majority, they were also distributed quite widely across the region, with a particularly large concentration in Harbin/Halbin in the northern part. Going in the other direction, most Manchus lived in various garrison quarters in China proper, principally in Beijing, with only a little over a sixth in Manchuria. So, not only would an independent Manchuria be mostly Han, it would also exclude the vast majority of Manchus, unless there was a considerable effort at deliberate resettlement in both directions. That doesn’t inherently legitimise (Han) Chinese claims to Manchuria territorially, but they do explain why, even if entertained, a Manchu nation-state in Manchuria simply was not a practicable outcome.

Secondly, the extent of Manchu ties to the monarchy are… a bit questionable, and there are two angles to it. Pamela Crossley, looking at provincial Banner garrisons, has argued that Manchu identity in the late 19th century coalesced out of a reaction to abandonment by the imperial court, as provincial garrisons became increasingly destitute and politically irrelevant amid the rise of modernised, Han-dominated provincial armies. Edward Rhoads, looking at the court, would argue that the majority of Manchus, being based in the main concentration in Beijing, benefitted considerably from continued attention by the court, albeit attention that was weighted towards the imperial clan and its cadet lines. While there is a difference in how each perspective views the court’s role in shaping Manchu identity – Crossley’s view would be that it was shaped by the court’s absence; Rhoads’ that the court had a much more active role – both would agree that Qing interest in the Banners atrophied considerably at the provincial level, and that there was a considerable degree of chafing against the restrictions that Banner status entailed in both the provinces and the capital. It is thus unclear how far even the Manchus were pro-Qing by 1911.

Thirdly, we need to look at the reformist agenda itself, where again, there were distinct views over how the Qing empire (small-e) should be dealt with in the absence of the Qing Empire (big-E). There were some, such as Zhang Binglin, who advocated for what might in effect be termed decolonisation, and argued that non-Han peoples under Qing rule, such as Tibetans, Mongols, Turkic Muslims (antecedents to today’s Uyghurs), and indeed Manchus should have the right to self-rule, same as the Han, should Qing rule be overthrown. However, it is important to understand that this was not benevolent but based fundamentally on racist thinking: for Zhang, Han and ‘barbarians’ should never have been mixed, and self-rule for ‘barbarian’ peoples was good not because it benefitted them, but because it essentially cast dead weight off the Han so as to allow all parties to reach their own destinies, which for the Han lay in greater ‘civilisation’ than could be achieved if shackled to ‘lesser’ peoples. A similar underlying invective motivated what we might euphemistically term ‘paternalist’ approaches which ended up being dominant among those who gained power after 1911, in which it was the apparent destiny of the Han Chinese to ‘uplift’ and/or to assimilate – literally, eugenically – the ‘lesser’ peoples who had ‘become part of China’ through the Qing empire, and so even in the absence of the Qing, the wider empire ought to be carried over into the new, Han Chinese-dominated state.

It is thus not entirely wrong to say that claims to Manchuria by the ROC and PRC are ultimately rooted in discourses attempting to reconcile ethnic nationalism with imperialism, nor to say that the Manchus very much did not have a choice in 1911. This of course has no bearing on the broader ideology of monarchism, especially in its present-day form. But, and it surprises me to say it, there is a vague kernel of truth to The Mad Monarchist’s suggestion, however tendentious, that there was a certain incongruity, even hypocrisy, between Han demands for self-rule in 1911, and yet also Han claims to overrule similar demands among other former imperial subjects.

—– 127.3 —–2022-02-07 03:34:21+08:00:

Sources and Further Reading

  • Pamela Kyle Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (1990)

  • Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (1999)

  • Joseph Esherick, C. X. George Wei (eds.), China: How the Empire Fell (2014)

  • Joseph Esherick, ‘Reconsidering 1911: Lessons of a Sudden Revolution’, Journal of Modern Chinese History 6:1 (2012)

  • Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928 (2000)

  • Edward J. M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895–1913 (1975)

  • Xiaowei Zheng, The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China (2018)

—– 127.4 —–2022-02-07 11:34:42+08:00:

I knew there’d be things I’d forget to explain! A lot of things about the fall of the Qing are very specific to the Qing itself, and arguably none more so than the queue, something I go into depth here about but where I’ll summarise the relevant part here. ‘Queue’ is, in this context, an English term for a braid of hair, known in Manchu as the soncoho and in Mandarin as bianzi. A series of edicts in 1644-5 had mandated that all Han Chinese men under Qing rule were to adopt the customary hairstyle of Manchu men, with all hair shaven except for a small amount at the back that would be braided – no more than would fit through the hole in a coin. The amount of hair that was retained increased over time, such that by the mid-nineteenth century it was really only the top and sides that were still shaven.

The queue edict came under fire from two general angles. The first related to the tonsure (shaving) part, as it was a widespread belief among Han Chinese that men’s hair was supposed to be worn long as a sign of respect towards one’s parents, whom one’s hair was inherited from. As such, for most of those who objected to the queue until the late nineteenth century, it was the sacrilegious act of shaving that was objected to, and in turn flouted by rebels who had broken free of Qing authority – most prominently the Taiping, who were nicknamed the ‘Long Hairs’ by their enemies for growing out the hair on their heads that was now unshaven.

The second related to the braid, as by the late nineteenth century many, especially elite intellectuals, saw the queue as backward. Yes, it is a little odd that a hairstyle could be considered not-modern-enough, but that was the situation on the ground as Han Chinese elites agitated for being allowed to adopt the short, cropped hairstyles that had become in vogue in Japan and Europe. While there had been a certain paranoia over queue-cutting on the part of the Qing court even in the eighteenth century, it would not be until the New Policies period (1901-11) that queue-cutting genuinely became a grassroots political cause. Thus, by 1911 it was no longer shaving, but the combination of partial shaving and partial grown-out hair, that had become the point of contention.

Of course, throughout this there was the problem of the supposed ‘barbarianness’ of the hairstyle, which was seen as – and intended by Qing rulers to be seen as – a visible sign of Manchu dominance. The queue-cutting movement of the 1900s was certainly motivated in large part by an anti-traditionalist, modernising agenda, but it was also deeply tied in with the ethnic politics that I discuss in the above answer. ‘Modernising’ sentiments changed the nature of the anti-queue position, but were not the origin of opposition to the queue edict in the abstract.

128: StabbyCon: AskHistorians Group AMA, submitted on 2022-02-08 01:00:45+08:00.

—– 128.1 —–2022-02-08 01:14:36+08:00:

So this isn’t a misconception as such so much as a rather unfortunate bit of laser-focus. Ask anyone about the Taiping and if anyone knows anything, it will be two factoids: that it was started by a guy who thought he was the brother of Jesus, and that it caused 20 million deaths. The former is true, the latter is actually hard to substantiate, but all facts aside, the problem is that the whole thing gets framed as ‘that time an insane thing happened in China but the only consequences were a lot of deaths’. And that’s just a crying shame for a period with lots of interesting angles of study and analysis: Where did the Taiping fit in global Christianity? How did they influence the development of Chinese nationalism? What was their legacy in Chinese popular culture? What was it like to actually live through the conflict? These are all questions historians have asked and – in some cases – answered, but which are completely elided by the whole narrative that ‘Jesus’ brother killed 20 million people that one time’.

—– 128.2 —–2022-02-08 01:55:12+08:00:

Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m really big on historical fiction, and I always end up a little wary of anything supposedly drawing inspiration from the Qing just because the nuances get really badly flattened (looking at you, ATLA…). But I do have an… interesting if decidedly flawed recommendation for a book set in the Qing period, that being Jules Verne’s rather odd The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China. Now obviously the title raises eyebrows, and it definitely is a novel written by a 19th century Frenchman in terms of how it portrays China and its people, and yet at the same time I find it utterly fascinating as a novel that does try to root itself in recent Chinese history (spoilers: the protagonist’s mentor is supposed to be an ex-Taiping, which is what alerted me to the book in the first place), which has its moments critiquing European (well, to be fair, mainly British because the French of course are far better at this) imperialism, particularly the opium trade, and just has many of the hallmarks that make Verne’s adventure novels tick. Weirdly enough, there was a film adaptation in 1987 that was a joint West German-Chinese production, whose most prominent star long-term seems to have been Rosalind Chao (known to fellow Trekkies for playing Keiko O’Brien, née Ishikawa, on Star Trek TNG and DS9.)

—– 128.3 —–2022-02-08 03:05:49+08:00:

What’s really interesting is that the academic and popular consciousnesses about the Taiping are really rather out of sync in the West. I’d argue that the Taiping War is probably one of the most studied periods in pre-republican Chinese history in the Anglophone historiography, with a new major narrative history written every two decades or so, and with a new book-length study of some specialised aspect being published every 2-3 years, and with plenty of articles in between. Even the Opium Wars and the 1911 Revolution don’t attract that level of scholarly attention: for instance, after Douglas Hurd’s The Arrow War in 1967, there wouldn’t be a new narrative history of the Second Opium War until Harry Gelber’s The Battle for Beijing in 2016, and that book is… questionable in terms of its overall quality; there has never been a scholarly monograph history of the 1911 Revolution in English.

I think part of why the Taiping don’t get as much attention is that it’s hard to look at it other than as basically an internal Chinese event, even within a global framing. Simply put, popular approaches to history tend not to be good at dealing with multiple simultaneous layers, so it can be hard to effectively get across the idea of something as being local in its primary scope even if it was global in its origins and its wider implications. It’s also the case that our popular narrative of Chinese history is still very much rooted in the notion of the ‘Century of Humiliation’ wherein European imperialism serves as the driving force, and the Taiping thus end up relegated to being a sideshow in a narrative that is ultimately about an oversimplified ‘China’ and an oversimplified ‘West’.

In China it gets more complicated because of politics and political changes. To really simplify things and make a rather long and bumpy story a shorter and smoother one, I would argue that the post-Mao period saw, and indeed has continued to see, a pivot in focus from class struggle and what I’ll clumsily call ‘state-sanctioned anarchism’ to ethnic nationalism as the cohering ideological force in the People’s Republic, and that shift has had a profound impact on how ‘modern’ (i.e. post-1840) Chinese history has been viewed. For a while, the Taiping, framed as a class struggle against landlordism and monarchy, were the centrepiece of nineteenth-century history in China, but since the crackdowns against the 1989 political protests there has been a considerable pivot towards an idealised vision of the Opium Wars as involving a unified, monolithic China victimised by a monolithic European imperial bloc. More recently, as Rana Mitter has written about, the critical piece of 20th century history has shifted from the CCP-KMT Civil War to the Second Sino-Japanese War, with an increasing co-optation and rehabilitation of the KMT’s place in the overall Chinese war effort.

In both cases, the shift in political ideology has come hand in hand with a shift in historical focus, away from events where Chinese people struggled against each other in what could be framed as the pursuit of internal change, towards events that can be spun as China standing against inherently predatory outside forces, to greater or lesser degrees of success. On top of that, as part of a general turn towards reinventing/readopting Chinese tradition, there has been a considerable rehabilitation of Chinese elite figures across the entire imperial period, but most pertinently during the late Qing. At one stage, some of these, most prominently Zeng Guofan, were excoriated as race-traitors for supporting the Manchu Qing against the Taiping (which gets into a complex ethnic dimension to it all as well, where the Taiping’s agenda as a Han Chinese revolt against the Manchu has been variously emphasised and de-emphasised as attitudes towards ethnicity and nationhood have gone this way and that), and yet are now held up as exemplars of ideal Confucian virtue. So the Taiping have ended up going from celebrated People’s Heroes to rather an awkward sore spot, not fitting into the narrative of Chinese resistance to imperialism, and also as the enemy to men (critically, men) who have been rehabilitated as national heroes.

—– 128.4 —–2022-02-08 12:58:31+08:00:

On question 1, a very similar question was asked on r/AskHistorians a couple of months back which I answered in reference to the Qing, /u/Dongzhou3kingdoms in reference to the Han, and /u/10_thousandstars in reference to changes over time in civil service selection: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s4uur3/did_the_various_ruling_dynasties_of_china_ever/. Admittedly perhaps my answer is closest to your particular phrasing here. Now, that need not be the be all and end all, but I think it is very much worth understanding that the apparent bureaucratisation of China has taken considerably different forms at different times, to the point where the late 19th/early 20th century German sociologist Max Weber characterised contemporary European polities as far more bureaucratic than imperial China ever was. Whether you agree with that assessment is another thing of course (Philip Kuhn, in Soulstealers, gives a much more nuanced approach while still using the theoretical basis of Weber’s model).

As for question 2:

The history of steppe societies is a particularly complicated one because it lies at the intersection of history and sociology. There is a certain extent to which it is argued that at the social level, steppe societies were much of a muchness, and that the principal differences between, say, the Hephthalites, the Göktürks, and the Oyirads were in terms of language and culture, but that the underlying mechanics of how steppe society functioned were consistent. The most obvious of these consistencies is a reliance on pastoral nomadism as the basis of said societies’ food production, which in turn leads to somewhat divergent schools of thought on the relationship between steppe and sedentary societies.

I would have been able to name names better last time I was doing an AMA here (I asked for my bio from last time to be reused and forgot that it included aspects that I’m no longer quite as familiar with), but in general I subscribe to the basic idea, first proposed by Owen Lattimore all the way back in 1940 and with recent refinements by historians such as Nikolay Kradin and Anatoly Khazanov, that pastoral nomadic societies are fundamentally reliant on sedentary ones to sustain themselves. Critically, they require a certain amount of agricultural products out of simple nutritional necessity. Most ostensibly pastoral nomads did practice seasonal farming, but even moderately arable land could be scarce on the steppe, and outputs were unreliable. As such, a major supplementary source had to come from sedentary societies, which could of course be obtained through commerce. Equally, though, if a sedentary society refused to trade grain and vegetables for whatever reason, then these could be taken by force or the threat thereof, either through tribute arrangements where a supply of food and/or other wealth was provided in exchange for the nomads not attacking, or simply through raiding, though the latter was rarely as sustainable an arrangement and often intended to convince the raided people to pivot to a regular tribute. So yes, steppe nomadic societies most certainly engaged quite regularly in hostile interaction with sedentary agricultural societies. But at the root of this hostility, we find that its basis was originally existential, not opportunistic.

This does tie a little into a related phenomenon, the ‘Nomadic Military Advantage’, which is its own can of worms, but the key feature we need to understand here is that historically, nomadic societies did not have particularly specialised labour, and if they were extracting their plant-based food from without rather than trying to produce them internally, then they could mobilise a huge proportion of their adult male – and in some cases adult female – population for war without seriously compromising their food production. Kradin puts this figure at around 75%. This, and what I’ve mentioned above, do a lot to explain why and how steppe societies earned a reputation for militarism – they genuinely were very good at war compared to sedentary societies of equivalent size, and they were usually reliant on war or the threat of it for their actual survival. When it comes to destructiveness, well an army that is entirely on horseback can move faster and further and carry more loot than one that is even partially on foot, as long as it remains able to feed itself and its horses by continually moving to fresh pastures and food supplies.

At the same time, we ought to acknowledge that othering discourses have played their own role in creating the reputation for nomadic brutality. Now obviously, Han literati trying to portray steppe nomads as barbaric ‘Others’ doesn’t mean that raiding and warfare, with all their attendant atrocities of varying scope, didn’t actually happen. But it is to say that writers in ‘civilised’ sedentary societies constructed a notion of ‘savagery’ on the part of steppe nomads that exaggerated and played up the notion of nomads as inherently brutal, something that would, by the nineteenth century, take on overtly racial dimensions.

So there was an extent to which steppe nomads were more aggressive and more destructive against sedentary societies than other sedentary societies were, but it’s an extent that was greatly exaggerated by sedentary authors trying to construct idealised opposites of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’.

129: How did the Qing defeat the Mongols and consolidate control over Inner and Outer Mongolia?, submitted on 2022-02-11 02:36:17+08:00.

—– 129.1 —–2022-02-11 14:16:41+08:00:

I ended up writing quite a long r/AskHistorians post on it here, based mainly on Peter Perdue’s China Marches West. To summarise its main takeaways:

Inner Eurasia in the late 17th-early 18th centuries was undergoing a period of immense transformation. The surrounding sedentary belt had become much more resilient to attacks from Inner Eurasia and, in the case of hybrid states like Russia, the Qing and Afsharid Iran, it was now the nomads under threat from those around them. The most damning aspect was probably the breakdown in the importance of Chinggisid legitimacy, both in the face of the emergence of the Latter Jin/Qing in Manchuria as a growing hybrid state in the east, and the growing power of the Gelug sect in the west, thanks to the crusade-like agenda pursued by Gelug adherents like the Zunghar princes. In this environment, there was ample opportunity for an adjacent hybrid state to step in and attempt to consolidate control over the region: something attempted by the Zunghars, the Qing and to a lesser extent the Russians.

But the Qing were more successful in this than the Zunghars for a few basic reasons, mainly related to their diplomatic acumen and partly to do with flaws in the Zunghars’ ‘state’ structure. Firstly, the Qing usually entered a situation in support of a displaced ally, which meant both more manpower and, crucially, people who would be willing to run the newly-secured regions on the Qing’s behalf. Secondly, the Qing could always fall back on a loyal core of Manchu and Han Chinese subjects, while the Zunghars struggled to keep even the core of their tribe in one piece. Thirdly, the Qing were able to mobilise their resources to secure the allegiance or neutrality of the Zunghars’ neighbours like the Russians, Kazakhs and Khoshuts, further tightening the noose.

Despite the Qing’s foreign origin, as in China they did manage to project a sense of legitimacy among the Mongols, both through genuine cultivation of good relations through the patronage of religious institutions and more pragmatic, subtle manipulations. More importantly, though, the Qing were driven to extend control over Mongolia in order to maintain peace in the region, aware of the risks inherent in allowing a contest of strength that would culminate in the survival and hegemony of the fittest tribe. This in turn was helped by a growing war-weariness among the Mongols, who saw not only the invasion of the Zunghars and their Gelug proselytisation, but also the ongoing internecine conflicts across the Mongol world, as pointlessly destructive, and therefore welcomed the stability offered by Manchu hegemony.

But I’d recommend reading the full answer, or better yet Perdue’s book, for full detail.

—– 129.2 —–2022-02-11 14:19:18+08:00:

the northern steppe threat existed in various forms all the way till 1991 (Russia and Soviet Union could be considered just a different form)

How so? Russia and the USSR were unitary, sedentary polities, not nomadic societies.

Manchu was fundamentally a part of steppe nomads and after they incorporated Mongol tribes they defeated

To echo /u/XXX_KimJongUn_XXX, that’s untrue. The Jurchens->Manchus were very much sedentarised by the time of the unification of the tribes by Nurgaci and Hung Taiji. While there were some Mongol and Khorchin tribes in Manchuria itself incorporated into the Banners, the vast majority of Mongols under Qing rule were organised into a separate system of tribal ‘banners’ and not incorporated directly into the Manchu-led system.

130: Free for All Friday, 11 February 2022, submitted on 2022-02-11 20:00:13+08:00.

—– 130.1 —–2022-02-13 08:47:46+08:00:

Yep, it was you! Wasn’t sure what policy would be around sharing the specifics of modmails, hence the only vague allusion to the tip-offs. Now, if we were to toot our own horn for a bit, we actually rather naively assumed that Quora would take action on Kevin if we sent a few reports in, and so we had kind of left things off in late November. What kicked off the full investigation as such was one mod checking in on Kevin out of curiosity on Monday and dragging me into just… the insanity.

However, Kevin Richardson ‘got taken down’ by public pressure, not by Quora. While ‘Quora Site Moderation’ stopped Kevin from making edits, whatever that means, he nevertheless wiped his profile page and a few dozen answers before deactivating the account, something separate from an account ban issued by Quora themselves. Moreover, Kevin’s sockpuppets weren’t removed, and this is very important because, as noted in my second thread, Kevin Richardson is not the OG plagiarist account. That would be Josue Dennis Chance, or more specifically, Josue Dennis Chance Round 1: someone who claimed to be an ophthalmologist in Washington D.C. with expertise in African history and who knew Lingala, and who racked up 2.4m content views before being banned in September 2020. This, of course, was an entirely separate person, I’m sure, from the ‘Josue Dennis Chance’ who joined Quora in October 2020, who had the exact same profile picture, who claimed to have been an ophthalmologist who used to live in D.C., and who claimed expertise in African history and Lingala. So unless Quora goes ahead and proactively deals with all 15+ sockpuppets tied to Kevin, the whole thing can repeat if they lie low for a bit and then restart the sockpuppet network.

—– 130.2 —–2022-02-14 04:06:34+08:00:

Hear, hear!

131: Hololive summer flare, submitted on 2022-02-12 02:41:28+08:00.

—– 131.1 —–2022-02-12 11:52:34+08:00:

FLEGS

132: Congrats to Fauna for a sub-10 minute run in Getting Over It!, submitted on 2022-02-13 14:37:59+08:00.

—– 132.1 —–2022-02-13 14:38:43+08:00:

Stream is still ongoing as of posting is now over, timestamp of the start of the run is here at 5:27:42.\

Fauna tweet

—– 132.2 —–2022-02-13 14:41:42+08:00:

If I’ve got my facts straight, supas were on during Arceus, but then after supa reading she played Getting Over It and didn’t turn then back on.

—– 132.3 —–2022-02-13 15:13:28+08:00:

It is, but she did a few Getting Over It runs after superchats.

133: What were the main differences in attitude towards traditional Chinese culture during the may 4th movement and the new culture movement compared to the cultural revolution?, submitted on 2022-02-13 19:37:00+08:00.

—– 133.1 —–2022-02-13 22:06:46+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you’ve researched so far, what resources you’ve consulted, and what you’ve learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we’d approve. Additionally, if you’re not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, “Finding and Understanding Sources”, which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

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