Imperialism and the evolution of central-provincial relations in late Qing China: Zhang Zhidong in Jiangsu and Hubei

This article examines one of the earliest Gujarati travelogues concerning China, written by Damodar Ishwardas—a Hindu resident of Bombay and a clerk for a Sunni Khoja commercial firm—and published in Bombay in 1868. Based on a three-year trip to the port cities of southern China, Ishwardas's text runs close to 400 pages and was patronized by a prominent stratum of Bombay's Gujarati-speaking commercial and bureaucratic elite. The primary intervention in this article is to analyze Ishwardas's account as a neglected relic of vernacular capitalism and vernacular intellectual history. Furthermore, the text presents an opportunity to reexamine the history of the Indian intellectual and mercantile engagement with late Qing China, especially before anticolonial nationalism and pan-Asianism supplied new paradigms for Indian writing on East Asia beginning around 1900. It further points to the many unstudied Indian materials that have yet to be integrated into the study of modern capitalism in the regions from the South China Sea to the western Indian Ocean.

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Capital, Empire, Letter: Romanization in Late Qing China

Twentieth-Century China ◽

10.1353/tcc.2021.0022 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 46 (3) ◽

pp. 223-246

Author(s):

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Keyword(s):

Late Qing ◽

Late Qing China

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Self-Strengthening Movement of Late Qing China: an Intermediate Reform Doomed to Failure

Asian Culture and History ◽

10.5539/ach.v8n2p148 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 148 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jason Qu

Keyword(s):

Western World ◽

The Political ◽

Trade Policies ◽

Qing Empire ◽

Late Qing ◽

Imperial Court ◽

Late Qing China ◽

The World ◽

World Trend ◽

Economy System

<p class="1Body">Despite of strong economy including highest GDP gross and self-sufficient feudal economy system, the late Qing Empire fell behind the world trend with its isolationist trade policies. As the Western world caught up technologically, economically, and politically, the former biggest economy had suffered from consecutive losses in wars. In order to preserve the feudal regime, the initiative reform, termed the Self Strengthening Movement was grandly carried out. However, without the true support from the supreme power on one hand, and without the support of the populace on the other, the Movement was an intermediate reform in attempt to preserve the royal system and forestall its continued decline. In policy, the reforms envisioned Western-style modernization without adjusting the political order, yet the entrenched conservatism of the Qing Imperial Court proved to be the decisive hindering factor in the failure of the Movement.</p>

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CORPSE ADMONITION: WU KEDU AND BUREAUCRATIC PROTEST IN LATE QING CHINA

Journal of Chinese History ◽

10.1017/jch.2017.14 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 109-143

Author(s):

Ying-kit Chan

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Unintended Consequence ◽

Late Imperial China ◽

Political Issues ◽

Late Qing ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Arbitrary Power ◽

Late Qing China ◽

Imperial China ◽

Further Development

AbstractIn late imperial China, an extremely small number of bureaucrats adopted corpse admonition (shijian尸諫) to protest with their death what they regarded as inadequacies or failings in the imperial structure. This article introduces the case of Wu Kedu 吳可讀, who killed himself to protest the designation, by the late Qing empress dowagers Ci'an and Cixi, of Guangxu as the emperor, and as the adopted son of Xianfeng and not as the heir to Tongzhi. The article argues that Wu Kedu's suicide, which was highly praised during and after its time, was an attempt to sway bureaucratic opinion to put a check on the arbitrary power of empress dowagers, but instead had the unintended consequence of reinforcing it. More importantly, Wu Kedu's corpse admonition was a precursor of the outpouring of voices of remonstrance over political issues at the turn of the twentieth century, leading to further development of the Chinese “constitutional agenda.”

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