1 - The Late Imperial Chinese State

Summary

Western historical scholarship on late imperial China seems less settled than ever. In recent years it has evolved in directions that significantly alter longstanding interpretations of the late imperial state. Once-definitive perspectives regarding the scope of the late imperial state, its processes and institutional trends, and its reach into Chinese society have been reopened. New frameworks built on different lines of inquiry and evidence have challenged enduring views on the reasons both for the unprecedented longevity of the Qing dynasty as an alien conquest regime and for its decline in the nineteenth century and demise in the early twentieth century. Presumed continuities between the late imperial past and the authoritarian present no longer seem as compelling as they once did. In their place a renewed appreciation of patterns of dynamism and change has suggested more fertile approaches to making the past serve the present. With all of these changes, alternative chronologies built around newly recognized historical turning points reorganize what seems useful in understanding how we got to the Chinese present from its late imperial past. More than ever, historians seem to speak with contending voices, not consensus regarding state and society in late imperial times.

For historians of China's late imperial era – here defined as China from the mid-sixteenth century until the 1911 Revolution – the emergence of these changes in the historiography of the late imperial era has seemed evolutionary and gradual. For them, they are the familiar consequences of the normal functioning of a now well-established disciplinary com-munity. Older answers to fundamental questions raise new questions whose answers in turn refine, modify, and sometimes transform previous work.