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War in the Making of Modern China1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Hans J. Van De Ven
Hans J. Van De Ven
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

No one even with only a casual interest in Chinese history can be unaware that China's capacity for war in the last few centuries has proved truly awesome. In the middle of the eighteenth century Qing armies numbering some 150,000 troops marched into central Asia. After many campaigns some of which continued for nearly two years, they rid China finally of the menace from the desert that had caused so much havoc in the past. In the process they exterminated the Zunghars as a people. In the nineteenth century, China fought wars with nearly all the major powers: England in the Opium War of 1839–42 and several times thereafter; France in the 1880s; and Japan in the 1890s. In 1900 it took on all of them at the same time. Civil war too was a frequent occurrence. The Taiping Rebellion of 1852–64 exacted casualties that should be counted in the tens of millions, and this was merely the most devastating of a series of rebellions. The scale of war in the twentieth century has proved even more spectacular. Warlord wars, fighting between the nationalists and communists, and the War of Resistance against Japan ravaged China until the communist victory in 1949.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 737 - 756
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

2 For a critical discussion of the contents of the term that places the new scholarship in the history of scholarship on war, see Paret, Peter, ‘The history of war and the new military history,’ in Paret, , Understanding War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 209–26.Google Scholar

3 Stephen MacKinnon organized the first conference in Tempe, Arizona in 1992. Realizing that researchers in various places were beginning to undertake research on China's military history, he brought many of them together to discuss sources, approaches, and topics. Future workshops and seminars are planned to discuss the history of strategic thought, war and memory, the impact of war on the statebuilding, and battles in modern Chinese history.

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29 Chen-ya, Tien, Chinese Military Theory (Stevenage, SPA Books, 1992), pp. 105–18.Google Scholar

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32 Fussell, Paul, War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 315.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., pp. 315–20.

34 Some examples of the new genre are Huaidan, Ran and Haiyan, Zhu, Beifang you zhanhuo (The smoke of war in the north) (Peking: PLA Press, 1993);Google ScholarQingping, Guo and Yuanshang, Xu, Baituan Dazhan (The hundred regiments offensive) (Peking: PLA Press, 1993);Google ScholarDikang, Wang et al. , Disi yezhanjun nanzheng jishi (The southern campaign of the Fourth Field Army) (Peking: PLA Press, 1993);Google ScholarYubin, Wang and Suhong, Wang, Dashi zhongyuan (Battles on the central plains) (Peking: PLA Press 1993).Google Scholar

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37 Bartlett, Beatrice, Monarchs and Ministers: the Grand Council in mid-Ch'ing China, 1723–1820 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991), p. 266.Google Scholar

38 See Zelin, Madeleine, The Magistrate's Tael (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 246ff. on attempts at reforms of the land registration system in eighteenth-century China.Google Scholar

39 McNeill, , Pursuit of Power, pp. 98–9.Google Scholar See also Frederic Wakeman, J., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 75–82, 168–70. The Ming was able at first to exploit European artillery technology to create defences that the Manchus were not able to breach. But the capture of artillery troops and experts by the Qing and their own acquisition and manufacture of European cannon changed the balance of forces decisively. The Qing also depended on their great cavalry speed.Google Scholar See also Zhenfu, Wei et al. , Zhongguo junshishi: diyijuan: Bingqi (Military history of China: vol. I: weapons) (Peking: PLA Press, 1983), pp. 129–35.Google Scholar

40 McNeill, , Pursuit of Power, pp. 95–8.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., pp. 98–9. For the technological, industrial, and managerial developments that were basic to the rise of the Muscovite empire, see Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914, pp. 23–5, 56–84.

42 Paret, ‘The new military history,’ in Understanding War, p. 222.Google Scholar

43 Fairbank, , ‘Introduction,’ in Kierman, Frank and Fairbank, John (eds), Chinese Ways in Warfare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 1.Google Scholar