The Shun-chih reign is poorly documented and understood period. This chapter describes the process of political and military consolidation and the integration of the Han Chinese scholar-official elite into it. The death of Hung Taiji on September 9, 1643, presented the young Ch'ing state with its first major political crisis. In a manifesto that circulated with the Ch'ing pacification commissioners in the lower Yangtze region, Ch'ing praised Dodo's troops for their discipline and appealed to the literati to remember the myriad souls of the people. The momentum of conquest seems to have kept the Manchus together, as it had under Hung Taiji, but the factional rifts grew deeper as Dorgon acted more and more like the emperor his brothers Ajige and Dodo had wanted him to be. Dorgon got tired of the campaign to prevent corruption and factional division within the Chinese bureaucracy. The anticorruption edict had specifically attacked the Ministry of Revenue for ignoring inequities in tax collection.

This chapter traces the rising visibility of commoner households and the growth of extrafamilial networks of homosociability in early Ch'ing to 1800. It examines the impact of the Ch'ing conquest on women and gender relations, and stresses the ruptures that separate the late Ming and early Ch'ing periods. The chapter emphasizes overarching continuities especially those based on economic development that span the late Ming and early Ch'ing periods to shape gender relations. The science of women's medicine, begun in Sung times, had become a well-funded enterprise by the late Ming period. Both men and women in late Ming and Ch'ing China were being drawn into family relations and sojourning networks structured by economic relations, territorial expansion, and patterns of mobility that drew males and females apart. The chapter focuses on women's oppression that masked the importance of same-sex relations, of sojourning patterns, and of other historical changes.

This chapter talks about Continental China and the account of recent work in the rapidly developing area of social history. It begins at a high level of generality by asserting that the Chinese revolution of the twentieth century has differed from all other national revolutions in two respects: the greater size of the population and the greater comprehensiveness of the changes it has confronted. The comprehensiveness of change in modern China is a matter of dispute between two schools of interpretation, which posit linear and cyclical patterns. The question of what happened to the Chinese economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a major focus of discussion. Commercialization permeated the agrarian economy during the Ch'ing. The Han Chinese in different regions and at different class levels had a common sense of identity and historical continuity. The horizontal class structure of late imperial China was theoretically divided by the Classics into the four occupational classes: scholar-gentry, peasants, artisans, and merchants.

This chapter looks at the external context of twentieth-century Chinese history, beginning naturally with the collapse of the old order. Certain patterns of Ch'ing response to encroachment may be seen all around the periphery of the empire. Instead of recognizing Outer Mongolia as a sovereign state open to international relations, Russia continued to recognize Chinese suzerainty. For Japan, the First World War provided the opportunity to stabilize its imperialist interests. The chapter lists the Japan's Twenty-One Demands. In less than half a year, the whole of Manchuria had fallen to the Japanese army and been severed from China. Japan had become the primary concern of Chinese foreign policy. Within less than a generation, a mere two decades, the East Asian regional order of the Ch'ing dynasty, the international legal order envisaged by the Washington Conference treaty powers, and the world revolutionary order dreamed of in Moscow, had all proved unavailing as an international matrix for the Chinese Republic.

This chapter elucidates the internal dynamic of China's social evolution at the end of the Ch'ing by looking at the rural world which still contained some 95 per cent of the total population. In the very last years of the monarchy, division among the new privileged classes grew from within and was actually more ideological than social. Instability and precariousness more aptly characterize lower class conditions in Chinese society at the end of the monarchy than do models of continuous evolution. Among the many factors contributing to changes in Chinese society during the last forty years of the monarchy, the foreign intrusion, in various forms, was of primary importance. The force behind the changes which shook Chinese society at the end of the imperial era perhaps lay more in the progressive deterioration of the agrarian situation and especially in landowners' relationships with their tenants.