New Qing History

The New Qing History is a school of thought that gained prominence in the United States in the mid-1990s by offering a wide-ranging revision of history of the Manchu Qing dynasty. Earlier historians had emphasized the power of Han Chinese to “sinicize” their conquerors, that is, to assimilate and make them Chinese in their thought and institutions. In the 1980s and early 1990s, American scholars began to learn Manchu and took advantage of newly opened Chinese- and Manchu-language archives. This research found that the Manchu rulers were savvy in manipulating their subjects and from the 1630s through at least the 18th century, emperors developed a sense of Manchu identity and used Central Asian models of rule as much as they did Confucian ones. According to some scholars, at the height of their power, the Qing regarded "China" as only a part, although a very important part, of a much wider empire that extended into the Inner Asian territories of Mongolia, Tibet, the Northeast (today sometimes called Manchuria) and Xinjiang, or Chinese (Eastern) Turkestan.

Some scholars criticize this approach for exaggerating the Manchu character of the dynasty and some in China accuse the American historians in the group of imposing American concerns with race and identity or even of imperialist misunderstanding in order to weaken China. Still others in China agree that this scholarship has opened new vistas for the study of Qing history.

This use of "New Qing History" as an approach is to be distinguished from the New Qing History, a multi-volume history of the Qing dynasty authorized by the Chinese State Council in 2003.

Prominent scholars who have been associated with "New Qing History," including Evelyn Rawski, Mark Elliott, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Laura Hostetler, Philippe Forêt, and others, although they differ among themselves on important points, represent an "Inner Asian" and "Eurasian" turn which conceived the Manchu-centered Qing as fundamentally different from most earlier dynasties but as similar to the Ottoman, Mogul, and Romanov empires across the Eurasian landmass. The historians in this group argued that the Qing saw itself as a universal empire, a multi-national polity which included China as only one component, although the most central and economically important one. The New Qing historians date the founding of the empire from 1636, when the dynasty was proclaimed, rather than from 1644, the year in which the Qing took control of Beijing. These historians argued that “Manchu” identity was deliberately created only after the takeover of China and that the new racial identity was important but “fungible,” or easily exchanged for others. In the early reigns of the dynasty, the new rulers played the Confucian role of Son of Heaven but at the same time, and often behind the backs of their Han Chinese ministers, adopted other roles to rule other ethnic groups. The military expansion of frontiers, which Han Chinese ministers often opposed because it drained resources from China proper, showed that the Qing empire was not simply a victim of imperialism, but also practiced imperialism itself. Some of these historians followed Evelyn Rawski in using the “Early Modern” label for the Qing period, rather than “late imperial” on the grounds that the Manchus created a centralized empire that the Ming could not have created.

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