The Fall of the Qing Dynasty - An End of An Era

An all too overlooked portion of world history is pre-warlord era Chinese history. While many Americans might have grown up with oblique in passing references to China --- often in a post-WW2 context, it is important to analyze the events that lead to the chaotic warlord era of the region.

The Qing dynasty, even at its most powerful, was merely an attempt to recapture the glory of the Ming era, which itself was a desperate attempt to revive the glory and laudable golden age that was the Song Dynasty. The sheer scale and relative isolation from other great powers over these several hundred years ensured that China, and its problems, were too far removed from the machinations of the rest of the world -----with only regional neighbors such as Korea and Japan having any meaningful influence on the Middle Kingdom's history. 

That is to not say that the periphery of the soft and hard powers alike did not occasionally brush up against the edges of Chinese society---merely that they were too muted and relatively insignificant to be any credible threat. 

This is not to say nor imply that China was the carnage of these lands, or the depravity of human nature and war specifically. The Jurchens, the Mongols, and countless other ethnic and political powerplays from within the Middle Kingdom's were the foundations for the region's many civil wars and periods of unrest throughout the eras----however these experiences, while unique, could not have prepared the nation for the rapid rise of a new conflicts that would define much of the 19th century, beginning with the Opium Wars and extending onwards.

While the Opium Wars themselves would require a robust essay to properly break down and analyze, the end result of these tragedies were a humiliating defeat wherein the Qing dynasty was, in quite some time, forced to cede significance control of its country to the hands of a foreign government --- and in which the leadership at the time was forced to come to terms with their categorical and humiliating defeat at the hands of far deadlier predators than themselves, with an unsettling reach. 

While some reformists in the aftermath of this war, such as Prince Gong, attempted to look both inwardly at the failings of their nation's ability to compete with these rivals, and externally to understand where these rivals were succeeding, much of the Qing dynasty refused to believe that the Middle Kingdom's time in the sun was no longer guarantied, and viewed these calls to adapt and reform as an admission of guilt or failure. This political struggle was Matriarch of that era, Empress Dowager Cixi(along with much of the court system loyal to her), spent an inordinate amount of time sabotaging both Gong and his reformists---while offering no counter solutions of her own save for maintaining the course as it was.

The narrowmindedness of Cixi is a point of debate to historians to this day: while some maintain that her unwillingness to adapt militarily, economically, or culturally doomed what little hope China might have had during this tumultuous era, other maintain that she was repeatedly lead astray by her own subordinates and capos alike---either being fed false information or manipulated by her subordinates in one way or another. Regardless of the reason, Cixi's crusade against multiple attempts at reform ended up dooming the country in the long run, with the spiritual death nail of the dynasty happening against the newly uplifted Meiji Japan during the Sino Japanese War of 1894-1985, wherein Cixi was once again accused of sabotaging the country's defensive efforts by redirecting funds in favor of more lavish pursuits. The Qing Dynasty eek out another 15-16 years before officially collapsing in 1911, setting the stage for the Warlord Era some years later. 

A post mortem:

The Fall of the Qing dynasty marked an end to the dynastic saga of China as a whole, and the both political and marshal power plays that defined so much of the country's history of that era. Within a lifetime, China had lost its dominance in the continent as well as its control of its vassal state, Korea, and failed to defend itself against the machinations of the British and Americans via the Opium Wars and the rise of Japan. Those in power believed so completely in their own history that they felt that they could simply outlast these new variables, and refused to listen any reformist with the foresight to see this decline decades in advance. In short, they believed that the world, and their place in it, would never change---and they paid deeply for such hubris. 

Today --- in both the landscapes of industry and more generally geopolitics, how many leaders do we see falling into that same trap of certainty? How many are so convinced that this, much like the 90s, was the "end of history" and that our control over our domains is so absolute as to not be contest? I worry for the future, how often the certainty of such leaders in our own society feels more of a liability than an boon.