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MANCHUS IN THE CH'ING DYNASTY Professor S. L. Tikhvinsky recently sent Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i a reprint of his article from the September 1966 issue of Voprpey Iatorii (Problems of History), inscribed "To the Center for Ch'ing Studies, with compliments. " a member of the Society had a short summary of the article made, which is printed herewith. He adds that note 5 on p. 73 of the article reports that a set of collected articles on "Manchu Power in China" is to be put out by the Nauka publishing house in late 1966; in an appendix to the work there will be a bibliography of works on China by Soviet authors from 1958-1965, as a supplement to Skachkov'e bibliography. S. L. Tikhvinsky, "The Rule of the Manchu Ching Dynasty in China, " Voprosy Iatorii. September, 1966. pp. 71-90. Manchu rule held back Chinese development. When the Manchus took over, China was a sovereign state, highly developed for its time; it was a feudal state, albeit upset by internal contradictions and peasant wars. But by the end of the Ch'ing period, China had become a half-feudal half-colonial country, subjected to exploitation and manipulation by the imperialists (who would have taken over the country if it had not been for the struggles among them). There were four stages of Manchu rule: (1) 1644-1683: Manchu invansion and establishment of control in - 15 - areas previously ruled by the Ming. (2)Relative internal stability and aggressive expeditions against the Mongolian Khalkhas, the Russian settlements on the Amur, the Jungar Khanate, Tibet, Eastern Turkestan, Vietnam, Burma, Nepal. This stage was from 1680s to 1770s, (3)Internal rot and weakening of the regime by peasant revolts led by peasant societies and uprisings of non-Han peoples; also period of aggressive acts of the capitalist powers (1770s to the end of the 19th O. (4)Alliance of the feudal-compradore reaction with the imperialists to prolong the life of the Ch'ing; overthrow of the Ch'ing and conversion of China into a colony after the Hsinhai Revolution (1894-5 to 1912). (Now follow four justifications, one from Engels, one from Marx, and two from Lenin.) Chinese historians before 1961 have done a lot of work on nationalism under the Ch'ing. They consider the Manchus to have been very oppressive of national rights because they were backward in economy and culture and weak numerically. The Ch'ing had to team up with feudal elements against the masses of Chinese and non-Hans. They played up the contradictions between nationalities, but even so they fired the flames of nationalism, from the mid- 17th century on. (Cf. Jean Chesneaux, Les Sociétés secretee en Chine. ) The bourgeois scholars of the West, led by the 'leading American - 16 - bourgeois specialist on modem Chinese history J. K. Fairbank, " all have the following mistaken views: they ignore Manchu-Chinese contradictions, they idealize the Manchu rule in China, and the personalities of the various Manchu emperors, and they deny the active role of the peasant uprisings and non-Han uprisings in shattering the bases of Manchu rule before the end of the 1860s. They attempt to underestimate the role of the capitalist powers in preserving Manchu power in the crucial years of the Taiping rebellion and the Boxer rebellion . It's important to keep studying recent Chinese history from the marxist viewpoint. Below we will just reconstruct a general picture of the Manchu government in China. (Here follows a brief review of the origin of the Manchus as a tribe and their conquest of China. There were not more than a hundred thousand of them in 1577, but after the military efforts of Nurhaci they reached 400-500 thousand.) In 1644 they got Peking, partly because of the anti-democratic policies of Chinese feudalists like Wu San-kuei etc. who allied with the Manchus against peasant revolts. This provided the class basis of Ch'ing period. N.B. the ratio of 5:2:1 among Manchus, Chinese and Mongolians in the Grand Secretariat. Later this pattern was varied only insignificantly. Even in the mid19th century under Tseng Kuo-fan and Li Hung...

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