Historians have tended to view the Ch'ing empire's nineteenth-century history as a period of decline. Europeans took concessions and territory. Rebels shattered the peace within. But in the 1800s the Ch'ing empire and China were not yet fully one. If the empire as such was in decline, China, the Han Chinese, their culture and their power, were beginning a period of unprecedented expansion. China had assimilated her Manchu conquerors. To survive the rebellions, the dynasty was forced to break the Manchu bannermen's monopoly of military might and put the command of armies into Han Chinese hands.

In Inner Asia, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the heyday of the Ch'ing order. Here the empire consolidated its earlier military gains, and only in Altishahr did this mean the repeated use of arms. Population pressure in China proper and Han Chinese trade initiatives eroded the dynasty's policy of segregating China from Inner Asia. The erosion was an expression of growing Han Chinese strength. The government had made the first official exceptions to its policy in the 1700s with the colonization of Tsinghai and Zungharia. Gradually it relaxed its efforts to seal off Mongolia and the Manchurian frontier. Segregation came more and more under attack. The ‘statecraft’ scholars Kung Tzu-chen and Wei Yüan both called for the fuller use of Sinkiang to provide land for China's landless Han population. Growing numbers of Han Chinese made their way into Ch'ing Inner Asia, even into strictly closed areas like Heilungkiang and Altishahr. Only central Tibet – remote and uninviting to Chinese settlement – remained untouched by the crescendo of sinicization and Han immigration.

Broad interpretations of late Ch'ing history inevitably revert to the imagery of dynastic decline. Yet a look at some of the political and social detail of the late Ch'ing period will suggest certain limitations of dynastic decline as an integrative concept; and will, perhaps, illuminate some of the elements of long-term social and political change that link the late Ch'ing to the broad trends of China's modern history. Dynastic decline has traditionally implied a loss of moral and administrative vigour among the bureaucracy. However, these phenomena can be understood more easily in the context of the social and political worlds in which bureaucrats had to live, than in the moral categories which adhere to the familiar decline model. Certainly there was rampant corruption throughout the bureaucracy; yet the early nineteenth century also witnessed a surge of concern for institutional reform and national defence among some of China's leading scholars and administrators.

Dynastic decline has been understood as an ebbing of centralized power and its accretion in the hands of regional satraps, a disruption of the balanced tension between state and society. Such a devolution did in some respects occur during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless the Ch'ing institutional format was able, to a surprising degree, to hold China together even in the wake of the century's most destructive civil war, a fact which no doubt ensured that the revolutionary transformations of the twentieth century would take place in a national context, and with the nation's preservation as their primary aim. Thus the degree to which China had achieved national political integration – even in the corrupting patronage systems that pervaded the public life of the scholar elite – must be taken into account as we examine the decline of Ch'ing power since late Ch'ien-lung times.

Three changes occurred in the eighteenth century that set the course of China's subsequent history. The change that has received the most scholarly attention is the solid establishment of Europe's presence. But two other changes may prove to have been of greater significance in the long run. One of these was a doubling of the territorial size of the Chinese empire. The other was a doubling of the Han Chinese population. The interplay of these three factors has set the direction of China's history in modern times.

By the opening decades of the nineteenth century the dimensions of the Middle Kingdom's effective sovereignty were greater than at any time in her history, and China was on the threshold of a political, economic and cultural metamorphosis. This metamorphosis, often seen as ‘modernization’, came not only as the result of the influence exerted, directly and indirectly, by European civilization but also as a result of China's internal social evolution. The indigenous social and economic processes of a demographically and territorially expanded China, no less than pressures from outside, have underlain the modern transformation of Chinese society that is still under way.

Before 1800 the focus of Ch'ing history was on Inner Asia – its conquest, its politics, the swallowing and digesting of immense, culturally diverse areas by a single, increasingly Han Chinese empire. After 1800 that emphasis began to shift to the interior of China proper and to the coast. In the nineteenth century Ch'ing Inner Asia commenced being slowly absorbed into an expanding China and began to come under the influence of Han Chinese culture.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TRADE

The essence of the Canton system by which China's European trade was regulated from 1760 to 1834 was hierarchic subordination: first, of the foreign traders to the licensed Chinese monopolists, known collectively as the ‘Cohong’; and second, of the Cohong members to the imperially-appointed superintendent of maritime customs at Canton, known to Westerners as the ‘Hoppo’. In legal-political terms, power was exerted downward in this hierarchy. The imperial officials at Canton, not only the Hoppo but also the governor of Kwangtung and the governor-general (or ‘viceroy’) of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, issued orders and regulations to the Cohong members and might jail or disgrace them for non-compliance; and they customarily refused any direct contact with the British East India Company's Select Committee at Canton, preferring to transmit orders to them via the hong merchants.

In economic terms, however, power was more equitably distributed because of a discrepancy between the formal Confucian rationale for the Canton system and the real interests of its participants. The system had grown up as an expression of China's traditional effort to achieve stability in foreign relations by permitting a limited trade to those who either presented tribute or were quarantined at entrepôts on the frontier, as the Russians were at Kiakhta (Mai-mai-ch'eng) and the Europeans after 1760 at Canton. In public Ch'ing policy expressions, commercial interests were subordinated to political raisons d'état. But in private, even Ch'ing emperors viewed the Canton trade as an important source of personal profit. Although the Hoppo was mistaken by foreigners for a representative of the Board of Revenue (Hu Pu), he was actually delegated by the Imperial Household (Nei-wu Fu) to transmit as much as 855,000 taels of the annual Canton customs duties to the ruler's privy purse.