The state barred literati from using the academies and literary societies for explicitly political activities. Scholars in Beijing and in the rich cities of the Yangtze delta turned from politics to the study of texts that marked the empirical school of scholarship (kaozheng xue). Influenced by their knowledge of European mathematics and mathematical astronomy, these scholars laid down new rules for verifying the authenticity of the Classical texts and, by revealing flaws in previously accepted canons, challenged the neo-Confucian orthodoxy. Turning away from the Confucian quest for sagehood, the empirical scholars were increasingly secular and professional in their pursuit of textual studies. Scholarly associations, poetry societies, and academies were the organizational loci for the empirical schools. Great libraries were created, rare texts were reprinted, and compilation projects proliferated, culminating in the great government-sponsored Siku quanshu (1772–82), which undertook to collect for reprinting the best editions of the most important books produced in China, using as selection criteria the methods of the empirical school.

A hallmark of Qing society was the expansion and extension of a national urban culture into various parts of the empire. Urban culture circulated through the market network into the hinterland, as sojourners disseminated culture from localities into the cities and back again. The spread of this culture was also supported by increased functional literacy and the expansion of large-scale printing for commercial and scholarly audiences. A wide variety of written materials were available in market towns and cities—collections of winning examination essays, route books for commercial travelers, religious pamphlets and scriptures, novels, short-story collections, jokebooks, and almanacs. Storytelling, puppet plays, and regional drama in rural and urban places provided yet another mode of cultural dissemination. In China’s cities, sojourning merchants sponsored visits of drama troupes from their own localities, which facilitated the spread of regional drama forms outside their own territories. Drama was the bridge connecting the oral and written realms, the “living classroom” for farmers and laborers who learned about cultural heroes and history through watching plays. The expansion of a national urban culture supported the state’s efforts to systematize and standardize Chinese society.

China’s non-Han minorities found themselves surrounded by an aggressive, expansionist Han Chinese culture during the early Qing. Attempts by the emperors at that time to protect minorities from the Han onslaught were largely unavailing, and some rulers, such as the Yongzheng emperor, actually tried to hasten the assimilation of Indigenous groups into the Chinese order. The Qing categorized the ethnic minorities into two groups: those who were “raw,” or still possessed of their own culture, and those who were “cooked,” or assimilated. The ethnic minorities resisted violently, but they were gradually assimilated or pushed farther south and west during the early Qing.

Trends in the early Qing

The tripling of China’s population from the beginning of the Qing dynasty to the mid-19th century rested on the economic expansion that followed the consolidation of Manchu rule. This population growth has been frequently cited as the major cause of the decline of China in the 19th century. Certainly, by the year 1800 the Qing state’s surpluses—sufficient through the 18th century to pay for numerous military expeditions—were exhausted in the long campaign to quell the White Lotus Rebellion. Whereas fiscal reforms had strengthened the state in the 18th century, fiscal weakness plagued Qing governments thereafter. The vaunted power of the Qing armies also waned after 1800, in part because of new modes of warfare. Increased commercialization had tied more and more Chinese into large market fluctuations. In the 18th century the world market economy into which China was increasingly integrated worked in its favor and stimulated a long period of internal prosperity. But the favorable trend was reversed in the 1820s and ’30s, when rising opium imports altered the net balance of trade against China and ushered in a period of economic depression.