Qingliu Dang

Qingliu Dang, group of conservative Chinese officials who advocated a return to traditional Confucian moral principles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement was a reaction against the increasing demands for concessions in China by Western powers. Consisting mainly of young scholars who wrote brilliantly on commemorative themes and were well connected with the centres of power, the Qingliu Dang maintained that weapons were not important if one had proper courage and virtue. As a result, they succeeded in halting the efforts of the “self-strengtheners,” who had begun to introduce Western weapons and technology into China.

The Qingliu party emerged into power during the Ili crisis (1871–81), a dispute over Ili, a territory bordering on Russian Turkistan that is now in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. Using the excuse of a Muslim rebellion in the area, the Russians occupied Ili, but, when confronted with Chinese military force, they signed the Treaty of St. Petersburg (Feb. 24, 1881), under which they returned a portion of the area to China. Encouraged by this success, the Qingliu party insisted that a similar militancy be employed against the French, who were encroaching on what is now Vietnam, at the time China’s largest tributary state in the south. Efforts to appease France were abandoned, and China became embroiled in the Sino-French War (1883–85), but the resulting military setbacks caused the Qingliu to fall from power. The only member of the clique who continued to be influential after the war was the scholar and government official Zhang Zhidong, who later became an advocate of partial Westernization.