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Dà Yīn: China's Last Imperial Dynasty

Decline of Qing During the XVIII century, the Great Qīng Empire began to decay from within. Vital infrastructure was neglected as corrupt officials diverted state funds to their estates, while the army withered as its last experienced officers died and their sons became landed gentry no longer training in warfare.

While the Eight Banners had used the latest technology to defeat the well-organized gunpowder armies of the Southern Míng diehards, innovation had slowed to a halt by the Jiāqìng era. From a height of tactical and technological prowess during the times Shùnzhì and Kāngxī, the army and especially the navy became more atrophied and antiquated with each passing decade.

Despite the dynasty's pride in the Ten Great Campaigns of the Qiánlóng Emperor (r. 1735–1796), the Qīng armies became largely ineffective by the end of the 18th century. It took almost ten years and huge financial waste to defeat the badly equipped White Lotus Rebellion (1795–1804), partly by legitimizing militias led by local Hàn Chinese elites. XIX Century Civil Wars The Tàipíng Rebellion (1850–1864), a large-scale uprising that started in southern China, marched within miles of the capital in 1853. The court was forced to let its Hàn governors-general, first led by Zēng Guófān, raise regional armies. This new type of army and leadership defeated the rebels but signaled the end of Manchu dominance of the military establishment.

During the 1840s, the country had been decisively defeated by the British in the First Opium War. Intellectuals suggested more brazenly that the Qīng had lost the favor of heaven. Floods and famine during the early XIX century resulting from poor infrastructure and corruption further reinforced this perception.

As the massive Tàipíng and Niǎnrebellions spread across the south, the banner armies struggled in vain to contain them, and in 1851, the Xiánfēng Emperor finally authorized reformist officials to raise from the provinces affected by rebellion new, experimental groups making use of western techniques and modern technology.

The Yǒng Braves Zēng Guófān's strategy was to rely on local gentries to raise a new type of military organization from those provinces that the Tàipíng rebels directly threatened. This new force became known as the Xiāng Army, named after the Húnán region where it was raised. The Xiāng Army was a hybrid of local militia and a standing army.

The Tuánliàn system is the Chinese term for localised village militias created in the Zhōu period. In May 1645, Míng rebel leader Lǐ Zìchéng was killed by a tuánliàn of local landowners in Húběi province.

During the Jiāqìng reign, with the corrupt and ineffective official military establishment of the Eight Banners and Green Standard Army incapable of curbing the White Lotus Rebellion, the Qīng court began to order local gentry and landowners in all ten provinces to organise tuánliàn for self-defense, with both funding and control in the hands of local gentry and landowners.

It was given professional training, but was paid for out of regional coffers and funds its commanders — mostly members of the Chinese gentry — could muster. The Xiāng Army and its successor, the Huái Army created by Zēng Guófān's colleague and student Lǐ Hóngzhāng, were collectively called the "yǒngyíng" (Brave Camp).

Other yǒngyíng included the Chǔ Army of Zuǒ Zōngtáng, and the Yīn Army of Níng Wěizhé raised from the norther counties of Hénán affected particularly by the Niǎn rebellion. Many of the yǒngyíng commanders gradually became disaffected with the weakness of the Qīng regime and as the wars wore on they found themselves increasingly in control of all local affairs on behalf of the central government.

Aftermath of the Second Opium War During the Second Opium War of the late 1850s, the Eight Banners performed even worse, and it became immediately apparent that only the new armies were having any noticeable effect on the Franco-British advance.

The Tiānjīn Peace gave Europeans unrestricted access to all Chinese ports, preventing the central government from collecting taxes there and unseating its control over the coasts, while Europeans walked Chinese streets unafraid of Chinese law in the foreign quarters. By the end of the war, the yǒngyíng were the only Qīng armies still able to control much of "China proper" as the Manchu and Mongol banner forces had retreated to the north or been destroyed.

Though the rule of the Qīng had effectively been broken by the 1860s (and there were many powerful people in China during the mid XIX century who were dissatisfied with the Qīng's embarrassing ineffectiveness and foreign origin) the Heavenly Kingdom was greatly feared by the gentry, by religious traditionalists, and by capitalists for its abolition of land ownership, alliances with organized crime, ruthlessly enforced moral policies as well as its extraordinarily strange para-Christian religion.

Most people with anything to lose saw rule by the Tàipíng as far, far worse than the Qīng. This was also true of the Niǎn Rebellion that had appeared in the north. While it adopted some White Lotus trappings, it remained largely a loose movement of starving young men forming bandit groups occasionally organized by petty warlords. This gave them their name, which refers to such gangs of brigands.

General of the Yīn Army Níng Wěizhé, in particular, became famous for fighting both the Tàipíng and Niǎn. He had been taken and sold into slavery as a child by criminals who burned his family's estate in 1810, remaining a slave until 1824, when his family regained their estate and managed to find him and buy him back. He fought with great vigor at the head of his new army, eventually becoming commander of the Army Group Jiāngnánand developing an intense rivalry with Zēng Guófān.

As the war wound down in the south he established a base of political and military power in Nánjīng. He gave the city its old name back and pardoned many people who had been imprisoned or exiled by the Tàipíng as well as a network of revolutionary intellectuals that he kept safe from government reprisals. There he concluded that much of the grievance with the Qīng government that had led to the rebellions was justified, and became determined to use the force at his command to rectify the issues of the southern people.

He created a new government in the military district of Army Group Jiāngnán based from Nánjīng. It included a cabinet of reformist scholars and officials who had been demoted or exiled by the Qīng, as well as victims of the Tàipíng, who would form the basis for the early-Yīn Grand Secretariat.

His motto became Chóngjiàn Shùndiān which had two meanings. One to "re-build a levelled imperial domain" which appeased the Qīng he nominally still served, and another to "re-establish the domain of Shùn" referring to his admiration for Lǐ Zìchéng and the ideals of the Shùn Dynasty.

The latter was a message with revolutionary connotations, as Lǐ was officially regarded as a usurper. His opposition to both the abuses of the reactionary and moribund Míng state and the Manchu domination at the same time made him a powerful symbol for Níng's government and for a strengthened, Hàn-ruled China.

From there, he launched expeditions against the Niǎn rebels of the north, and established control over most of the Yellow River basin. He returned many estates to their old owners, while also distributing grain to starving peasants and raiding western-financed banks to start infrastructure works in his domain. He began to redistribute the property of corrupt Manchu absentee landlords, while enforcing a policy of racial integration that was partially successful in reducing spontaneous public massacres of Manchu families.

Open Rebellion In December, 1865, with his army in control of much of the country and the Green Standard forces loyal to him and his coalition, he had his soldiers cut off their queues to show insubordination to the Qīng rulers that had failed them. With this test, numerous Qīng armies and citizens that remained on the fence about the transition of power did the same and joined the cause of the Nánjīng Government.

In April, 1866, with provincial governors now pledging to his side, Níng along with a coalition of other officers broke from the Qīng government, now helpless to stop them. Some of the other generals, armies, and people opposed this and remained loyal to the Qīng.

A major anti-Níng offensive was organized by Sengge Rinchen and Zēng Guófān, but the yǒngyíng commanders loyal to Níng were able to halt it in western Hénán, pushing the Qīng armies north into Mongolia. Many loyalist Green Standard and Banner units regrouped around Běijīng under Zēng's command, managing to hold the region around the city in a stalemate that would last until the 1871 Peace of Cāngzhōu.

With the defeat of the "Bǐngyín Offensive" against him in late 1866 (the year of the fire-tiger) Qīng commanders still resisting in the south widely surrendered and defected to the new government. By this time most of the Hàn gentry and scholar-officials supported the Yīn Army's takeover, which changed little of the real of state of affairs while also establishing Hàn rule over China proper without the upheaval of a working-class revolution.

In that year Níng began to refer to himself by a popular nickname that his associates had given him; the Prince of Yīn. This came from the name of his army, which had developed a firm loyalty to the general. Its soldiers mostly came from Níng's own home country of northern Hénán, where the ancient capital of the Shāng Dynasty was located. Homage to Shāng

An educated man, Níng Wěizhé was an admirer of King Pán Gēng and Tāng the Martial, comparing his efforts to those of the Shāng monarchs as recounted in the Bamboo Annals and the Records of the Grand Historian.

King Tāng was the ruler of a small Xià vassal state called Yīn, and led a rebellion to rectify the people's hardship during the reign of the tyrannical Jié of Xià. This was used to galvanize resistance and encourage a rebellion. Tāng's speech to the nobles from the Records of the Grand Historian made on the eve of his uprising was widely published by the regime, and the Qīng reprisals against civilians were compared with the punitive expedition of King Jié against the state which would become Yīn.

King Pán Gēng's legacy was used to illustrate the virtue of the southern government. The traditional accounts of his life mention his determination in moving the capital from the northern city of Yǎn (near modern Qūfù) to the old city of Bó on the south bank of the Yellow River. This had been the capital of the old vassal state, and he renamed the city Yīn after this state in order to honor his acestors' rebellion against the Xià.

Pán Gēng's purpose in this was to reinstate the old governance of King Tāng and bring new prosperity by moving to the legendary older capital (Bó) from which Tāng ruled, after which the dynasty itself is usually known as the Yīn to historians. This was compared to the Nánjīng Government's use of the southern city as the new capital in opposition to Běijīng.

In panic, defiance, and paranoia, remaining Qīng loyalists sometimes ordered the mass execution of civilians without queues, and some areas experienced depopulation, which inflamed existing ethnic tensions. For the most part, the commanders of the yǒngyíng supported the coup as well, which changed little of the real state of affairs while also establishing Hàn rule over China proper without the upheaval of a working-class revolution.

Jiàntóng Reform

Níng Wěizhé underwent the rites of enthronement as Emperor and Son of Heaven, beginning the era of Jiàntóng ("establishing a system") on the lunar new year of 1867. His new empire was named the Great Yīn, after the name of his army, which was named for the late-period Shāng capital on the south bank of the Yellow River. The army was raised in that country and it was the general's homeland.

Its use signified the throne's intention to initiate a renaissance of pre-Mongol Chinese culture and religion, while also using new techniques of industry and war to restore the power of the empire. It references the feudal ages to help reinforce a Chinese national concept centered on the Yellow River and the south.

His first series of imperial edicts for the time of Jiàntóng are known as the Jǐsì Laws after the sexagenary date of their passage (1869, year of the earth-snake). They introduced widely welcomed as well as controversial reforms. Slavery was abolished alongside familial punishment, the imperial naming taboo was abolished, the civil service examinations were rewritten to incorporate an understanding of modern sciences and techniques of government, land ownership was reformed, and religious freedom was introduced, while banking was centralized.

The Jiàntóng Emperor reorganized the numerous small and irregular armies of his allies into the Huángjūn, or "Yellow Army". After this new unified national military took Tàiyuán in 1870, the government seized many of the Piàohào draft banks to help begin the construction of highways and railroads, and to buy artillery and rifles from the United States and Russia.

Third Opium War and the Jiàntóng Restoration

The same year as the Fall of Tàiyuán, the Huángjūn occupied of the ports of Zhèjiāng, Fújiàn, and Guǎngdōng. The emperor ordered the seizure of the qiánzhuāng banks of the south as well, which were closely connected with the European factories along the coast. Also in this year the imperial government signed a new treaty with the Russian Empire agreeing to hand over claims to central Manchuria and Mongolia.

The new state's confiscation of wealth, its alliance with Russia, and its opium eradication policy was met with hostility by western European powers. This prompted a coalition of Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Japan to declare war on the Great Yīn in support of the Great Qīng, although the French could not participate due to their recent defeat against Prussia.

However, the country was not without foreign support this time. While Britain sent the Royal Navy and marines to Běijīng to protect their unlikely Aisin Gioro allies and hold the southern border in Shāndōng and Shānxī, the Russian Empire brought together forces from Anadyr, Chukotka, Khabarovsk, and Vladivostok to execute an invasion of Manchuria if the British attacked the Yīn.

In 1871, as the Anglo-Spanish forces launched their invasion of Guǎngdōng and Zhèjiāng from the sea and their land campaign across the Tàiháng Mountains, small groups of Russian Army forces fought their way into central Manchuria. While the offensive was very limited due to the distance that had to be traveled, the Qīng/Mongol armies were dedicated wholly to containing the Yīn counterattacks in the south while the Russians were faced with nothing but militias.

By the spring of 1872, the Russians had reached Harbin, while thousands of British casualties were sustained in the Battle of Chángchūn (which was widely photographed at the dawn of modern war journalism) with little gained. Even more deaths occurred in the struggles for Shànghǎi and the Pearl River against the well-trained and enthusiastic volunteer army of the Yīn. The international public began to scrutinize and question the war.

Peace of Cāngzhōu and Normalization

The newly unified German Empire and Kingdom of Italy also sided with Russia and China against Britain and Spain, while the US largely sympathized with the Yīn and did not help the coalition in any substantive way. A truce was declared at the city of Cāngzhōu, and a new treaty was signed with the representatives of the British crown in the foreign legations of Běijīng.

The British agreed to limit the number of troops it stationed to defend the Qīng, while the Russians withdrew from central Manchuria. Both the Huángjūn and the Cossack irregulars met with disaster attacking in the wide Mongolian steppe, and in the east the allied trenches in Bǎodìng county proved impenetrable. As a result of this stalemate, the Yīn Empire agreed to accept Northern Qīng independence.

While neither the Russians nor the Great Yīn could take Běijīng, and the British successfully kept the Russians from controlling Mongolia and central Manchuria, the western powers were forced to recognize the new government of China-proper as an independent nation, while the Yīn and Qīng agreed to recognize one another's sovereignty as the Sòng and Liáo had done in the middle ages.

The defeated powers recognized the right of the Yīn state to regulate and tax the ports, and relinquished claims of sovereignty over them, with the exception of Hong Kong and Macau. These would remain British and Portuguese respectively until they were retroceded to the Federal Republic of China in 1997.

Níng Wěizhé had allied himself from the early days with the religious minorities of the country which were persecuted by the Qīng. He saw parallels with the suppression of Buddhism during the early Middle Ages and with the Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars from the Qín Dynasty.

He tolerated the existence of churches and masjids and the right to worship freely, which earned him the sympathy of international Christian and Muslim communities, many of whom sent money to the Yīn imperial government, and Pope Pius IX condemned the British Empire's war against a free people. The Good Emperor Gientun became a title of endearment for the monarch, and his funeral procession in 1881 was observed by many international dignitaries.

With this treaty, the rule of China's last imperial dynasty was solidified, and it would last until 1945, when the Zhēnshèng Emperor was deposed along with the Grand Secretariat by the US-Japanese occupation forces after the end of the Second World War. The US military intervened in the resulting civil war, yielding the modern republic ruling in the east and south, while the Northern Qīng which had been occupied by the Yīn in 1933 would be incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Manchu-Mongol SFSR in 1947.

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"High Yīn" Epoch of Lóngsháo and Hóngyuán

In 1878, the US president arbitrated in favor of China in its dispute with Japan over the Liúqiú Archipelago and the Yellow Army was able to establish authority on the islands by 1880. The following year, the Great Yīn went to war against the Píngnán Republic, using muslim commanders like Mǎ Rúlóng to gain the loyalty of the people and reincorporate Yúnnán Province. The Jiàntóng Emperor died in 1881, leaving the state to his eldest son Níng Jūyì, who took the throne with the era of Lóngsháo (thriving harmony), but died a few years later in 1884 without leaving an heir.

The Lóngsháo Emperor left the throne to one of his nephews, Shūlún, who became the Hóngyuán Emperor (vast universality). Known in death as Emperor Huīzōng of Yīn, the young man took power under the influence of the Jiàntóng Emperor's widow, the Grand Empress Dowager Jìngcí. She is alleged to have had her son the Lóngsháo Emperor pressured by threats to make her grandson the crown prince so that she could control him when he reigned. There are even rumors to this day that she had the emperor poisoned for his modernist stance.

However, the Grand Empress Dowager died soon after the young Hóngyuán Emperor reached majority in 1893. He hated Jìngcí, and began to sideline her conservative Confucian Party while pursuing ambitious projects of industrialization and liberalization in collaboration with the Modernist Party. Allying with the growing bourgeoisie, he launched more reforms to the bureaucracy at the urging of a new generation of officials educated in western ideas, while also engaging in expansionist foreign policy aimed at strengthening the empire's position.

In 1891, the Chinese Navy briefly took control of Táiwān and dismantled the Formosa Republic, but in 1895, during the early Hóngyuán Era, the Yīn Empire went to war with Japan over control of Korea. The First Sino-Japanese War ended in defeat. Japan occupied Korea but was met with too strong a resistance in Liáodōng to advance any further, while the Chinese Navy was defeated in the Yellow Sea. Japan gained suzerainty over Korea and Táiwān after this.

Following the loss of Korea, the navy launched a coup and the Yīn government underwent a brief civil war that brought the Hóngyuán Constitution in 1898, ending the absolute monarchy and reorganizing the Grand Secretariat into a two-house parliament in a similar combination of the German and British models as had proven successful in Japan following the Meiji reforms.

Greater East Asia War

In 1905, the Yīn, Qīng, and Japanese as a coalition fought a successful war against Russia after the empire invaded Manchuria and Korea in order to construct a railroad. Russia was defeated on land and at sea, and Northern Qīng control in Manchuria and Mongolia was solidified. This resulted in an Anglo-Yīn rapprochement and paved the way for the construction of a modern Chinese navy, the Yellow Fleet.

In 1914, the European powers went to war due to the activation of interconnected alliances, and China fought on the side of the entente along with Qīng and Japan. After the war, Japan was given control of numerous islands in the Pacific, while the Northern Qīng helped to preserve the White Movement in eastern Russia until 1925.

Zhēnshèng Era and Expansionism

In the 1930s, militarists gained control of the newly enthroned Zhēnshèng Emperor with great popular support, sweeping out moderate and socialist parties in the Grand Council and establishing the Jiùguó Zhèngfǔ or "National Salvation Government", ending the alliance with Japan and Britain and withdrawing the country from the League of Nations.

From 1933 to 1936, Great Yīn conquered and occupied the Northern Qīng, splitting off Mongolia and putting it under the Buddhist theocracy of the Bogd Khanate. The Yīn Empire also annexed Běijīng, reverting the city's name to Běipíng as capital of Héběi Province while vassalizing the Aisin Gioro family under Yīn occupation as the sovereigns of a puppet Grand Duchy of Mǎnzhōuguó.

In 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out with the Huángjūn's invasion of Korea. At first, this was met with widespread popular support, but the Chinese occupation quickly alienated the people with the annexation of the peninsula and creation of the Āndōng Province. Koreans were forced to learn Chinese along with other sinification projects, and Korea would prove to be a prototype for other such efforts in China's colonial empire. The Japanese Army was pushed back to a perimeter around Busan. Japanese naval efforts to bypass the Sino-Korean army with a landing at Inchon was thwarted by a Chinese naval victory at the Battle of Huksan and the war at sea swung in China's favor. In 1939, China joined the Axis Powers while the US worked to supply the remnants of the Japanese Navy with ships and oil.

In 1940, following the start of the Second World War, China occupied French Indochina with the approval of the Vichy Government. In 1943, China would annex Việt Nam and Cochinchina, re-creating the "Jiāozhǐ Province". There, the imperial government launched a sinification campaign in education and business similar to that attempted in Korea, placing northern people in positions of power.

The imperial guards of Việt Nam fled to the forested hills where they would engage in a guerrilla war. They were soon joined by thousands of partisan fighters who resisted the Chinese occupation of Southeast Asia. This would be followed by a series of invasions in Singapore and the Dutch East Indies throughout 1940.

That same year, the country invaded Tibet and forced the 13th Dalai Lama to accept Chinese suzerainty under the Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs. This was used by the government to justify a religious cause to the war through the defense of Vajrayana Buddhism. Second Sino-Japanese War At the end of 1940, the Japanese Navy mutinied against the government in the name of the emperor, while the rival national army loyal to the central government marched against them and fighting broke out at the ports. People began to riot, and when Communists launched a Soviet-backed uprising, a full civil war was on. Far-right and left groups fought both one another and the National Diet.

With the Japanese navy defeated and its army expeditionary forces in Korea crushed in Busan by aerial bombing, the Chinese army and navy cooperated and launched a massive invasion of the Japanese Home Islands via Korea that occupied most of the Yīn imperial government's attention for the rest of the Second World War.

The islands were gradually absorbed by the combined Sino-Korean army, and the overwhelming force of the unexpected invasion left only pockets of resistance in the mountains. The Japanese government-in-exile continued to control the IJN and cooperated with the Allies in fighting the Chinese Yellow Navy in the Coral Sea as Sino-American relations strained to the breaking point. The Jiùguó Zhèngfǔ militarist government declared its mission of establishing Chinese dominance over a circle of East Asian nations as had been the case during the Míng period. In early 1941, as war loomed with the US, a system of state-sponsored Chinese folk religion was made the official state religion alongside Buddhism and Daoism. Hinduism, Christianity, Shinto, and Islam were suppressed and targeted as foreign elements, repudiating the tolerant legacy of the Jiàntóng Era. Just before the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, occupied Japan was annexed into China as Rìběn Province. End of the Empire In December, 1941, China launched successful attacks against the US Philippines and the naval base of Pearl Harbor, opening up a massive naval front in the Pacific, contesting the US and Japanese navies with a formidable fleet centered around a corps of aircraft carriers called the Tiānhǎi Zhàntuán (Sky-Sea Battle Group). The US Navy recovered, however, and the country began a gradual push into the West Pacific. The Yellow Army retreated from the Japanese countryside in late 1943, holding only the major cities and transportation routes, while Emperor Showa and the imperial family joined the resistance in 1944, fleeing south by plane to US-occupied Okinawa to lead the government-in-exile. In early 1944, a Chinese invasion of British India would end in defeat and the UK would invade the country via Tibet. That same year, the allied US, Australian, and Japanese fleets had destroyed most of the Yellow Navy and launched a campaign to retake the Japanese Home Islands. There they would find total chaos. Rival warlords were fighting one another in the unoccupied countryside and the civil war continued into the late 40s, but by 1949, the US and Soviet armies had successfully occupied the country and divided it at the 37th parallel. In 1945, the Soviet Union invaded Qīng Manchuria, while all the allied countries engaged in heavy aerial bombing. Vast devastation was incurred when the Royal Air Force bombed Chinese levees and dams on the Yellow River and the Yángzǐ, and famine ensued with the flooding of farmland. The Great Yīn surrendered after the cities of Shàntóu, Xiàmén, and Wēnzhōu were destroyed with nuclear fission bombs by the US Air Force.

#alternate history #taiping rebellion #imperial china #qing dynasty

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