I’ll try and provide feedback to posts in Hypothes.is, but the easiest way to address everyone is if I write my own posts, and add them to the blogstream You can even comment in Hypothes.is, or with regular blog comments, although they don’t count for your assignments. Maybe in future I’ll become a total co-learner, but this semester there is just too much going on to do this. If I manage to live up to being a duck, I’ll call it a success.
Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath. (Michael Caine)
Yeah, these are grebes but you get the idea. Source: Giphy
Already in the first week with contents, we had a lot of strong posts! I don’t think I’ll be able to mention them all, so don’t feel bummed if you don’t get a shoutout in this post, plenty of chance still this semester!
Some tips and requests
Before I dive into the content of the posts, just a few “housekeeping items.” Overall, the quality of the content is good to high, but I want us to be persistently high (this is a History course after all!) so here are a few tips:
Great job on providing references. Now take it up a notch, and see if you can provide hyperlinks in your text to additional information, too. That means you’re taking advantage of being on the internet, and shows how you’re using all available means to learn.
If you hesitate to refer the reader for general information to Wikipedia, you can check out Credo Reference, a reference library accessible through Trexler library.
Imagine yourself as the reader of your post, and you’d like to know more about the topic: wouldn’t it be handy if there was a link right there?
Provide a source/credit for the images you use. You can add simply create a hyperlinked caption, that will do, if it leads to the blog post or site you borrow from (e.g. the Wikipedia page about Dorgon, not the .jpeg file on Wikimedia). Again: imagine your reader wants to know more. Create a little rabbit hole for the reader to go down and follow their curiosity.
As we move forward in the semester, try to make connections across the weeks, and across posts: hyperlink to your colleagues’ posts if they made you think about something, or made you (re-)consider an idea or insight you had. It’s the equivalent of saying in a classroom discussion “based on the point made by X”. You don’t always have to agree with each other’s interpretations, but it’s nice to see acknowledged how you’re interacting with each other.
I know you already do this in the comments, but again: notch it up a level, and I think you’ll notice how this enhances your engagement with the material just through sheer curiosity.
Modernity: what about it?
I was heartened to see that so many of you just dove straight into the thorny issue of what modern/modernity is, and when/how it does or does not apply to China.
Emily made the excellent point that it’s one of those things we don’t often think about, but probably should, because it’s a whole lot more complicated when you start looking at it! And compare that with Hector, who always assumed that 1949 was a natural starting point, because that is when the PRC was founded, and the official way history is taught in China. Yet it all depends on how you define it. In the early twentieth century, a Japanese historian of China, named Naitō Konan floated the idea that the Song dynasty (960-1279) already showed signs of early modernity, and some scholars have even tried to look for “shoots” of early capitalism. (Does this make the Mongol Yuan dynasty [1272-1368] post-modern?) The theory is no longer accepted without some serious modifications, but it has led to some niche humor among premodern China historians. Yeah, we know how to have fun.
So brilliant, @James_A_Benn! I am trying to imagine the world in which this is how books about the Chinese middle period looked; and I am also trying to imagine the plot of a the thriller with this title. https://t.co/VQ19eT0mW7
Plenty of others engaged with the issue of modernity, also check out the Hypothes.is comments in our group. Abbey‘s post also tried to see if the rebel Li Zicheng was “modern” – I personally would hesitate, because he was merely replacing the existing power structure with a similar one (king/emperor at the top), and borrowing ideas that had been around since the dawn of time in “China” (whatever that means, see next point), and not a vastly different structure of government and stociety, as we will see the revolutionaries of the late Qing empire call for. But this depends on your definition of modern, and since historians can’t agree, why should we have to?
Ethnicity, and “what is China/Chinese?”
The tensions between Manchu and ethnic Han people may be hard to fathom. We can’t speak of “Chinese” as an ethnic group, because we talk about groups with different language, culture and customs, economic system (sedentary agrarian vs. pastoralist/hunters), and values.
The ethnic Han saw the Manchu as completely different, a “binary opposite”. This explains the fear. In their world-view, the emperor of the Ming was the center of the known world, and outsiders brought tribute of specialist goods to the court in acknowledgement of the superior status of the emperor. The Manchu (or before their rebranding exercise in 1635, the Jurchen) were “barbarians.” An additional issue at play here is the long historian memory of the ethnic Han. The Jurchen had ruled part of what was considered core ethnic Han territory, as the Jin dynasty (r. 1115-1234), the norther counterpart to the southern Song dynasty (1127-1279).
Both these states were conquered by the Mongols, founders of the Yuan dynasty (r. 1271-1368). That conquest also played a role in the way the ethnic Han of the Ming reacted to the Manchu conquest. Anna and Kaitlyn look in their posts at the ethnic aspect of the Manchu conquest. The Song-Yuan transition was a similarly brutal conquest as the Ming-Qing: entire towns were put to the sword; and because the conquest did not entail just a simple transfer of the Mandate of Heaven from one family to another, but to a “barbarian“, it must have felt like the end of times. Many officials of the Song regime felt they were duty bound to remain loyal to the Song regime, to the death. The Manchu conquest was like a bad repeat of history… It was betrayal not only of the Ming dynasty, but of the entire ethnic Han group, all one’s ancestors, and everything one could stand for. (William, this may answer some of the questions you had about the longevity of the Ming resistance!)
There were also posts doing a good job highlighting issues of taxes and government problems, for instance from Tyler, and check out Andrew‘s post for a neat summing up of the issue of Taiwan. We’ll be hearing more about this island as the course progresses.
Well done everyone with coming to terms with a weird semester, in the middle of a pandemic and all of its own stresses, in an asynchronous course, and with a topic that is completely new and alien territory to most of you!
