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Notes -
This seems pretty heavily coloured by recency bias. It was only less than 150 years ago that the modernisers in the ranks of the Qing elite were arguing that China was too frivolous and insufficiently receptive to Western efficiencies. Indeed, as the Self-strengthening movement wore on some of its greatest advocates complained that most of the Chinese bureaucracy were more or less uninterested in modernising the military at all. Chang Chih-Tung wrote in 1898 that ‘Zuo Zongtang established a shipyard near Fuzhou… Shen Baozhen set up the shipyard administration… Ding Baozhen instituted arsenals to make foreign guns and bullets… current opinion cavilled at every point’ and in consequence ‘their establishments went to waste or operated in a reduced form, none of them could achieve any expansion’, something their licking at the hands of the Japanese had proved in 1895.
Indeed, the controversial Heshang documentary, shown on Chinese television in 1988 argued that Chinese culture was entirely deficient precisely because it privileged tradition and even backwardness instead of the science and progress that they considered to be paramount in the West.
In general I think these sorts of arguments about national character are almost always overwrought and fairly meaningless.
Not to disagree with the overall point, but often the decisions made sense in context, at least in terms of securing power for an individual or tribe. Modernisation would have ceded massive amounts of power to the Han Chinese, something that the Qing were running pretty low on after the Taiping. Resistance to modernisation, iirc, was often as much fear as it was traditionalism.
Anyway, to add onto this.
I think this is understandable when you think about it. China has gone through a period of dynastic collapse, warlordism and anarchy, international war, civil war, and massive civil unrest pretty much one immediately after another, after which there was a blistering pace of market liberalisation under and after Deng Xiaoping.
In fact I would put the direct causative element of this cutthroat-ness to be the latest liberalisation under/after Deng, which is definitely something of an adaptation of Western capitalism, even if you can argue that it’s not directly a Western import. The Chinese had a lot to catch up to in the 1980s.
Perhaps, but worth noting that post-Sino-Japanese war the Guangxu emperor was generally rather reformist, and presumably many of the opponents of the reformers in the civil service were Han.
Yes (and Guangxu was a reformist even before the first sino-japanese war), but Cixi who blocked him had the bulk of the Manchu aristocracy behind her (not to mention the conservative neo-Confucians), and Cixi won. Nor was Cixi necessarily opposed to reform - she didn’t depose Guangxu until 1898, after all - but only that which threatened Manchu power. There were definitely both social and institutional factors to the ineffectiveness of reform in the late Qing era, and the Han themselves were often traditionalist, I don’t mean to downplay that. I just meant that oftentimes being conservative was a pragmatic choice for many elites at the time to try to maintain their grip on whatever power they had.
I tend to think that it was less important at this point, though. By 1898 much/most of the power was held in Han hands, simply because after the Taiping rebellion (a rebellion where the death toll of which would only be surpassed by WW2, and with the Taiping + other rebellions controlling key industrial areas like the Yangtze delta for years) the central government apparatus had bled much power to its Han officials to combat it, many of which were warlords but in name.
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