Copyright informationIntroductionToday's China is perhaps the most rapidly changing society in the world. With double-digit GDP growth during most of the last two decades, its social and cultural fabric has undergone a profound transformation, at a speed unprecedented in world history. Yet just as it was becoming popular with social scientists who hope to glean from China what the new century will look like, traditional forms of collective action began to rise as significant means for the underprivileged to make claims on political authorities. Two leading scholars on modern Chinese contention are surprised to find that "significant strains in contemporary popular protest can be traced back to Imperial and Republican era precedents" (Perry and Selden 2000, 8).One example is the practice of petitioning the central government to attend to local injustices. In Qing times (1644--1911), a common remedy for powerless subjects abused by local officials was to travel all the way to Beijing to appeal to the emperor as their grand patriarch, hoping that he would sympathize with their plight and penalize corrupt local officials. The petition process was often emotionally charged and involved dramatic displays of desolation, such as kneeling upon both knees, collective public weeping, and knocking one's head upon the ground ( koutou). From the 1980s to the 2000s, similar petitions proliferated, as grassroots citizens throughout the People's Republic traveled to Beijing to lodge plaints against tyrannical local officials (Michelson 2007; Minzner 2006; O'Brien and Li 2006). It is not certain whether government officials equate the power center of the Communist state with an emperor, but these petitioners apparently do. They acted in the same way as their imperial predecessors did, by kneeling and weeping in front of central-government offices. This parallelism is so conspicuous that a New York--based human-rights organization noted that"China's petitioning system is a unique cultural and legal tradition with deep historical roots. . . . In China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644--1911), petitioners traveled to Beijing and sometimes waited outside the gates of the emperor's palace on their knees, or tried to intercept imperial processions, to present their appeals. Today, their descendants stage sit-ins in front of Zhongnanhai, the Beijing compound where China's leaders live and work, and try to push their petitions into their limousines. Thousands of others throng Beijing's streets in front of national petitions offices, holding up signs that describe their cases."(Human Rights Watch 2005, 3)This traditionalist, submissive posture toward a supposedly paternalist state is not restricted to protests among less educated citizens. During the 1989 student movement, traditional protest tactics were practiced along with radical antitraditionalist languages and actions. The act of three student representatives presenting a petition letter to the authorities by kneeling in front of the Great Hall of People was one of the most memorable moments of the movement. The moralistic tone taken by the students was more reminiscent of the loyal moralism that scholar-officials employed to constrain the emperor's behavior in imperial times than it was of the liberal ideology of popular sovereignty that the students purported to espouse (Esherick and Wasserstrom 1990; Zhao 2001).Another auspicious example of the revival of traditional forms of Chinese protest is the Falong Gong movement of the 1990s. The movement employs very modern means of mobilization and information dissemination, such as text messaging and Internet Web sites. But its core convictions -- that Falong Gong practitioners can attain invincibility and that the corrupt world will soon be cleansed by horrific disasters and replaced by a happy paradise -- clearly originated with the heterodox Buddhist sects that flourished during the Qing dynasty and intermittently rebelled against the state (Ownby 2008).In the countryside, outbursts of collective violence against tax collectors, enforcers of unpopular policies (such as the one-child policy), and land-appropriating developers are on the rise. These rural unrests are always localistic. They rarely seek to change the larger system; rather, they tend to consider individual or local officials as the alleged sources of injustice. Attacking corrupt cadres or besieging government buildings or officials' residences or vehicles are nearly standard acts of resistance. As a historian of Chinese protests observes, this type of retributive violence, which personalizes injustice, constitutes "the most significant continuity" between today's China and the "peasant troubles linked to the centuries-long preindustrial old world" (Bianco 2001, xv, xvii, 251).To be sure, China is also witnessing the emergence of novel protest forms and strategies. One example is the increasing use of legal means and languages in collective claim making. Another is the increasing prominence of internationally linked NGOs in the organization of protest. The rise of a contentious Internet-based public sphere among technologically savvy youngsters is also impressive (Lee 2007; Yang 2005, 2009). But the rise of these new forms does not mean that we can conveniently dismiss the traditional forms of protest as residue from the past that will automatically fade away. Their noteworthy survival despite the revolutionary ferment of the early twentieth century and the three decades of Maoist efforts to eradicate traditions once and for all suggests that they are far more resilient than commonly supposed. We should, in fact, treat these "traditional" repertoires as constitutive parts of China's "modern" protests. The persistence of traditional protest forms and ideologies is by no means unique to China: religious millenarianism around the world is on the rise, and in Latin America, the structural-adjustment reforms of the 1990s saw the proliferation of food riots, a protest type that was supposed to have gone extinct with the advent of the Industrial Revolution (e.g., Auyero and Moran 2007; Rudes 1980, 33--108; Wickham 2002).This persistence of past protest forms in China and elsewhere undermines the long-standing paradigm through which we have understood the historical rise of modern protest, social movements, and democratic politics. According to this paradigm, most protests and revolts in the premodern world, East and West, were "reactive," "backward looking," and "parochial." These reactive protests invariably aimed to resist change and to protect participants' traditional rights and subsistence from outside and nascent forces such as the centralizing state. In early modern Europe (c. 1600--1800), the irreversible rise of centralized national states and market capitalism fundamentally transformed parochial and reactive protests into cosmopolitan and proactive ones. The proactive protests usually involved cross-regional organizing and demanded new, universalist rights through engaging the state, not resisting it. This transformation heralded the rise of modern social movements and the democratic politics of nineteenth-century Europe. The historical development of protest in non-Western latecomers to "modernization," such as China, is argued to be nothing but a reprise of the European path.Surging traditional protest forms and appeals in today's China raise questions that challenge this historical paradigm. Does Chinese protest manifest a distinct conception of rights, justice, and political authority, one that has persisted from past to present and that diverges from the supposedly "generic" modern protests that originated in Europe? When and how did these distinct features of Chinese protest originate? Is the transformation of a reactive form of protest into a proactive one unidirectional and inevitable? How do the dynamics and trajectory of the long-term historical development of protest in China differ from that of Europe?In this book, I seek to answer these questions by drawing on new historiography, which posits that China's modernity, characterized by political and economic rationalization through state centralization and rise of an empire-wide market, did not begin with its nineteenth-century clash with Western powers, as has been previously supposed, but started earlier and spontaneously, around the sixteenth century. According to this framework, China's "early modernity," which was comparable to but different from European modernity, peaked during the eighteenth-century prosperity and stability of the Qing empire. Many "traditional" practices, institutions, and identities that continue today -- such as lineage organizations and native place--based business networks -- are in fact products of China's early modern development (e.g., Faure 2007; Hamilton 2006; Perdue 2005; Pomeranz 2000; Rawski 2004; Wong 1997; Woodside 2006). As Jonathan Spence once noted: "It is only by starting at this time [c. 1600] that I feel we can get a full sense of how China's current problems have arisen, and of what resources -- intellectual, economic, and emotional -- the Chinese can call upon to solve them" (1990, xx).We shall see in this study that "traditional" protest forms and demands are likewise rooted in China's early modernity. The core of this book will describe the pattern, forms, and appeals of popular protests directed at the state in the heyday of China's early modernity: the mid-Qing period, from 1740 (during the great thrust of state centralization) to 1839 (on the eve of China's clash with Western imperialism, in the Opium War of 1839--1842). By connecting the dynamics of mid-Qing protests as unearthed in this study with those of the seventeenth century and the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as documented extensively in the literature, I sketch the indigenous trajectory of the long-term historical transformation of protest from early modern to modern China. I then compare it with the Western trajectory, which has been erroneously presumed to be universal. I explore how and to what extent these early modern protests are related to large-scale rebellions, which have been more intensively studied (Bernhardt 1992; Bianco 2001; Perry 2002; Robinson 2001; Rowe 2007; Tong 1991). I also investigate how these protest forms survived the collapse of empire in 1911, perpetuated into today's China, and hybridized with Western forms of protest that have been introduced to China since the nineteenth century. Teleological and Eurocentric Views of Protest Most historical studies of protest have been premised on the general view that modernity started with the state centralization and transition to capitalism in sixteenth-century Europe and that modern historical developments outside Europe were only belated replications of Europe's development. This view has been recently criticized as "teleological" and "Eurocentric." Despite these assumptions, this established social historiography of modern protest is still an indispensable and useful conceptual apparatus for our investigation of mid-Qing protests. In this section and the next, I review the major themes of this historiography and its critics, deriving from them the analytic scheme and guiding questions of this study. TeleologyAccording to the classical view, modern protests and social movements, as well as revolutionary and democratic politics, originated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and then spread to the rest of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This view was pioneered by classical sociologists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, who saw the rise of modern protest as part of the unilinear progress of history.In the ending section of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels painstakingly attacked what they called "reactionary socialism," a type of political movement against the capitalist order by the aristocracy and peasants, who struggled to resist change and revive the precapitalist order. Given their conviction about the irreversibility and desirability of social progress, Marx and Engels declared that these backward-looking, "antiquarian" movements, owing to their "total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history" (1972, 354--355), were doomed to fail, while the forward-looking revolutionary movement of the proletarians, who strived to bring about a more egalitarian and productive society, was destined to prevail. Marx's unilinear view is echoed by Max Weber, who discussed in Economy and Society the transformation of popular protest from "resistance to the market," such as food riots throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, to "fight for access to the market," such as protests emerging from wage disputes. To Weber, the latter type of struggles "have been slowly increasing up into modern times" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1946, 185--186).By classifying opposition to the capitalist order into backward-looking and forward-looking movements and suggesting the inevitable evolution from the former to the latter in the "march of history," this Marxian or Weberian view had a significant effect on the historical study of popular protest in the New Social History. This scholarly movement has strived since the 1960s to bring historians' attention to the ordinary people at the bottom of society (see Sewell 2005, 22--80).For example, Eric Hobsbawn (1959) painted in his Primitive Rebels a colorful picture of how banditry, mafias, urban mobs, and millenarian sects in southwest Europe constituted the "pre-historic stage" (10) of modern social movements. To Hobsbawn, the transition of these "archaic," "premature," "inchoate" movements into modern movements such as labor unionism and socialist-party politics was a drawn-out process of evolution through which the primitive rebels, who were "pre-political people who have not yet found . . . a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world" (2), struggled to "adapt to the modern conditions" (8).A similar evolutionary account of protest in terms of the "modernization" of protesters' consciousness can be found in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic essay on the transformation of French peasant protest in the eighteenth century (1976 [1974]). For Le Roy Ladurie, French peasant protest in c. 1675--1788 witnessed a gradual transition from "past-based patterns" of protests in the seventeenth century, when peasants reacted to the newly imposed taxes from the modernizing state and yearned to return to the "good old way" through communal tax riots, to the "futurist patterns" of protest emerging after c. 1750, when peasants asked for a new and more just social order through humble petition to local authorities or the king against the old system of aristocratic seigneurial rights (442). This transition was inevitable and irreversible, as "there had been a modernization -- ideological, cultural and social -- of the peasant . . . [who increasingly] refused to go on living as it had lived in the past. . . . This kind of evolution could lead in no time at all to revolutionary consequences" (437). Hobsbawn and Le Roy Ladurie's delineation of protest transformation from "archaic" to "modern" forms fell far short of offering an explanation for such a transformation. Indeed, they seemed to assume, following in the footsteps of Marx, that this evolution was natural.What is left unexplained in these pioneering works was elaborated in E. P. Thompson's study of the moral economy (1991). According to Thompson, grassroots society in precapitalist England was regulated by a moral economy, which is defined as a set of values and social relations that prioritized reciprocity and subsistence over market exchange and profit making. With the advent of market capitalism in the eighteenth century, local moral economies were disrupted when merchants shipped local grains away to sell them at better prices in distant markets. The subsequent subsistence crisis often unleashed reactions from the masses in the form of violent seizures of grain and attacks on greedy merchants or aloof local authorities. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the state increasingly espoused the market ideology, became further centralized, and cracked down on such food riots relentlessly. Facing ever tougher repression, food riots consequently died out in the course of the nineteenth century. They were replaced by more organized forms of anticapitalist opposition, such as labor unionism and socialist movements, which sought to influence or even control the state in their favor.Thompson, like Marx, Hobsbawn, and Le Roy Ladurie, noted a unidirectional transition from parochial riots against the expanding market and state in the seventeenth century to organized protests or petition that sought to wrest control of the state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thompson went further, linking the transition to the changing characteristics of the state apparatus. His work constitutes a crucial step toward the theoretically rigorous studies of Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, who employ a large-scale survey of changing protest patterns in Western Europe and North America from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century to illuminate the macrohistorical dynamics underlying the unidirectional transformation of protest (Tarrow 1994; Tilly 1978, 1986, 1995).Tilly classified protest repertoires in his earlier works into reactive and proactive categories. While reactive protests aimed to defend preexisting communal rights, proactive protests sought to expand the protesters' rights. Based on his catalogs of protest episodes in early modern France and England, Tilly converges with earlier scholars to observe a unidirectional transition of protest from eighteenth-century reactive violence, such as tax riots, to nineteenth-century proactive action, such as collective petitioning for legislative reforms.Tilly later shifted to a more complicated terminology and characterized the transition as one from parochial, particular, and bifurcated protests to cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous ones (Tilly 1986, 1995). Protests before the late eighteenth century were parochial, as they addressed local issues and expressed localistic identities. They were particular, as most repertoires were restricted to specific issues or localities. They were bifurcated, as protesters resorted to direct violence against local authorities while relying on the patronage of local power holders in making claims on higher-level authorities. In contrast, protests after the turn of the nineteenth century became more cosmopolitan, as protesters expressed more universal identities (e.g., citizens instead of villagers) and made more universalist demands (e.g., rights of political participation). They were modular, as protests converged on a few standard repertoires that transgressed localities and issues. They were autonomous, making their claim on higher authorities without any patronage or mediation of local authorities.Rather than seeing this transition as natural and driven by some endogenous logic of protest, Tarrow and Tilly interpreted it as a function of the rise of market capitalism and the centralization of the national state, two structural processes exogenous to the development of protest. During the initial stage of state centralization, most protesters resisted the new demands imposed by the state, through reactive protests. As political centralization proceeded and appeared to be irrevocable, protesters shifted to engage the state proactively to ensure that it would act in their favor. Moreover, market expansion intensified interactions among people from distant communities, undermining localistic identities and cultivating more universal identities and claims -- as well as standard repertoires of action. Concentration of political power in the national government and its increasing scope of social intervention eroded the relevance of local power holders as targets or patrons of protesters, who increasingly took on higher authorities directly.The different accounts of the historical development of protest in early modern Europe from Marx to Tilly have been criticized indiscriminately as "teleological" (Sewell 1990, 2005). Though all of these accounts agree on the unidirectionality of protest development, lumping them together under the "teleology" label is far from accurate and fair. Teleology refers to the view that the development path of a certain entity and the final destination, or telo s, of such development are predetermined by some inherent, evolutionary logic of the entity and are inevitable. Viewed in this light, the different accounts of the origins of modern protest from Marx to Tilly in fact manifest significant steps away from teleology. Marx's depiction of the transition from reactionary to revolutionary opposition to capitalism as an "inevitable march of history" is the most teleological. But Thompson, Tilly, and Tarrow explained the large-scale replacement of reactive protests by proactive ones in terms of exogenous political-economic changes, that is, the twin rise of market capitalism and the centralized state.To be sure, their account would have implied a secondary teleology had it suggested that state centralization and market expansion, as the sources of the historical transformation of protest patterns, were inevitable and predetermined. But this is not the case. Although Thompson took the rise of market and state as given backgrounds, Tilly did painstakingly explicate the twin rises in his other works. To Tilly, the protracted and costly war-making activities in the particular geopolitical terrain of early modern Europe encouraged European rulers to ally with the mercantile class, who financed the war in exchange for protection. This alliance between war-making states and profit-making capitalists heralded the advancement of centralized political institutions and the market economy (Tilly 1990). In other words, it was Europe's contingent geopolitical constellations that accounted for the unidirectional rise of states and markets, which in turn precipitated the unidirectional transformation of protest patterns there. This account does not hinge on any assumption that this direction is inevitable and universal (Tilly 2006).More recently, cultural studies of protest downplay the role of political-economic processes in the rise of modern protest by looking at how its rise was in fact shaped by cultural changes. Agreeing with Tilly's and others' description of the unidirectional change in Western protest patterns at the turn of the nineteenth century, this literature interpreted this change not as an outcome of state centralization and market expansion but as a consequence of the replacement of corporate and localistic ideologies by new cultural idioms about popular sovereignty, rights, and nationwide collective identity (Chartier 1991; Hung 2009; Sewell 2005, 1990; Steinberg 1999; Young 2006). Despite their different emphases, both culturalist and political-economic theories agree that the unidirectional change in protest patterns in the early modern Western world was not inevitable but was determined by other contingent, exogenous processes.It is therefore not impossible to imagine a non-Western case in which a different geopolitical or cultural context led to a different trajectory of macrohistorical development in protest. Nevertheless, so far few such non-Western cases have been discovered in the literature. The rarity of such cases, as we shall see, is not a function of reality but a manifestation of a problematic and deep-seated assumption that modern political, economic, and cultural developments in non-Western societies are nothing more than replicas of what had already unfolded in the Western world. EurocentrismThe above view of modern world history, criticized recently as being "Eurocentric," can be traced to the eighteenth century, when European philosophers increasingly identified Europe as a uniquely "progressive continent" with the dynamism for change and advancement, while the rest of the world sank in stagnation or decay. In this view, change would not occur spontaneously in the non-Western world until it was introduced directly or indirectly by Europeans. Once historical dynamism was injected from without, the argument goes, those non-Western societies would embark on such unidirectional changes as state centralization, marketization, and cultural modernization by repeating the path that Europe had undertaken spontaneously in an earlier period (Adas 1989; Blaut 1993; Hung 2003; Wolf 1982). Following this logic, transformation of protest patterns in the non-Western world should repeat the Western trajectory as well.This Eurocentric view of non-Western protest was again pioneered by Marx, who saw China's Taiping Revolt, in the 1860s, as the first modern revolution in China's history and one that followed the same dynamics underlying European revolutions in the eighteenth century. He credited British imperialism for making such revolution possible by "[breaking] down the authority of the Emperor and forc[ing] the Celestial Empire into contact with the terrestrial world" after the Opium War, enabling "the finances, the morals, the industry, and political structure of China" to receive "their full development under the English cannon" (Marx 1951, 1).This Eurocentric view was inherited by the modernization paradigm of the postwar social sciences. Though severely critiqued by a new generation of social scientists in the 1960s as being apologetic of imperialism, this view continued to haunt even the most brilliant and critical historical studies of Asian revolts in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, in his iconic study of Southeast Asia's peasant unrest in the colonial period, James Scott discussed how European colonialism shattered the unchanging equilibrium of the indigenous society and ushered in the rise of market capitalism and the centralized colonial state in the early twentieth century. These changes upset the peasants' moral economy, which had been undisturbed until colonization, and urged the peasants to rebel against the colonial order. Their resistance faded out under relentless repression by the colonizers. But it cultivated among the peasants a "dissident subculture" and "alternative moral universe," which became building blocks of the later rise of the communist revolutionary movement (1976, 240). What Scott saw in twentieth-century Vietnam was reminiscent of what Thompson saw in eighteenth-century England. The only difference between the two is that state centralization and market expansion, which were the origins of the resistance, unfolded spontaneously in England, while they were imposed by colonial rule in Southeast Asia two centuries later.Scott's analysis of how market expansion and state making unleashed peasant revolts is accurate and pathbreaking as far as the particular time period under scrutiny is concerned. The analysis, nevertheless, easily could lead us to assume that those peasant revolts were unprecedented and heralded a new era of modernity that should be considered a radical break from a tranquil and resistance-free past. Though Vietnam's precolonial state also taxed the peasants, according to Scott, it did not upset the rural moral economy and generate revolts, as "the ambition of kingly courts far exceeded their grasp . . . [and] their intelligence was limited, their 'bureaucracy' was porous to say the least . . . [and it] was a state with powerful thumbs but no fingers" (Scott 2000, 191). This characterization of Vietnam's precolonial countryside as a harmonious world left alone by the state is surely in discord with more recent findings concerning large-scale peasant revolts precipitated by precolonial state making and commercialization in eighteenth-century Vietnam. The Tayson Movement, in 1771--1802, is one intriguing case (Dutton 2006; Li 1998).In another example, Lucien Bianco documented that modernizing reforms (such as new taxes for new schools and the eradication of opium growing), which the nascent nationalist elite promoted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China in response to imperialist pressure, triggered widespread resistance from peasants. Bianco remarked that China's peasant resistance during the first half of the twentieth century was identical to Europe's reactive violence against centralizing states from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. This time lag was "related to a universal process [of political centralization and industrial revolution] that has been spreading at an unequal pace in different parts of the planet" (2001, xviii). China's early twentieth-century resistances, just like their seventeenth-century European predecessors, were characterized by "the feeble class consciousness of the peasants and the defensive . . . characteristics of their activities" (2001, xiii). Only after 1927, when Westernized communist elites entered the countryside in full force and started to organize the peasants, was this parochial and reactive activism transformed into part of a universalistic and proactive revolutionary movement aspiring to build a new state and society for everyone.In sum, this extension of the historical study of Europe's protests to China and other Asian societies suggests that (1) the unidirectional growth of centralized state power and markets in Asia, as landmarks of modernity, began at the turn of the twentieth century under the pressure of Western imperialism, constituting a replica of earlier Western development as well as a radical break from Asia's stagnant past and (2) that transformation of protest patterns in these societies since the early twentieth century has followed the same unidirectional path that Europe witnessed two centuries earlier.These two assumptions were rejected recently by the literature on global early modernities that unveils the multiple and simultaneous origins of modernity across different Eurasian civilizations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These parallel and independent developments of early modernities are first and foremost the result of a global economic integration following the discovery of the Americas and the subsequent surge in silver circulation and hence expansion of commercial wealth across civilizations. China in Global Early Modernities Since Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, modernity has been defined in the social sciences as a general process in which the parochial and traditional is replaced by the universal and rational (see Habermas 1985). It emerged in nineteenth-century Europe with the replacement of the local subsistence economy with market-oriented mass production, displacements of local patrons by centralized states, and the transition of regional loyalties to national identities grounded on the conception and institution of popular sovereignty. The full-fledged development of modernity in the nineteenth century was preceded by the rise of early modernity, which began with the European colonization of the New World.The colonization process generated a massive inflow of new resources to Europe in c. 1500--1800. While the introduction of New World crops such as maize and sweet potato led to a demographic upswing starting in the sixteenth century, the ample supply of precious metal fueled a price revolution, which in turn triggered the rise of market economies in Western Europe. The competition for access to these new resources exacerbated interstate conflicts, facilitating a centuries-long centralization of state power. Under the sponsorship of the rising bourgeoisie, intellectuals became more independent from courts and churches and increasingly courageous in debating radical ideas. These political, economic, and cultural changes in early modern Europe were the harbingers of the three pillars of modernity in the nineteenth century and onward: industrial capitalism, the nation-state, and democracy.It has long been assumed that the above developments were confined to early modern Europe and that Asia was stagnant during the same period. In the past two decades, a spate of historical studies has challenged this thesis with solid new evidence. These studies reveal that not only Europe but also most other civilizations across the Eurasian continent benefited from the huge supply of New World silver, which flowed substantially to Asia, above all China, as an international currency that European traders used to purchase textiles, ceramics, spices, and the like. Frank (1998) estimates that China absorbed much more American silver than Europe did, making China the "sink of silver" and the center of the global economy in early modern times.The abundance of silver precipitated an inflationary expansion of markets in China. When domestic and international trade blossomed, private merchant networks thrived, productivity surged, and the standard of living improved. Many quantitative and comparative studies of early modern socioeconomic performances converge on the view that China fared better than, or at least no worse than, most Western European economies. The shift to a simple silver standard in taxation and the general expansion of wealth enabled eighteenth-century Qing rulers to strengthen their centralized state power, which became more capable of reaching and delivering public goods to grassroots communities. The twin rises of the centralized state and market economy were in fact universal phenomena seen in most Eurasian civilizations in c. 1600--1800 (Arrighi 2007; Eisenstadt et al. 2001; Eisenstadt 2002; Frank 1998; Goldstone 2002; Hung 2008; Lee and Wang 1999; Lieberman 1999; Perdue 2005; Pomeranz 2000; Rawski 2004; Wong 1997; Woodside 2006; Zelin 2005).Despite the parallelism between East and West, some studies also highlight the key differences in the political-economic trajectories of early modern Europe and China. For example, Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) and Jack Goldstone (2002) argued that toward the end of the eighteenth century, the dynamic economic expansions in China and Western Europe both hit serious ceilings because of mounting ecological constraints. These constraints generated widespread hardship, diminishing revenue of the state and proliferating unrest. What distinguished Western Europe from China was that it managed to transcend this ecological constraint to achieve further political centralization and ignite the Industrial Revolution, while China and most other Asian states plunged into prolonged economic crisis and political disintegration.What enabled Western Europe but not others to overcome the ecological constraint is a topic of intense debate. For Pomeranz, it was Western Europe's direct access to the vast ecological frontier in the New World that set it apart from the rest of Eurasia. For Goldstone, the availability of engineering sciences, which had accidentally taken root in England in the sixteenth century, enabled England to weather the crisis by extracting its coal more efficiently and by boosting labor productivity through the use of machines. Either way, the twin rises of the centralized state and market in Europe perpetuated beyond early modernity into the nineteenth century, ushering in the age of full modernity and constituting a unidirectional trend over the long run. The same twin rises in China, on the contrary, were reversed toward the end of the eighteenth century, constituting a cyclical pattern.In addition to this difference in trajectories, Western Europe and China also differed in the cultural milieus that encompassed the rises of state and market. Delving into the cultural aspects of early modernities, Shumel Eisenstadt and his collaborators (Eisenstadt et al. 2001) see that expanding commercial exchanges, increasing mercantile wealth, and centralizing political processes created new spaces for articulating nonconformist discourses and fostered the rise of large-scale territorial identities. These public spheres and quasi-national identities took diverging institutional forms and generated different cultural outcomes in different parts of Eurasia. For example, salons, as the most prominent form of the public sphere in eighteenth-century France, cultivated the radical universalist conceptions of popular sovereignty and identities of rational subjects, paving the way for the French Revolution (Giesen 2001; cf. Chartier 1991). In contrast, literati networks, which constituted the public sphere in early modern China, were immersed in statecraft, deliberating over pragmatic proposals that could improve the efficacy of the state. In the process, the literati maintained their collectivist, filial loyalty to the throne and repressed any individualist conception of the self (Wakeman 1998).The global triumph of Western modernity in the nineteenth century and beyond never totally displaced the indigenous ideologies and identities that consolidated in the non-Western world during early modern times. The non-Western modules of early modernities were so resilient that many twentieth-century industrial modernities in Asia were indeed hybridizations of Western modernity and indigenous early modernities. One example of such hybridization is modern Japan's "honorific individualism," which was strongly influenced by early modern samurai culture and diverges from Western possessive individualism (Ikegami 1995; cf. Walthall 1986; Berry 2001). In a similar vein, many studies of the centralized paternalist mode of political power, the Confucianist-familial mode of business networks, lineage organizations in South China, and practices of criminal justice attest to the continuity between China's early modern (c. 1600--1850) and modern (1850--present) periods, despite the many twentieth-century transformations (e.g., Faure 2007; Hamilton 2006; Muhlhahn 2009; Walder 1988; Wong 1997). In this light, we can assume that a similar continuity exists in protest patterns as well.This continuity, however, is never positively and rigorously verified, as the literature on China's early modernity is so far reticent about one of the most essential facets of Europe's early modernity: how the popular classes -- as opposed to the elite classes such as French intellectuals and Chinese literati -- increasingly shed their absolute subservience and expressed their claims on authorities through collective action. Popular claim making on power holders through protest is as important as elitist public spheres in early modern times in preparing the groundwork for the revolutionary movements of later periods. The question is as follows: how did the distinct trajectory of early modern state formation and market expansion, as well as the Confucianist orthodoxy circumscribing these processes, shape the forms and appeals of popular protests in early modern China? The Historical and Theoretical Significance of Mid-Qing Protest In this study, I combine the insights from, as well as overcome the limitations of, the theory of protest development and the historiography of early modernities to explicate the changing pattern, forms, and appeals of popular protest in the eighteen predominantly Han Chinese provinces in mid-Qing China from 1740 to 1839. The core questions that I derive from the above two literatures and that guide this study are:1. Given the cyclical rise and fall of centralized state power and market prosperity in early modern China, in contrast to the unidirectional rise in Western Europe, did the historical change in popular protest patterns also follow a cyclical pattern, in contrast to the unidirectional change from reactive and parochial to proactive and universalist protests in Europe?2. How did the specific cultural milieu of Qing China, as dominated by Confucianist ideology, shape the strategies and identities of Chinese protesters in comparison with their European counterparts? What are the historical legacies of these strategies and identities in early modern protests, and how did these legacies help shape the development of social and political movements in twentieth-century China?This study first and foremost fills an important gap in both the historiography of eighteenth-century China at the apogee of its early modernity and the historiography of social unrest in early modern China. The former, while shedding new light on the dynamic development in state institutions, market networks, intellectual discourses, gender relations, etc. (e.g., Mann 1997; Perdue 2005; Pomeranz 2000; Rowe 2001), has been relatively silent on the topic of popular protest. In the meantime, existing historical studies of China's social unrest focus on large-scale peasant rebellions and are seldom interested in the mid-Qing period, when such spectacular upheavals were rare. This study shows that mid-Qing China was not free from social unrest. The plurality of mid-Qing protests, which included demonstrations, riots, and petitions, though less disruptive than large-scale rebellions, were more persistent, innovative, and widespread than previously assumed. They constituted lasting legacies that continue to shape the ideology, strategies, and identities of grassroots collective action in the twentieth century. As far as popular protests in contemporary China are concerned, the legacies of these mid-Qing protests are perhaps more relevant than those of large-scale revolts amid dynastic collapse, as the prosperous market economy and centralized state power of today's China is reminiscent more of mid-Qing China than of the dark days of the late Qing or late Ming period. Though the existing literature of revolutions assumes that large-scale rebellions were fundamentally different from localized protests (Goldstone 1991; Skocpol 1979), I show in this study how mid-Qing protests were connected to a number of rebellions in the era and to the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rebellions and revolutions breaking out in extraordinary circumstances were usually not simply a sudden eruption of discontent out of nowhere but were the development and culmination of popular protest in ordinary times.Second, this study enriches our global-comparative understanding of the dynamics of protest transformation. Mid-Qing China, as we will see in the next chapter, was one of the most politically centralized and commercially advanced states in preindustrial Eurasia. Yet the cyclical pattern of its political-economic development, in contrast to the more unilinear path of Western Europe, was among the most manifest in Asia. Mid-Qing China also experienced the enduring dominance of the conservative Confucianist ideology. This ideology was more distinct and isolated from European influences than were local cultures in other early modern Asian states, such as India, which started to be reshaped after the 1750s by British colonialism, and the Islamic world, which never ceased to intermesh with Europe through the intensive conflicts and exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The general political-economic similarity, coupled with the diverging trajectories of political-economic changes and cultural contrast between China and Europe, makes China a particularly illuminating case for the study of protest transformation under diverse political, economic, and cultural conditions across Eurasia.I choose 1740 as the starting point of my investigation because that year was in the wake of a wave of centralizing political reforms and liberalizing economic reforms of the 1720s and 1730s, under the Yongzheng reign (1723--1735). These reforms ushered in the peak of centralized state power and commercial prosperity in the 1740s and 1750s. They also instituted a centralized system of intelligence collection, rendering the documentation of protest episodes in the central-government archive more reliable and systematic from the 1740s onward. The year 1839 was chosen as the end point as it marks the beginning of the head-on collision between Chinese and Western powers in the Opium War of 1839--1842. By focusing on the hundred years between 1740 and 1839, we can depict the indigenous development of Chinese protest in its full-fledged form prior to its hybridization with Western patterns. Chapter Outline In chapter 1, I outline the trajectory of the rise and decline of centralized state power and commercial prosperity in the mid-Qing period. I also delineate the conservative strain of Confucianism reinstated by the Qing state and how this orthodoxy conceptualized the empire's political hierarchy as a familial one grounded on the principle of filiality from below and paternalist benevolence from above. This orthodoxy not only constrained the empire's subjects but also subjected the emperor to the same rigid moral standard. I show how the moral legitimacy of mid-Qing emperors changed in a U-shaped trajectory under this self-imposed rigid standard. By taking the rhythms of political, economic, and cultural changes together, I partition the mid-Qing period into three subperiods: c. 1740--1759, when both centralized state power and commercial prosperity were at their peaks and the emperor's moral legitimacy was high; c. 1760--1799, when centralized state power unraveled, commercial prosperity continued, and the emperor's moral legitimacy was low; and 1800--1839, when both centralized state power and the market economy were in crisis but the emperor's moral legitimacy revived.Chapter 2 discusses data and methodological issues, followed by a general overview and classification of all documented protests. These episodes were not distributed evenly over time but were clustered in three waves: 1740--1759, 1776--1795, and 1820--1839. These waves of protest correspond to the three political-economic and cultural constellations of the three subperiods discussed in chapter 1.Chapters 3, 4, and 5 discuss the three waves of protest separately by looking at representative cases in great detail. The mid-eighteenth-century wave was composed mainly of state-engaging, or proactive, protests, in which protesters, through the performative expression of filiality toward the authorities, sought to expand their rights to universal care by the paternalist state and their rights to participate in the government's decision-making process. The late eighteenth-century wave, in contrast, saw mainly violent resistance against the state triggered by heightened tax levies and state repression of illicit activities. These state-resisting, or reactive, protests were prone to converging into large-scale uprisings aimed at overthrowing the Qing dynasty, which was deemed to have lost the Mandate of Heaven because of its moral decay. The early nineteenth-century wave was similarly characterized by violent resistance against the state. In this period, however, protesters ceased to be prone to recruitment by large-scale revolt, and they increasingly complemented their resistance against local officials with humble and direct petitions to the emperor, whose moral authority had recovered from its late eighteenth-century decline.The first part of chapter 6 compares the three waves of protest with one another. The comparison shows that while the general political-economic contexts determined whether the protesters were more likely to engage or resist the state, the perceived moral legitimacy of the state delimited how exactly the protesters would engage or resist the state. This part of the chapter also compares the overall trajectory of mid-Qing protests with the contemporaneous Western European trajectory. It shows that the trajectory of protest development is generally shaped by the rhythm of macropolitical-economic change. While a long-term expansion of centralized state power in Europe fostered a unidirectional transition from reactive to proactive protest, the cyclical rise and fall of centralized state power in mid-Qing China entailed first the rise of proactive protests and then a transition back to reactive protests. At the same time, the substantive difference in strategies and identities between Chinese and European protest can be explained by the difference between the persistent hegemony of Confucianist filiality in China and the emergent ideology of popular sovereignty in Europe.The second part of chapter 6 traces the continuities and ruptures between mid-Qing protests and modern protests in the early twentieth century based on the rich secondary literature. It suggests that China's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reactive violence, which had been regarded by Eurocentric views as the starting point of departure from a stagnant antiquity, was in fact the end point of a century-long transformation from proactive to reactive protests in China since the mid-eighteenth century. Despite this transformation, mid-Qing protest repertoires, together with the underlying Confucianist conception of authority, continued to be part of the "symbolic reservoir" among protesters and dissenters throughout the early twentieth century, occasionally reviving in popular protests and sometimes repressed by Westernized revolutionaries. In the epilogue, I extend the analysis in the second part of chapter 6 by reexamining China's contemporary protests, with a focus on the revival of traditionalist repertoires in light of the insights generated by this study....COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Columbia University Press and copyrighted © 2011 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please visit the permissions page on our Web site.