The Great Upheaval of the Late Qing

The Great Upheaval of the Late Qing is the representative work of Yuan Weishi, professor in the Department of Philosophy at Sun Yat-sen University, on China's modern transformation. First published in 1992 by Haitian Publishing House under the title Trends of Thought and Figures in the Great Upheaval of the Late Qing, it has since been revised and expanded several times and reissued under titles including Empire's Sunset: The Great Upheaval of the Late Qing. The 2014 Thread-Bound Books edition is an expanded version that adds a new chapter, "Two Death Warrants That Buried the Great Qing Empire," written to mark the centenary of the 1911 Revolution; the text is roughly sixty percent longer than the first edition. The book takes the success or failure of China's social transformation as its guiding thread and focuses on the figures and currents of thought from the Opium War to the 1911 Revolution: it seeks the roots of the difficulties of modern transformation in traditional culture and the patriarchal autocratic structure, traces the progression and deviations of the currents of statecraft, self-strengthening, and reform, and analyzes the choices and limitations of Lin Zexu, Guo Songtao, Wei Yuan, Xu Jiyu, Hong Xiuquan and Hong Rengan, Wang Tao, Feng Guifen, Zheng Guanying, Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong, Empress Dowager Cixi, Kang Youwei, and others, with a dedicated chapter on the causes and characteristics of official corruption in the late Qing. The author argues that the key to the late Qing's repeated missed opportunities lay not only in "foreign aggression" but even more in intellectual confinement and institutional obstacles such as government-supervised merchant management, and thus asks: why was an ancient empire unable to complete its turn from tradition to modernity? Grounded in solid historical sources and written with a sharp pen, the book is an important read for understanding late Qing reform and its failure.