The orientalist trope of Chinese “stagnation” in the centuries prior to the Opium Wars, seen in contradistinction to the vigorously “progressive” society and culture of the West, has a long pedigree in Euro-American thought. It was an assumption held in common by those two otherwise diverse Victorian ideologues, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, that received academic legitimacy in the work of such mid-twentieth-century sinologists as Karl August Wittfogel, and that has forcefully resurfaced most recently in such popsinology formulations as Alain Peyrefitte's “l'empire immobile.” It even has its counterpart among self-orientalizing Chinese writers such as Chin Kuan-t'ao, author of the 1987 maverick bestseller Hsing-sheng yü wei-chi (Prosperity and crisis), with its pseudoscientific postulation of imperial China's “super-stable” (ch'ao wen-ting) society.

But, as most serious students of the first half of the Ch'ing dynasty would nowadays agree, this complacent characterization of stagnation is simply wrong. The Chinese empire in the era which, in Western history, is often designated “early modern,” underwent sudden and wrenching population growth, dramatic territorial expansion, the transition to a new kind of multiethnic society, a seemingly unprecedented degree of geographical and social mobility (featuring, among other things, pioneering settlement of many new regions and a significant elimination of unfree and debased personal status), rapid commercialization and monetization of the economy (and, with it, new kinds of social displacement and dislocation), and an apparently novel development of both the urban hierarchy and urban culture. The best recent scholarship in China, cognizant of these patterns of change, has sought to reconcile them with older views of the shock of Western-induced modernity.