Chinese Studies Public Lecture

Thursday, Feb 27, 12:00 noon

Tokioka Room (Moore Hall 319)

“New Perspective on Social Protest and Empire-Building in Qing Dynasty China”

Wensheng Wang, Associate Professor, Dept. of History, UHM

The last quarter of the eighteenth century witnessed a crescendo of social protests which rocked the Qing dynasty and engulfed much of the empire. The White Lotus rebellion (1796-1805) and south China piracy (1790s-1810) were merely the climax to this escalating wave of upheavals during the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition. This paper examines these two concomitant events through a new analytical model that I call “all-encompassing contentious crises.” This integrated view of social protest allows us to use a coherent approach to relate seemingly independent contentious events to each other through a common process of conflicts and changes. Furthermore, it provides the prism through which to rediscover self-adjustments and endogenous dynamics that became increasingly overshadowed by Western aggression in the final century of Qing rule.

About the Speaker: Wensheng Wang is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He was a Mellon/ACLS Fellow, and has received major fellowships from the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program and other sources. Prof. Wang’s first book, entitled “White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire,” has just been published by the Harvard University Press. His other publications appear in peer-reviewed journal, edited volume, and encyclopedia. Trained as a historian of late imperial China and East Asia, Prof. Wang’s research interests include empire building, peasant movements, cultural politics, and maritime interactions.

Event Sponsor
Center for Chinese Studies and Confucius Institute at UHM, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-8891, china@hawaii.edu

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