Scholars on both sides of the Pacific are rewriting China's “century of humiliation” from the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. With access to previously unavailable or under-used primary sources and a return to familiar sources with new questions, these scholars now argue that China's wealth and power in the twenty-first century are rooted in the little-appreciated actions and programs of Qing officials and Republican bureaucrats. In Quest for Power, Stephen Halsey focuses on the period of 1850 to 1895, though he does sketch the story to the 1911 Revolution, and highlights Republican-era contributions in his epilogue.

How, Halsey asks, did China avert the colonial fate of so many non-Western polities? The ambitious and persuasive argument is that late-Qing officials like Li Hongzhang—the “Self-strengtheners” in the old historiography—were effectively transforming public finance, military capabilities, and bureaucratic practice. In doing so, Halsey argues, they were creating the “sinews of power,” in John Brewer's evocative phrase, that characterized the “military-fiscal states” of Great Britain, France, and Prussia after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. To these quantitative manifestations of state power, Halsey adds the related innovations in the thought and practice of diplomacy and war. New European conceptions of national sovereignty provided a crucial ideological framework for the formation of military-fiscal states. Halsey argues that these revolutions in European state-making made possible the Western domination of the world in the age of imperialism.

After the shock of the first Opium War of 1839–42, China adopted Western military technology, found new sources of revenue to pay for its military mobilization, and expanded and extended the reach of the state. These interrelated processes made possible a much stronger and better-defended China by the end of the nineteenth century. These material advances, combined with China's spirited defense of, as Halsey puts it, a “constrained sovereignty,” help explain why the European powers could not “carve up China like a melon.” This ideological component is a critical element in Halsey's argument. The West, Li Hongzhang knew, must be countered in action and thought, including a new political vocabulary. The idea of “sovereignty” was introduced by the missionary educator and advisor W. A. P. Martin in his 1863 translation of Henry Wheaton's The Elements of International Law. Halsey argues that China's growing understanding of zizhu zhi quan (sovereignty), shortened in the twentieth century to zhuquan, was at the center of resistance to the West and the transformation of its place in a new world of equal nation-states.

Another key argument is the importance of day-to-day, year-to-year practice in redefining thought. While the Self-strengtheners initially framed their actions with traditional Qing dynasty statecraft (jingshi) ideas in the background, Halsey argues that the process of remaking the worlds of finance, the military, and government along with founding new state-sponsored enterprises such as a steamship company or a telegraph network, created a “new statecraft” conceptually beholden to both the Chinese past and the global present.

By these reformulations, then, Halsey rethinks several generations of scholarship in significant and provocative ways. He has drawn from a vast bibliography, as if he had gathered around him a brain-trust that included, to name just a few, John Fairbank and Teng Ssu-yü, Albert Feuerwerker, Paul Cohen, Philip Kuhn, Kenneth Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong along with John Brewer and C. A. Bayly. That would make for an interesting seminar, but does it lead to a synthetic, coherent, and persuasive book? The answer is yes.

And yet Halsey combines this necessary reliance on his brain-trust with original research at key points, discovering and using both new sources and the work of generations of Chinese scholars. The most important of this research can be found in chapter 3, “Money.”Footnote ¹ Here Halsey brings together the late-Qing official Wu Tingxie's Qing caizheng kaolű (An examination of Qing finance, 1914); Wang Yeh-chien's rice-price series; Luo Yudong's Zhongguo lijin shi (A history of China's lijin [tax], 1936); and Tang Xianglong's 1992 edited volume on the Imperial Maritime Customs Service revenue data to document a crucial set of findings: in inflation-adjusted terms, the government increased both its revenue (300 percent from 1850 to 1911) and its share of total economic output (5–10 percent by the late-Qing New Policies era). In a striking comparison, Halsey finds the state's share in the United States did not reach this level until the New Deal (pp. 93–95, 110). This explains why, even with the new turn-of-the-century burdens of loans and Boxer indemnities, the state could still fund expensive New Policies initiatives. Luo Yudong's findings on the management and operation of the lijin tax bureaus, Halsey further explains, show that this transit tax on commercial goods generated desperately needed revenues and required an extensive sub-county bureaucracy. Scholars of the Republican and PRC eras will know where this significant expansion of Qing state power to rural areas is headed.

Halsey's liberation of late-Qing history from the shackles of both Nationalist and Communist denigrations compels us to rethink China's late nineteenth century. Significant continuities put China's so-far-successful twenty-first-century state in debt to Qing and Republican-era foundations of the fiscal-military state.