The Qing dynasty (1644–1912) was established by conquest and maintained by armed forces. The founding emperors personally organized and led the armies, and the continued cultural and political legitimacy of the dynasty depended on their ability to defend the country from invasion and expand its territory. Military institutions, leadership, and finance were fundamental to the dynasty's initial success and ultimate decay. The early military system centered on the Eight Banners, a hybrid institution that also played social, economic, and political roles.
The use of gunpowder during the High Qing can compete with the three gunpowder empires in western Asia.Millward 2007, p. 95. However, the military technology of the European Industrial Revolution made China's armament and military rapidly obsolete. By the middle of the 18th century, the military of the Qing dynasty numbered over 200,000 bannermen and 600,067 Green Standard troops.
The Qing navy became the largest in East Asia, but its organization and logistics were inadequate, officer training was deficient, and corruption widespread. The Beiyang Fleet was virtually destroyed and the modernized ground forces defeated in the 1895 First Sino-Japanese War. The Qing created a few semi-modernized units, but could not prevent the Eight Nation Alliance from invading China to put down the Boxer Uprising in 1900. A national effort to create a Western-style regular army, the New Army, began in 1901, which included 16 divisions as of 1911. The revolt of a New Army unit in 1911 led to the fall of the dynasty.
History
The Banner system was developed on an informal basis as early as 1601, and formally established in 1615 by the Jurchen chieftain Nurhaci (1559–1626), the retrospectively recognized founder of Great Qing. His son Hong Taiji (1592–1643), who renamed the Jurchens "Manchus", created eight Mongol banners to mirror the Manchu ones and eight "Han-martial" () banners manned by Han troops who surrendered to the Qing Empire before the full-fledged conquest of China proper began in 1644. After 1644, the Ming troops that surrendered to the Qing Empire were integrated into the Green Standard Army, a corps that eventually outnumbered the Banners by three to one.
After the Qing Empire captured Beijing in 1644 and rapidly gained control of large tracts of former Ming territory, the relatively small Banner armies were further augmented by remnants of Ming forces that surrendered to the Qing Empire. Some of these troops were first accepted into the Chinese-martial banners, but after 1645 they were integrated a new military unit called the Green Standard Army, named after the color of their battle pennants. (integration of surrendered Ming troops into Green Standards); (Chinese troops integrated into the Chinese banners in 1644; access restricted starting in 1645). Even though the Manchu banners were the most effective fighting force during the Qing conquest of the Ming, most of the fighting was done by Chinese banners and Green Standard troops, especially in southern China where Manchu cavalry could play less of a role. The banners also performed badly during the revolt of the Three Feudatories that erupted in southern China in 1673. It was regular Chinese troops, albeit led by Manchu and Chinese officers, who helped the Qing Empire to defeat their enemies in 1681 and thus consolidate their control over all of China. Green Standard troops also formed the main personnel of the naval forces that defeated the Southern Ming dynasty resistance in Taiwan.
Manchu imperial princes led the Banners in defeating the Ming armies, but after lasting peace was established starting in 1683, both the Banners and the Green Standard Armies started to lose their efficiency. The Qing Emperor thought that Han Chinese were superior at battling other Han people and so used the Green Standard Army as the dominant and majority army for crushing the rebels, instead of bannermen. In northwestern China against Wang Fuchen, the Qing Empire put bannermen in the rear as reserves while they used Han Chinese Green Standard Army soldiers and Han Chinese generals like Zhang Liangdong, Wang Jinbao, and Zhang Yong as the primary military forces, considering Han troops as better at fighting other Han people, and these Han generals achieved victory over the rebels. Sichuan and southern Shaanxi were retaken by the Han Chinese Green Standard Army under Wang Jinbao and Zhao Liangdong in 1680, with Manchus only participating in dealing with logistics and provisions. 400,000 Green Standard Army soldiers and 150,000 Bannermen served on the Qing side during the war. 213 Han Chinese Banner companies, and 527 companies of Mongol and Manchu Banners were mobilized by the Qing Empire during the revolt. The Qing Empire had the support of the majority of Han Chinese soldiers and Han elite against the Three Feudatories, since they refused to join Wu Sangui in the revolt, while the Eight Banners and Manchu officers fared poorly against Wu Sangui, so the Qing Empire responded with using a massive army of more than 900,000 Han Chinese (non-Banner) instead of the Eight Banners, to fight and crush the Three Feudatories. Wu Sangui's forces were crushed by the Green Standard Army, made out of defected Ming soldiers.
The frontier in the south-west was extended slowly. In 1701, the Qing Empire defeated the Tibetans at the Battle of Dartsedo. The Dzungar Khanate conquered the Uyghurs in the Dzungar conquest of Altishahr and seized control of Tibet. Han Chinese Green Standard Army soldiers and Manchu bannermen were commanded by the Han Chinese General Yue Zhongqi in the Chinese expedition to Tibet in 1720 which expelled the Dzungars from Tibet and placed it under the Qing rule. At multiple places such as Lhasa, Batang, Dartsendo, Lhari, Chamdo, and Litang, Green Standard troops were garrisoned throughout the Dzungar war. Green Standard Army troops and Manchu bannermen were both part of the Qing force who fought in Tibet in the war against the Dzungars. It was said that the Sichuan commander Yue Zhongqi (a descendant of Yue Fei) entered Lhasa first when the 2,000 Green Standard soldiers and 1,000 Manchu soldiers of the "Sichuan route" seized Lhasa. According to Mark C. Elliott, after 1728, the Qing Empire used Green Standard Army troops to man the garrison in Lhasa rather than bannermen. According to Evelyn S. Rawski both Green Standard Army and bannermen made up the Qing garrison in Tibet. According to Sabine Dabringhaus, Green Standard Chinese soldiers numbering more than 1,300 were stationed by the Qing Empire in Tibet to support the 3,000 strong Tibetan army. Garrisoned in cities, soldiers had few occasions to drill. The Qing Empire nonetheless used superior armament and logistics to expand deeply into Inner Asia, defeat the Dzungars in the 1750s, and complete their conquest of Xinjiang. Despite the dynasty's pride in the Ten Great Campaigns of the Qianlong Emperor (1735–1796), the Qing military became largely ineffective by the end of the 18th century. In particular, their Burmese and Vietnmese campaigns, while achieving the Qing's political objective of nominally gaining submissive tributaries, they were essentially military defeats.
It took almost ten years and huge financial waste to defeat the badly equipped White Lotus Rebellion (1795–1804), partly by legitimizing militias led by local Han elites. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), a large-scale uprising that started in southern China, marched to within miles of Beijing in 1853. The Qing court was forced to let its Han governors-general, first led by Zeng Guofan, raise regional armies. This new type of army and leadership defeated the rebels but signaled the end of Manchu dominance of the military establishment.
Nineteenth century
Early during the Taiping Rebellion, the Qing forces suffered a series of disastrous defeats culminating in the loss of the regional capital city of Nanjing in 1853. The rebels massacred the entire Manchu garrison and their families in the city and made it their capital. Shortly thereafter, a Taiping expeditionary force penetrated as far north as the suburbs of Tianjin in what was considered the imperial heartlands. In desperation the Qing court ordered a Chinese mandarin, Zeng Guofan, to organize regional () and village () militias into a standing army called tuanlian to contain the rebellion. Zeng Guofan's strategy was to rely on local gentries to raise a new type of military organization from those provinces that the Taiping rebels directly threatened. This new force became known as the Xiang Army, named after the Hunan region where it was raised. The Xiang Army was a hybrid of local militia and a standing army. It was given professional training, but was paid for out of regional coffers and funds its commanders — mostly members of the Chinese gentry — could muster. The Xiang Army and its successor, the Huai Army, created by Zeng Guofan's colleague and student Li Hongzhang, were collectively called the "Yong Ying" (Brave Camp).
Before forming and commanding the Xiang Army, Zeng Guofan had no military experience. Being a classically educated Mandarin, his blueprint for the Xiang Army was taken from a historical source — the Ming general Qi Jiguang, who, because of the weakness of regular Ming troops, had decided to form his own "private" army to repel raiding Japanese pirates in the mid-16th century. Qi Jiguang's doctrine was based on Neo-Confucian ideas of binding troops' loyalty to their immediate superiors and also to the regions in which they were raised. This initially gave the troops an excellent esprit de corps. Qi Jiguang's army was an ad hoc solution to the specific problem of combating pirates, as was Zeng Guofan's original intention for the Xiang Army, which was raise to eradicate the Taiping rebels. However, circumstances led to the Yongying system becoming a permanent institution within the Qing military, which in the long run created problems of its own for the beleaguered central government.
First, the Yongying system signaled the end of Manchu dominance in the Qing military establishment. Although the Banners and Green Standard armies lingered on as parasites depleting resources, henceforth the Yongying corps became the Qing government's de facto first-line troops. Secondly the Yongying corps were financed through provincial coffers and were led by regional commanders. This devolution of power weakened the central government's grip on the whole country, a weakness further aggravated by foreign powers vying to carve up autonomous colonial territories in different parts of the Qing Empire in the later half of the 19th century. Despite these serious negative effects, the measure was deemed necessary as tax revenue from provinces occupied and threatened by rebels had ceased to reach the cash-strapped central government. Finally, the nature of Yongying command structure fostered nepotism and cronyism amongst its commanders, whom, as they ascended the bureaucratic ranks laid the seeds to the Qing Empire's eventual demise and the outbreak of regional warlordism in China during the first half of the 20th century.
The Qing government's decision to turn the banner troops into a professional force whose every welfare and need was met by state coffers brought wealth, and with it corruption, to the rank and file of the Manchu banners and hastened its decline as a fighting force. Bannermen frequently went into debt as a result of drinking, gambling, and spending time at theaters and brothels, leading to a general ban on theater-going within the Eight Banners.