Legacy of the Qing dynasty

[2] During the Ming dynasty, the name "China" (中國; 中華) was generally understood to refer to the political realm of the Han Chinese, and this understanding persisted among the Han Chinese into the early Qing dynasty, and the understanding was also shared by Aisin Gioro rulers before the Ming-Qing transition.

Actual independence from the Republic of China was also achieved in 1921, and Mongolia (as a satellite state of the Soviet Union) joined the United Nations in 1961.

[5] The Confucian concept of the dynastic cycle was used by traditional Chinese historiography to organize China's past in terms of consecutive ruling houses that arose and collapsed.

During the Beiyang government period, the textbooks mainly criticized the Qing dynasty's autocratic rule from the "republican" standpoint; during the Nationalist government period however, the textbooks often criticized the ethnic oppression of the Manchu Qing dynasty from the Han standpoint.

[12] On the other hand, scholars like American historian Peter C. Perdue have characterized the Qing as a colonial empire in the same league as the great powers of New Imperialism,[13] while scholars like Yang Nianquan and Wu Qine have argued the characterization of Qing western expansion as "colonization" is an "over-interpretation" and pointed out that Chinese traditional imperialism differed from modern Western colonialism.

[14] The New Qing History is a revisionist historiographical school that emerged in the mid-1990s and emphasizes the particular Manchu character of the dynasty.

[17] The most prominent feature of the studies has been characterised by a renewed interest in the Manchus and their relationship to China and Chinese culture, as well as that of other non-Han groups ruled by Beijing.

As jointly pointed out by Ding Yizhuang and Mark Elliott, the most critical academic interest of these scholars has been to discover the Inner Asian dimension of Qing rule (with an emphasis on the Manchu ethnicity and identity), to better incorporate the use of non-Han historical evidence, especially Manchu-language documents, and to pay additional attention to the greater trends in global history, including attempts to re-examine the Qing history as one of the world empires.

[20] Scholar Ping-ti Ho criticized this new approach for a perceived exaggeration of the dynasty's Manchu character, hewing towards the traditional position of sinicization,[21] while scholars like Zhao Gang and Zhong Han have argued from the evidence (including the use of Manchu-language documents) that the Qing dynasty self-identified as China.

[23] Scholar Yuanchong Wang wrote that the mainstream explorations of the concept of "sinicization" have much focused on the Manchu ethnic identity.

Rather, he used the term "sinicization" in a different sense, in the hope to show how the Manchu regime, instead of the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom or Zhongguo.