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Historians on the Chinese mainland maintain that the self-strengthening movement became “bankrupt” after the Sino-French War of 1884–1885. Their phraseology is typically value-laden, and contains the usual quotient of exaggeration. Yet these Communist scholars do point to a development in the late Ch'ing period that is usually overlooked by students in the West. During the Sino-French War, French forces had sailed almost at will along the entire coast of the empire, had temporarily occupied a part of Taiwan, and finally had snuffed out the dynasty's last pretensions to sovereignty in Vietnam. In the wake of this conflict, growing threats of Russian and Japanese aggression further raised doubts that the self-strengthening policy was effective as a means of securing the defense of the empire.

The tardy and ineffectual response of China to the Western challenge remains one of the most significant problems confronting historians. This article attempts to shed light on one of the factors that appears to have contributed in some measure to the decline of the Chinese empire in the nineteenth century, viz.,chʻing-i, or literati opinion. An initial section sketches the historical origins ofchʻing-i. Then, I trace the influences thatchʻing-ibrought to bear on the process of policy formation during the early 1880's, when the Chinese empire fought a war with France in a vain attempt to save an imperial tributary from Western domination. Finally, I speculate upon the course the empire might have taken had not the throne—a term that here refers essentially to the Empress Dowager Tzʻu-hsi—had to tack and shift to meet the demands ofchʻing-i.