It's an interesting topic - but this article is wrong on so many factual counts it's probably not worth bothering with. Here's three of them:
> The British Empire acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a base
Which was then, and had been for some time, a major trade center
> And one's [ an upwardly mobile enterpreneur's ] children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi.
Nope. Succeeding in the examinations meant having been brought up in them, which only aristocratic children were. Though the examination system seemed meritocratic from the outside, in reality it was anything but.
> Perhaps 10 million people, 3% of China's population, died [ during the Taiping rebellion]
Nope, more like 50 million
It's an interesting question why China suddenly fell behind the West after 1700 and this article touches on some of them - the Qing were definitely part of the problem - but it veers off course so often it pretty much becomes worthless.
> The British Empire acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a base
Which was then, and had been for some time, a major trade center
> And one's [ an upwardly mobile enterpreneur's ] children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi.
Nope. Succeeding in the examinations meant having been brought up in them, which only aristocratic children were. Though the examination system seemed meritocratic from the outside, in reality it was anything but.
> Perhaps 10 million people, 3% of China's population, died [ during the Taiping rebellion]
Nope, more like 50 million
It's an interesting question why China suddenly fell behind the West after 1700 and this article touches on some of them - the Qing were definitely part of the problem - but it veers off course so often it pretty much becomes worthless.