Madam Carstein
Cheerful Middenlander Demoness
- Location
- Middenland
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
Less "failed" and more "didn't bother to", both the queue order and the foot binding ban were supposed to impose a new lifestyle on the conquered people as a sign of their submission, but foot binding only affected women, on a lower social scale than the men forced to wear the queue, so when facing fierce resistance from both facets Dorgon choose to enforce only the queue order rather than both, less risk and the same reward.
I don't think that's incorrect, but I don't think it's the full picture either. I think it's fair to say that a large part of the reason that the ban on footbinding failed is because footbinding was an extremely private practise. The bound women were typically cloistered in their homes with very limited access to the outside world. Whereas men were much more accessible. One behaviour was done more or less exclusively within the privacy of one's home, whereas the other was a public display.
It's also just a lot harder to enforce things in people's homes as opposed to things which are public and difficult to conceal (such as one's hairstyle). I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the eradication of footbinding was something that only happened when the Chinese government had literal inspection teams that would examine women's feet for signs of footbinding.
If you want an example of country that tried the same and succeeded, just cross the Pyrenees. France may look like the model ethnonationalist wet dream but it's mostly on the back of extremely thorough education based destruction of local language. For a long time, speaking local dialects in school was ground for corporal punishment. Speaking your birth language was ground for a caning. In government schools. In a democracy.
Honestly, I don't think the idea of a very strict imposition of an imagined national identity is particularly shocking in the 19th and 20th-century context. The concept of a unified nation with one people has frequently proven detrimental to the rights of minority peoples and their societies.
If anything, various multinational empires actually tended to be more tolerant of minority peoples, but with the very important caveat of "in exchange for loyalty". The Russian Empire gave an extraordinary amount of autonomy and tolerance to the Finnish people... while simultaneously brutally repressing even the slightest expression of nationalism and discontent in Poland.
Why the dramatic difference? One of these peoples had a long history of rebellion (largely in response to the aforementioned brutal repression) and the other didn't.
But at the end of the day, power is something of an arbitrary thing. Whether certain peoples are loyal subjects to be respected or potential threats to be suppressed can be a very arbitrary distinction at times.
Again, there was no concept of Han Chinese until the end of the 19th century. What we now consider "Han Chinese" was a myth made up by those who adopted Western nationalism as a modern ideology to fight against the Manchu government. There was no common language, no common culture, no common belief, the only thing that allowed communication being East Asian Characters.
I do feel the need to add that while it is indisputably true that Chinese intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th century adapted various Western ideologies, it's worth adding that a lot of these adaptions came through the lens of Japan.
So it's not a direct import of ideas from the West to China (since only the most elite people actually had the resources to fund an education in Europe) but rather from the West to Japan, and from Japan to China.
There's definitely an added complication when one considers the presence of Japanese influence in the nationalist and racialist worldviews of Chinese intellectuals of this period. And it goes a long way to explaining the rather bizarre love-hate relationship many of them had with Japan: simultaneously reviling Japan as an imperial power which tormented China and seized its territory, yet also revering it as a model Asian nation which had "modernised" (which in such parlance usually meant Westernised).
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