>>2703633>That wasn't the real problem.Yes and no. The Qianlong Emperor who ruling through most of the 18th century continued to cap head taxes (started by his predecessor) and refused to conduct a new population census, which would have increased tax revenue from land taxes to catch up up with inflation and massive population growth. In effect, they starved the government of tax revenue (which decreased per capita) and made it more difficult for the state to respond to increasing crises caused by overpopulation and military weakness.
The Qianlong Emperor also froze the amount of government positions which were open to examination while the number of exam sitters grew as the population exploded from 150 million in 1700 to 300 million in 1800. You had more people competing for fewer spots.
>You had to spend years fully memorizing many Confucian books to pass which ultimately had nothing to do with actually running the empire and just encouraged rigid thinking.The knowledge encompassed political philosophy, legal theory, administrative ethics, and so on, so it wasn't entirely useless. It also fostered a shared scholarly and literary culture that allowed the scholar-official caste to act as a coherent unit. But generally, yeah, the retarded Confucian curriculum was too rigid and did not encompass natural sciences and engineering and other shit needed for a modern industrial economy, so it was fundamentally conservative and backwards looking.
>They literally made the test to become a bureaucrat pointlessly complicated.The 18th century saw it increasingly become predictable and there were many guidebooks on how to pass the exams, or people could straight up by pre-written essays to memorize.
>However the testers would then give Manchu people extra pointsQuotas were set aside for Manchu exam-takers, but the Manchu was literally the overlord class, of course they wanted educated Manchu cadres alongside Han officials. Manchu still had to pass the exams though.
>Qing dynasty was also behind the spread of foot binding.uygha wat? The Qing were Manchu, and the Manchu women DID NOT footbind. Footbinding was a HAN practice that originated in the Song dynasty and became widespread in the Ming dynasty. The worst you can say is that the Manchu did not stamp out footbinding out of disgust for the practice, but they let their Han Chinese subjects continue the practice.