continuing with the professor's narrative..

...The destruction of traditional Chinese culture under the impact of Western Civilization was considerably later than the similar destruction of Indian culture by Europeans. This delay arose from the fact that European pressure on India was applied fairly steadily from the early sixteenth century, while in the Far East, in Japan even more completely than in China, this pressure was relaxed from the early seventeenth century for almost two hundred years, to 1794 in the case of China and to 1854 in the case of Japan. As a result, we can see the process by which European culture was able to destroy the traditional native cultures of Asia more clearly in China than almost anywhere else.

The traditional culture of China, as elsewhere in Asia, consisted of a military and bureaucratic hierarchy superimposed on a great mass of hardworking peasantry. It is customary, in studying this subject, to divide this hierarchy into three levels. Politically, these three levels consisted of the imperial authority at the top, an enormous hierarchy of imperial and provincial officials in the middle, and the myriad of semi-patriarchal, semidemocratic local villages at the bottom. Socially, this hierarchy was similarly divided into the ruling class, the gentry, and the peasants. And, economically, there was a parallel division, the uppermost group deriving its incomes as tribute and taxes from its possession of military and political power, while the middle group derived its incomes from economic sources, as interest on loans, rents from lands, and the profits of commercial enterprise, as well as from the salaries, graft, and other emoluments arising from his middle group's control of the bureaucracy. At the bottom the peasantry, which was the only really productive group in the society, derived its incomes from the sweat of its collective brows, and had to survive on what was left to it after a substantial fraction of its product had gone to the two higher groups in the form of rents, taxes, interest, customary bribes (called "squeeze"), and excessive profits on such purchased "necessities" of life as salt, iron, or opium.

Although the peasants were clearly an exploited group in the traditional society of China, this exploitation was impersonal and traditional and this more easily borne shall if it had been personal or arbitrary. In the course of time, a workable system of customary relationships had come into existence among the three levels of society. Each group knew its established relationships with the others, and used those relationships to avoid any sudden or excessive pressures which might disrupt the established patterns of the society. The political and military force of the imperial regime rarely impinged directly on the peasantry, since the bureaucracy intervened between them as a protecting buffer. This buffer followed a pattern of deliberate amorphous inefficiency so that the military and political force from above had been diffused, dispersed, and blunted by the time it reached down to the peasant villages. The bureaucracy followed this pattern because it recognized that the peasantry was the source of its incomes, and it had no desire to create such discontent as would jeopardize the productive process or the payments of rents, taxes, and interest on which it lived. Furthermore, the inefficiency of the system was both customary and deliberate, since it allowed a large portion of the wealth which was being drained from the peasantry to be diverted and diffused among the middle class of gentry before the remnants of it reached the imperial group at the top.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2020/06/part-4-tradegy-hopethe-far-east-to.html