We now speak of "the end of the Qing," Qīng mò, when speaking of the waning years of the last imperial dynasty. If reforms again fail, might we some day find ourselves speaking of this interim as "the end of the People's Republic," Rénmín Gònghéguó mò?

John Delury:

By the turn of the last century, the Qing Dynasty was like a once great and fierce prize bull that was gushing blood from every limb, having been lanced, stabbed and barbed since the 1830s—when the trouble really became obvious—and was, by the early 1900s, just waiting for the matador to do him in once and for all. The scale and intensity of the Qing’s afflictions in the 19th century are staggering to think back upon: civil disorders such as the Boxers coming after full-scale civil war during the mid-century Taiping rebellion; defeat at sea and on land to the British, French, Japanese, and finally, in 1900, to an eight-nation allied force, resulting in treaties that obliged the Qing to cede territory and pay hundreds of millions in indemnities to its vanquishers; all this, while the economy stagnated, the environment deteriorated, and bureaucracy resisted reform and was riddled with corruption.

Many topics on such a list will ring bells of familiarity with observers of contemporary China, and the renewed interest in the late Qing is of a more than antiquarian nature. But still, the depth of the problems faced by the Qing 100 years ago would seem to outstrip even the more dire diagnoses of today, and the Communist Party under Xi Jinping would appear to have much more formidable resources at its disposal than those the Qing state with Empress Dowager Cixi at the helm could muster. To offer just one example—succession of a paramount ruler was a crippling problem for the Qing from 1860 onwards. The series of weak boy emperors left a vacuum at the top that Cixi could not fill. But the CCP has been moving toward increasingly orderly successions of power, as demonstrated by the relatively smooth ascents of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, and the strong consensus with the Party now around Xi.

Orville is right that the CCP would be wise to study not only the fate of the Soviet Union, which, from a PRC perspective, reformed too fast under Gorbachev, but also the fate of the Qing, which reformed too slow. But they also can take some solace in the likelihood that at this stage at least, given China’s decades of economic dynamism and growing international stature, they are much better placed to take “reform and opening-up” to the next level than were their Qing forebears a century ago.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom:

In recent years, many events in China—and elsewhere—have brought to mind, sometimes in unexpected ways, Chinese events of a century or so ago. For example, even though when Mubarak first fell at the start of the Arab Spring, the obvious China-Egypt analogy seemed to only involve the recent past (Tahrir Square protests seeming similar in some ways to the Tiananmen Square ones of 1989), recent moves by Cairo’s generals have been reminiscent of Chinese events of the start rather than end of the twentieth century. What has been happening in Egypt lately parallels Qing military-official-turned-revolution-backer Yuan Shikai's moves in 1912 to put an end to Sun Yatsen’s very short term as China’s first President.