by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright April 2016
This month in class we read a piece on China's "Time of Troubles" during the 1800's when the Qing (Manchu) dynasty faced many big problems and ultimately succumbed to them.
The excerpt we read approached this from a contemporary Chinese point of view. I have previously read a different book on this that took a more holistic point of view, and it is the comparison of those two reads which has sparked this series of thoughts. (Sadly, I can't remember the name of that previous book.)
The British harassment of the Qing to get better trading treaties is high profile in Chinese histories, but the magnitude was small potatoes compared to the magnitude of the Taiping rebellion.
From the class history reading, The History of China, second edition, by David Curtis Wright, in Chapter Five:
o Here is a description of the British force that brought about the Treaty of Nanking. "Eventually a British naval force sailed up the Yangtze River to the city of Nanjing and poised itself to bombard the city if a formal peace agreement were not forthcoming. The thought of this was more than the Qing government could bear, and in August 1841 the Treaty of Nanking was concluded aboard a British ship anchored outside Nanjing."
A fleet of high tech ships. A threat to bombard... that's it? That's all it took to end this war? Compare this to the "Rape of Nanking" that occurred one hundred years later in World War Two when the Japanese captured the city. This was a small potatoes incident.
o Here is a description of the magnitude of Taiping Rebellion. "If the intrusion of the British and other Westerns was China's great external calamity of the nineteenth century, by far its most disastrous internal upheaval was the Taiping Rebellion, a pseudo-Christian uprising that very nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. It was suppressed in 1864 only with the greatest of difficulty, and not before 40 million people had died in what was, and still is, the most cataclysmic civil war in world history."
What is being described here is a million times bigger than the British problems the Qing were facing. This difference in magnitude must be kept in mind.
During the 1700's the Qing had seriously gotten their act together and conquered not only all of Han China, but much of the surrounding landscape as well. In this they surpassed their dynastic predecessors, the Ming.
But they were doing this with the same Agricultural Age technologies the Ming and previous empire builders used, and they faced the same governing problems that faced all large empires based on Agricultural Age technologies -- conquering was not easy, but subsequently ruling what was conquered was even more difficult. For most great military leaders who conquered a far-reaching empire, the empire either vanished with their death or within the death of two leadership successors. Making a long-lasting extensive empire is just as much challenge as making the empire in the first place.
One of the powerful tools in the Agricultural Age governing tool kit for all sizes of government is ritual. The people of the lands will stay relatively peaceful when the rituals employed by the governors are considered impressive.
Ritual comes up in the history of this era when the meetings between the English diplomats and the Chinese emperors are described. What gets described is a series of gaffs on the part of the English. The history book describes these as important, but I wonder if this importance is not due more to the story structure than it is to the real-world circumstances of the time?
What made the 1800's, and the European intervention, different from previous threats to imperial rule was the introduction of new technologies -- the first fruits of the Industrial Revolution. These fruits made huge differences in what was possible in the activities surrounding military, farming and trading lifestyles. The Europeans brought better military hardware which the local governors admired and wanted to acquire. They brought new crops which the local farmers wanted to acquire. The better trans-oceanic ships reduced the costs of bringing in desired trading goods. And later in The Revolution the factories in Europe could produce much cheaper goods, such as textiles, to bring to China.
A high-profile example of bringing in desired trading goods more cheaply is bringing opium from India. This "Opium Epidemic" in Southern China that Chinese histories blame on the British was the namesake for the Opium War of 1839-42.
But there is more going on here than the history book is talking about.
The story in the current history book, like many contemporary versions, blames the introduction and surge in opium use in Southern China on the British and their seeking more trading opportunities in the face of Chinese bureaucratic obstructions.
From the book, "British opium was produced in Bengal and then sold to smugglers who ran the drug into Chinese harbors in small, fast boats under cover of night. Opium flowed into China in insignificant amounts during the eighteenth century, but in the early decades of the nineteenth century the opium habit began taking hold in southern China..."
This makes sense on the history story level, but look deeper and there are some inconsistencies:
o The opium is coming from poppies being grown in Bengal in India. Bengal is not that far from Southern China. It is a many days hike over rugged mountain terrain. (This shortness was emphasized in the World War Two era by the heroic stories of constructing the Burma Road.) This magnitude of hiking isn't much of a challenge for drug smuggling.
o The pleasures of opium were known in the eighteenth century, but the use expanded rapidly in the nineteenth. This means that something changed the demand. It could have been the ease of getting it into Chinese port cities, which would lower cost and increase availability. The book talks about the availability of small fast ships. But the rise in demand could have been triggered by something else as well, such as being part of some larger lifestyle change that was happening in Southern China -- something that was making people more prosperous and more willing to experiment with new ideas for seeking pleasure. This kind of change would make it more equivalent to the perceived rise in drug use in the US starting in the 1960's -- the beginning of the War on Drugs era.
o It is not clear how supplying opium was facilitating purchasing of Chinese goods to take back to Europe. How was one paying for the other? This would take some interesting accounting of a sort that never gets talked about in the history stories.
For all these reasons it is unlikely that opium was playing as big a role in the trade disputes as this history book recounts. As I see it, opium was just a symptom for much deeper and much more extensive social changes that were sweeping Southern China. The Industrial Revolution was starting to swirl through the region... Southern Chinese style.
Unlike the trade disputes with foreigners the Taiping Rebellion was a big affair any way you slice it. It engulfed millions of people -- half of Han China -- and nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. What saved the dynasty was that while there was a lot of homespun vigor behind this protest, it could never connect with an established bureaucracy class and set up a stable government. This was an archetypical peasant uprising: vigorous, but short-lived for lack of leadership that could understand how to manage larger scale, longer term issues.
Here are more details. Let's start by outlining the conventional view.
From the current book, "Overpopulation lead to the disastrous calamity. By the nineteenth century, China's population had grown to unmanageable proportions, and millions of people in the Chinese country-side were facing malnutrition and even starvation. By the 1840s millions of peasants unable to eke out an existence on their tiny plots of land abandoned farming altogether and began to roam the country-side as bandits."
and
"The leading figure in the Taiping Rebellion was Hong Xiuguan, a mentally unstable and intensely imaginative man who was convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He was born to a poor peasant family in southern China's Guangdong province, but it was quickly apparent to Hong's family that he was a bright, precocious boy."
Here is my take: based on this current book, what I remember from the previous book, and my reading between the lines of both.
The rebellion began in Southern China. Some of the root issues were usual ones: the incompetence of a local ruling class that had been installed by a distant government and with time had become corrupt and ineffectual. Some were new: there were new technologies and techniques being introduced to the region as the first winds of the Industrial Revolution blew through the region.
The widespread use of opium can be looked at as a high profile symptom of these technology and social changes. The description of starving peasants roaming the land can describe two things: anytime there is a disruption of the harvest, and the first stages of an industrial revolution installing itself -- in this latter case these wandering peasants are looking for factory jobs.
These winds of social change were bringing prosperity, new kinds of inequality, and strange new ways of doing things. It was a spooky mix for the local traditionalists and their governors who wanted to rule in traditional ways. But there were also a lot of enthusiastic backers of these new ways of doing things. The high profile early backers-of-change were the hardy, independent, frontier people of this region of China. These people started the serious protesting violence that grew into the rebellion.
In a surprise twist this unrest came to be lead by a truly strange-duck character who, in addition to being quite charismatic and clever, declared he was a brother of Jesus and was getting direct guidance from him and the Christian God. The previous book more than the current one explains that this strangeness of the leadership was what put off the support of those establishment types who were also looking to support serious reforms, and this is why the peasant revolt remained peasant-centric.
The more curious question is how such a strange thinker came to be leader? What were his followers thinking that lead them to follow him and not someone else? Why were a bunch of backwoods Chinese peasants interested in Jesus? Strange... most strange... and something that needs more explaining about this event. Putting this in a 2010's United States context, it would be as if a Scientologist suddenly convinced a whole lot of people in The South that by following him and Scientology "The South Would Rise Again".
In the aftermath, as with all social revolutions that produce a lot of violence, there were many unhappy people with bitter feelings on all sides of the contest. In many cases this aftermath leads to yet another round of fighting -- something I call a Bloodletting War because it goes on a long time and in most cases, in retrospect, its important accomplishment seems to be shedding a lot more blood. (The Napoleonic Wars are an exception to this part of the pattern. They got a lot accomplished.)
Another aftermath pattern that is common is a diaspora -- lots of those still-bitter and disgusted people vote with their feet. They head off to new lands and start new lives. This is what happened after the American Civil War -- today we call it settling the Far West. In the case of the Taiping Rebellion the diaspora took hundreds of thousands of Chinese to the realms of Southeast Asia and Western United States -- these were the Chinese who built railroads in America's West.
This current story of 1800's Qing China suffers from following a common pattern in history telling -- picking and choosing to talk about events which are harmonious with contemporary political and social views so history can reinforce opinions about contemporary issues. Another example of this is the current descriptions of the origins of the American Civil War which emphasize slavery as the main cause rather than resting the origin on a big basket of contentious issues that swirled around America's transition into the Industrial Age.
In both of these cases the root cause is not a handful of issues that resonate with current readers, but the multi-faceted whirling and swirling as a society transitions into Industrial Age lifestyles. The reality of what unfolded is much more complex, and as a result much more uncertain, and much more surprising.
And recognizing the complexity makes the story much more useful in using history patterns to forecast the evolution of current events. Being able to grasp the big picture of a historical event is an important skill. It is difficult to do, and not instinctively pleasing, but because of the forecasting value of seeing things in the big picture way, this is what history classes should be emphasizing.
--The End--