China's Revolutions in the Modern World

A Brief Interpretive History

Rebecca E. Karl

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788735599
• eBook ISBN: 9781788735605
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

China's emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation's "great rejuvenation," a story narrated as the return of China to its "rightful" place at the center of the world.

In China's Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China's contemporary emergence is best seen not as a "return," but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today's capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China's successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how.

CHAPTER 1

The Taipings

It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire … than on any other political cause that now exists.

—Karl Marx (1853)¹

The War of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a peasant revolutionary war waged against the feudal rule and national oppression of the Qing Dynasty in the middle of the 19th century.

—Mao Zedong (1949)²

In 1850–1851, a group of dispossessed peasants and disappointed scholars banded together in the marginal wild regions of Guangxi Province, in the South of Qing China, under the banner of an idiosyncratic ideology in opposition to local authorities bent on disciplining them. With a leader, Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ—thus the Christian God’s younger son—this unlikely group propelled themselves and their movement, now named the Taipings, from their mountainous redoubt to become one of the major internal threats to the stability of the Qing dynasty in the mid nineteenth century. In the course of fifteen or so years, those who came to identify with the Taipings (whether strongly or loosely) swept north in ever larger and more violent military campaigns, finally to occupy much of the most fertile regions of the South while centering their rule in the old Ming dynastic capital city, Nanjing. Initially, Qing dynastic forces were quite ineffective in quashing what they called a “heterodox rebellion”—that is, one led by a non-Confucian and thus nonorthodox vision of the world. Eventually, however, the Qing was able to organize an effective military strategy to vanquish completely and thoroughly these pretenders to an alternative state and ideological form. By 1865, the Taipings were being systematically wiped out and their movement crushed; with an estimated 50 to 70 million dead at the hands of both sides, the Qing was able to re-establish some form of dynastic and domestic order over a destroyed and depopulated Southern landscape.

The Taiping Revolution (or Rebellion or Uprising or Insurrection) was a cataclysmic disordering of the Qing dynastic imperial world from within.³ It also profoundly unsettled the European world in its apparent demonstration of Chinese revolutionary fervor so soon after the abject defeat of the Qing in the First Opium War (1842), on the one hand, and the 1848 pan-European wave of revolutions, on the other. While any posited direct relationship between Europe’s 1848 and the Taipings must be seen as the result of a profound misrecognition or wishful thinking—Marx’s view notwithstanding—the chronological proximity of the upheavals to one another left a deep impression on anyone who bothered to pay attention. Yet, those who came to call themselves proponents of the taiping (great peace) and who attempted to establish what they called the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom” (1853–1864) were thoroughly products of mid-nineteenth-century southern Chinese conditions.

The initial mass of peasant participants had been displaced from their livelihoods in the decade after the First Opium War, when the geographical center of trade and commerce shifted from Canton (Guangzhou) up the coast toward Shanghai. Meanwhile, the Taiping leaders were mostly failed scholars, having repeatedly tried without success to pass the ever-narrowing funnel of civil service exams required of any educated man who wished to formally serve in the dynastic bureaucracy. Among the leaders and the led alike, many were susceptible—because of personal disappointments, individual intellectual propensities, or crass opportunism—to a number of different readings and interpretations of a variety of sacred texts excavated from China and abroad. These texts were syncretically mixed in a cauldron of social, political, economic, and cultural dislocation that soon lent newly created ideological precepts a social coherence and practical plausibility that found, at least at first, enthusiastic adherents. If, by the end of the revolution, the ideology had been rendered hollow; if, by the end of the revolution, its leaders had been corrupted and discredited; if, by the end of the revolution, its followers were disillusioned and felt trapped; if, by the end of the revolution, the forces of Qing dynastic order and stability proclaimed the righteousness of a sweeping, indiscriminate, and vengeful massacre of every last putative sympathizer … None of this denouement is particularly surprising, even if it was enormously deadly and tragic.

What is surprising, shocking even, is how attractive the Taipings were in the beginning stages of their movement’s development—an attraction that helped propel them from the confines of their intensely local birthplace into an empire-wide movement of social upheaval and ideological contestation. The combination of social and ideological claims allows us to consider the Taipings a modern revolutionary movement. Their process exhibits an important modal characteristic of all modern revolutionary movements in China: it drew upon a wide range of global and domestic textual, practical, and ritual resources to plant itself in Chinese society, thence to offer approaches to social change at an unprecedented depth and breadth. In their very conceptualizations of the world, moreover, the Taipings proposed a rereading of China’s past, present, and possible future in the light of a new form of historicity and temporality. Animated in large part by pre-modern or unmodern peasants and marginalized populations, the Taipings were nevertheless a very modern phenomenon.

Yet, unlike Mao Zedong and generations of Communist Party historians, we should not consider the Taipings the origin of the Chinese Communist Revolution that came to fruition a century later. Despite superficial resemblances—the huge peasant constituency of both revolutions, for example—there is no indication among Taiping texts or practices that there was even an embryonic understanding of class analysis and class struggle, or of socialist productive relations, both of critical importance to the Communist revolutionary movement a century later. Among the Taipings, there was an intense concern with land, its value-producing capacities, and its equitable redistribution; this is not surprising, given that China was at the time a predominantly socially and economically uneven agrarian society. Additionally, among the Taipings there was a concern with proper leadership and military tactics for what would come to be called, a century later, “guerilla” or “asymmetrical” warfare; again, this is to be expected among those who believed dynastic leadership had failed them and who were contending with vastly better armed forces in the service of often-corrupt local and provincial bureaucrats. There was, as well, concern with hierarchies, and with gendered modes of social production and reproduction—the former a feature of many bottom-up movements in China’s past, and the latter perhaps more surprising than otherwise, as it had been foreshadowed in few prior domestic or global social movements. Maybe most intriguingly, there was great concern with what we might want to call, anachronistically, “propaganda” and “cultural information wars.” Indeed, the placards placed in cities under siege by Taiping rebels along the way from their nascent villages to what was to become their final destination of Nanjing display a canny sensibility about the relationship between possibly aggrieved historical experiences of the present and broader textual strategies aimed at mobilizing people into disruptive social activity. The combination of these concerns—the technics as well as the epistemic foundations—is an argument for the modernity of the Taipings as a movement, whose transformative grasp of temporality and historicity was potentially locally and globally world shattering. It is no less, and no more, than this general transformative temporality and historicity that renders the Taipings a recognizable genealogical antecedent to Mao’s Communist Revolution. Any claimed teleological relationship is entirely invented.

The origin story told of the Taipings focuses on the charismatic figure of their leader, Hong Xiuquan, who, in the course of sitting for the provincial bureaucratic exams in Canton in the mid 1830s, picked up a Christian tract introducing God and Jesus, their sacrifices, and their proposed mode of world salvation. At the time, Christian missionaries were circulating illegally in China; however, a short few years later they won the privilege of operating freely, through a legal clause included in the Nanjing Treaty that ended the First Opium War (1842). In Qing China, missionary religious freedom—as with “free trade” more generally—thus grew out of the barrel of imperialist guns. The particular tract Hong picked up happened to be from the hands of a Chinese convert working with the American Congregationalist Edwin Stevens from the Seamen’s Friend Society. The tract was entitled “Good Words for Exhorting the Age.” Hong was not immediately struck with religious fervor. Yet after several more exam disappointments over the course of a decade or so, Hong apparently turned to the Christian texts, which helped explain his now-incoherent experience of his world: though highly educated, he was unable to pass the exams that would lend him social and cultural legitimacy; unemployed, he was unable to sustain himself or bring credit to his family. Through his reading of these accidentally obtained texts, Hong embraced the story of Jesus’s sacrifice. He began further study with the American Southern Baptist Isaacher Roberts, who encouraged him to defy local authorities and oppose traditional ancestor worship, among other prevalent social rituals.

By the mid 1840s, Hong was driven out of his hometown for his unorthodox behaviors—smashing ancestor tablets among them. He left the cities, linked up with some desperados in the mountains of Guangxi, and began to formulate a new type of ideological and conceptual understanding of the world, now informed by a sense of monotheistic justice and righteousness against apostate, evil dynastic authorities and polytheistic beliefs. Leading the “Society of God Worshippers,” Hong declared himself Jesus’s younger brother, the designated spokesperson for the one true God, sent to China to save the Chinese and the world from heathenism, the devil’s depredations, and God’s vengeful wrath. As countless scholars have shown, the belief system informing Hong’s initial movement, a bit incoherent from the get-go, quickly got further muddled by the necessity to include more people in its leadership structures as a tool of social mobilization and cohesion. Monotheism, while retained as an ultimate principle, was stretched thin as different people came to claim the ability to channel and speak of and to God or Jesus, and as different leaders came to hold and wield power through their claimed channeling capacities. In the very beginning, however, Hong Xiuquan was the exclusive conduit of meaning from God/Jesus to his flock of believers.

Through the late 1840s, the movement grew in its backwater locality—Guangxi—where it soon became threatening to local officials, who swooped down upon it to suppress the now-burgeoning number of adherents, most of whom were out-of-work migrants and social marginals: coal miners, itinerant charcoal producers, and former drug runners for the now-displaced Canton-based opium-for-tea dealers who had monopolized trade with the British until the Nanjing Treaty put an end to such monopolies. The proclaiming of the movement as a form of “heterodoxy”—a necessary move by local officials to qualify their ineffective military defenses for coordinated Qing imperial assistance—put Hong on the map as a formal opponent of Qing neo-Confucian orthodoxy; this brought the weight of dynastic ideological censure and military violence upon him and his followers. From the beginning of 1851, when Hong named his band of followers the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping tianguo /

)—where tian (heaven) referred specifically to the Christian God, rather than to the “son of heaven” of Confucian dynastic ritual—the movement gained in strength and credibility as it defeated the first dynastic military foray into the area. Finally ousted from their base in late 1851, the denizens, now swollen in number, began a long trek out of the mountains, heading north along an uncertain path that ultimately led to Nanjing. With news of their military prowess preceding them, the economic and social disorder of southern China, which had fallen into disarray because of long-standing trends now accelerating under the impact of the Nanjing Treaty provisions, helped produce many followers for the Taiping, including a renowned and much-feared all-female military corps composed of fighting Hakka women. The military campaigns through 1852 and 1853 proceeded north along the Yangzi River. With victories, the movement spread.

Meanwhile, ideological texts explaining and lending ideological coherence to the movement were promulgated, promoted, and often posted on placards hung on the walls of the cities under assault. Such texts as the “Taiping Ballad to Save the World” (Taiping jiushi ge /

) were meant to introduce the Taiping worldview while also competing with imperial dynastic classics for the attention and fealty of regular folks as well as of the educated classes. While most of educated society shunned the Taipings, and while Christian missionaries were supportive only until the blasphemous nature of the belief system became clear, those whose fortunes had been frustrated or destroyed by the Qing decline and imperialist assaults were particularly attracted to this new way of seeing the world and the future. At the same time, those in opposition attempted to escape before being swept up in the efforts of what were derisively called the “Yue bandits” to conquer ever-larger territories.⁴ The back-and-forth fighting between the Taipings and the military forces of provincial and dynastic authorities produced spectacular violence and succeeded, ultimately, in depopulating and laying waste to large swaths of the Qing empire’s most populous and economically productive regions.

Taiping leaders—Hong Xiuquan, joined by a few other highly educated men, who would remain close allies until 1856, when internecine battles broke apart any remaining unity—elaborated an exceptionally detailed set of living and production precepts that were to provide guidance and educational materials to the rapidly developing settlements and fighting corps of Taiping rebels and their dependent families. Though never fully implemented, these precepts nevertheless indicate how thoroughly the temporal and the historical were being rethought through new conceptualizations of the ordering of everyday social life and the tasks of the present. In the most abstract terms, general introductory Taiping narratives tell of how God and Jesus came to earth to deliver sacred texts, and/or how Hong Xiuquan went to Heaven to directly discuss with God and Jesus the salvation of China and humankind; later, communication between Hong Xiuquan and God was narrated as having taken place via various outer-body voices. These direct and indirect visitations, and Hong’s own claim to being Jesus’s younger brother, conferred legitimacy upon Hong and gave the movement he led a source of textual and conceptual authority that lay well outside the dynastic order, even as it remained plausible to his followers. The salvation of the Han (Chinese) people from the evildoing of the Manchu Qing Empire—pictured in placards as snake demons—which worked its Satanism through Confucianism, was one major aim of the movement. Thus Confucius, at least in part, was rendered as the Devil in disguise, creating havoc on earth as part of the epic battle between God and Satan for the souls of humankind. And yet, Confucius was also partially redeemable, through the operations of ren (

, benevolence), a key Confucian concept that took on enhanced meaning in the Taiping universe in its relation to Christian compassion. This temporal vision elaborated a global present as an urgent, historically extended and crucial moment of battle between a Heavenly universalism and a people doomed to damnation.

Underscoring this abstract vision, Taiping textbooks, so-called “three-character classics,” were used in elementary schools and other institutions to inculcate the correct political and social attitudes and practices into children and adults. These books drew upon the common form of missionary-disseminated Bible study materials and classical Chinese primers to re-narrate all of history around the Creation, where the coming of Christ also then augurs the arrival of his younger brother, Hong Xiuquan, as savior. Hong’s coming is thus an integral part of the Heavenly story, and the Heavenly story is an integral part of China’s history. In this way, the “universalism” of Christianity, hitherto monopolized through the particular stor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Taipings
• Chapter 2: The Collapse of the Qing and the Republican Revolution
• Chapter 3: The May Fourth Movement (1919) and Cultural Revolution
• Chapter 4: Competing Revolutions in the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937)
• Chapter 5: The 1949 Revolution
• Chapter 6: The Cultural Revolution
• Chapter 7: 1989 and Its Aftermath
• Conclusion: 2019
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index