WITH AN ESTIMATED 20 to 30 million deaths, the Taiping Rebellion is considered the bloodiest civil war in recorded history. The revolt’s base was the southern Chinese province of Guangxi, where several factors came together. They included discontented, non-Han-Chinese ethnicities that resented what they regarded as the aggressive expansion into their territories of Han Chinese, who strongly discriminated against indigenous peoples. In addition there was social and economic turbulence throughout southern China resulting from the rise of Shanghai, once an utterly insignificant harbour town, at the expense of Canton. The jobless could be won over for revolutionary causes just as easily as the soldiers idled after the Opium War and the inhabitants of riverfront regions were exposed to the depredations both of pirates and the ever-advancing Europeans. The bureaucracy of the faraway Manchu rulers was too corrupt and inefficient to enforce law and order. Underground groups, the best organized of which was the ‘White Lotus’, repeatedly capitalized on this explosive situation. For centuries they had been indoctrinated to take advantage of any conflict among the various ethnicities and any rebellious upheaval they believed suited their purposes. As was the case in previous uprisings, local conflicts and restive populations sparked the Taiping Rebellion. It needed a clever and charismatic leader to expand them into a national movement against the alien Manchurian elite.
Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864) was the man who personified the Taiping Rebellion. He failed several times to pass the exams that gave access to a career in the imperial administration. Given this and what else we know about him, it is tempting to attribute the physical illnesses and mental delusions of his later years to this inability to escape his hardscrabble existence as a teacher for a career of distinction. If we give credence to his reports, during one of his morbid episodes he saw a middle-aged man and a bearded old man on a throne. When a Christian missionary pamphlet later fell into his hands, he recognized the two: God the Son and God the Father. From that moment on he considered himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
Hong Xiuquan’s education allowed him to construct another of the many syncretistic ideologies that Chinese heterodoxy has produced so plentifully until the present day. He blithely melded Christian doctrine with Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist ideas. This seemingly random conflation of religious and political revolutionary thought found its first enthusiastic reception among the Hakka, a widely scattered and therefore defenceless ethnic group that could not – unlike other threatened peoples – form its own militia. Only once the movement turned against the Qing rulers, whom it condemned as diabolical, alien and cruel, did it gain the mass support that would plunge the entire country into turmoil for years and nearly terminate the Manchu Dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century.
In 1853, in a series of merciless campaigns by gigantic armies over enormous distances, the ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’ that Hong Xiuquan had proclaimed two years before took control of Nanjing. The imperial forces suffered one setback after another. When Shanghai appeared threatened in 1860, the British and French saw their own interests at risk. They had nothing to gain from a China ruled by the Taiping. They distrusted the movement’s ideological cocktail of traditional Chinese ideas and Christian elements, and rejected as blasphemous Hong Xiuquan’s portrayal of himself as Jesus’ younger brother. Moreover the rebels’ moral standards were unsuitable for winning allies among the troops in the treaty ports. The Taiping rejected private property. They gave the sexes equal rights while simultaneously demanding their strict separation. They condemned gambling, tobacco, alcohol, polygamy, slavery, prostitution and of course opium, which was why the Europeans had fought China in the first place.
The chaos that was evident throughout the administration of the ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’ also left the Europeans in doubt that a Taiping victory would let them pursue their interests as efficiently as they could under the Qing. The officially neutral British and French therefore intervened in the defence of Shanghai, repulsing the advancing Taiping forces. Expecting little resistance, these had approached in relatively small numbers in any case. The Chinese elites also increasingly used European mercenaries for security.
Flawed strategy, egocentric power struggles among the Taiping commanders, and finally Hong Xiuquan’s political agenda, which proved utterly inadequate to effectively govern the territories he conquered, were the reasons the enormous revolutionary potential that had put huge bodies of men in motion did not suffice to bring the Taiping victory. Once again the Qing bureaucracy, which repeatedly seemed finished during the uprising, managed to stabilize itself. In 1864, the imperial commander Zeng Guofan reported the situation was under control. Some regions remained restive; indeed, the dynasty would never again see a time of complete peace. Most of the blows that set the giant teetering anew were dealt from outside. They further weakened a structure that had already become hollowed out. When the first members of the elite recognized the danger, they declared that ‘The Chinese building of ideas exists in its substance; the Western building of ideas exists in its use.’ Yet the substance they were invoking had largely ceased to exist.
In retrospect, the Taiping Rebellion was shocking evidence of the multiple domestic woes besetting China. It also demonstrated that most of these, if not all, were caused or at least worsened by the conflict with the Europeans. In the course of the Taiping Rebellion revolutionary social, ethnic, military, religious and not least commercial interests soon gave rise to an insoluble jumble of alliances.
Adding to the blows from the Western imperialist powers that the Chinese Empire sustained in quick succession in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Taiping Rebellion was an internal wound that hastened the end of the Manchu Dynasty and thereby the Chinese imperial system as a whole.