The Taiping Rebellion

In the first half of the 19th century, the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, the homeland of the Taiping people, had been beset with accelerating social unrest. After the first Opium War, government prestige declined, and officials lost their capacity to reconcile communal feudings. The greatest among such conflicts was that between the native settlers and the so-called guest settlers, or Hakka, who had migrated to Guangxi and western Guangdong, mainly from eastern Guangdong. The Baishangdi Hui (“God Worshippers’ Society”) was founded by Hong Xiuquan, a fanatic who believed himself a son of God, and his protégé, Feng Yunshan, an able organizer. Their followers included miners, charcoal workers, and poor farmers and laborers in central Guangxi, most of whom were Hakka. In January 1851 a new state named Taiping Tianguo (“Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”) was declared in the district of Guiping in Guangxi, with Hong Xiuquan assuming the title tianwang (“heavenly king”). That September the Taiping shifted their base to the city of Yong’an (present-day Mengshan, Guangxi), where they were besieged by the imperial army until April 1852. At that point they broke the siege and rushed into Hunan. Absorbing some secret-society members and outlaws, they dashed to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, and proceeded along the Yangtze to Nanjing, which they captured in March 1853, renamed Tianjing (“Heavenly Capital”), and made their capital.

The core of the Taiping religion was a monotheism tinged with fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, but it was mixed with a hatred of the Manchu and an intolerance of the Chinese cultural tradition. In the early years of the rebellion, this politico-religious faith sustained the fighting spirit of the Taiping. In the ideal Taiping vision the population was to give all of its belongings to a “general treasury,” which would be shared by all alike. While this extreme egalitarianism was rarely implemented outside the original Hakka core from Guangxi, it probably at times attracted the distressed and lured them to the Taiping cause. The origin of many Taiping religious ideas, morals, and institutions can be traced to China’s Confucian tradition, but the Taiping’s all-out anti-regime struggle, motivated by strong religious beliefs and a common sharing, also had precedents in earlier religious rebellions.

After the Taiping settled in Tianjing (Nanjing), village officials were appointed, and redistribution of farmland was planned in accordance with an idea of primitive communism. But in fact the land reform was impracticable. The village officials’ posts were filled mainly by the former landlords or the clerks of the local governments, and the old order in the countryside was not replaced by a new one that the oppressed people could dominate.

In May 1853 the Taiping sent an expedition to northern China, which reached the neighborhood of Tianjin but finally collapsed during the spring of 1855. After that the Yangtze valley provinces were the main theater of struggle. Of the government armies in those years, the Green Standards were too ill-disciplined, and not much could be expected of the bannermen. The Qing government had no choice but to rely on the local militia forces, such as the “Hunan Braves” (later called the Hunan Army), organized by Zeng Guofan in 1852, and the “Huai Braves” (later called the Huai Army), organized by Li Hongzhang in 1862. These armies were composed of the village farmers, inspired with a strong sense of mission for protecting the Confucian orthodoxy, and were used for wider operations than merely protecting their own villages. The necessary funds for maintaining them were provided initially by local gentry.

The Taiping were gradually beaten down; with the capture of Anqing, the capital of Anhui, in October 1861 by the Hunan Army, the revolutionary cause was doomed. But the fall of Nanjing was accelerated by the cooperation of Chinese mercenaries equipped with Western arms, commanded by an American, Frederick Townsend Ward; a Briton, Charles George Gordon; and others. Nanjing’s fall in July 1864 marked the end of one of the greatest civil wars in world history. The main cause of the Taiping failure was internal strife among the top leaders in Nanjing. Not only did they give themselves over to luxury, but also their energy was exhausted and their leadership lost by an internecine conflict that erupted in 1856. In addition, religious fanaticism, though it inspired the fighters, became a stumbling block that interfered with the rational and elastic attitude necessary to handle delicate military and administrative affairs. The intolerance toward traditional culture alienated the gentry and the people alike. Presumably, the failure of the land-redistribution policy also estranged the landless paupers from the Taiping cause.

The Nian Rebellion

Often in the first half of the 19th century, plundering gangs called nian ravaged northern Anhui, southern Shandong, and southern Henan. In mid-century, however, their activities were suddenly intensified, partly by the addition to their numbers of a great many starving people who had lost their livelihood from repeated floods of the Huang He in the early 1850s and partly because they had become emboldened by the Taiping advance north of the Yangtze. From 1856 to 1859 the Nian leaders consolidated their bases north of the Huai River by winning over the masters of the earth-wall communities, consolidated villages that had been fortified for self-defense against the Taiping. The Nian strategy was to use their powerful cavalry to plunder the outlying areas and carry the loot to their home bases.

Many influential clans, with all their members, joined the Nian cause, and the clan chiefs played an important role among the Nian leaders. Gentry of lower strata also joined the Nian. The greater part of the Nian force consisted of farmers and laborers, although deserters from the government-recruited militias and salt smugglers were important as military experts. The real cause of their strength was supposed to be the people’s support and sympathy for their leaders, but creating a power center proved to be difficult because the Nian’s basic social unit was the earth-wall community, where a powerful master exercised autonomy. In 1856 Zhang Luoxing received the title “lord of the alliance” of the Nian, but he was far too weak to form a center. Imperial pacification was launched by General Senggelinqin, who led a powerful cavalry into the affected area in 1862, but his pursuit was ineffective, and the general himself was killed in Shandong in May 1865. Thus, the last imperial crack unit disappeared. Zeng Guofan succeeded Senggelinqin as general and enforced a policy of detaching the earth-wall masters from their men and of employing the latter as his troops. Finally, Li Hongzhang succeeded Zeng in 1866 and set up encirclement lines along the Huang He and the Grand Canal, using that strategy to destroy the revolts in 1868.