Category Archives: China

Home in a Flash (part 3)

by in China, Fiction, Flash's Stories, Hmmm..., Japan, Luminous Aether | 8 Comments

The Kirin first appears in ancient Chinese texts dating to the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC – 256 BC), where it was known as the “Qilin” and depicted as dragon-like and covered in fire. It’s appearance was considered a good omen and a herald of peace.

In Japan, the Kirin was first mentioned in the “Kojiki” (711 AD), a collection of Japanese myths, legends, and histories. In the Kojiki, it is described as resembling a deer, but with a dragon’s scales, a tail like an ox, a fiery mane, and a single antler or horn.

The Japanese Kirin is seen as a serene being, moving through the world without harm. Consequently, they tend to appear during times of great peace, and only in the domains of wisdom and benevolence. They appear in Japanese carvings and paintings as symbols of peace and of virtuous leaders. And holy images of Kirin can also be found in temples and shrines.

The Kirin watched Santa’s two elves silently. And for several minutes, Flash and Candy Cane just stared back astonished, and not really sure what to do next. Candy Cane thought she saw a slight amusement in the Kirin’s expression, but decided that she must be imagining things. Eventually, the Kirin turned and began to walk away. The two elves followed.

The Kirin led them onto a ledge along a high cliff. Candy Cane looked down and it made her feel dizzy. After that, she kept her eyes focused on the tag on the back of Flash’s inside-out shirt, and followed closely. Eventually, the ledge widened to an amazing sight…

To their right was the entrance to a magnificent sanctuary carved directly into the granite cliff!

“It’s the Kirin’s refuge!” said Flash.

Candy Cane, being the more focused and observant of the pair, pointed toward a figure of a peacefully sitting elf carved into the the stone at the far side of the entrance. “Then why is there an elf?” 

Flash thought for a moment. “I barely passed Elven History. But I think that’s the first chief-bureaucrat of the Unmei no Kuromori… the Black Forest of Destiny.”

“I mostly know about Elf history from Pennsylvania,” replied Candy Cane. “One was famous for hiding magic in the sounds of bells… like cowbells, and bicycle bells… and a big one with a crack in it that nobody rings anymore. Is the first chief-bureaucrat famous for something?”

Flash was looking intently at the carving. “He was supposedly a really good negotiator. There’s a legend about him haggling someone down to zero. ‘I cannot tell a lie. I have nothing in my coin purse.’ ” Flash looked at Candy Cane. “I don’t think it’s a true story. But what if he made a deal with the Kirin?”

“What kind of a deal?”

“This,” said Flash, pointing to the magnificent shrine carved into the side of the mountain. “A safe refuge in exchange for the good fortune, peace, and blessings that come from the Kirin’s presence.”

The Kirin looked directly at Candy Cane, and then turned, walking into entrance of the sanctuary. It was clear that he wanted the elves to follow.

Trailing behind the Kirin into a large room brightened by light let in through an arched window cut into the cliff, the two elves could see the reason for the Kirin’s recent absence. Sitting on the soft, sandy floor were the Kirin’s family… including two young fawns.

Suddenly, a very large crow flew in through the window. Gliding across the room, it circled the group before settling onto Flash’s shoulder. Candy Cane was surprised by its sudden appearance. But Flash didn’t seem to show much concern as the it spoke quietly into her ear.

Flash held out her arm, and the shiny black bird jumped onto it. “Tell my sister not to worry. I have an idea!” And with that, the great bird flew back out the window.

Turning toward Candy Cane, “A karasu… a messenger bird,” said Flash. “My sister sent it. Somehow, Jynx Shadowheart has found the trail toward the mountain. We have to hurry!”

So, What’s the Point?

by in Boundary Behavior, China, Culture, Existentialism, Hmmm..., Identity, Japan, Philosophy, Taiwan | 13 Comments

The One-Thousand “New Taiwan Dollar” is something like a US $20. The most commonly carried banknote in Taiwan, its face isn’t that of a dead-president or some famed character from the past. Rather, it’s the country’s youth looking toward the world. The watermark on the right depicts a girl looking inward through a microscope. And another watermark, not visible to the left, shows an older student looking toward the heavens through a telescope. I think it’s probably one of the most profound, beautiful, and hopeful statements ever made on a piece of currency.

We were heading back to Taipei after having traveled to a traditional Chinese event at a rural Taiwanese “old town”. The journey required about an hour by bus to the commuter-rail stop in Changhua, where we hoped to catch the last train back to the High Speed Rail station in Taichung.

The late afternoon bus was crowded. So I ended up sitting next to an elderly woman while my husband stood a few rows back. But after just a few stops, the woman departed and I slid over toward the window, thinking my husband might be able to join me. However, the stop also served a high school that had just let out a mass of students who were also served by the local commuter systems.

About twenty teenagers piled onto the bus, with two girls perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old pushing back to where I was seated. One of the girls immediately sat down next to me, and rather to my surprise, collapsed onto my shoulder, sound asleep. Angling toward her, I let the girl’s head fall into my arms as I looked up toward her friend, who merely smiled and raised a shoulder.

About ten-minutes on, the girl who was standing prodded her friend awake, and they departed at the stop for another high school where the two were apparently attending evening classes of some sort. This process of shuttling northward migrating students between high schools along the bus’s route continued for many more miles. It was dusk before my husband could slide into the seat next to me.
–

Walking the mile or so from the train station to my place in eastern Tokyo would take me past a local high school. Even late into weeknights, the site would host large groups of students. Sometimes, it would be study teams working on specialized skills such as a foreign language. Other nights would see students practicing physical disciplines such as kendo (Japanese fencing), or judo. Evenings and Saturdays were also the domain of “gakushū juku”, private cram-schools where students prepared for things like college entrance exams.

So, what’s the point of all of this apparently endless schooling?

Westerners see only youth absorbed into a never-ending drudgery of learning and the seemingly overwhelming pressure of keeping up. We see lost freedom and subdued creativity, and wonder what drives such sacrifice… all while signing-off on the $100,000 loan for a Fine Arts degree.

Education is serious business throughout East Asia. Historically, it was seen as a way to obtain meritocratic access to the authority (and power) of Chinese bureaucracy. In Japan, the tradition was applied to the rarefied status of samurai. Seen not only as skilled warriors, they also possessed the social merit of refinement through an education providing the wisdom incumbent to a position of authority. Even today, government jobs in Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan are perceived as high-status positions.

This East Asian expectation that the young must prepare both intellectually and physically to prove themselves worthy of a respectable place in society is still maintained by the sheer inertia of centuries of cultural tradition. It keeps both the physical and bureaucratic infrastructure in place, as well as the societal expectations. And armies of “tiger parents” continue to enforce this ethic that a measure of one’s very worthiness can be found in having developed the skills necessary to assure a prosperous life.

In East Asian culture, the wisdom of knowledge is purpose. And the purpose is to assure prosperity in a communal society where one’s social identity is the product of others’ perceptions. In the West, this is frequently referred to as “face”. In kanji , this is written as, 面子 (Chinese: “miànzǐ”, Japanese: “mentsu”).

As a generalization, East Asian societies are built upon hierarchies based in reputations among social groups. “Face” is consequently central to both an individual’s identity and status. So it’s not a small thing. A person’s ability to prove his-or-her self capable of gaining access to responsibility (and presumably to prosperity) amounts to proving one’s self as worthy.

Historically, passing government examinations could quite literally be the proof of one’s worthiness to others and to society. It granted status, and thus access through social bureaucracy. And even if the contemporary goal isn’t necessarily to become a bureaucrat, it remains a means to achieve the security of meritocratic status within some structure of society. It is the underlying social force behind the East Asian pressure to obtain an education.

The closest Western parallel might be an eldest son of a wealthy family being sent to Law School, a second to Medical School, and third son perhaps to Seminary. The point of such a Western education is that of gaining access to the systems that guarantee authoritative social, physical, and religious connections. In the West, a degree from the right university can thus be analogous to a form of “gaining face” through one’s education.

More pragmatically, the Western “sciences” emerged as expressions of a direct power over nature itself. But there’s a Japanese idiom, “門前の小僧習わぬ経を読む” [Monzen no kozōnarawanu kyō wo yomu]. It reads literally (and figuratively) that, “Before the (temple) gate, the little boy is lessoned in read sutras (that he overhears)”. It means that one may learn something, but not understand it. Mere knowledge has to be grounded in wisdom.

In the broader, if more traditional Western sense, the idea of the “Liberal Arts” was to give context to practical knowledge so that it could be applied with that wisdom. It was seen as a way to connect the mere fact of a science to the social fabric in which it was to be applied. It’s only a modern interpretation that such an education has value on its own. But at what point does it lose its purpose and become mere self-stimulation?

Knowledge, skill, self-discipline… we are what we know.

Red Sparrows

by in China, Culture, History, Hmmm..., Numbers, Politics | 23 Comments

“The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.”
– Karl Marx, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (1843-1844).

I’ve been imagining all this free money we’re being promised for paying off student loans, buying homes, child tax credits (tripled for newborns), and upper-middle income tax cuts… supposedly to be funded by taxing the same corporations and wealthy individuals financing the campaigns of the those making the promises. Indeed, Wharton can’t get it to balance without firing up the printing presses. And even with the Fed’s inverted yield, China’s buying gold now, not dollars.

But then there’s the vague alternative of consumer-funded tariffs, slashing tax revenues by trillions, deporting the cheap labor, and allowing unlimited state tax deductions for wealthy Californians. Never mind that eating and staying warm costs 30% more, no one’s walking away away from their 3% fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, and universities now graduate students who have no clue what I’m talking about anyway.

The Right likes to shout that inflation happened because the Federal Reserve irresponsibly dumped $5-trillion in funny-money into the economy… and then people tried to use it to buy stuff. The Left respond that as long as the economy grows proportionally to the money supply, then it’s no problem. It’s the old Keynesian measure of inflation as a ratio, with the numerator as the supply of Monopoly money, and the denominator as the number of hotels in the game.

2020 marked the start of what could possibly go wrong, unburdened by what has always worked before. Americans were jacked up on $5-trillion in “stimulus” while the doors to the mall were locked down with the economy. Then in 2021, the starting gun was fired and everybody swarmed at the merch like a mob of drunken looters at a burning Costco.

There was no possible way to meet the demand. Short supplies and bulging wallets spiked up prices, causing what the Fed assured was just a “transitory” form of inflation. But then the competition for staffing in order to meet all that demand also drove up wages, inflating labor costs. And that’s something that sticks.

Political pressure pushed the Fed to wait a year before hiking rates because no one wanted to admit that they’d so badly screwed-up the US economy. It wasn’t until 2022 that they even started to suggest that inflation was demand-driven. And it was 2023 before Americans’ long-COVID addled memories had faded enough for it to become politically feasible to fully admit what was going on.

The politicians knew up front that what they were doing would cause massive inflation… or at least they should have. Eleven-year olds trading Pokemon cards saw this coming. But they approved the lockdowns while sending out the checks anyway (the politicians, not the eleven-year olds), because the new regime couldn’t fess-up to not having a better plan than their overtly ignorant predecessor.

According to the Consumer Price Index, grocery store prices are now about 25% higher than when this all started. And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, energy prices have risen by 32%.  Those responsible cry that it’s because of “price gouging”, since it gives them a sound-bite solution that excuses even more economic meddling. Never mind that most large grocery chains are running at only about a 2% profit margin, and energy rate increases haven’t even kept up with inflation in most states, which doesn’t leave much slack for resurrecting the zombie-economics of a Nixon-esque wage-and-price freeze.

This may all have been well-intentioned, at least at the start. And (most) everyone got their de-facto $15/hour minimal wage with which to buy their $600 Epi-Pens. But putting distant authority in charge of such overarching policy simply drives home why politically bureaucratized governance rarely works, no matter how good it sounds. So as November 5th approaches, I’m just trying to decide what might be best to stock up on before the next calamity.

The Great Leap Forward was Mao Zedong’s centralized bureaucratic road map to a Red Chinese socialist utopia. Departing from the nation’s ancient Daoist traditions rooted in seeking harmony with nature, Mao would instead mobilize China’s massive human population to subdue nature for the benefit of the people. The Four Pests Campaign would seek to eradicate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows as threats to health and to agriculture. What could possibly go wrong?

The Asian tree sparrows that swarmed through fields were estimated to consume nearly ten-pounds of grain per bird each year. Targeted as agricultural pests, a mass extermination campaign combined with the disruption of nesting resulted in a drastic population collapse among the previously ubiquitous birds. But this had unknowingly disrupted a delicate ecological balance.

The old landlords understood that the sparrows also consumed locusts, knowledge lost in the purges of land redistribution to the peasantry. And without the sparrows, locust populations exploded exponentially, disastrously swarming entire fields of both rice and grains. The resulting catastrophic agricultural failures would play a significant role in the deaths by starvation of as many as 30 million people, perhaps more.

Politically expedient governance produces little more than conveniently simplistic solutions, the harbingers of unnatural disasters. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, they fail in ways that result in nothing at all; no one seemed to miss the rats, flies and mosquitoes. Sparrows, however, are now a protected species in China, and killing more than twenty is a punishable criminal offense. But it only takes one Red Sparrow to destroy an entire system. And American politics seems able to produce them at will, and from thin air.

So good luck to those trying to buy a house, or land, or gold, or anything else that might maintain some value over the next few years. Maybe those investment portfolio artworks or Venezuelan Bolivars will make a comeback. But when that tax-refund won’t buy a bag of groceries or keep the lights on through the next month, just remember that the rules were changed by people who aren’t even in the game.

To Destroy a Nation, Part 6

by in Boundary Behavior, China, Culture, Death, Fear, History, Identity, Philosophy, Politics, War | 18 Comments

This is part six (and a merciful last) in a short series of brief summaries about the collapse of the 19th-century Chinese Qing Dynasty, and how and why China has emerged as the country we know today.

This section is the second of two about Mao Zedong, who emerged as the architect of China’s communist revolution, with Zhou Enlai as its executor.  The details of Mao’s rise to lead China are far beyond the scope of these articles.

Part 1, Drugs and Greed: The First Opium War
Part 2, Religion and Fanaticism: The Taiping Rebellion
Part 3, Open Borders and Nationalism: The “Boxer” Rebellion
Part 4, Promise and Politics: The New Republic
Part 5, Charisma and Ignorance: The Long March
Part 6, Ideology and Anarchy: The Red Guard

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878).

Ideology and Anarchy
The Red Guard

The Long March gave Mao Zedong control over what was left the Red Army. But leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was still in question. Pro-Bolsheviks educated in Moscow, led by the popular CCP senior leader, Wang Ming, wanted a government in line with the “Comintern”, an international organization to promote world communism led by the Soviet Union.

Mao had a different vision for China, later articulated in “Mao Zedong Thought”. He asserted that a Marxist-Leninist style revolution led by a “proletariat”, or working-class, would fail in a nation dominated by a rural peasantry. Mao saw the peasant-class leading a Chinese revolution.

While rebuilding his army in the north, Mao accordingly imposed strict rules-of-conduct in interactions with peasants, including respectful treatment and fair exchanges. This greatly enhanced Mao’s reputation among the rural populations, quickly swelling his ranks.

From 1937 to 1945, the Communists and the Nationalists suspended fighting while forming a loose alliance against the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This gave Mao a further opportunity to establish his leadership while developing a more disciplined and experienced Red Army. Utilizing Wang Ming’s Soviet connections, Mao was able to gain access to financial and military support through the Comintern. But Wang was summarily sidelined after Mao had what he wanted.

The period from 1941 to 1944 also marked Mao’s “Yan’an Rectification”, a movement supposedly intended to consolidate CCP ideology. Party members were to study Mao Zedong Thought, subsequently engaging in self-criticisms. But the program’s actual purpose was to identify and to purge opposition. By the end of the Rectification, as many as 10,000 party cadre had been “re-educated”, establishing Maoism as the official ideology of the CCP.

A more experienced, disciplined, and better equipped Chinese communist military would re-emerge from the close of World War II as the “People’s Liberation Army” (PLA), while the nationalist Kuomintang had lost the support of a German military alliance. Using tactics refined in battles against superior Japanese forces, the PLA would consequently drive the Kuomintang entirely out of Mainland China, forcing them to take refuge on the island of Taiwan.

By 1949, the CCP under Mao’s leadership turned inward, toward the destruction of the Chinese Confucian social order through land reform. Mao directed the development of the Agrarian Reform Law in June of 1950, ordering the seizure of lands from landlords, industrialists and capitalists, and its redistribution to landless peasants.

Mao described the process as, “…a vicious war. …our troops are 260 million peasant soldiers. …it is the most terrible class war between peasants and landlords. It is a battle to the death.” The CCP encouraged peasant revenge through the “Speak Bitterness” campaign. Indifference was interpreted as counter-revolutionary, and villagers complied if merely as a way to survive.

Former landlords and presumed supporters were accused of crimes, interrogated, and put on trial. Punishments ranged from public humiliation and beatings to torture and execution. Others were banished, imprisoned, or forced into suicide. By 1953, an estimated 500,000 to 2-million landlords had perished, along with their knowledge.

Party meetings and propaganda sessions replaced ceremonies that had helped to time and to coordinate plantings and harvests and to forge bonds of assistance between farmers and villages. Old farming methods were forgotten or banned, replaced with the pseudo-scientific theories of a discredited Soviet scientist, Trofim Lysenko. The results were crop failures and damage to farmlands.

And then came Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”.

The Great Leap was the CCP’s second, “Five Year Plan”, implemented during the four years from 1958 through 1962. Grossly underestimating what would be required to develop an industrial production base, Mao directed a policy aligning with rural agricultural collectivization. Peasants would lead in the modernization of industry, thus omitting the development of an urban bourgeois class of “experts”.

Despite Zhou Enlai urging caution, collectives were ordered to organize labor forces that would shift tens-of-millions of rural Chinese into non-agricultural and industrial work. This would include the smelting of iron in “backyard furnaces”, sometimes by melting down farm implements.

Mao’s plan rapidly devolved into a bureaucratic catastrophe. As farms failed, the demands on rural food production became unsustainable, and the CCP’s food-rationing systems entirely collapsed. The “Great Chinese Famine” from 1958 to 1962 would be among the greatest man-made disasters in all of human history, with estimates ranging from 15-to-55 million deaths due to starvation. In some provinces, one-in-five would perish.

The CCP would call this time the, “Three Years of Natural Disasters”. Floods, droughts, severe weather and infestations certainly played a role in crop failures. But flawed and unrealistic policies and poor governance were at the root of an inability to manage any meaningful response. In 1962, First Vice Chairman of the CCP, Liu Shaoqi, declared that the Great Famine was, “30-percent natural disasters, and 70-percent human-error,” earning his eventual arrest in 1967.

Mao’s waning power after the Great Famine would motivate the “Cultural Revolution” from 1966 through 1976. Promoted by Mao as a means to cleanse the socialist state and society of traitors and bourgeois, it was initiated by mobilizing a few thousand fanatically loyal students from universities in Beijing, unleashing the ultimate expression of his destructivism.

By August of 1966, the student “Red Guards” had exploded to include more than a million members in Beijing alone. Looking to Mao for direction, he focused their energies toward the eradication of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. The Red Guards had been given free rein to destroy anyone or anything not born of Maoist socialism.

In a frenzy of destruction, thousands of years of Chinese imperial history was obliterated, including sculptures and statues, tombs, architecture, and irreplaceable artworks, antiques and artifacts. Books and literature were burned, and the people who possessed them were punished. Historical landmarks, temples and palaces, and religious structures were ransacked and vandalized. Family heirlooms were seized from private homes, and their residents were beaten. Even street signs were torn down and streets renamed. The Forbidden City survived only because Zhou Enlai ordered its protection.

Then the Red Guards turned their attentions toward the cultural knowledge of the Chinese people themselves. Teachers and intellectuals, former capitalists or business-owners, those wearing traditional or foreign clothing or religious items, including Catholic nuns and the elderly, were attacked.  Many were tormented, forced to confess to crimes, and beaten to death in front of crowds during “struggle sessions”.

By 1968, Mao would order the Chinese military to encourage the Red Guards, who had become too difficult to control, dispersed into the countryside. But over the next decade, the Cultural Revolution would continue to sweep away the last of traditional Chinese culture while leaving the nation’s economy in ruins. It was a war with a death toll of unknown millions in a final form of destruction.  It was a battle against thought, until even the last memories of a nation had been destroyed.

Images:

Mao Zedong shakes hands with People’s commune workers, 1959. Unknown Photographer, Chinese book ,”10th Anniversary Photo Collection of the People’s Republic of China 1949-1959″, published by the People’s Republic of China Editorial Committee, Public Domain.
(*Note the wristwatch worn by the “peasant” farmer. This was clearly a posed propaganda photo.)

Red Guards marching in Shanghai, April 30, 1967. People’s Pictorial, Public Domain.

References and Further Reading:

Ash, A. (2014). The Red Guard and the Landlady, The Wang Post (blog).
https://thewangpost.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-red-guard-and-landlady.html

Bennett, G. A., & Montaperto, R. N. (1980). Red guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai. Peter Smith Publisher.

Brown, K. (2016). Why China still can’t make sense of the Cultural Revolution. The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/why-china-still-cant-make-sense-of-the-cultural-revolution-59624

Hays, J. (n.d.). Cultural Revolution Enemies. Violence, Attacks and Betrayal, Facts and Details.
https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat2/sub6/item67.html

Janku, A. (2021). China’s Communist Party at 100: revolution forever. The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/chinas-communist-party-at-100-revolution-forever-163665

Keane, M. (2007). Created in China: The Great New Leap Forward. Routledge.

 

To Destroy a Nation, Part 5

by in Boundary Behavior, China, Culture, Death, History, Hmmm..., Philosophy, Politics, War | 9 Comments

This is part five in a short series of brief summaries about the collapse of the 19-century Chinese Qing Dynasty, and how and why China has emerged as the country we know today.

This section is the first of two about Mao Zedong, who emerged as the architect of China’s communist revolution, with Zhou Enlai as its executor.  The details of Mao’s rise to lead China are far beyond the scope of these articles.  But I’ll leave some recommended links in the post script.

Part 1, Drugs and Greed: The First Opium War
Part 2, Religion and Fanaticism: The Taiping Rebellion
Part 3, Open Borders and Nationalism: The “Boxer” Rebellion
Part 4, Promise and Politics: The New Republic
Part 5, Charisma and Ignorance: The Long March
Part 6, Ideology and Anarchy: The Red Guard

“…the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank’.”
– Mao Zedong (毛泽东), Chairman of the Communist Party of China, Introducing a Cooperative, 1958.

Charisma and Ignorance
The Long March

On December 26, 1893, Mao Zedong was born to the family of a wealthy farmer in Shaoshan village, in the Hunan Province of central western China. Ambitious and intelligent, he grew up unhappy with the social constraints of a rural lifestyle. So at the age of sixteen, he left home for the provincial capital of Changsha, where he enrolled in a middle school.

The following year, in 1911, Mao watched as revolution exploded throughout China. Masses frustrated with the social effects of opium, corruption and criminality, usurious taxation, foreign influences, and a weak and ineffective Qing central administration almost spontaneously rebelled against the ethnic-minority Manchu government. And under the tacit leadership of a revolutionary, Western-educated political philosopher and Chinese nationalist, Sun Yat-sen, China overthrew dynastic rule to create a Chinese republic in 1912.

Mao openly voiced support for the revolution’s goals of Chinese social and political reform, and served briefly in the Republican army after the abdication of the six-year old Qing Emperor, Puyi. He then re-enrolled in school where he studied history and political philosophy, and took notes as the new republic self-destructed from within.

General Yuan Shikai, leader of China’s Beiyang Army, took control of the new government, declaring himself emperor in 1915. But as the West became distracted by WWI, Japan flexed its regional power, taking effective control of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, seizing German ports in Shandong, and demanding the Japanese administration of railways and mining operations in China.

Yuan could do little more than acquiesce to Japan’s military might, irreparably damaging his image and forcing him to abdicate after a mere 83-days. Returning to a contested presidency of the republic, China’s de facto dictator would die of kidney failure in June of 1916, fracturing the Beiyang government. Meanwhile, a power struggle within Sun Yat-sen’s, nationalist Kuomintang government in Nanjing would further divide loyalties within the country, beginning China’s “Warlord Era” and decades of civil war.

Mao, meanwhile, went on to graduate from school in 1918 and moved to Beijing with Yang Changji, a teacher and leftist intellectual whom Mao admired. Working as a librarian at Beijing University, Mao met many of the people who had inspired his ideas. However, he found himself dismissed as merely a young student from the countryside, and returned to Hunan in 1919.

A young and handsomely charismatic Mao Zedong would marry Yang Changji’s infatuated daughter, Yáng Kāihuì. Possibly Mao’s single most devoted and unwavering supporter, Kāihuì would bear Mao three children before her execution by Kuomintang forces a decade later after refusing to renounce Mao, who had already taken another wife. Likewise, Mao saw the potential energy in establishing unquestioning loyalty among China’s massive rural peasant population.

In much the same manner as Hong Xiuquan, the leader of China’s bloody Taiping Rebellion almost 100-years earlier, Mao began to build a following among the region’s poor farmers and landless laborers, while also forging a connection with the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Nanjing.

Mao’s philosophy was strongly influenced by the “destructivist” political doctrine of Liang Qichao, who saw China’s weakness as its disconnected cultures. Liang consequently advocated for a centralized, authoritarian empire that would combine the country’s many ethnicities into a single, unified national culture. To this end, Liang advocated for the destruction of the customs of the past, and their enforced replacement with the official doctrines of a centrally-defined “Chinese” identity.

Mao’s expression for this was, “Bupo buli,” (不破不立), or “That not destroyed is that not rebuilt.”  The idea would manifest itself in “re-education”, and eventually in Mao’s “Little Red Book” and the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”.

Sun Yat-sen would die in 1925, further dividing the nationalist Kuomintang. And Mao, perhaps hoping to capitalize on its internal chaos, unleashed his peasant army in the 1927, Autumn Harvest Uprising. Taking place in the Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, Mao used the insurrection to establish the short-lived Hunan Soviet, perhaps hoping that its influence might spread as had the opening protests of 1911.

Mao’s disorganized coup attempt was, however, quickly and brutally quashed by Kuomintang forces. Moreover, the event spurred the nationalists to massacre around 380,000 suspected communist Hunanese civilians. The central CCP establishment expelled Mao, ridiculing him for attempting to use peasants as an army. But Mao remained undeterred.

By confiscating and redistributing private lands and “re-educating” the landlords (often meaning “execution”), Mao continued to attract followers among the rural poor. Even some 1,700 thieves and bandits were included into his army, so long as they “confiscated” nothing from poorer peasants. By October of 1934, Mao, along with several other communist leaders, had established a combined army of up to 86,000 committed fighters.

Within a year, more than ninety-percent would be dead.

The combined “Red Army” defenders found themselves hemmed-in by General Chiang Kai-shek‘s far larger, better trained, equipped, and organized Chinese Nationalist forces. Enduring increasingly fierce attacks, Mao and the Red Army would be forced into a 6,000-mile long fighting retreat across western China.

After what would come to be known as “The Long March”, fewer than 8,000 communist fighters survived. Doggedly pursued through remote backwaters and wilderness, many in Mao’s peasant army simply died from exposure or starvation. Ironically, however, Mao was left emboldened.

Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had taken full advantage of the event to establish themselves as topmost leaders of both the Chinese Communist Party and of its “Red Army”. And despite their withering losses, there was a seemingly endless supply of poor and uneducated peasants with which to re-fill the ranks.

Post Script:
For a more exhaustive, if down-to-earth presentation of Mao Zedong and his rise to power, I suggest “Tippy Gnu’s” absolutely free book, The Cultural Revolution, Then and Mao.

Images:

Mao Zedong in 1924, Xinhua News, Unknown Photographer, Public Domain.

Barefoot Revolutionaries (赤腳革命者), Chinese Communist peasant revolutionaries in the 1920s, Chinese Communist Party Archives, Unknown Photographer, Public Domain.

The Long March in China, 1934-1935, Rowanwindwhistler, Creative Commons with Attribution.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45277819

References and Further Reading:

Alpha History. (2023, November 2). Chinese Revolution. Chinese Revolution.
https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/

Asia for Educators, Columbia University. (n.d.-a). Asia for Educators | Columbia University. https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_early.htm

Asia for Educators, Columbia University. (n.d.-b). Asia for Educators | Columbia University.
https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_war.htm

Schell, O., & Delury, J. (2013). Wealth and power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century. Random House.

Schurmann, F., & Schell, O. (1967). Republican China: nationalism, war, and the rise of communism; 1911-1949.

Shuyun, S. (2010). The Long March: The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth. Anchor.

Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2024, May 17). Long March | Chinese history, Communist retreat & Mao Zedong. Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Long-March

To Destroy a Nation, Part 4

by in China, Culture, History, Hmmm..., Politics, War | 10 Comments

This is part four in a short series of brief summaries about the collapse of the 19-century Chinese Qing Dynasty, and how and why China has emerged as the country we know today.

Part 1, Drugs and Greed: The First Opium War
Part 2, Religion and Fanaticism: The Taiping Rebellion
Part 3, Open Borders and Nationalism: The “Boxer” Rebellion
Part 4, Promise and Politics: The New Republic
Part 5, Charisma and Ignorance: The Long March
Part 6, Ideology and Anarchy: The Red Guard

“…government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil…that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise is easily demonstrated. ”
– Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776.

Promises and Politics
The New Republic

In 1906, with opium profits in decline despite phenomenal rates of addiction, the British decided that they were better off dealing with the new Qing government than with a collection of warlords, and agreed to restrict Sino-Indian opium imports. And by 1910, the British officially ended their participation. However, the Chinese had already developed other routes for sourcing the drug from Southeast Asia, funding several powerful narco-trafficking cartels.

Meanwhile, the new but politically inexperienced Empress Dowager Longyu attempted to oversee changes intended to legitimize Qing leadership, including the declaration of a constitutional monarchy on May 8, 1911. Regardless, revolution erupted almost spontaneously across China, spreading rapidly from the spark of a local protest in Sichuan province.

Subversive political ideas infused into Chinese society through secret literary groups that included some military officials, eventually fueled open rebellion. And in October of 1911, an army unit in the city of Wuchang in Hubei province mutinied, violently seizing regional government offices and then declaring the domain a republic.

Up to that point, loyalist Hui Muslims in Xi’an, in Shaanxi province had protected the city’s ethnic-Manchu population. But overwhelmed by a sudden surge of violence, around 10,000 Manchu residents were captured and mercilessly killed by rebels.

The last vestiges of the Qing dynasty as a political force remained only due to the support of the powerful “Beiyang”, or “Northern Sea” Army. Under the leadership of the affluent, connected and influential General Yuan Shikai, the Beiyang Army had become the most modern, well-trained and effective military force in China.

Government forces responded to the rebels with attacks, even managing to recapture Wuchang. But the floundering Qing government had lost its credibility with the Chinese population. By November, fourteen of twenty-two provinces officially declared that they no longer recognized the Qing government.

—

Into this chaos arrived an influential, would-be nationalist leader, Sun Yat-sen. Even today, Sun plays a central role in the narratives of both the communist mainland, People’s Republic of China, as well as the democratic Republic of China in Taiwan. Sun is mutually portrayed as THE revolutionary whose philosophies legitimized a China of and for the Chinese people.

However, Sun would lead as China’s first president for a mere 45-days.

Ironically, Sun’s early years were spent overseas, studying or in exile, where he was exposed to foreign ideas and philosophies. And after traveling to Hawaii in 1894, Sun began to promote ideas for Chinese government reforms that would ultimately result in his exile in Japan for the next 16-years.

In Japan, Sun studied how the Japanese had so successfully responded to the same Western challenges that had faced China. Sun was a sincere Chinese nationalist. But his idealized version of a new Chinese civilization emerged from republican socialist ideals based in Western and Christian perspectives.

Arguing early on that Qing dynastic rule was holding back Chinese progress, Sun proposed a new system that would be based in the full participation of the Chinese population, both in governance and in the generation of domestic wealth. And by accumulating connections and funding, Sun became the popular leader of a Chinese nationalist revolutionary movement that promised to modernize and to strengthen China and its society.

Sun’s primary political philosophy was summed up in the (variously interpreted), “Three Principles of the People”:
Mínzú, or “nationalism,” which Sun first used in opposition to the minority ethnic-Manchu, Qing dynasty, as well as to foreign imperialism. Sun eventually limited its meaning to that of a sovereign Chinese territory, and self-determination for the Chinese people as a whole.
Mínquán, or the “rights of the people”, which Sun explained as giving all Chinese citizens control over their own governance through democratic processes.
Mínshēng, or “people’s livelihood,” which is usually translated as “socialism.” Sun never expounded deeply on the idea, but implied an equalization of land ownership and of taxation.

Sun returned to China at the invitation of various other revolutionaries, and was sworn in as the first president of “The Republic of China” on January 1st, 1912, with its capital in Nanjing. But it became quickly evident that despite wide support, the new government lacked an essential element required to re-unite the fractured nation… namely, a strong military force. So Sun and the new republic’s National Assembly decided to make what would amount to a deal with the devil in negotiations with General Yuan Shikai.

General Yuan proved a dangerously loose cannon for the Qing. Shifting loyalties and taking the powerful force of the Beiyang Army with him, Yuan eventually suggested to the Empress Dowager Longyu that Qing welfare might best be served by the abdication of the 6-year old Emperor Puyi. So on February 12, 1912, the Qing dynasty officially came to an end.

A little known farm-boy from the Hunan Province named Mao Zedong would serve briefly in the Republican army after the abdication of the Qing government. Meanwhile, the cannon would roll to the other side of the deck as Yuan would suggest that indeed the welfare of the new republic might also best be served by the abdication of its president. And so after 45-days in office, Sun resigned.

General Yuan Shikai was elected the next president of The Republic of China in 1912.  But the new republican government wouldn’t last much longer, with Yuan almost immediately coming into conflict with both the National Assembly and Sun’s Chinese nationalist “Kuomintang” party (KMT).

A second attempt at revolution was easily put down by Yuan’s military forces, after which the KMT was outlawed and the National Assembly dissolved. And in December of 1915, Yuan officially restored the monarchy, proclaiming himself the new Hongxian Emperor.

Images:

Longyu as Empress Consort, Palace Museum Publishing House, scanned and cropped. Public domain.

SUN Yat-Sen, circa 1910s, Unknown source. Public domain.

President Yuan Shikai in 1915, Photo by Rio V. De Sieux, The World’s Work, Volume 30. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company. 1915. p. 378.

References and Further Reading:

Adu-Frimpong, A. (2013). Orville Schell & John Delury. 2013. Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Random House Publishers; African and Asian Studies, 12(3), 325–326.
https://doi.org/10.1163/15692108-12341268

Alphahis. (2018, July 22). The Xinhai or 1911 Revolution. Chinese Revolution.
https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/xinhai-1911-revolution/

Kuomintang News Network. (n.d.).
https://www1.kmt.org.tw/english/page.aspx?type=para&mnum=108

Wang, Y. C. (1998, July 20). Sun Yat-sen | Biography, achievements, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sun-Yat-sen/The-revolution-of-1911

To Destroy a Nation, Part 3

by in China, Culture, Existentialism, Fear, History, Hmmm..., Identity, Politics, War | 14 Comments

This is part three in a short series of brief summaries about the collapse of the 19-century Chinese Qing Dynasty, and how and why China has emerged as the country we know today.

Part 1, Drugs and Greed: The First Opium War
Part 2, Religion and Fanaticism: The Taiping Rebellion
Part 3, Open Borders and Nationalism: The “Boxer” Rebellion
Part 4, Promise and Politics: The New Republic
Part 5, Charisma and Ignorance: The Long March
Part 6, Ideology and Anarchy: The Red Guard

“Nationalism in that part of the world is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.”
– Daniel Fried, from: Old Divides Plague Bosnia, by Christine Spolar, Chicago Tribune, May 14, 2007.

Open Borders and Nationalism
The “Boxer” Rebellion

By the 1890s, as many as 90-million Chinese out of a population of around 400-million were addicted to opium in a country functionally fragmenting into territories run by pirates, feudal drug lords, and powerful ethnic clan-leaders. The Manchu, Qing imperial dynasty found itself in existential danger as various foreign powers each poised themselves to descend upon the carcass of its empire and claim an economic zone-of-influence.

In China’s Shandong province, the region had become known primarily for its poverty and famines, as well as for its population of almost mythically-hardened fighters. The region harbored a Chinese secret society, the Fists of Righteous Harmony, or the “Boxers” as they were known in the West.

The Boxers, were both critical of the weakness of the Qing government, and strongly anti-foreign and anti-Christian. In November of 1897, a group of armed men, probably Boxers, broke into a Catholic mission in Juye in the Shangdong province, destroyed the church, and murdered two German priests.

Seeing an opportunity to claim a right to territorial oversight, the German government responded by sending two naval vessels to the Shandong coast. Then, it demanded that the Qing government financially compensate the German Catholic Church, and hand over control of the province to German authorities in order to assure the safety of its own citizens.

The Germans then brought in soldiers, fortified their churches, removed any suspect or uncooperative local officials, and began to flood the region with German missionaries. Eventually, a Buddhist temple in the city of Liyuantun was occupied by a group of Christians and converted into a church, resulting in further conflicts. In response, attacks against foreigners began to spread across the Shandong province starting in late 1898.

In October of 1899, about 1,500 emboldened Boxers battled a much smaller group of Qing government soldiers in the city of Pingyuan, in north-west Shandong. The Battle of Senluo Temple ended a myth that Boxers possessed magical defenses against bullets. But a nationalist, anti-foreign faction that had gained power in the Chinese government in 1898 subsequently convinced the Boxers to end their mutual hostilities, effectively granting approval to the Boxers’ anti-foreign campaigns.

By the end of 1899, the Boxers began openly attacking both foreigners and Chinese Christians in western Shandong. Foreign homes and businesses were burned. And Chinese found with Bibles, Christian religious symbols, English-language books or European-sourced objects or clothing were beaten, or in some cases killed. The Boxers also began to spread rumors about foreigners, and to distribute anti-foreign posters and propaganda.

In the spring of 1900, word spread that thousands of Boxers were moving toward Beijing. Panic spread among foreigners in the Chinese capital as naval vessels from various countries began to congregate just off the northern Shandong coastline. And in June of 1900, a group of more than 20,000 Boxer rebels and Chinese Muslim, “Gansu Brave” fighters flooded into Beijing, and began moving toward its foreign and diplomatic quarter near the Forbidden City.

A group of Boxers and Gansu began attacking Chinese Christians whom they accused of collaborating with foreigners, burning some alive.  The secretary of the Japanese legation, Sugiyama Akira, was captured while trying to leave the city, and was subsequently torn to pieces by a group of Gansu.  And the German ambassador, Clemens von Ketteler, was shot dead by a member of the anti-foreigner, “Manchu Bannermen” whom he had mistaken as an Imperial Lancer. 

Foreign officials and Christian missionaries from nine countries, along with about 400 troops gathered for safety inside a fortified compound.  With little food or ammunition, and a single canon, the troops would defend the besieged refuge for fifty-five days. The Empress Dowager Cixi issued a decree on June 21st, ordering soldiers of the regular Chinese army to join the Boxers in their attacks.  But Imperial authority had become so weak that it was largely ignored.  

Meanwhile, a cooperative military agreement was reached between eight countries with economic interests in various Chinese territories. The “Eight Nation Alliance” consisted of forces from Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States.

On August 14 of 1900, a force of about 20,000 Alliance soldiers entered Beijing, rescuing the foreigners trapped in the compound.  The Eight Nation forces then occupied Beijing for weeks, dividing the city into areas of control.  Each force was to root-out, identify, and quell any resistance from Boxers or their sympathizers.

Mostly, however, the occupation turned into a frenzy of looting, rape, and summary and mass-executions. Even the Forbidden City was looted. German soldiers were among the worst offenders, responding to a 1900 speech by Kaiser Wilhelm II: “No quarter shall be given. Prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns made a name for themselves under Attila… may the name ‘German’ be stamped by you in such a way that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.”

Fearing for their lives, the Dowager Empress Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor fled Beijing, going into hiding in the safety of the mountains of Shaanxi province. Eventually returning to a plundered capital city, they were able to negotiate an end of hostilities with the “Boxer Protocol”, signed in 1901. Among its provisions was a massive financial compensation to the Eight-Nation Alliance, to be paid out over the subsequent thirty-nine years.

This final plunder of China’s national wealth combined with various royal intrigues so weakened Qing power that it became irrelevant to the leaders of many provinces. Subsequent Qing government efforts to modernize the country, even allowing intermarriage among the ruling ethnic-Manchu and Han majority population amounted to too little, too late. 

In 1909, the 37-year-old Guangxu Emperor died suddenly, likely after having been poisoned with arsenic. The next day, the 72-year old Dowager Empress Cixi, who had probably ordered the poisoning, died in her sleep.

The Qing imperial throne was then passed on to a two-year-old boy, Puyi.

Images:

A “Boxer” of the Boxer Rebellion in China, 1900, by H.W. Koekkoek (1867-1929).

Troops of the Eight-Nation Alliance (except Russia) that fought against the Boxer Rebellion in China, 1900. From the left Britain, United States, Australia, India, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan. 1900, by Captain C.F. O’Keefe; Colorized by Julius Jääskeläinen.

British, Indian and international troops outside the Forbidden City, Beijing, 1900.
National Army Museum, Study Collection, Out of Copyright.
NAM. 1953-07-24-1-61.
https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1953-07-24-1-61

References and Further Reading:

Chung-Mao, H. (2021, June 25). [Picture story] The Boxer Rebellion: A wound in China’s modern history. ThinkChina – Big Reads, Opinion & Columns on China.
https://www.thinkchina.sg/history/picture-story-boxer-rebellion-wound-chinas-modern-history

Esherick, J. W. (1988). The origins of the boxer uprising. Univ of California Press.

Gady, F. (2015, June 4). When Americans ruled Beijing. The Diplomat.
https://thediplomat.com/2015/06/when-americans-ruled-beijing/

MIT Visualizing Cultures. (n.d.).
https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/boxer_uprising/bx_essay01.html

Purcell, V. (2010). The Boxer Uprising: A Background Study. Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, R. R. (2000). Military dimensions of the ‘Boxer Uprising’ in Shanxi, 1898-1901. In BRILL eBooks (pp. 288–320).
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004482944_010

 

 

To Destroy a Nation, Part 2

by in China, Culture, Death, History, Hmmm..., Identity, Politics, War | 17 Comments

This is part two in a short series of brief summaries about the collapse of the 19-century Chinese Qing Dynasty, and how and why China has emerged as the country we know today.

Part 1, Drugs and Greed: The First Opium War
Part 2, Religion and Fanaticism: The Taiping Rebellion
Part 3, Open Borders and Nationalism: The “Boxer” Rebellion
Part 4, Promise and Politics: The New Republic
Part 5, Charisma and Ignorance: The Long March
Part 6, Ideology and Anarchy: The Red Guard

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

Religion and Fanaticism
The Taiping Rebellion

The re-introduction of Christianity to China by Protestant missions during the 19th-century would ultimately result in the Taiping Rebellion, possibly the single greatest man-made disaster of the nineteenth century.  Many millions of Chinese would lose their lives during what amounted to a social cataclysm.

The shifting of Western trade to new ports north of Canton in 1842, severely affected the Gangdong region’s economy while leaving many without work and addicted to opium. Pirates displaced from now British-occupied Hong Kong also moved upriver to prey on a local population, increasing dissatisfaction with distant and ineffectual Qing governance. But in 1850, an alternative presented itself in the “Taiping Tianguo”, or “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”.

Fifteen-years earlier, in 1837, a frustrated school teacher and would-be bureaucrat, Hong Xiuquan, claimed to have experienced a divine vision during a severe psychological breakdown. In his vision, a man with a golden beard had told him that it was his task to purify the world, and then another man had directed him on how to destroy demons.

Six years later, in 1843, Hong encountered a Christian booklet, The Benevolent Words to Advise the World, written by a Chinese Christian named Liang Fa. After reading it, Hong concluded that his vision had been of God and of Jesus, imploring him to purify the world of evil. He then declared that he was the Second Son of God, and that the Chinese culture of his time was the work of demons.

By 1847, Hong was able to amass several thousand followers among poor peasants in Guangxi province. Then declaring himself China’s new, “Heavenly King”, he was able to gain more followers in Gangdong province, where many Bibles had been introduced to its discontented population through the Canton port.  He then led a force of around 30,000 fanatical converts, mostly consisting of ethnic-Hakka, into a rebellion against the Manchu, Qing Dynasty, starting in 1850.

A Chinese social fabric weakened by opium addiction and rampant corruption was easily overwhelmed by Hong’s army of religious zealots. And by 1853, after a series of bloody battles, the city of Nanjing fell to forces of the Heavenly Kingdom. 

Shortly thereafter, Hong’s waning sanity would precipitate his withdrawal from control of the Heavenly Kingdom, and he subsequently devoted himself to meditating with his private harem. Regardless, the rebellion’s army of mostly poor but disciplined fanatics, which included both men and women, continued to grow with each victory.

Wearing red hats or jackets and growing their hair, Taiping soldiers were known as “Chángmáo”, or “long hairs”. Fighting with mostly small arms, battles were particularly brutal and bloody, with victories accomplished by sheer numbers. By 1856, Taiping forces had expanded to include just over 1-million soldiers, and may have reached twice that by 1860.

Usual Taiping military strategy was to first overrun large cities, establish themselves by purifying the population of demonic influences (including government officials, landlords, intellectuals, the wealthy…) and then moving into the surrounding countryside to attack Qing government forces before they could organize themselves.  In many ways, they could be compared to the much later, People’s Liberation Army.

Meanwhile, a Qing dynasty government desperate for able soldiers was again compelled to demand an end to the still technically illegal British opium trade that had existed since the end of the First Opium War in 1842. But after the Chinese seizure of the British-registered ship, Arrow, in 1856, the British East Indies and China Station fleet responded by capturing the Pearl River forts and shelling the city of Canton.

A subsequent Cantonese riot in which European businesses were burned and a French missionary was executed then galvanized French involvement. Eventually, the United States and Russia also became involved in what would become The Second Opium War. And by 1858, an overwhelmed Qing government found itself being forced into another series of unwanted concessions.

The result was a treaty in which China would again be forced to pay war reparations while officially legalizing the opium trade, as well as granting rights to free travel and business within China for foreign citizens. Regardless, the British went on to destroy the Old Summer Palace in retribution for the torture and murder of British prisoners, and to occupy the Forbidden City in Beijing until the Qing government formally confirmed the treaty during the Convention of Peking in 1860.

Hong would die as Qing forces, bolstered by the British and French, retook Nanjing in 1864, during a battle that claimed around 100,000 lives.  But fighting would smolder on for seven more years. The Qing government had been so weakened by its war with the West and an opium-addicted populace that stamping out the last of the Heavenly Kingdom required empowering various influential regional warlords in exchange for their cooperation.

By the end of fighting in 1871, a best estimate is that the Taiping Rebellion had resulted in the immediate deaths of a staggering 20-to-30 million people, or about 6-to-10 percent of China’s population at that time. This, along with the concessions of the Second Opium War left China so weakened, both economically and politically, that it became a nation effectively governed by a collection of warlords, with many funded by a network of exploitative foreign interests.

Images:

Alleged illustration of Hong Xiuquan. Chinese engraving published in a European book. Unknown author; published by Melchior Yvan (1806-1873) and Joseph-Marie Callery (1810-1862) – L’Insurrection en Chine.

Extract from map showing the extent of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Wikimedia Commons, M.Bitton – Own work based on: Peng, L. (2021). The last guardian of the throne: The regional army in the late Qing dynasty. Journal of Institutional Economics, 17(2), 321-337. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000430 , The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire, Thomas H. Reilly, page 2, University of Washington Press, ISBN 978-0-295-80192-6 a derivative of File:China 1820 de.svg.

References and Further Readings:

Boardman, E. P. (1972). Christian Influence upon the ideology of the Taiping Rebellion, 1851-1864. Octagon Press, Limited.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2049091

Canton, J. A. (2020, December 10). This religious revolt nearly toppled China’s last imperial dynasty. History. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/this-religious-revolt-nearly-toppled-china-last-imperial-dynasty

Derks, H. (2012). History of the Opium problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600 – 1950. BRILL.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf

Hong Xiuquan – New World Encyclopedia. (n.d.).
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hong_Xiuquan

Hsieh 1929: Origin and Migrations of the Hakkas. (n.d.).
https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/HsiehHakkaHistory.html#sec25

Meyer-Fong, T. (2013). What remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China. Stanford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804754255.001.0001

Taiping Rebellion – New World Encyclopedia. (n.d.).
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Taiping_Rebellion

Twitchett, D. C., & Fairbank, J. K. (1978). The Cambridge History of China, pp. 264 – 317. Cambridge University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521214476.007

To Destroy a Nation, Part 1

by in China, Culture, History, Hmmm..., Politics, War | 17 Comments

This is part one in a short series of brief summaries about the collapse of the 19-century Chinese Qing Dynasty, and how and why China has emerged as the country we know today.

Part 1, Drugs and Greed: The First Opium War
Part 2, Religion and Fanaticism: The Taiping Rebellion
Part 3, Open Borders and Nationalism: The “Boxer” Rebellion
Part 4, Promise and Politics: The New Republic
Part 5, Charisma and Ignorance: The Long March
Part 6, Ideology and Anarchy: The Red Guard

“What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees.”
– Marcus Aurelius

Drugs and Greed
The First Opium War

In 1757, China’s Qing Dynasty, Qianlong Emperor, wary of Western powers, declared that all such sea trade would be restricted to the single port of the city of Canton, or modern day Guangzhou. The distrusting Manchu led government further restricted all trade to areas outside of the ethnic Cantonese Han city’s walls, where it could be more easily monitored by government officials.

Regardless, by the start of the 1800s, British demand for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain had resulted in a massive trade-deficit. Since few Western goods were in such demand in China, the Chinese had to be compensated with large quantities of silver. And this cut into the profits of British merchants who would arrive with mostly empty ships.

To make up for this financial and trade imbalance, many British merchants turned to the smuggling of opium, conveniently produced in the relatively nearby Indian subcontinent. While opium had been illegal for non-medical use in China since the early 1700s, actual enforcement of its ban had proven difficult.

The British, East India Company had agreed that it would not transport opium into China. But in reality, it had merely transferred shipments to other merchants who acted as proxies for its smuggling. The trade eventually became so profitable as to reverse the flow of silver back into British hands.

Monetary and social damages to Chinese society caused by ever-increasing quantities opium flooding through the Canton port eventually proved untenable, compelling the later Daoguang Emperor and the Qing Dynasty Court to move forcefully against its smuggling. In 1839, Chinese officials arrested several Chinese smugglers in Canton while also demanding that British merchants surrender any opium in their possession. Around 1,400 tons of the drug were confiscated and destroyed, resulting in a massive financial loss for the British.

Tensions with the British escalated until late 1839, when two British warships destroyed 29 Chinese vessels enforcing a blockade of the Pearl River delta, beginning the First Opium War. While the Chinese had a numerical military advantage, the British possessed a far superior naval force. And in June of 1840, a large British naval contingent arrived at the Chinese coast.

The British warships sailed north toward Shanghai and up the Yangtze River, destroying Chinese vessels and capturing fortifications along the way, and eventually cutting off inland waterways to Beijing. And in August of 1842, the British captured the city of Nanjing, forcing the Qing government into negotiations that would result in the August of 1842, Treaty of Nanjing.

This treaty marked the first of the “unequal treaties”, or one-sided concessions forced by powerful Western countries upon various weaker nations in East Asia.  In this case, the treaty required a Chinese payment of substantial war reparations to the British, the opening of five new trading ports, and ceding Hong Kong to British control.

In 1843, China was additionally required to allow the free entry of foreign Christian missionaries, and to exempt British subjects from the jurisdiction of Chinese law. Eventually, other Western countries, such as France and the United States also forced China to grant their citizens similar privileges. These concessions to foreign powers began what would come to be known as China’s, “century of humiliation”.

Images:

British warships attacking a Chinese battery on the Pearl (Zhu) River, 1841,
From: Narrative of a Voyage Round the World: Performed in Her Majesty’s ship Sulphur, During the Years 1836-1842, Including Details of the Naval Operations in China, from Dec. 1840, to Nov. 1841, by Captain Sir Edward Belcher, R.N.

Signing of the Treaty of Nanjing.
Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library

References and Further Reading:

Derks, H. (2012). History of the Opium problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600 – 1950. BRILL.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf

Fairbank, J. K. (1940). Chinese diplomacy ANF The Treaty of Nanking, 1842.

Gentzler, J. M. (1977). Excerpts from The Treaty of Nanjing, August 1842. In Praeger Publishers, Changing China: Readings in the History of China From the Opium War to the Present (pp. 2–3) [Book]. Praeger Publishers. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/china/nanjing.pdf

Libretexts. (2021, January 15). 7.7: The first Opium War. Humanities LibreTexts.
Book: A History of World Civilization II, Imperialism in Asia, The First Opium War
https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Lumen_Learning/

MIT Visualizing Cultures: The First Opium War, Essay by Peter C. Perdue.
https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/opium_wars_01/ow1_essay04.html

Modernisation and China’s ‘century of humiliation.’ (2021, December 5). CEPR.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/modernisation-and-chinas-century-humiliation