Jonathan Spence, "God's Chinese Son"

Map of Ching China showing the areas
ruled at one time or another by the Taiping.

Jonathan Spence (1936-1921) was my teacher for modern Chinese history at Yale, one of the many fabulous gifts I received from my alma mater. If you want an introduction to Chinese history from 1600 to 1989, his The Search for Modern China (1990) is the best thing I know; and if you want a short introduction to how traditional Chinese governance worked in practice, The Death of Woman Wang (1978) is terrific.

God's Chinese Son (1996) is partly a narrative of the event we call the Taiping Rebellion and partly a biography of Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan. But like all of Spence's books it really part of his grappling with China, his lifelong attempt to understand its history, culture, and likely future fate. I thought it was great.

Hong Xiuquan was from a class of people one meets over and over in Chinese history, a failed candidate in the imperial civil service exams. As with many others, his aspiring family had made a huge investment in his preparation, so his failure was a major blow to them and thus a double burden on Hong.

While traveling to Canton for his repeated exam failures, at a time when his mental state may not have been very good, Hong met Christian missionaries and became interested in their teachings. In 1837 he had a vision in which he ascended to heaven, where God, dressed in a dragon robe and seated on an imperial throne, called Hong his son and introduced him to his elder brother, Jesus. Hong began to tell his close friends and relations about his vision, and some immediately became his followers. He embarked on years of wandering southern China in which he sought to learn more about Christianity and to draw more followers to his cult of the "God Believers."

In the 1840s the Ching imperial state began the decline that ended with its overthrow in 1911. Defeat by foreigners in the First Opium War (1839-1842) had damaged the prestige of the state and its ruling Manchu dynasty, and revolts broke out in many regions against Manchu rule. Secret societies called the Triads spread, mixing banditry with ethno-nationalist rebellion, using the slogan "Destroy the Ching, Restore the Ming." Banditry was a particular problem in the region of southern China where Hong and his followers lived. For his part, Hong hated the Manchus as much as anyone, and he preached that the Manchu emperors were demons who needed to be destroyed. It was against this background of spreading chaos and anti-Manchu anger that the Imperial authorities decided, in 1851, that Hong and his roughly 30,000 followers needed to be suppressed.

This did not go according to plan.

Instead of the police action the authorities expected, they got a 14-year war in which at least 10 million people died, some say 30 million. Hong and his followers marched more than a thousand miles across southern China, driven from one place after another by imperial forces, but always regrouping and gaining more followers from among China's millions of disaffected people. Eventually the God Believers conquered the great city of Nanjing and established it as the capital of their kingdom of Perfect Peace (Taiping).

Here is a poem of Hong's, written in 1937, that may give a hint at his mental state when he launched his rebellion:

Poem on Executing the Evil and Preserving the Righteous

In my hand I wield the Universe and the power to attack and kill,
I slay the evil, preserve the righteous, and relieve the people's suffering.
My eyes see through beyond the west, the north, the rivers, and the mountains,
My voice shakes the east, the south, the Sun, and the Moon.
The glorious sword of authority was given by the Lord,
Poems and books are evidences that praise Yahweh in front of Him.
Taiping [Perfect Peace] unifies the World of Light,
The domineering air will be joyous for myriads of millennia.

I don't personally see Hong's theology as especially important to his movement. In times of uncertainty and rapid change many people are drawn to cults, and it sometimes seems to me that the content of the teachings matters little compared to just offering an alternative to the status quo, especially if it is mixed with a bit of apocalypticism. But if you are interested, Spence has a detailed account, much of it drawn from the writings of westerners who were curious about this native Chinese version of their faith.

What really struck me about the story of the Taiping is the shear scale of events in China. In nineteenth-century China, a bandit chief could command 100,000 men, a rebel cult leader like Hong 250,000. These huge armies were raised, fed, equipped, and transported thanks to the astonishing productivity of southern China's wet rice agriculture and the bustling commercial society is supported. It astonished me that both sides were able to lose whole armies in campaigns and then just raise more men to replace them, along with fleets of boats, arsenals of weapons, and so on.

Another interesting insight concerns the conspicuous competence of China's civil servants. Their education consisted entirely of reading Chinese classics and learning to write something called an "eight-legged essay" that was never used for anything except answering question on the exam. Yet once in office they did things like manage irrigations systems, build roads, negotiate with foreigners, and battle bandits. They were not perfect, of course, but they kept the empire together through nearly a century of strife. They eventually put down the Taipings, who at their peak led a state with 30 million inhabitants. One incident that lodged in my brain concerns a local official who was particularly successful at putting down banditry in his district. His superiors asked for a report on his methods. He explained that it was too crude to divide villagers into those who were "for" or "against" the bandits; instead, one had to divide people into "those who know," "those who are afraid," and "those who want things to happen."

One of the Taiping's problems was that early on they accepted a couple of people as legitimate mouthpieces for God and Jesus, in addition to Hong. The difficulties created by the sometimes conflicting pronouncements of these men were smoothed over by Hong until after they took Nanjing. In their new capital one of these prophets began to proclaim himself the equal of Hong, indeed to be another younger brother of Jesus. Hong eventually had him assassinated, and 6,000 of his followered massacred.

Tricky business, prophecy.

Some accounts of the final days of Taiping have a sort of Jonestown feel, but Spence does not see it that way. In his telling the Taiping were basically ok socially and religiously, they just lost the war against the forces of the Ching state. There was some meddling by western powers, at first in favor of the Taiping (who seemed to be a sort of Christians, however weird), and then in favor of the empire, but this was essentially a Chinese civil conflict. I think this is an important point. While some left-wing westerners have lately been blaming all of China's problems in this era as on western imperialism, most Chinese do not see it that way. They have a 2,000-year tradition of regarding meddling by foreigners as something that happens when the Chinese state is weak, along with civil wars, banditry, and revolts. In the Chinese version of Chinese history, it is always the Chinese who are the main actors, and whether things go well or ill is up to the Chinese themselves. While westerners often argue that adapting to western technology and influence is a major theme of nineteenth-century Chinese history, Chinese historians generally see it as a side issue compared to their usually problems with the decay of an old imperial dynasty. Today there is a monument to Hong Xiuquan in Nanjing with text that makes no mention of his interest in Christianity or anything else about foreigners; he is simply a man who rose up against a corrupt Chinese regime on behalf of the suffering common people.

RIP Kevin Drum

After a long battle with cancer that he regularly blogged about, Kevin Drum has died.

Other people sometimes get emotional about the deaths of actors, but I have never felt much about that. I do mourn Kevin Drum. He has been a presence in my life for decades, someone whose thinking I have come to know very well, and I miss him already.

Abel Grimmer

This painting by Flemish master Abel Grimmer (c. 1570-1620) was recently rediscovered when the family that owned it, but had no idea what it was, put it up for auction. It is being called Landscape with Peasants near a Lakeside Castle, but that's just a description. I had never heard of Abel Grimmer, but I liked this castle, so I looked him up. 

He was born and died in Antwerp, and also spent most the years in between there. He learned to paint from his father, who got his own career started by painting small panels in the style of Pieter Breughel the Elder and selling them from a marketplace stall. Abel Grimmer's most famous painting is probably this one, The Tower of Babel (1595), now in Abu Dhabi.

One of the things I love about painting of this era is the little wonders in the background. This is Christ Carrying the Cross.

And these are the buildings in the background. Perfect. These glimpses of background cities are like little hidden worlds, and they entice me like doors into Faerie.

But Grimmer is most famous as a painter of ordinary life. The body one is a nice reminder of how much labor was involved in creating those famous geometric gardens.

This one, The Marketplace of Bergen op Zoom, is "attributed to" Grimmer, but it certainly looks very much like the others. Anyway a pleasant discovery for a weekend when Spring is making hints but not yet ready to arrive.

The Age of Busyness

Matt Yglesias, who has never had any job that didn't involve being online all the time, has been trying to recenter himself by reading old books. One of the things he learned from nineteenth-century novels is that rich people used to think it was ok to do nothing.

Yglesias is writing about Victorian England, and even in that case there were plenty of rich people who did a lot; for every Mr. Darcy enjoying his garden there was a Henry Layard traveling the world and excavating Nineveh. In other societies the demands on the rich and prominent were much greater.

But one thing aristocrats did not do across much of European history was hold jobs. Some did, mainly in the military or the high reaches of government, but plenty of others cultivated their leisure as best they could.

So it does strike me as interesting that in our era the aristocrats one hears about all have careers. Like, the Princess von Thurn und Taxis who was an editor at Vogue, or the Earl and Countess of Sandwich, who own one of England's most famous private houses and have spent their lives being busy as an executive in international development (the Earl) and a journalist (the Countess).

I have noted several times on this blog that the only prize our society can think up to give people for hard work and good behavior is a "rewarding career." When Covid created severe labor shortages in some industries many firms reacted, not by raising pay, but by touting "opportunities for advancement." The "American Dream," insofar as I understand it, was always about earning money, not inheriting it. Money you don't earn by hard work makes us suspicious, and we love sharing stories about people ruined by lottery riches, or professional athletes bankrupt within five years of leaving the league.

It seems to me that as a society we put a huge emphasis of work; work as identity, work as virtue, work as psychological stimulus. I wonder how many of our social pathologies can be traced back to our obsession with work and career success. On the other hand, I have no idea what we would do without work, which is one reason I am worried about the post-AI future.

Links 7 March 2025

Fragment of a La Tene torc, now in the British Museum

The Mediterranean grass Carl Linnaeus dubbed Poa annua is one of the world's great colonizers, even spreading to Antarctica.

Matt Levine explains the company bidding to buy the remains of InfoWars by issuing memecoins.

South Korea's birthrate ticked up a little last year, from 0.72 to 0.75, which is nice but no reason for some of the triumphant crowing coming from South Korean officials. They have not solved their problem.

The "truth" about the "Epstein files." The various prosecutions and civil lawsuits concerning Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell generated tens of thousands of pages of material, much of which has already been made public. News organizations have put some of this online in searchable formats, including Epstein's address book and the flight logs to the island. Much of the rest has not yet been made public because nobody has had the time to cleanse it of the names of victims and other parties who have not been accused of a crime (like Donald Trump, who appears plenty but was turned into "Doe 174"). The idea that there are bombshell revelations yet to come from this material is silly.

Japan looks to robots to take over caring for its aging population.

The cuisine of ancient Egypt, at Atlas Obscura. Interesting that there are a lot of pig bones in Egyptian archaeological sites but no pigs in tomb paintings. Anothing interesting note is that the workers building the great pyramids ate a lot of cow and pig feet, which struck sparks in my brain because cow feet figured prominently in the diet of the inmates in the Bruin Slave Jail. I guess cow feet have a long history of serving as cheap, high-protein food for poor workers.

Fixing social science using "replay review" for famous articles, on the model of professional sports. The argument is that we don't have the resources to do real reviews of all research before publication, so we should have a separate, better-funded process for research that has become important.

More weird details from the administration's DEI purge, including censoring documents about the Enola Gay and scientists named Gay.

This fall the Metropolitan Opera performed Grounded, an opera by Jeanine Tesori about an American drone pilot. Trailer here. Ninety seconds of "Blue," the first aria, here, review here that calls it a "triumph."

Tyler Cowen interviews science writer Carl Zimmer, much about airborne diseases and the possibility of life on other worlds.

And a review of Zimmer's new book on life in the air.

Denmark's postal service will no longer deliver letters after the end of the year; other European postal services are drastically cutting back.

Sabine Hossenfelder reads a study that was cited by a lot of US media arguing that human-induced climate change made the recent Los Angeles fires more likely and worse, notices that they actually found no statistically significant relationship but made their assertions anyway. 7-minute video.

I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats.

Melting permafrost exposes whaling-era graves on Svalbard.

Foucault and Neoliberalism, interesting essay.

Spitalfields Life has a photoset of old churches in the City of London.

Tyler Cowen on the importance of card games in his childhood, which was also true in my family.

Retirements of coal-fired power plants in the US will increase in 2025.

Taking off from the notion that Trump's victory will somehow revitalize an elite culture that has been ruined by leftist politics and distrust of greatness, Becca Rothfeld ponders the connections between art and politics in the Romantic age.

The Minds of People on Social Media

A MAGA classic from somebody called Insurrection Barbie on Twitter/X:

In 2022, NBC was reporting that Joe Biden lost his temper with Zelensky because he wasn’t grateful and he was very demanding.

That’s in 2022.

Wait, the media didn’t tell you about this? I wonder why…

So is NBC not part of "the media"?

First Daffodils, and Others

First daffodils I have seen this year, at the old estate I mentioned last week.

Amazing meadow of snowdrops, like this across half an acre.

One-antlered buck.

Decorative concrete piece, probably a leg from a garden bench.

Listening to "The Autumn of the Patriarch"

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) is a famous and famously weird novel by Gabriel García Márquez about the old age of a Latin American Dictator. It is written like a fever dream, an endless series of bizarre anecdotes told in extremely long sentences that randomly shift in tense, person, point of view, and style. The main subjects seem to be the loneliness of power, the absurdity of dictatorship, and the inevitability of decay, but honestly cows, birds, and whores may get as many words as any of the deeper themes.

I tried to read it a long time ago but bogged down and never finished. During my recent fieldwork I decided to listen to it, and this went wonderfully. I liked it much better read aloud that I did when I tried to read it to myself, lettering the mad words just flow over me rather than my trying to disentangle them. I highly recommend this way of appreciating García Márquez, and he now joins my list of authors (Dickens, J.K. Rowling) who are better to listen to than to read.