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.