What I Am Reading: "Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom" by Stephen R. Platt

Having enjoyed Stephen Platt's most recent book on 19th century China, I chased right after his book about the Taiping Rebellion. Like his other book, this book focuses fairly heavily on the period’s foreign involvement in China, including the Second Opium War. The rebellion, which lasted almost fifteen years, could be one of the deadliest wars in history, with between fifty and a hundred million casualties. A war this large, even in the waning self-imposed isolation of Qing China, had effects beyond Chinese borders; Britain's semi-involvement in the war in its later stages was partially a reaction to the need for markets for British textiles due to the market disruptions of both the Taiping Rebellion and the American Civil War. Platt says in his introduction that the war was already viewed through the lens of foreign participants by us foreigners, especially through the involvements of mercenaries Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles Gordon. However, though he tried to see beyond their story initially, this foreign involvement was essential to the war's outcome. The Taiping were a millenarian movement, but Platt also aimed to focus more on their Chinese nationalist and anti-Manchu elements, and not their religious theorizing.

The rebellion was the brainchild of Hong Xiuquan, a failed candidate for the imperial examinations who had a breakdown and started seeing Christian-flavored religious visions (that reminded me a lot of a UFO abduction narrative, with different cultural influences of course), proclaiming himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He gathered enough religious zealots and peasants disaffected by the corrupt and incompetent Qing regime to launch a rebellion in southeastern China in 1850. This was viewed as just another chaotic bandit uprising for the first few years, but hit home for the Qing and for the foreign population of China when the Taiping captured Nanjing in 1853. The rebellion expanded a bit from there, carving out a territory in the region that doesn't look large on a map of China, but in fact made up some of the richest and most populous parts of the country. Evolving from their peasant origins, the Taiping set up a centralized, bureaucratic state, mirroring the decaying Qing. They were kicked back into high gear in 1859 by Hong Rengan, Hong Xiuquan's distant cousin, who had been one of his earliest followers and had in between spent time with Christian missionaries in Taiwan, and adventured his way to Nanjing full of ideas for industrial modernization and cooperation with foreigners (coupled with admittedly harsh social policies). His cousin placed him as Prime Minister and put him in charge of foreign relations, and he set about trying to achieve his reformist goals, with some concessions to traditional Confucian bureaucracy to win over local elites and gentry. Many viewed the Chinese Mandate of Heaven as eventually passing from one dynasty to another as it had in the past, and Hong Rengan did his best to show that if this happened, it would be a stable transition.

The Taiping made a breakout from the besieged Nanjing in 1860 in an effort to move east, and establish control of the Yangtze River Valley from its origin all the way to Shanghai, allowing them to maintain foreign trade and a thriving economy as they took over the entire south. They made considerable advances under their young general, Li Xiucheng, but were met (to their bafflement) with British and French cannon fire when they approached Shanghai. They did not take the city, but consolidated control over the rest of the region.

The Qing dynasty had their own problems at the time. After initial fighting in 1856, in 1858, the British and French launched a new Opium War, a quickie expedition to correct treaty noncompliance and various trade disputes. A first expedition went up the river to Beijing, meeting with a quick submission and new treaty to be ratified. A year later, the expedition to force the river again to conclude the treaty didn't go so well at first, with Mongol general Senggelinqin repulsing the British and French at the mouth of the Hai river. In 1860, a final expedition did force the river, and after a breakdown of talks at the halfway point did make it to Beijing. After the betrayal and capture of their parley party, the British commander sacked the Emperor's summer palace as punishment. This act of vandalism was viewed controversially at home; at this point there was considerable debate about British policy in China. The Palmerston government was interested in propping up the Qing despite having just attacked them; but others, especially missionaries in religious sympathy with the Taiping (and in awe of Hong Rengan and his agenda of modernization and foreign cooperation) wanted to support the Taiping in their freedom from foreign (Manchu) "oppressors." In recognition of the ongoing importance of foreign contacts, the Qing government's Prince Gong made a new Foreign Office to deal with them.

Meanwhile, to fill the gap between their northern-based Mongol bannermen and their Han Green Standard gendarmes, the Imperial government had called upon elite mandarin Zeng Guofan to form his Hunan army in 1853. This army was more disciplined and higher-paid than other troops or militia, and was recruited through a pyramid scheme of personal contacts. They spent their time in a slog up and down the Yangtze until the Taiping breakout in 1860, whereupon (after the deaths of other generals) Zeng Guofan was given command of their entire theater of war, cutting through the dense Qing bureaucracy of generals and governors by securing multiple civil appointments with which to supply and pay his army. This outwardly bold but inwardly insecure and reluctant official planned to encircle the Taiping, starting at the westernmost edge of their Yangtze River control, Anqing. Every siege in this book, for the record, seems to have made use of the inward-and-outward facing fortifications that I thought were mainly the province of Caesar in Gaul.

Toward the end of 1860, the Taiping set off to relieve Anqing, their base of power on the upper Yangtze, and conquer the north side of the Yangtze river. They attacked Zeng Guofan's troops in his encampment on the south side, bottling him up and sending him into paroxysms of despair. They pressed north, but hesitated because of the newfound British trading presence and the veiled threats of the "neutral" British officials. This delay meant that they were unsuccessful in relieving the siege, and the city fell in September of 1861. Zeng Guofan started to become a bit of a villain in my eyes after his casual massacres, and geared up to push his offensive to the east. For the record, this post (dashed out on the day of the book’s conclusion, as they all are) skims over a lot of the specifics of the battles and campaigns, as there were many of them and the pendulum constantly swung back and forth vis a vis who had the upper hand; almost as much as the pendulum of British public opinion swung.

Around this same time the Emperor died, and was succeeded by his five-year-old son, with power wielded by his mother, the Dowager Empress Cixi after dispensing with the official regents made up of war lobby officials. The Taiping, having failed to advance up the river to lift the Anqing siege, abandoned Hong Rengan's plan to secure the river as their main conduit of trade and the key to securing the entire south as their kingdom. His philosophy toward the foreigners was also on the wane after he had failed to secure foreign weapons shipments. Instead, the Taiping again focused on expanding their control in the east under Li Xiucheng, with the exception of Shanghai.

The British did a brisk textile trade with China through most of the rebellion, but things finally went to hell when the other end of their market was blocked off by the Southern secession and American Civil War in 1861. The Confederates were extended belligerent status during the war; this is not a recognition of sovereignty, but it entitles the state to trade during their conflict, and regards their rebellion as more than just an internal matter. Supporters in Britain of the Taiping wanted the same status, but were reassured by the Palmerston government that their officials were following a policy of strict neutrality. This was far from the case. Ambassador Frederick Bruce was hostile to the Taiping and their sympathizers, and presented a biased view to his superiors that portrayed them as threatening anarchists. The British officials had strict orders not to meddle beyond their own defense, but Bruce and the military officials pushed the limits of those instructions, including hindering Taiping acquisition of treaty ports despite strategic necessity, and despite the fact that trade was mostly carried out as normal when they did take them. In order to open a third front in the campaign against Nanjing, Zen Guofan was allowed by the British to ship his troops down the river to the Shanghai area, since the Taiping wouldn't fire on the British vessels.

Platt's books on China may not specifically be public policy texts, but they present clear examples of the difficulties of policy implementation through the case of the British officials: operating largely on the exigencies of circumstance, interpreting their orders to give them maximum possible agency to follow their own agenda, and coloring official policy through control of the flow of information. False information on Taiping atrocities led Palmerston's government in 1862 to order its troops to secure all treaty ports, and this plus a manipulated incident involving accidental damage to allied ships gave the British and French a pretext to fight. They moved to evict the Taiping from several river ports and an area in a thirty mile radius around Shanghai. In the mean time, the economic crisis around the textile industry and reports from returned civil servants hostile to the Taiping colored British elite and popular opinion against the Taiping at the time, though the public switched back to their usual disgust at the Qing in the inevitable face of new atrocities as their armies advanced into Taiping cities.

The British and French didn't have enough forces for an extended campaign of their own, and they pulled back to the Shanghai area by the end of 1862. Meanwhile, starting earlier in that year, Zeng Guofan had success pressing the Taiping from both ends of the Yangtze river, and the Taiping thus spent the year falling back into the city, and came under siege (though other fighting continued elsewhere, which leads to the intermixing of dates ahead). An attempt by some British operatives to secure and command a flotilla of gunboats on behalf of the Qing lasted through 1862 and into 1863, but eventually fell apart when the commissions didn't come through. Foreigners were, however, involved in the fighting, mainly a unit of dock-scum and deserter mercenaries led since the early days in the defense of Shanghai by American officer Frederick Townsend Ward, from Salem, Massachusetts. After being met with defeat after grisly defeat in the eastern theater, Ward eventually adopted the model of American and European officers commanding Chinese troops, which went marginally better until he died in late 1862. After a few interim commanders (one of whom, Henry Burgevine, defected to the Taiping, leading tunnel-vision foreigners to conclude that he would win the war for them), the unit, known as the Ever-Victorious Army, came under the command of the more professional Charles Gordon, young British artillery officer (on loan, and not just an adventurer). These forces helped the Qing advance upriver, though Gordon eventually left his job after he negotiated a surrender of a Taiping city in late 1863, only to have the rebel leaders massacred by the Qing in spite of his explicit promise against it. This was the event that convinced the British public once and for all that they should not be involved in the war, and the chastened Palmerston government (having held on long enough to save the textile industry anyway) retreated to full non-interventionism in early 1864. Gordon’s role in the overall conflict is much smaller than it is portrayed in his mythological story (as recalled of course in Eminent Victorians), though his forces did a lot of important fighting in the campaign up the Yangtze.

Li Xiucheng had made an attempt to lift the siege of Nanjing in October of 1862, but failed after a month of brutal counter-siege fighting. As Zeng Guofan moved forces to Nanjing from several directions for his beloved encirclement, starting with attacks on the outlying fortresses in 1863 (Nanjing was a city with a large enough perimeter that encirclement took a long time). The full-court siege lasted until July of 1864, by which point an increasingly paranoid Hong Xiuquan had already died of his illness. Li Xiucheng made a brief breakout with Hong Xiuquan's son, but they and Hong Rengan were all captured and eventually executed.

This was the end of the Taiping Rebellion, after almost fifteen years of fighting. British (and French) meddling definitely paved the way for Qing military successes, and true neutrality could have seen the Taiping gain the ports and the weapons shipments that would have kept them on top in their region. Contemporary foreign opinions on the war were very interesting, as Karl Marx first lauded it as a revolution that the proletariat in Europe could look to, before eventually souring on the Taiping after the negative stories kept coming. Many others viewed it as a fight for freedom from Manchu foreigners; this was cast in some eyes as a bad thing, as future Confederates saw the uprising as similar to a slave revolt. Some in Britain feared that their intervention had broken the country so thoroughly, stunting its natural regime change, that they would have no choice but to colonize it. The Japanese, meanwhile, came to view the rebellion as a counter-example to their own successful modernization, and later Japanese statesmen told the British that helping to suppress it as they did was the worst thing they could have done for China. Many Chinese themselves, as noted above, were not opposed to the passing of a dynasty, as it was part of the cycle of Chinese civilization (as I was first exposed to in reading Owen Lattimore, as those connected to the system but not beholden to it come from the frontiers and borderlands to take it over).

This book taught me that my knowledge of Chinese geography is severely lacking. It also impressed that the war was very complicated, with multiple theaters of operation in place at once, and considerable movement of generals between those theaters. A timeline was helpfully provided at the front, though I based my notes on the book’s order of things and not the chronological order.

I am sympathetic to a positive portrayal of the Taiping, especially in light of the continued stagnation and downfall of the Qing, and the not-exactly-happy fate of China subsequent to that. I am in favor of the idea of new regimes replacing the old, but maintaining continuity within the country. Perhaps things would have gone just as poorly, especially in the fickle face of European greed, but perhaps they would have gone better. The grass is always greener.