Marx and the Taiping rebellion
the Heaven and Earth society, which filled this governance vacuum alongside various bandit organizations, typically overpowering ‘ the people ’ which Michael identifies as the governing body. The Taiping filled a similar function for their members, who began as the dejected Hakka people, and flocked to the Taiping for protection, often from persecution or their ethnic conflict with the Punti. Indeed, in the anarchic environment of 1850s China, the Taiping offered a comparatively well- organized state, with plans for the development of railroads and schools, as Hong Rengan outlined in his plans for a victorious Taiping state. Marx rightly recognizes the link between opium smuggling and the rise of particularly triad crime in contemporary southern China. Increased British policing of the waters around Canton forced gangsters inland, where they readily exploited and exacerbated the preexisting lack of government authority. 6 And this is precisely the problem with Marx’s argument; he ignores – or more probably was ignorant of – the underlying causes of the weak Qing state: longstanding institutional corruption, under which every layer of bureaucracy sought bribery for even the most trivial task, with those who had paid 3000 taels to purchase a magistracy attempting to recuperate it; and the deterioration of the Faustian pact it had long reached with the gentry requiring it to surrender questions of local administration to them for their continued support, which had reached such a sordid state by the 1850s that gentry were readily subverting government edicts for their own gain, for instance by overtaxing peasants. Indeed, the development of local militias began to overpower even ‘ the old order of decaying officialdom [including the gentry] ’ as described in Sources of Chinese Tradition. 7 This predated foreign intervention, and it produced increased criminality in southern China, which Marx attributes to the humiliation of the dynasty (citing the loss of ‘ the superstitious faith in the eternity of the Celestial Empire ’ , or the Mandate of Heaven) at the hands of ‘ the English cannon ’ and the aforementioned criminality which the opium trade had swept into China. 8 Marx offers a portrait of a Chinese sovereign authority haemorrhaged by the consequences of western intervention; this paragraph proves the inaccuracy of that portrait. He rightly cites factors in the weaking of imperial authority, but they were very much secondary to the basic inability of the state to exercise its functions resulting from a long defunct bureaucracy and the existence of extrajudicial authorities, another problem which predated foreign intervention. This was something, which as next explored, was worsened by dire economic conditions. If the government struggled to offer authority, it certainly failed to provide prosperity. What Franz Michael views as ‘ the pressure of a rapidly growing population on the limited resources of agricultural land ’ was severe, with the e mpire’s population having increased threefold, to about 300,000 by the turn of the nineteenth century, despite scarce increase in the quantity of cultivated land in a time of few wars, epidemics, and natural disasters. 9 This placed the food supply under strain. The natural disasters – such as drought in Hunan, the flooding of the Yangtze in 1847, and famine in Guangxi in 1849 – of the 1840s and 1850s worsened the picture further. These issues of food supply were of greatest severity, in comparison to other factors, and their lack of relation to foreign powers reflects the domestic causes of economic hardship, and thereby discontent, that Marx ignores. He rightly recognizes that the link between the opium trade and the diminishment of Chinese silver reserves essential for tax collection,
6 Spence 1996: 120. 7 De Bary Lufrano 2001: 215.
8 Marx (note 2). 9 Michael 1966.
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