Marx and the Taiping rebellion
The rebellion should be considered to be partly a class uprising, a factor which Marx surprisingly fails to fully appreciate. There is but a passing mention to the effects on the proletariat of burdensome taxation, with scarce attention paid to the revolutionary potential of their suffering. The Taiping, until their much later development into a quasi-state actor, were very much overwhelmingly a force of the proletariat. That most gentry allied themselves with the Qing government, fearing that they would loose generational wealth to Taiping confiscation and redistribution (as Mao would later note, Taiping policies on matters of socialized food provision, for instance, were somewhat socialist), reveals the presence of class conflict as a motivating factor. Indeed, that for Stephen Platt ‘ it was unclear what . . . a farmer stood to gain from the continuation of Xianfeng’s reign’ and a clear peasant hostility towards elites emerged alongside the promise of a more egalitarian Taiping state strengthens this argument. 14 So clearly peasant resentment of the ruling class and a desire to displace for a regime of new promise motivated peasants to join – energizing it with revolutionary, even Marxian, p otential. And Marx’s failure to fully appreciate this aspect of the rebellion further limits his account. But the reasons for joining the Taiping were not entirely practical or economic. The Taiping maintained an ideological appeal, which was both stronger and more broad than many scholars – in particular Marx, who in more conventionally Marxist fashion largely entirely fails to discuss it in his 1853 article, preferring to consider economic motives – acknowledge. The first aspect of this appeal was religious. The most prominent uprisings in early nineteenth century China had had a religious or spiritual appeal. The White Lotus rebellion was motivated by millenarian Buddhists and Qingyun Wu notes that ‘ Historically, Chinese peasant uprisings have never been free from Messianism. 15 The socioeconomic devastation wrought by famine in the 1840s, which plunged many of the comfortably wealthy into poverty, predisposed many to millenarian cultism in the view of many sociologists in a way similar to Mahdists in north Africa, whom General Gordon would also confront. 16 Indeed, the strong religious discipline of Taiping forces, which regularly recited the ten commandments, manifest itself in a strong unity of purpose, manifest in much greater discipline than the Qing banner forces. 17 Zeng Guofan’s focus at the fall of Nanjing on capturing Hong Xiuquan’s son, the heir apparent to the Taiping throne following the discovery of Xuiquan’s death, reflected the importance of removing the last viable ideological figurehead from the movement, for this son could claim the similar religious legitimacy as Hong himself, even if too young to orchestrate such an uprising. 18 This is despite doubts over the sincerity of much Taiping religious belief, which Johnathan Spence disarms in his descriptions of mass baptisms of new members and regular mass recitations of the ten commandments, with punishment for those who showed ‘sarcasm or ignorance of God’s wider purpose’ . 19 Indeed, even the prospect of Hong Xiuquan’s insanity – and perhaps that of other senior Taiping officials, like the East King – cannot account for the evidently widespread religious belief in the core of the movement, although it must be granted that the sincerity of Taiping faith was considerably diluted as the movement grew. And Hong Xiuquan’s inconsistency on matters of religious principle, making frequent use of concubines in Nanjing for example when such was banned for other citizens of the Heavenly Kingdom, does not
14 Platt 2012: 215. 15 Wu 1997: 235. 16 Yap 1954. 17 Spence 1996: 128. 18 Platt 2012: 350. 19 Spence 1996 : 118.
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