MCLC: ripe for revolution

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: ripe for revolution
***********************************************************

Source: NYT 
(2/9/12):http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/is-china-ripe-for
-a-revolution.html

OPINIONIs China Ripe for a Revolution?
By STEPHEN R. PLATT

ONE HUNDRED years ago, on Feb. 12, 1912, the 6-year-old child emperor of
the Qing Dynasty abdicated, ending more than 2,000 years of imperial rule
in China. But this watershed moment for modern China will not be widely
celebrated in the People¹s Republic. The political climate in Beijing is
tense as the ruling Communist Party prepares for a secretive transition to
the next generation of leaders, with the untested vice president, Xi
Jinping, expected to become president. Reminders of past regime change and
the end of dynasties are not welcome.

Of course, the current government has little to fear from the example of
1912. The Qing Dynasty, founded in 1644 by Manchu tribesmen who conquered
China from the north, was brought down by a highly organized revolutionary
movement with overseas arms and financing and a coherent governing
ideology based on republican nationalism. The Communist Party today faces
nothing like that.

What it does face, however, is enormous, inchoate rural unrest. The dark
side of China¹s economic rise has been a shocking widening of the gulf
between the prosperous coast and the poverty-stricken interior, a
flourishing of corruption among local officials and, by such data as we
can gather, widespread anger and discontent. The government has
acknowledged tens of thousands of yearly ³mass incidents,²
<http://ssrn.com/abstract=995330> which can range anywhere from a handful
of elderly widows protesting a corrupt real estate grab to communities in
open revolt (like the southern village of Wukan) to murderous ethnic
rioting, as occurred in the last few years among Tibetans and in western
Xinjiang Province and Inner Mongolia.

In that sense, it is instead the Taiping Rebellion, which nearly toppled
the Qing Dynasty 50 years earlier, that bears the strongest warnings for
the current government. The revolt, which claimed at least 20 million
lives before it was quelled, making it the bloodiest civil war in history,
suggests caution for those who hope for a popular uprising ‹ a Chinese
Spring ‹ today.

The Taiping Rebellion exploded out of southern China during the early
1850s in a period marked, as now, by economic dislocation, corruption and
a moral vacuum. Rural poverty abounded; local officials were wildly
corrupt; the Beijing government was so distant as to barely seem to exist.
The uprising was set off by bloody ethnic feuds between Cantonese-speaking
Chinese and the minority Hakkas over land rights. Many Hakkas had joined a
growing religious cult built around a visionary named Hong Xiuquan, who
believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. When local
Qing officials took the side of the Chinese farmers, they provoked the
Hakkas ‹ and their religious sect ‹ to take up arms and turn against the
government.

What was so remarkable, and so troubling, about the Taiping Rebellion was
that it spread with such swiftness and spontaneity. It did not depend on
years of preliminary ³revolutionary² groundwork (as did the revolution
that toppled the monarchy in 1912 or the 1949 revolution that brought the
Communists to power). And while Hong¹s religious followers formed its
core, once the sect broke out of its imperial cordon and marched north, it
swept up hundreds of thousands of other peasants along the way ‹
multitudes who had their own separate miseries and grievances and saw
nothing to lose by joining the revolt. Out-of-work miners, poor farmers,
criminal gangs and all manner of other malcontents folded into the larger
army, which by 1853 numbered half a million recruits and conscripts. The
Taiping captured the city of Nanjing that year, massacred its entire
Manchu population and held the city as their capital and base for 11 years
until the civil war ended.

SCHOOLCHILDREN in China in the 1950s and ¹60s were taught that the Taiping
were the precursors of the Communist Party, with Hong as Mao¹s spiritual
ancestor. That analogy has now fallen by the wayside, for China¹s
government is no longer in any sense revolutionary. So it makes sense that
in recent years, the Taiping have often been depicted negatively, as
perpetrators of superstition and sectarian violence and a threat to social
order. The Chinese general who suppressed them, Zeng Guofan, was for
generations reviled as a traitor to his race for supporting the Manchus
but has now been redeemed. Today he is one of China¹s most popular
historical figures, a model of steadfast Confucian loyalty and
self-discipline. Conveniently for the state, his primary contribution to
China¹s history was the merciless crushing of violent dissent.

Beijing has learned its lessons from the past. We see this in the swift
and ruthless suppression of Falun Gong and other religious sects that
resemble the Taiping before they became militarized. We can see it in the
numbers of today¹s ³mass incidents.² One estimate, 180,000
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/world/asia/harassment-and-house-eviction
s-bedevil-even-chinas-well-off.html> in 2010, sounds ominous indeed, but
in fact the sheer number shows that the dissent is not organized and has
not (yet) coalesced into something that can threaten the state. The
Chinese Communist Party would far rather be faced with tens or even
hundreds of thousands of separate small-scale incidents than one unified
and momentum-gathering insurgency. The greatest fear of the government is
not that violent dissent should exist; the fear is that it should coalesce
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=995330>.

The rebellion holds lessons for the West, too. China¹s rulers in the 19th
century were, as they are today, generally loathed abroad. The Manchus
were seen as arrogant and venal despots who obstructed trade and hated
foreigners. All romance was on the side of the Taiping rebels, who at the
onset were heralded abroad as the liberators of the Chinese people. As one
American missionary in Shanghai put it at the time, ³Americans are too
firmly attached to the principles on which their government was founded
and has flourished to refuse sympathy for a heroic people battling against
foreign thralldom.²

As Mr. Xi prepares to visit the United States on Tuesday, a similar
sympathy shapes our view of China¹s current unrest. Just last weekend,
Senator John McCain warned China¹s vice foreign minister that ³the Arab
Spring is coming to China.² The dominant tenor of Western press coverage
is that the Communist Party is finally receiving its comeuppance ‹ for its
corruption, for its misrule in the countryside, for its indifference to
human rights and democracy. And below the surface, usually unspoken, lurks
a deeply felt sense of schadenfreude ‹ a desire to see the Communist Party
toppled from power by its own people.

But we should be careful about what we wish for. For all of the West¹s
contempt for China¹s government in the 19th century, when the Taiping
Rebellion actually drove it to the brink of destruction, it was Britain
that intervened to keep it in power. Britain¹s economy depended so heavily
on the China market at the time (especially after the loss of the United
States market to the American Civil War in 1861) that it simply could not
bear the risk of what might come from a rebel victory. With American
encouragement, the British supplied arms, gunships and military officers
to the Manchu government and ultimately helped tip the balance of the war
in its favor.

We may not be so far removed. Given the precarious state of our economy
today, and America¹s nearly existential reliance on our trade with China
in particular, one wonders: for all of our principled condemnation of
China¹s government on political and human rights grounds, if it were
actually faced with a revolution from within ‹ even one led by a coalition
calling for greater democracy ‹ how likely is it that we, too, wouldn¹t,
in the end, find ourselves hoping for that revolution to fail?

Stephen R. Platt is an associate professor
<http://www.umass.edu/history/faculty/platt.html> of history at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of ³Autumn in the
Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil
War.²