China

The End of the Tai-ping Rebellion

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In an earlier post, I mentioned the excellent old book The “Ever Victorious Army”: A History of the Chinese Campaign under Lt.-Col. C.G. Gordon, C.B., R.E., and of the Suppression of the Tai-Ping Rebellion by Andrew Wilson (1868). The author, Wilson, at key points in the book, reaches an almost poetic intensity in his prose.

The tragic story of the Tai-ping Rebellion is little known in the USA. Yet the wholesale devastation it inflicted on China, killing over 20 million people during 14 years of internal warfare and anarchy, makes it the largest military event of the 19th Century.

The founder and ruler of the Tai-ping movement, Hung Sew-tsuen, was exposed to foreign missionaries who showed him a Chinese translation of the Bible. After failing to pass the examination to enter the Mandarinate, he went into a trance, had a vision, and believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus. Conditions in China were disorderly, and he believed himself to be Heaven’s instrument to rectify the wrongs and bring peace and justice and prosperity back to China. He convinced others of his status and mission. He raised an army and overran many provinces and cities. But instead of restoring harmony in the Flowery Land, he and his rampaging subordinates (called wangs, or kings) brought only death, famine, destruction and chaos. In the closing years of the rebellion Hung Sew-tsuen was besieged in Nanjing by the Imperialist forces of the Manchu Emperor.

As dangers gathered round him, Hung Sew-tsuen, the Heavenly Monarch, became more cruel in his edicts, and ordered any of his people who might be found communicating with the enemy to be flayed alive or pounded to death; but even he could no longer conceal from himself the fact that the days of his reign and of his life had drawn to a close. It would be interesting to know what were the last thoughts of this extraordinary man when he found himself in these circumstances. Did he still believe that he was a favourite of heaven, and authorised representative of Deity on earth, or had he in his last hours some glimpse of the true nature of the terrible and cruel destiny which he had had to fulfil? Surely as his thoughts reverted to the simple Hakka village of his youth, he must have known that his path over the once peaceful and happy Flowery Land could be traced by flames and rapine and bloodshed, involving a sum of human wretchedness such as had never before lain to the account of the most ferocious scourge of mankind. Where there had been busy cities, he had left ruinous heaps; where fruitful fields, a desolate wilderness; “wild beasts, descending from their fastnesses in the mountains, roamed at large over the land, and made their dens in the ruins of deserted towns; the cry of the pheasant usurped the place of the hum of busy populations; no hands were left to till the soil, and noxious weeds covered the ground once tilled with patient industry.” Even, as has been remarked, the very physical features of the country, owing to neglect of the embankment of great rivers, had been largely changed by his destructive career. And, after all this ruin and misery, what had the Tai-ping movement come to at last but the restoration of Imperial rule in China, while a cloud of fear and wrath hung over the doomed city in which the king and priest and prophet of the Great Peace anticipated death in the midst of his trembling women and the remnant of his ferocious soldiery.

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The Birth of the Ever Victorious Army

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Through an English friend in the Chinese service, Ward obtained an introduction to Wu, the Taotoi of Shanghai, and to a millionaire merchant and mandarin named Tah Kee. The plan he proposed was as simple as it was daring. He offered to recruit a foreign legion, with which he would defend Shanghai, and at the same time attack such of the Taiping strongholds as were within striking distance, stipulating that for every city captured he was to receive seventy-five thousand dollars in gold, that his men were to have the first day’s looting, and that each place taken should immediately be garrisoned by imperial troops, leaving his own force free for further operations. Wu on behalf of the government, and Tah Kee as the representative of the Shanghai merchants, promptly agreed to this proposal, and signed the contract. They had, indeed, everything to gain and nothing to lose. It was also arranged that Tah Kee should at the outset furnish the arms, ammunition, clothing, and commissary supplies necessary to equip the legion. These preliminaries once settled, Ward wasted no time in recruiting his force, for every day was bringing the Taipings nearer. A number of brave and experienced officers, for the most part soldiers of fortune like himself, hastened to offer him their services, General Edward Forester, an American, being appointed second in command. The rank and file of the legion was recruited from the scum and offscourings of the East, Malay pirates, Burmese dacoits, Tartar brigands, and desperadoes, adventurers, and fugitives from justice from every corner of the farther East being attracted by the high rate of pay, which in view of the hazardous nature of the service, was fixed at one hundred dollars a month for enlisted men, and proportionately more for officers. The non-commissioned officers, who were counted upon to stiffen the ranks of the Orientals, were for the most part veterans of continental armies, and could be relied upon to fight as long as stock and barrel held together. The officers carried swords and Colt’s revolvers, the latter proving terribly effective in the hand-to-hand fighting which Ward made the rule; while the men were armed with Sharp’s repeating carbines and the vicious Malay kris. Everything considered, I doubt if a more formidable aggregation of ruffians ever took the field. Ward placed his men under a discipline which made that of the German army appear like a kindergarten; taught them the tactics he had learned under Garibaldi, Walker, and Juarez; and finally, when they were as keen as razors and as tough as rawhide, he entered them in battle on a most astonished foe.

From Gentlemen Rovers by E. Alexander Powell (1913), chapter entitled “Cities Taken by Contract” about Frederick Townsend Ward and the Ever Victorious Army during the Taiping Rebellion. After Ward’s death, the Ever Victorious Army was led on to victory by Charles “Chinese” Gordon. (The title of Powell’s book is based on the poem The Lost Legion by Rudyard Kipling.) See also The “Ever Victorious Army”: A History of the Chinese Campaign under Lt.-Col. C.G. Gordon, C.B., R.E., and of the Suppression of the Tai-Ping Rebellion by Andrew Wilson (1868).

UPDATE: Reading the Wilson book, I found this excellent paragraph, about the death of the Emperor, who had suffered both the Taiping rebellion as well as foreign invasion, culminating in the destruction of the Summer Palace, and unremitting disaster throughout his reign:

About this time some events occurred at Peking which had a not unimportant bearing on the future of China and of Tai-pingdom. On the 21st August the Emperor Hien-fung died at the Jehol, his hunting-seat in Tartary, in the 26th year of his age and the 11th of his reign. Unequal to the difficulties of a transition period, he had, like many other rulers similarly placed, sought consolation in sensual indulgences, and had allowed himself to be led by unworthy favourites. At last, as the decree announcing his death stated, “his malady attacked him with increasing violence, bringing him to the last extremity, and on the 17th day of the moon he sped upwards upon the dragon to be a guest on high. We tore the earth and cried to heaven, yet reached we not to him with our hands or voices.” When the mortal shell of this frail and unfortunate monarch was laid in its ” cedar palace,” his spirit ascending on the dragon would have many strange things to tell to the older Emperors of his line. He would have to speak of trouble, rebellion, and change through all the years of his reign, over all the vast plains of the Celestial Empire, from the guttural voiced tribes of Mongolia and the blue-capped Mohammedans of Shensi, down to the innumerable pirates of Kwangtung; he might complain that, east and west, north and south, his people had been disobedient and rebellious; the administration of his empire had been set at defiance, and his sacred decrees had been imperfectly carried out by weak and corrupt viceroys, much more intent upon their own aggrandisement than upon the welfare of the people. Year after year great bands of marauding rebels had moved across the once happy Flowery Land, marking their progress in the darkness of night by the glare of burning villages, or shadowing it in the day by the rolling smoke of consuming towns. A maniac usurper had not only sought to ascend the dragon throne, but had nearly done so, and had claimed divine honours; while invading armies of the outside barbarian had humiliated the empire, had visited the once inviolate city of Peking, and had burned the palace of the Son of Heaven.

Woe unto poor China, and her unhappy Emperor. A vivid and tragic depiction of the destruction of the Summer Palace, mentioned here, can be found in How We got into Pekin: A Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860 by The Rev. R.J.L. M’Ghee (1862), which is a very worthy book.

Just Say “No”

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(or at least “less”)

…to rare earths

There has been much concern, and rightly so, about the increasing dependence of the U.S. and other economies on the elements known as rare earths, for which the primary current supplier is China. These concerns have been further increased by the rather high-handed manner in which the Chinese government has conducted itself in this matter. As a result, stocks of companies with access to rare-earth mineral deposits outside of China have been doing pretty well.

A couple of weeks ago, General Electric posted about their efforts to reduce the need for rhenium in jet engines. Although it is not technically a rare earth, rhenium is indeed rare–world production about 50 tons per year–and expensive. GE’s rhenium-reduction project has three elements: recycling metal grindings from the manufacturing process, developing alloys that require less or no rhenium, and reclaiming rhenium from used engine parts.

When reading the GE post, it struck me that just about every company that is highly dependent on rare earths probably has similar projects underway. Comes now Toyota, with an announcement that it’s making good progress in developing an electric motor (for hybrids) which has no need of neodymium, a mainly-Chinese-source element that is a key component in today’s hybrid motors. (Toyota’s new motor is based on the induction-motor principle–scarcely a new technology, but one that has required considerable reengineering to meet the weight and efficiency needs of the hybrid application.)

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The Dangling Grand Bargain

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The thirst for a  magic bullet is profoundly American. In war, the magic bullet manifests itself in the antiseptic wonder weapons that promise to transform conflict into a harmless, contact-free sporting event. In politics,  the magic bullet manifests itself as something like a 2,000+ page health care reform law. In finance, it manifests itself as the AAA rated senior tranche in a collateralized debt obligation (CDO).

In diplomacy, the manifestation of magic bulletry is the “grand bargain”. Every diplomat’s secret desire is making the agreement to end all agreements and conducting the negotiation to end all negotiations. As a magic bullet, the grand bargain would kill all diplomatic disputes for all time,  Unfortunately, over every aspiring  1648 or 1815 hangs the long shadow of 1919. Versailles was intended to be the magic bullet to end all magic bullets. Instead, it became the magic bullet that wasn’t. Inasmuch as it possessed magic, it was the magic to ricochet off its intended target and right back at its originators.

In today’s West, dominated by those high on the heady drug of  global meliorism, the mere act of talking has somehow become an end unto itself. Whether it’s a “peace process”, “six-party talks”, “quartet”, “agreed framework”, “security council resolution”, or some other high-falutin’ hogwash, Western diplomacy resembles is more the decrepit liturgy of a dying baroque cult than the hard-nosed power brokering beloved by naïve realists. Like a general  who puts the desperate lunge for a tactically decisive battle above stodgy strategic logic, a diplomat who puts talking, negotiating, and agreements first puts the tactical cart before the strategic horse.

Strategy seeks to convert power into control to achieve purpose. The ideal was outlined by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 31:

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