Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast

Welcome to the Chinese Revolutions podcast by me, Nathan Bennett. We're setting off on a long journey through modern Chinese history, looking at how China came to be the way it is today through the lens of revolutionary movements starting in 1839.

I lived in China for 7 years. This podcast is a love letter and a farewell letter to that country.

When you live in China for a long time, there's a lot you just "can't" say for one reason or another. It's a truly dynamic place, and I'm still processing all I learned and saw.

Now, I'm going to bring up all the good and bad and work it all out.

This podcast is for beginners. You'll go from nothing to something in understanding modern Chinese history.

For us, history is "what was done" and ideals should be founded in what has worked. What "should" a country be? Determined by historical processes, what actually happens, what lasts.

Nations continually rearticulate their identities. Enough of a break of continuity, it's a revolution.

We follow the "one China ... eventually" policy. There is one China but history shows the band breaking up and getting back together again all the time.

We will not be following Communist Party of China guidelines in how to talk about Chinese history. I'll talk about it however seems true and right. It might agree with the CPC if it's the truth, but I'm not following their guidelines.

We're going with as sympathetic a view of China as possible. We're going to talk about the good and the bad, but this podcast proceeds from a love for China, not just opposition to a government or a desire to make China something other than it is.

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In this episode, we go over the organization of Zeng Guofan's army and the first few years of his campaigns against the Taiping rebels.

We are following the book Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt for this episode.

Zeng Guofan's army recruited in Hunan had local loyalties, but not a strong attachment to the emperor. The soldiers were well paid to shore up their personal motivation to fight well and not steal from locals in areas they moved through.

Songs were composed to instruct soldiers in proper conduct on campaign. Because of the importance of local support to defeating the Taiping, it was critical to prevent soldiers from stealing from local people.

Zeng Guofan had to deal with opposition from local elites, officials, and others. Whatever their reasons, his local opponents made his job extremely difficult to the point that he attempted suicide twice after big defeats.

Some victories helped Zeng Guofan silence some critics, but his work was an uphill battle on both the military and political sides of his mission.

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Please reach out at [email protected] and let me know what you think!

Here, we’re going to discuss the definition of “revolution.” It’s too easy to look at the CPC and think that’s what the revolution produced. No, there were other Chinese revolutions, and before we look at what THOSE were, we’ll look at what revolutions are.

Before I get away into my own program too much, I owe a debt of inspiration to the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan.

He's gotten various suggestions to cover Chinese content. I know—I sent him one myself. Then I thought, I could do that !

So here we are.

Follow the link or search for it on your favorite podcast app. (Tell him I sent you!)

Basically:

• The rules change
• The foundational facts change—or are seen to change

Revolution is basically an opportunistic infection. It takes advantage of unusual weakness in a political system.

My definitions are yoinked directly from the Wikipedia article on revolution.

Definitions in this episode rely heavily on quotations in the Wikipedia article from the work of Jeff Goodwin. I quote him as "he's who Wikipedia quoted," but let's do him justice in the show notes.

• Personal site
• NYU faculty profile

For the show notes...

Revolutions are planned. There's a smaller group of people organizing it. They follow a popular impulse. Most ordinary people don't have the capacity to plan, so it's this small group that drives things.

Who's in charge changes, why they're in charge changes. Family, business, community—it all changes. Social revolution often accompanies political revolution.

When I prepared this episode, I used a summary from this website to get my notes straight. Thanks, Mr. Sustainability!

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith provides foundational insights into why China was so ... revolutionary from the early mid-1800s to 1949.

These are the rules that Chinese rulers couldn't somehow keep:

(Copied directly from Mr. Sustainability, just to be clear.)

• Politics is about getting and keeping power, not the welfare of the people.
• Political power is best ensured and maintained when you depend on few essential cronies to attain and retain office (dictators are often in a better position to retain power than democrats).
• Depending on a small coalition of cronies allows leaders to tax at higher rates.
• Dictators have the most power when the essential cronies are easily replaceable.

• Keep the winning coalition as small as possible: you will need fewer people to stay in power, have higher control over them, and you will save on graft (smaller number also mean it easier for them to organize a putsch however).
• Keep the nominal selectors as large as possible: so that you can easily replace troublemakers among the influentials and essentials, and sends the essentials a message that they better behave.
• Control the flow of revenues.
• Pay your essentials just enough to keep them loyal: and keep them away from the source of money.
• Don’t take money out of the essentials’ pockets to make the people better: dictators depend on essentials, not on average citizens.

• Wait for him to die.
• Strike at the right opportunity (old leader, a faux pas, a financial crisis).
• Make an offer and/or convince the current supporters to switch sides.
• Overthrow the government through internal revolution or war with a foreign power.

So...

Ways to remove an incumbent kept opening up until the Communist Party nailed things down.

Revolutions kept happening because there were problems the authorities:

1. couldn't solve
2. wouldn't solve

Will Durant in The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage stated in reference to the founding of a Japanese dynasty that a founder uses up half the genius of a dynasty in founding it.

When we get to the CPC, it will be interesting to see what a succession-by-adoption opens up.

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We’re going to go back into history and look at some of the precursors to revolutions that we’ll be covering in our podcast. It wasn’t like somebody woke up one day and decided to throw a nice revolution and the whole nation came, there are precedents in Chinese history for revolution.

In this podcast, we're just going to call it "political legitimacy." If a government figures out how to keep itself in power and address enough of the needs of the people to get them to go with it, then there you have it.

• Legalism school of thought, “burning of books and burying of scholars,” end of the “Hundred Schools of Thought” of the Warring States Period
• Great Wall
• Other public works, unified weights and measures, national road system, unified writing system

• Buddhism challenged the, to that point, traditional structure of Chinese society.
• During the Tang Dynasty, Emperor Wuzong (814-846, contemporary of the Byzantines, early Islam) repressed Buddhism as un-Chinese.
• The inheritance of past revolutions conflicts with the inheritance of other revolutions down the years.

• The ruling dynasty slipped gears, some idealists found themselves in charge, tried some reforms, but ruling dynasty was restored
• Though the Han were eventually overthrown, the imperial system sustained.

• Each dynasty did things differently, it’s not like it was one long sleepy succession of dreamy emperors, in America and Europe we just don’t know anything about it.
• Dynastic succession meant refreshing in initiative, revolutions in policy.
• Cycles of division and then ultimate reunification: history established that China pretty much always “gets the band back together.”

• At the end of the Han Dynasty, a weird religious cult took off, rebelling against the corruption in the imperial court.
• Some guy gets an apparition from a Taoist sage, then on the basis of his widespread popular support, decides to have a go at seizing the realm.
• In Chinese history, things like this are the opportunistic infections that strike as the political “immune system” falls apart.
• You see stuff like this toward the end of a dynasty. We’re going to cover the Taiping Rebellion in more detail.

• Today’s revolution inherits a lot of the furniture from the last revolution.
• So far, it seems that there being one unified China is the thing that keeps poking through any time of disruption, the warlords in the warlord era weren’t starting something new, they were just protecting their slice of the pie.
• Introduction of new ideas and religions is going to shake things up, one possible hinge on which a revolution will turn.
• China’s boundaries fluctuate through history, but China continues for, like, ever. What “should” China’s boundaries be? History kind of solves that.

1. Subscribe, share, leave a rating. THIS IS FREE!
2. Give once, give monthly at www.buymeacoffee.com/crpodcast
3. Subscribe to the substack newsletter at https://chineserevolutions.substack.com/

Also...

Please reach out at [email protected] and let me know what you think!

This week, we're talking about how the unequal treaties forced on China during the Second Opium War further clarified anti-imperialism as a driver in later Chinese revolutions.

Foreign powers readily turned to force to push things along in China whenever dialogue got stuck. Force had worked before, and they thought force was the only language that the Chinese consistently understood.

Part of this episode will follow Lord Elgin's travels up and down the Yangtze River. British engagement with the Taiping was an interesting mixed bag: they despised the uncouth manners of Taiping representatives but appreciated the possible trade opportunities the Taiping might possibly have offered.

Yet, British and other foreign powers' policy of neutrality in the Taiping Rebellion meant that they had to work with both sides of the conflict to ensure that trade agreements with one side or the other produced anything.

And so that leaves open the possibility of future foreign intervention on one side or the other of the conflict.

1. Subscribe, share, leave a rating.
2. Give once, give monthly at www.buymeacoffee.com/crpodcast
3. Subscribe to the substack newsletter at https://chineserevolutions.substack.com/

Also...

Please reach out at [email protected] and let me know what you think!