A historian returns, through compassionate history, to a little-known episode: the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), the greatest civil war in the history of humanity before the XXe century, which begins more than a century of violence in China.
The other “ century of extremes »
Modern China can legitimately challenge Europe’s label of “ continent of darkness » (in the words of Mr. Mazower): few spaces have been so much and so constantly tormented by political violence.
The great bleedings of XXe Chinese century are for some well known, and can be assigned to historical episodes familiar to European consciousness: the Second World War, communism, etc. But unlike Europe, China did not sink into sound and fury in 1914 – and, despite what a still widespread ethnocentric vulgate wants, it did not sink there either in 1839, because the First World War ‘Opium did not immediately upset the Qing empire, the Manchu dynasty. In China, along century of extremes » (according to the expression of E. Hobsbawm) begins with the rebellions of the middle of the XIXewhich inaugurated 120 years of internal violence combined with foreign aggression. The country only really caught its breath in the 1970s, after the last convulsions of Maoism.
An inaugural disaster
Violence sets in at the end of the XVIIIe century, when the “ golden age » of the Qing. But the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) plays the pivotal role in this bloody story. Because this episode, little known in Europe, is quite simply the greatest civil war in the history of humanity before the XXe century: in 1851 the Taiping, a millenarian group led by a scholar convinced of being the little brother of Jesus Christ, took up arms against the Qing dynasty. The latter, struggling with economic difficulties and other uprisings, did not react with sufficient vigor. The conflict spread rapidly and did not end until thirteen years later, after the defeat of the Taiping and twenty to thirty million deaths.
Such an earthquake cannot leave a society unscathed. For those who want to understand the degree and modalities of political violence in China XXe century, it seems essential to appreciate the legacy of the Taipings. Now if we have an abundant and often remarkable literature on the revolt, on its political (reorganization of the State, local militarization, etc.) and ideological (Confucian restoration) consequences as well as on its subsequent recuperations (by Maoism in particular) , the impact of the civil war on the Company Chinese has been little studied.
The work of Tobie Meyer-Fong, professor at Johns Hopkins University, can be seen as an attempt to fill this void. At least that’s what the title suggests, What Remainswhich invites us to ask ourselves “ what remains » of the war. The subtitle announces, in a somewhat enigmatic manner, the ambition to study the way in which the Chinese approached the civil war (coming to terms with civil war). The book focuses more specifically on Jiangnan, a rich and vast region of Central China which became the epicenter of the disaster in the late 1850s.
The human consequences of the civil war
It is an exploration of “ human consequences » of the war that the author invites us to read. She considers that the grand narratives of revolution, modernization or state building obscure, more than they illuminate, the intimate experience of the Chinese caught in the torment of the conflict. Because their experience was characterized above all by “ pain, moral ambivalence, confusion », the precariousness of individual destinies and allegiances. By the loss, finally, which the author wishes to put at the heart of the story, to the detriment of ideology.
The title can therefore be misleading because Tobie Meyer-Fong focuses as much on the experiences of the actors during the war as on the legacy of the latter. To understand this subject, it relies on retrospective sources, some of which have been neglected until now, such as martyrologies, personal memories or newspapers – in addition to traditional documents such as local historical compilations (difangzhi), administrative documents, etc.
The experiences of the actors are understood in thematic chapters, which correspond less to categories of experience than to vast headings under which quite diverse reflections are brought together. “ The words » are the efforts of the actors to make sense of the catastrophe, particularly the scholar Yu Zhi, who takes up the brush to defend the Confucian order. “ The marked bodies » designate the bodily translation of allegiances, for example the hair (which the Taiping wear long, in defiance of Manchu commandments) or the tattoos with which the captives are afflicted. In the chapter “ bones and flesh », the author evokes the issue of the treatment of corpses, while “ wood and ink » refer to the loyalist policy of celebrating martyrs. “ The loss », finally, focuses on mourning through the study of the memoirist Zhang Guanglie, who lost his mother during the war.
Return to order and celebration of the martyrs
In this richly documented work, the author moves easily from the study of an individual or a place (a sanctuary, a cemetery) to more global perspectives (such as the official policy of celebrating the dead). What Remains is also full of stimulating details – we learn, for example, how the memory of the civil war was reactivated during the famine of 1876-1879: Yu Zhi’s disciples got involved in the relief efforts by taking a model from their master. We can also glean from the work a wealth of information on life in Jiangnan during the revolt, the loyalist forces and to a lesser extent the Taiping themselves.
The work delivers two main lessons:
– First, and although this point appears only implicitly, the extraordinary resilience of the dominant ideology. The scholars studied by Meyer-Fong give a primarily moral interpretation of the catastrophe, conceived as a celestial retribution for failings in Confucian virtues. It is striking that after a challenge of this magnitude, the social and moral order has reasserted itself with such force – one is tempted to say with such obstinacy. This point was already noted by Mary Wright in The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatismin 1965.
– Second, the inclusive effects of the civil war. This, as we already knew, stimulates the activism of notables, who take charge of the duties of the failing State. Meyer-Fong thus provides very interesting details on the role of local elites in the burial of bodies, or the creation of sanctuaries which shelter the martyrs. But it also shows that the scale of the devastation forced the Qing to extend posthumous honors – reserved for soldiers and officials – to common people, most often under pressure from local society. This liberality is undoubtedly, in part, a response to the Taiping leveling project, of which the author clearly shows the horror it arouses among scholars (whom the rebels subject, for example, to corporal punishments from which they are normally exempt).
Lived experience or vision of the winners ?
These qualities cannot, however, obscure a certain number of difficulties induced by the author’s biases.
First of all, the subject of the book is quite vague. The work focuses partly on the legacy of the civil war, but just as much on the experience of the actors during the revolt, or even on their material world (clothes, etc.). The meaning of the terms “ human consequences ” Or “ experience » is thus left in an indeterminacy which makes it difficult to identify a general questioning.
Second, Tobie Meyer-Fong’s hostility to “ great stories “, to which it opposes the concreteness and authenticity of human experience, leads to obvious impasses. Because the author – like any historian – only has access to this experience through speeches, which always have a measure of generality and an ideological charge, a fortiori when it comes to retrospective accounts of the revolt. But T. Meyer-Fong gets out of this difficulty by assuming a tension between individual experience and macrosocial phenomena (ideologies, political institutions, etc.) or even by attributing to the former the capacity to “ subvert » the latter. Thus Zhang Guanglie’s memoirs are presented as overflowing from within the official formulas of mourning that they reuse. But is there any wonder that an individual expresses and formulates his personal emotions through collective cultural forms? ? This social science evidence is obscured by the romantic valorization of individual experience, the micro as opposed to the macro, and the choice of empathy (or rather compassion) as the key to historical interpretation.
Third, this attachment to the immediacy of individual experience sometimes weakens the singularity of the event by dint of decontextualizing it. The work thus abounds in propositions on late Qing culture which could have been formulated on the subject of other historical episodes, or even in anthropological generalities (the eternal human nature of pain and uncertainty). What Remains thus offers the curious spectacle of a history book with often ahistorical reasoning, which undoubtedly explains the virtual absence of comparisons with other spaces (apart from a few references to the American Civil War), despite the ambitions displayed in the introduction. Likewise, the Taiping Rebellion is not part of a Chinese history of civil war or rebellions. It is significant that the best passages of the book are those where T. Meyer-Fong agrees to deliver a… political story: thus the story of the progressive extension of the cult of martyrs to civilians, or remarks – unfortunately succinct – on the transformation of the way we view the civil war at the end of the XIXe century, when reforming or revolutionary nationalists (like Zhang Binglin) took up the theme.
Because finally, and whatever she has, Tobie Meyer-Fong really talks to us about politics. And all the more so since the book is dependent on the point of view of part of the victors, namely the Confucian elites allied to the State without being formally integrated into its structures. This is certainly due to the state of the sources: the Taiping texts have been massively destroyed, and this is not a question of making a bad case of the author. But this bias should have been the subject of serious reflection. However, if the problem is mentioned in the introduction, it is to be dismissed in this way: the sources express less a pro-Qing loyalty than a localist attachment, and as much or more a social contempt for the rebels than a hostility to their ideology. It is difficult to see how these facts remove the difficulty, because these points are in reality inseparable: it is because they saw their entire world (social, ideological, political) threatened by the Taiping that the local elites, who knew yet showing themselves to be indocile, they showed solidarity with the faltering dynasty.
But it is undoubtedly the fate of every compassionate story to play politics without knowing it – and, for lack of access to the voice of the vanquished, to espouse the point of view of the victors.