Hong Xiuquan

Chinese political reformer

• Born: January 1, 1814
• Birthplace: Fuyuanshui, Guangdong Province, China
• Died: June 1, 1864
• Place of death: Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China

Hong Xiuquan created and led the first revolutionary movement to shake the traditional Chinese political system. His movement, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, was a cataclysmic upheaval that greatly influenced both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong.

Early Life

Born in a small Chinese village thirty miles from Canton (Guangzhou), the great port of south China, Hong Xiuquan (hong chih-ew-kwahn) was the third son of a Hakka family, clannish, hardworking peasants who spoke a distinct dialect and were often discriminated against by the Han Chinese majority. He was later described as tall with a fair complexion and large, bright eyes.

For young Chinese men, there was one sure way to climb in the ancient society: to pass the civil service examinations used to assign positions in the bureaucracy. The examinations were based upon the Confucian classic texts and demanded proficiency in the Chinese language with its tens of thousands of characters. Students often had wealthy families who could support them, because study had to begin early and usually did not culminate before a man’s late twenties or early thirties. Although poor, Hong had unusual intelligence; many of his relatives, therefore, sacrificed to enable him to study. At the age of sixteen, he had to quit studying and work on his father’s farm. The villagers thought so much of his talents that they hired him to teach their children, giving him an opportunity for part-time study.

Despite Hong’s intelligence and ambition, part-time study was not enough. He repeatedly failed the first level of the examinations. In 1837, he collapsed in nervous exhaustion and was bedridden for some time. In this state, he had a series of religious visions combining traditional Chinese notions with themes derived from Western Christianity.

Earlier, China had been strong and self-reliant and had repelled the repeated attempts of Western diplomats, businesspeople, and missionaries to gain entrance. However, problems, above all overpopulation, mounted. China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), were Manchus, formerly a fierce warrior people. They had grown corrupt and incompetent and were unable to stem China’s accelerating decline. By the time Hong was born, many Westerners were in China though their activities were closely regulated. Western businesspeople, primarily British, were selling increasing amounts of opium. Great Britain hoped both to defray the costs of controlling India, where the opium was grown, and to use opium profits to pay for British purchases of Chinese teas and silks. The numbers of Western missionaries also increased rapidly, and their access to Chinese society expanded.

The missionaries meant well and made a lasting contribution to Chinese society by improving education and social welfare; China, however, had never known a monotheistic religion, and the impact of Christian ideas upon the Chinese was unpredictable. Hong had cursorily examined some translations of missionary texts the year before his collapse. In his illness, Hong had visions that continued over some months. He believed that God was calling upon him to drive evil spirits and demons, represented by the Manchus, out of China.

Life’s Work

Hong recovered and began to preach ideas that struck most listeners as strange. It was a time of great turmoil, however, and friends and relatives began to listen to Hong; soon he was making converts. In 1844, he damaged local temples and drew the attention of the authorities, who strictly prohibited teachings outside the three religions of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Hong and one of his first converts, Feng Yunshan, left for the neighboring province, Guangxi (Kwangsi). Guangxi was poor, and many of its inhabitants were racial minorities such as the Yao, Miao, and Chuang peoples. The Chuang were the most numerous Chinese minority and had often served as mercenaries in Chinese armies in the past.

During the winter, Hong went back to Guangdong (Kwangtung), leaving Feng, who had relatives among the numerous Hakka in Guangxi, to stay and preach. In Guangdong, Hong continued to preach and write, studying briefly in Canton with a noted American missionary, Issachar J. Roberts. In 1847, Hong returned to Guangxi. Feng was a spellbinding speaker and had been successful in winning converts, particularly among the Chuang and the Hakka.

China was in increasing turmoil. The Manchus had fought and decisively lost a war with Great Britain in 1839-1842. The ostensible cause of the war was the Chinese attempt to control the opium trade, but the real issue was foreign demands for greater freedom of action in China. The Opium War, as it was called, caused immense dislocation in south China. Guangxi, already poor, suffered from recurrent drought; banditry became widespread. Many peasants joined secret societies, traditional organizations that frequently became violently antigovernment. The authorities created local militia, which easily became tools of local despots.

Hong’s congregations, known as the Society of God Worshipers, became embroiled in local conflicts, and the authorities attempted to suppress them. However, the combination of Hong’s messianic fervor and of Feng’s mystical appeals was irresistible in troubled Guangxi. In 1850, the Society of God Worshipers won a battle at Jintian village, attracting new converts as well as the cooperation of the secret societies and pirate bands eager for plunder. In 1851, his forces swollen with tens of thousands of new followers, Hong declared the “Taiping Tienkuo” (the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) as both a new Chinese dynasty and a new holy order on earth.

The group repelled government counterattacks and moved north, into the Chang Jiang (Yangtze) River valley, China’s populous economic center. Disaffected peasants flocked to Hong’s banner. From 1851 to 1853, victory followed victory, and the Taiping established their capital at Nanjing, a major city on the Chang Jiang River. However, the government in Beijing rallied, led by a new generation of Han Chinese more willing to adopt Western weapons and techniques than the traditional Manchu leadership had been.

A major question was the attitude of the Western powers, who had won many privileges following the Opium War. They now had access to many Chinese ports and were gaining control of import and customs duties, making trade much easier. They were dubious of Hong’s religious ideas, which were based upon only a small portion of the Bible, particularly upon the mystical Book of Revelation. Some thought him insane. A decisive issue in the minds of many foreigners was that Hong absolutely prohibited the opium trade. After considerable debate, the Western powers decided to maintain a public posture of neutrality, but they encouraged private assistance to the Manchu regime and gave necessary financial support. Foreign adventurers, such as the American Frederick Townsend Ward and the Englishman Major Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, formed units of Filipino and Western mercenaries, who fought for the government and trained Chinese soldiers.

Fighting was widespread and savage. Armies of hundreds of thousands marched and countermarched across central China. Prolonged sieges of large cities resulted in mass starvation. Enormous fleets clashed on China’s many lakes and rivers. The peasants often found it impossible to farm, and famines resulted. It has been estimated that from 20 million to 40 million Chinese died in these upheavals.

Feng died in battle in 1852, but Hong had many talented soldiers, some of whom were made “kings” in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The Taiping could not, however, win over the Confucian bureaucracy, who were instrumental in governing local communities in China. The Confucians preferred the Manchus, who were a known quantity and themselves highly Confucian, to the alien ideas of the Taiping, who held land in common and preached social leveling and the equality of the sexes.

In August of 1856, the Taiping were split by a series of internal struggles in which several of the kings died. Other able generals arose, and the war seesawed; however, the Taiping failed to deal with their internal problems. Without the help of the local Confucian gentry, they could not produce the necessary revenues to fight an increasingly modern war. The foreigners openly supported the government. During the late years of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Hong grew increasingly isolated and less and less realistic. He believed that God would ultimately protect the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, but the capital at Nanjing fell on July 19, 1864. Hong died in June, reportedly by his own hand.

Significance

Despite his ultimate failure, Hong Xiuquan had great impact for a Chinese peasant. The odds against him were great. In Chinese history, only one peasant had founded a new dynasty, and that had been more than five hundred years earlier. Hong’s religious ideas inevitably were unconventional. He necessarily perceived Western Christianity through the veil of his own Chinese culture, which alienated contemporary Western observers. Some scholars have questioned his sanity.

As well as dreaming of a China divinely purified of the Manchus, Hong also dreamed of a China that would be a better place for common men and women, a strong China free of foreign influence, without opium, slavery, prostitution, and marked social inequality. His example influenced a later generation of revolutionaries, such as Sun Yat-sen, another Hakka peasant from Guangdong, who helped to overthrow the Manchus, becoming the first president of Republican China in 1913. Hong also influenced the communists led by Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The Chinese government and people revered Hong as the first Chinese revolutionary, a visionary who fought for a new and more equitable Chinese government.

Bibliography

Boardman, Eugene. Christian Influence upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion, 1851-1864. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952. Many works on the Taiping Rebellion largely ignore Hong as an individual, but not Boardman’s. This work brings together everything that is known about Hong and examines his beliefs in both the Chinese and Western Christian context of the period.

Hamberg, Theodore. The Visions of Hung-Siu-tshuen, and Origin of the Kwangsi Insurrection. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1975. This book was written during the Taiping Rebellion by a Western missionary who investigated Hong’s background, particularly his exposure to Christian ideas, and his resulting religious beliefs.

Jen, Yu-wen. The Taiping Revolutionary Movement. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973. Most scholarly works on the Taiping Rebellion are primarily interested in the contemporary Chinese social scene or in the war or in Taiping institutions. This work treats in detail the issue of Christian influences upon Hong’s values and beliefs.

Kuhn, Philip A. “The Taiping Rebellion.” In The Cambridge History of China Late Ch’ing, 1800-1911, edited by John K. Fairbank. Vol. 10. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Kuhn is one of the foremost historians of the rebellion, and this is an excellent introductory essay to it and to China during that period. Several other essays in the volume also relate to the rebellion. Contains a bibliographic guide to sources in Asian and Western languages.

Michael, Franz, and Chung-li Chang. The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents. 3 vols. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966-1971. The first volume of this massive work is a narrative history of the rebellion. The final two volumes are translations of important documents. The work is considered a standard history for research purposes.

Reilly, Thomas H. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Examines the religious underpinnings of the Taiping Rebellion, chronicling the development of Christianity in China and explaining how Hong and the rebels interpreted Christian religion as an indictment of the Chinese imperial order.

Spence, Jonathan D. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Spence, a specialist in Chinese history, chronicles the rise and fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Focuses on Hong’s religious vision and how Hong’s faith helped spur the rebellion.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Taiping Vision of a Christian China, 1836-1864. Waco, Tex.: Markham Press Fund, Baylor University Press, 1998. The text of a lecture about the social and political conditions that led to the Taiping Rebellion. Includes information about Hong’s life, including an analysis of his intellectual development and the influence of Christian scripture upon Hong and the rebels.

Teng, Ssu-yü. The Taiping Rebellion and the Western Powers. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Teng is a leading historian in the field. This is an excellent study of the diplomatic context of the rebellion, particularly of the relations between the foreign powers and the Chinese court.