The Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion, China’s Stability Then and Now, and Pinker’s Violence Vanquished

Part 1: The Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion

Introduction

The nineteenth century was one of the most turbulent periods in Chinese history. The Qing dynasty (1644–1912), once among the most powerful states in the world, faced two overlapping crises: foreign aggression, most dramatically in the Opium Wars, and internal rebellion, above all the Taiping Rebellion, the deadliest civil war of the century anywhere in the world. These crises grew from the same underlying conditions: a population that had outgrown its land and government, a strained and increasingly corrupt bureaucracy, economic disruption caused by the opium trade, and a Western world determined to open China to trade on its own terms. Together, the wars and the rebellion weakened the Qing state, opened China to foreign domination, and set the stage for the revolutions of the twentieth century.

Conditions in China before the crises

• Population pressure: China’s population roughly doubled from about 150 million in 1650 to about 300 million by 1800, and reached about 450 million by the late 1800s. New World crops such as sweet potatoes and peanuts allowed farming of marginal land, but farms averaged only about three acres, and equal inheritance among sons divided holdings further (Columbia University, n.d.).
• A government that did not grow: the size of the imperial bureaucracy remained roughly the same while the population doubled, so officials could not govern effectively, and local elites with their own loyalties gained power (Columbia University, n.d.). Corruption, tax burdens and a fiercely competitive civil service examination system left many educated men frustrated.
• Environmental disasters: poorly maintained dikes and water-control systems led to floods, droughts and famines, which drove peasants into poverty, banditry and secret societies.
• The trade imbalance and opium: Western demand for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain had long drawn silver into China, while the Qing limited foreign trade to Canton (Guangzhou) under the “Canton system.” To reverse the flow, the British East India Company expanded sales of opium grown in India. By the 1830s, opium addiction was widespread, and silver was flowing out of China, causing inflation in the copper-to-silver exchange rate and heavier tax burdens on peasants (Columbia University, n.d.; Lovell, 2011).

The First Opium War (1839–1842)

In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor sent the official Lin Zexu to Canton to end the opium trade. Lin confiscated and publicly destroyed more than 20,000 chests of British opium and wrote to Queen Victoria appealing to her moral responsibility. Britain, defending its merchants and its principle of free trade, responded with naval force. British steamships and modern artillery easily defeated Qing forces along the coast and the Yangzi River. The war ended with the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), the first of the “unequal treaties.” China ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five treaty ports (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai) to British trade and residence, paid a large indemnity, and abolished the Canton trading monopoly. Supplementary treaties granted extraterritoriality (foreigners tried in their own consular courts) and most-favored-nation status, and the United States and France soon obtained similar privileges.

The Second Opium War (1856–1860)

Western powers soon demanded more: access to the interior, diplomatic residence in Beijing and legalization of opium. Using the seizure of the ship Arrow and the execution of a French missionary as pretexts, Britain and France attacked again. The Treaties of Tianjin (1858) and the Convention of Beijing (1860) opened more treaty ports, allowed foreign diplomats to reside in Beijing, permitted Christian missionaries to travel and preach in the interior, legalized the opium trade, and ceded Kowloon to Britain. In 1860, Anglo-French troops entered Beijing and looted and burned the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), an act that remains a symbol of national humiliation in China. Russia used the moment to gain vast territory in the northeast (Columbia University, n.d.).

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864)

While the Qing struggled against foreign powers, a far deadlier crisis erupted inside China. Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka from Guangdong who had repeatedly failed the civil service examinations, came to believe after reading Christian tracts that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to rid China of “demons,” meaning the Manchu rulers and Confucian idolatry (Spence, 1996). His God Worshipping Society attracted poor peasants, miners, Hakka and other marginalized people in Guangxi province.

• Uprising: in 1851, Hong proclaimed the Taiping Tianguo (“Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”). His armies swept north and in 1853 captured Nanjing, which became their capital for over a decade.
• Program: the Taipings proposed radical changes, including shared property, land redistribution, equality of men and women, bans on opium, foot-binding and alcohol, and the replacement of Confucian learning with their version of Christianity, though many reforms were never fully implemented.
• Internal collapse: a failed northern campaign and a bloody leadership purge in 1856, in which top leaders and thousands of followers were killed, weakened the movement.
• Qing counterattack: the Qing relied on new provincial armies raised and funded by Confucian scholar-officials, especially Zeng Guofan’s Xiang (Hunan) Army and Li Hongzhang’s Huai Army, supported later by the Western-officered “Ever-Victorious Army.” After the Second Opium War, Western powers sided with the Qing to protect their new treaty rights.
• End: Hong died in 1864, and Nanjing fell to Zeng’s forces that summer, followed by massacres. Remnant forces fought on for several more years.

The human cost was staggering. Estimates commonly place deaths at 20 to 30 million or more, from battle, massacre, famine, disease and suicide, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in human history (Platt, 2012). In What Remains, Meyer-Fong (2013) moves away from a story of leaders and ideologies to examine how ordinary people experienced the war: the violence, displacement and loss, the struggle to find and bury the dead, and the ways survivors made sense of catastrophe. She shows that the war was not a clear contest between heroic rebels and loyal defenders but a chaotic, devastating experience for millions caught between armies. At the same time, other rebellions, such as the Nian Rebellion (1853–1868) and Muslim uprisings in the southwest and northwest, spread across the empire (Columbia University, n.d.).

Outcomes and consequences

Conclusion

The Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion were linked products of a Qing state under extraordinary strain. Population growth, an undersized and corrupt government, economic disruption from the opium trade and Western imperial ambitions created conditions in which foreign powers could force open China’s markets and a charismatic visionary could mobilize millions of desperate people. The results were territorial losses, unequal treaties, tens of millions of deaths and a gravely weakened dynasty. As Meyer-Fong (2013) reminds us, behind these political outcomes lay immense individual suffering, and the memory of these catastrophes continues to shape Chinese views of foreign intervention and the value of stability today.

Part 2: China’s stability and Pinker’s “Violence Vanquished”

Stability in China today compared with the 19th century

China today is far more stable than in the 1800s. In the nineteenth century, China experienced repeated foreign invasions (the two Opium Wars, the Sino-French War of 1884–1885, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and the Boxer intervention of 1900), several massive internal rebellions, the loss of territory and sovereignty, famines and a weakening central government that could not control its provinces. In contrast, since 1949 China has had a strong, centralized state under the Chinese Communist Party with firm control over its territory and military, no civil war, and no invasion by a foreign power. Economic reforms since 1978 have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and made China the world’s second-largest economy and a major military power, reversing the weakness that made it vulnerable in the 1800s.

However, today’s stability is maintained partly through tight political control: restrictions on free speech, the press and political opposition, extensive surveillance, and repression in regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. Challenges such as slowing economic growth, an aging population, inequality and tensions over Taiwan remain. China today is stable in the sense of having an orderly, powerful state and low levels of organized violence, but that stability rests heavily on state authority rather than open political competition.

Stability in China today compared with the 20th century

The twentieth century was arguably even more violent for China than the nineteenth. After the fall of the Qing in 1912, China fragmented into the warlord era (c. 1916–1928), followed by the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists, the brutal Japanese invasion (1937–1945), including the Nanjing Massacre, and the final phase of the civil war ending in 1949. Even after unification, the People’s Republic experienced devastating self-inflicted violence: the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) caused a famine that killed tens of millions of people (Dikötter, 2010), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) brought political persecution, violence and chaos. The century ended with the 1989 crackdown on protesters in and around Tiananmen Square. Compared with this record, China in the twenty-first century is markedly more peaceful and stable: there has been no mass famine, civil war or large-scale political campaign of mass killing since the 1970s. The decline of large-scale violence in China mirrors the broader global pattern Pinker describes, although the state’s capacity for repression remains significant.

Pinker’s thesis about violence over time

Steven Pinker’s thesis, presented in “Violence Vanquished” (2011a) and developed in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011b), is that violence has declined dramatically over long stretches of human history, and that today we may be living in the most peaceful era of our species’ existence. He argues that this decline is not a matter of one period or region but appears across many scales of time, which he describes as six major trends:

1. The Pacification Process: the transition from hunter-gatherer and tribal societies to the first states reduced deaths from raiding and feuding.
2. The Civilizing Process: homicide rates in Europe fell sharply from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century as kingdoms centralized and commerce grew.
3. The Humanitarian Revolution: beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, movements abolished slavery, judicial torture, cruel punishments and dueling.
4. The Long Peace: after World War II, the great powers stopped fighting wars with each other.
5. The New Peace: since the end of the Cold War, organized conflicts of all kinds, including civil wars, genocides, repression and terrorism, have declined worldwide.
6. The Rights Revolutions: since the 1950s, growing opposition to violence against ethnic minorities, women, children, gay people and animals.

Pinker acknowledges that the twentieth century included horrific wars and genocides, but he argues that, measured as a proportion of the population killed, violence has trended downward. Critics have challenged his statistics, his focus on Western Europe and his optimistic view of progress, so a strong paper can acknowledge these debates.

To what does Pinker attribute the decline in civil wars and civil unrest?

Pinker attributes the decline in violence broadly to historical forces that encourage people’s “better angels” (empathy, self-control, moral sense and reason) over their “inner demons.” He identifies five such forces (Pinker, 2011b):

• The Leviathan: effective states and justice systems with a monopoly on legitimate force reduce feuding, rebellion and anarchic violence.
• Commerce: trade makes other people more valuable alive than dead, rewarding cooperation over conquest.
• Feminization: growing respect for women’s interests and values reduces the glorification of violence.
• Cosmopolitanism: literacy, mobility and mass media expand people’s circle of empathy.
• The escalator of reason: education and reasoned debate lead people to treat violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

For civil wars and unrest in particular, the “New Peace” since the end of the Cold War is linked to the end of superpower sponsorship of proxy wars, the spread of democracy and more competent governments, growing international peacekeeping, mediation and humanitarian intervention through the United Nations and other bodies, and the decline of ideologies such as revolutionary communism that justified mass violence (Pinker, 2011b). Applying this to China, the shift from the Taiping era to today can be read partly through Pinker’s lens: a strong central state (Leviathan), economic integration with the world (commerce) and rising education have coincided with a dramatic decline in internal war, even though the means of maintaining order remain debated.

Related reading: Forbes on imperialism and exploitation and evolution and learning.

References

Columbia University. (n.d.). China and the West: Imperialism, opium, and self-strengthening (1800–1900). Asia for Educators. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/main_pop/kpct/kp_imperialism.htm

Dikötter, F. (2010). Mao’s great famine: The history of China’s most devastating catastrophe, 1958–1962. Walker & Company.

Lovell, J. (2011). The Opium War: Drugs, dreams and the making of China. Picador.

Meyer-Fong, T. (2013). What remains: Coming to terms with civil war in 19th century China. Stanford University Press.

Pinker, S. (2011a, September 24). Violence vanquished. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180

Pinker, S. (2011b). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking.

Platt, S. R. (2012). Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the epic story of the Taiping Civil War. Alfred A. Knopf.

Spence, J. D. (1996). God’s Chinese son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. W. W. Norton.