China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl

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Taipings was indeed cataclysmic. The revolution was peasant led; it was historically consequential because it forced a rethinking of temporal and historical premises of the Qing Chinese sociopolitical order and of global history. However, it did not lead to the forms of internationalist solidarity upon which Marx hinged his ideas of global revolution in the 1850s, nor did it usher in Mao’s anti-feudal, anti-capitalist revolutionary movement. By the same token, Marx and Mao were right to designate the Taipings as a progressive phenomenon: in their reconceptualization of Chinese and global history as part of the same universal (Christian and millenarian though it was), and in their restructuring of temporality around a futurity secured by and through political and social transformative activity in the present, the Taipings proved themselves utterly modern.

      China’s modern revolutions thus start from then.

       Interlude: Post-Taiping “Restoration”

      I read Western newspapers and they report on … the disorder in the Chinese polity … This has been going on for the past few decades. Since September or October of last year [1896], they have even more openly and brazenly publicized how wild and uncivilized the Chinese are, how ignorant and dishonest, how empty Chinese Confucianism is. The meaning is clear: they will move to eliminate China at once.

      —Liang Qichao, “On the Future Strength of China” (1897)¹

      In the post-Taiping reordering of the empire, many sociopolitical and economic aspects of life were supposedly “restored,” when in fact they were being invented as part of an effort to stabilize the Qing and to ward off further internal social threats to the dynasty. The Euro-American powers assisted the Qing in their efforts, in part to ensure that a central government—not too weak but not too strong—could be forced, at gunpoint if necessary, to sign treaties disadvantageous to itself but of great advantage to the capitalist, missionary, and other expansions desired by the “free trade” leaders of the mid-nineteenth-century global North. Known as “self-strengthening” (ziqiang / ), this top-down program of restoration/invention entailed the renovation of old institutions and the building of new ones. These included the reorganization of the Qing military banner system into a more modernized fighting force (eventually including a navy) equipped with the latest weaponry, which closely tied the Qing military to Euro-American weapons industries and advisors; the elaboration of a foreign diplomatic corps through the Zongli Yamen (Office for General Affairs), which took on the responsibility for negotiating trade and colonial/territorial matters that arose or were forced upon the Qing by various foreign powers; the Maritime Customs Service, under the direction first of the British Colonial Office and subsequently of Americans, charged with setting and collecting internal riverine transport taxes (lijin or likin / ) on behalf of the Qing court as well as on their own behalves;² the establishment of “arsenals” that were as tied to foreign military industry as they were to training new talent in new knowledges (foreign languages, translation, and “Western” science and technology), useful primarily not for Confucian bureaucratic purposes but for modern-world managerial tasks; and so on. These institutional reforms were accompanied by socioeconomic innovations: the repopulation of the Yangzi River valley with new peasant households, whose female labor was deployed to rebuild the regional specialization in sericulture (silk production), a trade ever more closely tied to urban centers and hence to global commodity markets;³ efforts at industrialization along the coastal littoral near Shanghai, funded through public-private arrangements that socialized risk while privatizing profits; railroad building, financed primarily through territorial and other concessions granted to foreign powers; and so on. Qing fiscal discipline, never very strict, already had been dealt a huge blow by the growing scarcity of silver since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then by the difficulty of gathering revenue during the Taiping Revolution; now, it went wildly out of control. Predatory debt regimes, enforced by colonial merchant banks backed by imperialist powers and underpinned by the British/ American-dominated Customs Service,⁴ were not far behind.

      The post-Taiping economic and political “restoration” helped transform Qing social relations by placing more socioeconomic power in the hands of landowners, usurers (who mediated trade, in part by indebting producers and advancing capital on speculative crops such as silk and tea), and urban commercial and merchant elites, as well as by welding more closely together those local and provincial elites with global capitalist concerns—the latter imposed upon and increasingly incorporated into China through visible and invisible imperialist expansion into the everyday workings of social life. The concomitant growth of urban treaty ports—Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Xiamen (Amoy), Tianjin, and others—and such inland entrepôt cities as Wuhan/ Hankou (at the intersection of several riverine commercial routes) brought various types of local elites—merchants, literati, and so forth—into “an unprecedented social mixing,”⁵ as well as bringing this new mix into residential, political, social, and cultural proximity to colonial settlers from many countries, all of whom (aside from the Japanese) were now commonly lumped into the catchall category of “Westerner,” who came from somewhere now homogeneously called “the West.”

      By the 1880s and 1890s, these transformations had seeped, unevenly, into everyday life, helping visibly or invisibly to restructure and recalibrate the rhythms and expectations of many. Agrarian producers were now often tied to the fluctuations of the global markets in which their commodity economy was increasingly embedded. Meanwhile, for elites accustomed to securing social status through state service, larger civil service exam quotas for those social sectors that had defended the dynasty against the Taipings led, in an immediate sense, to larger numbers of sons admitted to bureaucratic appointments. Primarily aimed at pacifying the Yangzi delta region, this helped further enhance the dominance of that area in relation to other regions of the empire. Small but increasing numbers of educated sons also were sent to new-style schools, or even sent abroad to study new forms of knowledge. Some girls were now being schooled as well, although not systematically, while a movement against footbinding—that congeries of practices that had been visited upon many Chinese girls since at least the fourteenth century and that had become a firm part of the marriage market—grew in the interstices of urban society, albeit only gaining major ground and persuasive power after the 1911 Republican Revolution.⁶

      Meanwhile, various intellectual endeavors attempted to make “Western” and “Chinese” knowledge systems compatible, or at least comparable, either by separating them out so that each would pertain to a different albeit equivalent domain (as with the late-nineteenth-century saying “Western function serves Chinese essence” [zhongti xiyong / ]), or by mixing and matching fragments of each system as needed and desired—thus arriving at a syncretism identifiable by neither system. In the latter vein, for example, a far-reaching reinterpretation of Confucius was undertaken by the renegade scholar Kang Youwei, who, by the early 1890s, had configured Confucius as essentially a reformer rather than a conservator of sociopolitical structure. By using Confucius to sanction not preservation but reform, Kang’s syncretism, impeccably rooted in Confucian textual studies now updated with new perspectives derived from a reformist imperative, gained enthusiastic adherents among rebellious younger scholars even as it drew calumny from staid conservatives. Their relentless efforts to quash Kang and his followers persisted through the 1890s, even as new forms of thought outstripped Kang’s audacity and came to inform a whole radical movement that led directly to anti-dynastic activity. These efforts—the quashing and the development of more radical thought and action—led to the relocation of some scholars to the relatively safer shores of Japan or Hong Kong, at a remove from Qing dynastic forces keen to jail or silence them.

      The fall of the Qing and the Republican Revolution startlingly emerged from a combination of these social, intellectual, systemic, and

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