48. K. Marx. Chinese Affairs
A little while before tables started to dance,[229] China, that living fossil, began to revolutionise.[230] In itself, there was nothing extraordinary about this phenomenon, for the Oriental empires demonstrate constant immobility in their social substructure, with unceasing change in the persons and clans that gain control of the political superstructure. China is dominated by a foreign dynasty.[231] Why should not a movement to overthrow this dynasty make its appearance after 300 years? The movement had a religious tinge right from the outset; but it had this in common with all the Oriental movements. The immediate causes giving rise to the movement were evident: European intervention, the opium wars,[232] the resultant undermining of the existing regime, outflow of silver abroad, disturbance of the economic equilibrium by the importation of foreign goods, etc. To me it seemed a paradox that opium, instead of lulling, stimulated. Actually, the only thing novel about this Chinese revolution are those who are making it. They are aware of no task except changing the dynasty. They have no slogans. They are an even greater abomination for the masses of the people than for the old rulers. They seem to have no other vocation than, as opposed to conservative stagnation, to produce destruction in grotesquely detestable forms, destruction without any nucleus of new construction. The following excerpts from a letter of Mr. Harvey (English consul at Ningpo) to Mr. Bruce, the English ambassador in Peking,(1) may help to give one an idea of these "scourges of God".
For three months, Mr. Harvey writes, Ningpo has been in the hands of the revolutionary Taipings. Here, as everywhere else where these robbers had extended their domination, devastation has been the only result. Have they any other aims? In point of fact, the power of unbridled and boundless licentiousness seems to be as important to them as the destruction of other people's lives. This view of the Taipings is, of course, at odds with the illusions of English missionaries, who fabricated stories about the "salvation of China", the "rebirth of the empire", the "saving of the people", and the "introduction of Christianity" by the Taipings. After ten years of tumultuous pseudo-activity they have destroyed everything and produced nothing.
At any rate, Mr. Harvey says, the Taipings show to advantage, as compared to the mandarins, in their official dealings with foreigners because of a certain openness of conduct and energetic crudeness; but that is their entire catalogue of virtues.
How do the Taipings pay their troops? They receive no pay but live off booty. If the captured cities are rich, they swim in plenty. If they are poor, the soldier holds out with exemplary patience. Mr. Harvey asked a well-dressed Taiping soldier how he liked his trade. "Why shouldn't I like it?" he answered. "I take what I like; if there is any resistance, then—" and he made the gesture with his hand of cutting off a head. And this is his manner of speech. A human head means no more than a head of cabbage to a Taiping.
•The revolutionary army has a core of regular troops, old, veteran and tested partisans. The rest consists of younger recruits or peasants drafted for service on raids. The leaders systematically send conscripts from a conquered province into a different province far off. Thus, at the present time, forty different dialects are spoken among the rebels in Ningpo, while the Ningpo dialect is now being heard for the first time in remote districts. All the riffraff, vagabonds and bad characters in a district join up voluntarily. Discipline extends only to obedience in the service. Marriage and opium smoking are forbidden to the Taipings under penalty of death. Marrying will only come "when the empire has been established". As compensation, the Taipings get carte blanche for the first three days after capturing a city whose inhabitants did not flee in good time, to perpetrate every conceivable act of violence on women and girls. At the end of the three days all females are driven out of the cities by force.
To produce terror is the entire tactics of the Taipings. Their success is based solely on the operation of this mechanism. The means of producing the terror are: first of all, the overwhelming masses in which they appear at a given point. Emissaries are sent out first to feel the way out in secret, spread alarming rumours, start some fires. If these emissaries are seized by the mandarins and executed, others follow immediately, until either the mandarins flee with the population of the city or, as was the case at Ningpo, the demoralisation that has set in makes the victory of the insurgents much easier.
One important means of causing terror is the variegated clownish attire of the Tai pings. They would make a comical impression on Europeans. On the Chinese they work like a talisman. This buffoon-like clothing gives the rebels a greater advantage in battle than rifled cannons would afford them. Added to this is their long, unkempt hair, black or dyed black, their wild looks, their melancholy howls and an affectation of anger and raving, enough to frighten to death the polite, tame, ordinary Chinese, moving within the pale of his traditional way of life.
If the emissaries have spread panic, they are followed by purposely chased fugitive villagers, who exaggerate the number and power and frightfulness of the advancing army. While the flames rise inside the city and, perhaps, its troops take the field under the impression of these scenes of terror, they see in the distance, dizzying their minds, a few of the harlequin hellhounds, whose appearance has a magnetic effect. Then, at the right moment a hundred thousand Taipings, armed with knives, spears and fowling-pieces, rush wildly at their half-dismayed adversaries and overrun everything, unless, as was recently the case at Shanghai, they meet with resistance.
"The essence of the Taipings," says Mr. Harvey, "is a huge mass of nothingness.(2)"
Obviously, the Taiping represents the devil in persona, as the Chinese fantasy must represent him. But also, only in China was this sort of devil possible. It is the product of a fossil social life.
Endnotes
[229] An allusion to the mania for spiritualist practices that swept Europe, especially Germany, in the early 1850s.
[230] See Note 2.
[231] In the early seventeenth century China was invaded by the Manchu tribes, which put the country under the rule of the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1912).
[232] The Opium wars—aggressive wars waged against China by Britain, 1840 to 1842, and by Britain and France, 1856 to 1860.