Rev Left Radio - Modern China Pt. 1: The Taiping & Boxer Rebellions w/ Ken Hammond

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we launch our 4 part miniseries on modern Chinese history featuring Ken Hammond (and guest host Breht O'Shea of Revolutionary Left Radio) with this terrific discussion on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions!  Be sure to go back and listen to the previous episode we did with Ken in the fall, which serves as a bit of an introductory work for this miniseries. The other three installments will drop every other week (with other episodes in between), and will cover the Chinese Revolution/Civil War, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and the Reform period, so be sure to subscribe to not miss any of those coming episodes! Ken Hammond is Professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University. He has been engaged in radical politics since his involvement in the anti-war movement at Kent State in 1968-70.  Ken is also the author of the book China’s Revolution & the Quest for a Socialist Future.

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome. to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-host,

Sanri Hakimaki, unfortunately not joined by my usual co-host, Adnan Hussein. We are, however, joined by a special guest host who will be familiar to many of you, listeners. I'm pretty sure that we can say that at this point. Our guest host is Brett O'Shea, who, unless you missed that last episode that we put out, Brett has at this point officially left the show, but to demonstrate that it was on amicable terms, Brett is coming back to co-host this series on a guest hosting basis. So Brett, it's nice to see you again, although there hasn't really been any gap since the last time I saw you. Absolutely. It is a little weird to hear that, you know, the guest co-host thing, but I'm just happy to continue doing whatever work we can

together, loved our three and a half years together, and just really want to drive home the point that it's certainly not the end. It's just a change. So happy to be here. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, knowing that Adnan is not able to make it today, I couldn't ask for a better guest host than somebody who I've been hosting the show with for the last three and a half years anyway. Now, we do have a returning guest.

And this is the start of an excellent mini-series that we have planned, which we've actually been planning for the last almost half a year. But before I introduce the miniseries and the guest, I would like to. to remind listeners that you can help support the show by joining us on patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Any contributions there are what allow us to continue to make the show. You can also follow us on Twitter at Guerrilla underscore pod,

that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod, where you can keep up with the work that each of us are doing individually, as well as what the show is putting out collectively. As I mentioned, this is the start of a mini-series, which is going to be a mini-series on modern Chinese history. This is a continuation in many ways of the last conversation that we had with our guest, Ken Hammond, when he joined us for discussing his new book, China's Revolution and The Quest for a Socialist Future. Ken is a professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University,

and as I mentioned, a returning guest of the show. Hello, Ken. How are you today? Very good and glad to be here. Absolutely. So I guess before we enter this, episode formally, I just want to let the listeners know that we have four episodes planned of this series. I highly recommend if you haven't listened to that last episode that we did with Ken, which will be linked in the show notes and it's titled China's Revolution and Quest for a Socialist Future. Listen to that episode first because that is an overview of modern Chinese history. It's about an hour and a half and we really do a rather brief sweep of modern Chinese

history. The purpose of this series is to take four discrete events and to try to dive in a little bit more on a granular level. Today's episode is going to be focusing on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, but we have future episodes as well in the series, which should be coming out in the next three weeks on the Chinese Civil War, particularly the Long March, the Cultural Revolution, and the Deng reforms. So if you are interested in any of those topics, do be sure to stay tuned, as those will be coming out in the next three weeks. And I also highly recommend you, if you know any students, particularly middle and high school students who are studying world history, when these events in Chinese history come up, these

would be a really good supplement to the garbage that they're hearing in schools, to put it bluntly. So, Ken, today we're going to be talking about the Taiping and Boxer rebellions. We did talk a bit about these rebellions last time. So I don't want to cover the exact same things that we did in that episode, but we do, of course, have to start by saying, all right, let's focus on the Taiping Rebellion first because chronologically it comes first. Can you lay out what the socioeconomic and material conditions were like within China at that time at the origin of the Taiping Rebellion? That way we can then understand the events that unfold from there. Sure thing. Sure thing. Yeah, I mean, the Taiping Rebellion arises at a moment.

moment that is one of tremendous sort of turmoil and upheaval in transition in 19th century China. You know, China, as we've talked about before, had for a long time been this very powerful, very prosperous economy, society that was widely engaged in global exchange, global trade. But with the arrival of industrial European imperialism, you know, that begins to change. And it changes quite rapidly. We talked a little bit last time about the opium war, the origins of that, the British and the importation of opium into China that leads to a very serious crisis, a crisis, a social crisis with, you know, millions of people becoming addicted, a crisis of, you know, sort of supply of opium. The smuggling opium was illegal in China.

so there's a big criminal organization that arises around that. And that eventually, as the Chinese try to regain control of that situation and suppress the opium trade, the British go to war. They send the Royal Navy out and they shell the coast of China, shell various cities and all this. And that leads to the surrender, really, the capitulation of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu government and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing.

in 1842, that opens up more ports, legalizes new forms of trade with foreigners, especially the British. And that leads to significant disruptions in what had been, you know, a long-established set of economic relationships and patterns within China. One of the effects of that, one of the specific effects of that was the disruption of internal, you know, transportation routes, let's say, communication lines, which had been focused on the single port of Guangzhou in southern China, what's also called Kenton. And now with the opening of other ports, what had been a single line, kind of line of transmission, which involved a lot of employment, for people along that path, you know, carting goods, in many instances, literally portering goods,

carrying them on their backs up over some of the hills and the passes on the way down south. A lot of those people are cast out of employment. A lot of those people lose their positions. There's other disruptions going on in the economy as low-cost manufactured goods start coming into China from the West. and that disrupts, you know, primary producers. It disrupts artisan producers, craft communities, things like that within China. So this opening up of trade, you know, it's obviously what the imperialists want, what the British one, but in terms of its impact on ordinary working people in China, it generates a lot of distress

and a lot of, well, frustration and anxiety and anger on the part. of many, many people. In that context, one particular grouping in southern China, a grouping of people that are called the Hakka, which is an ethnically Chinese community, but they have a particular historical position that we don't need to go into in great detail. They were late migrants from the north to the south. But they were very heavily engaged in these transport routes, these connections, these internal shipping lines, if you will, and many people in the Haka communities in southern China, wide up losing their employment, losing their livelihoods. And this creates obviously a lot of stress. So we have both, on the one hand, the influx of low-cost European

manufactured goods, disrupting production activities, and, you know, a lot of that employment, but also these changes in the internal organization of trade, in the internal organization of the movement of goods, that has a particular impact on the Haka community in the South. Yeah, I was wondering if we could take kind of a step back, and of course a lot of listeners who might not know the details of Chinese history, will especially our listeners, be familiar with this formulation of the century of humiliation. And of course, you mentioned the Opium Wars,

which is more or less the sort of informal beginning period, of that century of humiliation. I was wondering if you could contextualize the Taiping rebellion in the context of that century of humiliation. I know you touched on it a little bit. And then you were also mentioning, of course, the political, economic sort of dimensions of this bubbling conflict. I was hoping you could also touch on the cultural and religious dimensions at the beginning of this conflict. Sure. Well, what happens? What gets the Taiping rebellion or begins the Taiping movement, is actually it's centered around without getting into a sort of great men of history mode,

but it is centered around a particular leader who emerges in the later 1840s. There's a gentleman named Homsho Tren, and Heng Shuo Tuan was himself a member of this Haka community, and, you know, so he had relations into that larger social sort of nexus in South China. Like many families and many young men in China, in Imperial China, Hong Shuo Tren had ambitions of perhaps passing the imperial examinations and going on to serve in the government as a way of personal enrichment, personal benefit, but also to bring honor to his family, things like that, all these things within the traditional sort of,

political culture of the society. But like the vast majority of people who tried to sit for the exams, Hong Shō-Tren sat for the primary level exams. There's a three-tier system of examinations, and he kept sitting for the entry-level exams, but he kept failing. Every three years, there was a three-year cycle of these, and every three years he would go to Guangzhou, the great fort in the south, which was the center for the local exams that he was taking. But he wouldn't pass. 90% of the people who sat for the exams at any given level didn't pass.

It was a very, very steep gradient to select people to go to the next level. And obviously, this was very frustrating. His family had invested a lot in allowing him to study and allowing him to prepare. And so that's very frustrating for him. And after the fourth or fifth attempt, he has kind of a psychological breakdown and spends like six weeks in a dark room trying to get over things and all that. Now, while he had been in Guangzhou, one of the things about Guangzhou at that point is that this is where foreigners were allowed to come and trade.

So there was a significant presence of Westerners in the city, including missionaries. They weren't allowed to go further into China, but they were there in Guangzhou. and so Heng Shuan at a certain point had encountered at least one of these missionaries who had given him some religious tracts, you know, some Bible tracks or something like that, which he hadn't paid much attention to. He took him home, put him in a drawer. But while he's struggling with his sort of psychological issues after yet another failure of the exams, he comes across these. And as he's recovering, he's reading again, he realizes that while he was sort of in this darkened room for a while,

he had had what he comes to think of as visions in which he had encountered this strange pair of beings, you know, an older gentleman with a long beard and a younger fellow who had talked to him, and he hadn't really understood what was going on, but after he reads these Bible tracts, he decides that this was an encounter with God and Jesus. And what they had told him was that he was Jesus's younger brother, and that just as Jesus had brought God's message to the West, it was his mandate to bring it to the people of the East. And that is, that's sort of what starts his career, his program, that builds into the Taiping movement.

He, you know, once he has this realization, he starts to talk about this, he starts to read a little more. He never seems to have gotten deeply educated about Western Christianity, but he starts to go down that path. Yeah, Henry. Yeah, just to follow up here, because this part is something that we did cover a bit in the last episode, but something that I think could possibly be expanded upon. So we did mention the story of Heng Chuo Chen and how he thought that he was the brother of Jesus Christ and that he was supposed to bring Christianity to the East. But one of the things that was a little bit unclear to me in both me trying to read more on the subject as well as from the discussion we didn't really touch on this aspect of things, which was how widespread was this kind of Christian missionary work within the Qing dynasty?

Because when you look at most of what's written about, at least most of what I've seen about the Taiping rebellion, the focus geographically is all within a rather. small area of the Qing dynasty, kind of in the southeast of the Qing dynasty. But I'm curious as to whether or not there was this kind of dispersal of Christianity to other parts of the Qing dynasty, because that, of course, would then play into how the Taiping rebellion would unfold, as we'll probably discuss in the coming questions. Yeah, at first, of course, the missionaries were restricted to the sort of port area in Guangzhou, you know, what they call the factory area where the western businesses were, there were houses, all that kind of stuff. Once the Treaty of Nanjing is signed and these five other courts going up all the way to Shanghai are open,

missionaries can go in there as well. And bit by bit, they extend their activities deeper and deeper into China, into the interior of China. So while this is a unfolding. While the Taiping movement itself is getting underway and beginning to grow, Christian missionaries are also coming into China through what are called the treaty ports, these ports that have been opened after the Treaty of Nanjing. And there are more and more of them as time goes by as well. Later treaties, treaties with other countries that open additional ports. So there's a growing influx of Western missionaries, primarily Protestant missionaries, some Catholics as well, that's actually going to be, that's more of a factor when we talk

a little bit later about the Boxer Rebellion, is this sort of blanketing of the interior of China with Western missionaries. In the context of the Taiping's, that becomes important as they achieve greater success, and particularly as foreign imperialists, are looking at China and initially thinking, oh, here's this movement taking place which presents itself as a Christian movement. Maybe we as Christians should align with them. Maybe we should support them. In the end, as we'll talk about perhaps, that doesn't really work out very much. But there is that sort of initial encounter. But it's a sign perhaps that the penetration of the missionary endeavor into China even by the 1850s has not, it hasn't gone that deep.

That's going to be something that becomes much greater in the 60s, 70s, 80s going on down to the latter part. Right. That was actually the reason why I brought it up because I know that when we talk about the Boxer Rebellion, we will talk about how this coverage of missionary, quote unquote, work was much more widespread across the Qing dynasty. But I hadn't been seeing much in terms of missionary, again, quote unquote, work that had been going into the interior. of the Qing dynasty. And I was just curious of whether or not there was literature on that that I hadn't been seeing or not. But it sounds like essentially what I was seeing was essentially what was the case.

But then what I want to know is, again, we talked about Heng Shua Chen and how he had these visions and came to this understanding that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. How did it going about building these kind of communes that you described in the last episode that we did with you? how did that work like functionally how does one come to this realization that they're the brother of Jesus Christ and then go about in uh this you know this particular area recruiting people into kind of a movement how does that work well with hongshotuan what happens of course he has he's embedded in a in a in a social network of families right his family he's family he's in this

Haka community. They have a shared sort of cultural niche in the South. And initially, the Taiping movement is largely confined to the Haka community. It eventually, once he really gets going, it spreads out and encompasses many, many, many more people, but non-Haka people as well. But initially, it's pretty concentrated in that community. And so what happens, this is part of a pattern that we see not just with the Taiping Rebellion, but in a number of responses of, well, I suppose what we might call traditional communities, communities that were well-established in particular locations that had, you know, their, you know, whatever features and characteristics, you know, had come down over time. We see this in Korea with what's called the Toghok movement. We see it

down in Vietnam with the Kao Dai movement of as the impact of Western imperialism begins to be more disruptive on established orders and hierarchies and ways of thinking. And as, you know, the Qing dynasty or, you know, the Joseon state in Korea or the Nguyen dynasty down in Vietnam, as those political hierarchies are exposed, are, you know, shown to be dysfunctional, shown to be ineffective, shown to be not defending and caring for the interests of the people and not really even able to defend, you know, the elites against Western imperialist depredations. People begin to question the cultural order in which, you know, they have been living. And so there's a, there's a kind of, perhaps there's a sort of window of opportunity or a little

crack in the, in the cultural facade that allows new ideas. and new interpretations to be introduced. And so in all three of those movements in East Asia, the Tonghak and the Taiping and the Kaudai, what you get are these sort of hybridized ideologies, if you will, or mythologies, where East Asian actors, agents, present themselves in a sort of interacting way with Western archetypes.

with Western imagery, you know, and the Taiping is the greatest example of that. Because, you know, what Hong Shokhuan talks about is, is equality, is sharing, is building a society. I mean, Taiping means great peace. And the full title of the movement is the Taiping Tianhua, the heavenly kingdom or the heavenly land, really, of great peace. and so that's the appeal that things are going badly in South China. People are suffering. People are really facing a hard time. And he comes along and says, well, it's not just, you know, this isn't just something that's internal to, you know, this particular situation in China.

This is a real crisis. And it's a crisis that we can only address by turning in new direction, right? And so the appeal is, look at the Christian. And, of course, he doesn't, as I say, he doesn't have a profound understanding of theology. But apparently he knew something about the idea of the early church and the way in which, you know, people pooled their resources, shared their goods and things like that back in early Roman times and all that. So he presents this idea of let's come together. And in many ways, the Taiping Rebellion is seen, you know, by historians in contemporary China, China today, as a kind of a kind of a kind of. of foreshadowing of the communist movement because it evokes this idea of commonality, of shared

interests, of people pooling, you know, what they have so that, you know, those with a little more can take care of those with a little less and, you know, kind of level it out, kind of make it a more, well, a more viable response to these conditions of social and economic turmoil engendered by the, you know, penetration of imperialism. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, know, of course, you know, dialectically we understand religions as like these processes that unfold over time and then they move into new geographic or cultural areas. They, and this has always been true, adopt certain aspects of the already existing culture while introducing this new aspect. And so we've talked about his sort of religious revelations. We've talked about

how that Christianity informs this now sort of more egalitarian political impetus. I'm wondering what Chinese, already existing Chinese cultural, spiritual, philosophical traditions, this, this, Protestant Christianity was mixed with. And what sort of Christianity that gave rise to that might be distinct from, let's say, you know, European forms of Protestantism? You know, I think that the, you know, to the degree to which the Taiping movement can truly, you know, be said to have some sort of ideological or cultural forms. information that resonates with Western Christianity. I think that's fairly minimal. I think that Hong Shoghren was able to appeal to long-established egalitarian ideas that come up throughout

Chinese history in popular movements, you know, going back a couple of millennia. There's a recurrent pattern of an appeal to sort of, you know, spiritual powers. you know, supernatural beings, whatever, you know, whatever you, however you want to characterize it, that will come into a world, a world of injustice, a world of inequity, a world of suffering, and raise up the lowly and cast down the mighty and all that. And, of course, that resonates with certain things in the rhetoric of Western Christianity, not obviously to be very much in the practice. But it's that kind of message that is, that is embedded within the millinarian tradition, the rebellions,

you know, the white lotus movement, the yellow turban movement, the red turbines at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, these were all egalitarian movements calling for the transformation of the existing social order. The Taiping, what makes the Taiping different is that the face that's put on that is this idea of Hong Shuo Quan as the younger brother of Jesus. But it's not, it doesn't articulate with what would the Western missionaries were saying, you know, they were, they were doing their thing. But it, rather, it, it, it's this, it's this, dialectical hybridization of, of these traditional popular movements, insurrectionary movements, which had a very clear political agenda of egalitarianism and, and the equitable distribution

of goods and all that, moving away from the, the whole imperial model. But now with this, in the context of the impact of imperialism and the disruptive presence of imperialism, reaching across that gap to appropriate something from this clearly more powerful system, and trying to assimilate that into a Chinese cultural matrix. Really fascinating. I want to turn to the rebellion itself, because if we don't get to it, we're just going to talk about the Taiping rebellion for two hours without getting to the boxer rebellion as we uh i i sometimes fear that we can get bogged down too much because it is so interesting and so such a rich history but one thing that i want to when i ask you can you

can you explain how the rebellion unfolds kind of kicks off unfolds and comes to uh something of a conclusion over the period of about what 12 or 14 years one of the things that's really interesting that I also would like to make sure that we hit is in those early days of the rebellion, the movement was rather, I don't want to say rather small, there was a lot of people in it for what it was, but

as the rebellion starts to sweep up to the north, they start to pick up more and more followers as they go north, despite the fact that they're in basically constant armed conflict with the Qing Dynasty's armies. And one of the things that strikes me

is really interesting is that in a time of outright warfare, you're still able to not only maintain your level of support as you're being attacked by the government and the army of the government, but you're actually able to dramatically expand the number of people who are working alongside you as you're entering new areas. It's not like you're drawing from the same community that we're in from the beginning. That dynamic is particularly interesting to me that they're entering new area, new area, new area, and picking up new supporters along the way while at war. That's really fascinating. So, Ken, can you talk about the rebellion itself as well as that aspect of the rebellion, how they were able to keep reaching out to essentially new people

in new areas? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, the movement gets started, as you mentioned earlier, as this kind of rural commune movement. And at first, the idea seems to have been, to sort of disengage from the established, you know, political order and to kind of go about their own business. At first, you know, they weren't raising a banner of rebellion. And at first, you know, there was a much smaller, not an insignificant number of people, but nothing compared to what was lying ahead. But that that disengagement meant that they didn't want to pay taxes to the imperial state. They didn't want to be, you know, conscripted for labor service, things like that. So they were in, effectively in a kind of low-intensity state of rebellion. And that, of course, resulted in

legal hassles. Heng Shua Tren actually gets imprisoned for a little while, comes back out, resumes the leadership of the movement. And it's by that point in the early 1850s, right, by about 1853, that he and other leaders around him who have emerged by this point is not just him, you know, he's not some sort of, you know, dictator. He has built a cohort of leadership around him. That they decide that they're going to take this into a more active mode of rebellion because they come to understand that, you know, the Qing state is collaborating now with the imperialists. the imperialists are continuing their, you know, intrusions, and that what's needed is a transformation. What's needed is a revolution, right? And so they launch what becomes this great military campaign.

And exactly, as you say, it basically goes north through central China, up from Guangdong province in the south, where Guangzhou is, and Guajos province just west of there. That's sort of the heartland where it begins. and now it's going north for a while basically tracking along what had been these old trade routes down over the mountains and the south and then up through Hunan province all the way up to the valley of the Yangza River where they kind of turn east and move down towards the coast. But that's an ongoing process, as you say. Once they launch into rebellion, they're fighting the whole way.

but they're also winning the whole way. And that, I think, is the key to, you know, to the dynamic that they come out of this sort of rural communal, you know, establishment that they had tried to build up, and they start to spread their message, you know, through going out into communities and talking and organizing, but also, you know, they're facing resistance every step of the way. now they're not taking that anymore. They're not just trying to be, you know, we're going to, we're going to try to create this sort of alternative model. We're going to, we're going to try to overthrow the existing order and take that message out. And, you know, there were lots of other people. The people that

they were coming into contact with were going through the same turmoil, the same loss of employment, the same disruptions of the economy, the same intrusions of Western power that had. generated Hong Shō-Tren's concerns in the first place. So they're, you know, they're encountering a receptive audience. And, you know, there's this very positive dynamic all the way through the 1850s as they go north and eventually establish themselves at Nanjing, which had been one of the old capitals of the Ming dynasty, still a very important economic and political center on the Yangtze River, a little bit west of Shanghai and, and, you know, and, you know, and all that area.

And once they establish themselves there, that's the culmination. That's the fruit of this military campaign. But it has been a campaign going sort of from success to success. And as people see them achieving these military victories and as people hear the message that they're putting out, this idea of a sharing egalitarian society. that has a lot of popular appeal. You know, and as I say, we've seen this with rebellions at different points in history that sometimes were succeeded in bringing down a dynasty.

That doesn't happen in this instance, but it's a pattern that is not unique to the Taiping uprising. So, yeah, I think it's the combination of, you know, everybody likes a winner, but also the message was the appeal. And so people were like, I'm going to go with this, I'm going to throw my lot in with this, rather than just stick with the establishing order that was clearly failing to protect the country from imperialism, or Western imperialism, and clearly unable to resolve the economic contradictions that were being generated by the hollowing out of the domestic economy by, by industrial imports. So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, It's a dual line of advance or dual lines of advance that I think allow the Taiping to achieve their success in their northern campaign and the establishment of their center now at Nanjing.

Before you continue with explaining what happened during the rebellion itself, I just want to pause for a second here. As you mentioned that a lot of people were willing to stick with the winner and the people who were willing to resist against Western Imperial. This is something that we've been talking about a lot in recent days talking about the Palestinian resistance to Zionist imperialism. And one of the things that we've been reflecting on in terms of what groups within Palestine are receiving the most support from the Palestinian masses, it is the groups that have the most resolute defense against Zionist imperialism. and at the current historical juncture, those are Islamic groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. We can analyze whether or not that's a good thing or not. Obviously, on this show, we're communists. So, you know, we would prefer the more communist-aligned groups to be at the forefront of the Palestinian resistance.

But when analyzing why these groups have the support that they do, one has to come to the realization that people look at resistance against imperialism and are taken by success in resistance against imperialism. It's just a simple fact. And I just wanted to draw that resonance with what we're seeing today and things that we've been talking about in recent episodes. And listeners, you can find many episodes that we've talked about, Palestine in the recent months and a couple more that we already have recorded,

which will be coming out after this. But Ken, I feel free to continue with the narrative of what happened during the rebellion. I just wanted to pause for a second on that note. Well, I think that's an excellent point. because, you know, people, when people who are suffering see people who are willing to fight for them and with them, along with them, not just, you know, we're going to take care of your problem, but we will, you know, we're part of you. You are part of us. This is our movement. When people feel that, yeah, they're going to, of course, they're going to embrace that, you know, as we see in Gaza and certainly as we saw, you know, in China with, with the Tai Ping movement. Yeah, you know, I mean the trajectory, the historical arc of the Taiping movement,

of course, does not end with the victory of the movement and the radical revolutionary transformation of China into a heavenly kingdom. You know, the forces of the Qing dynasty are able. They have to go through some serious content. of their own, but they do mobilize sufficient resources from the established, largely Han Chinese elites, who had been somewhat marginalized in the dynasty, but now are given a little more free reign to mobilize local resources to protect their interests. You know, the egalitarianism

of the Taiping movement is not just a rejection of Western imperialism. It's a rejection of the established hierarchical order within Chinese society. You know, Imperial China, late Imperial China, or early modern China, historians use different categorizations, was an economy that was in many ways a commercial capitalist economy. It was an economy in which an elite that was partly based in sort of urban manufacturing production, but also in commercialized agriculture. A lot of agricultural production was commodity production for markets, long distance interactions of market areas within China. It was an exploitive economy aimed at capital accumulation and the extraction of value from labor. And people understood that too. It's not just an anti-imperialist

thing, but it's also seeking to change the digital. economic order and hierarchies as well. And so, you know, once that is demonstrably clear, you know, those elites are going to mobilize themselves. You know, there may be tensions between the ethnic Chinese and the Manchus, you know, that go back to the 17th century and all that. But they're all exploitors. They're all, you know, in a shared class position.

And that is one which is antagonistic to the interests of, you know, the agricultural proletariat, as Chairman Mao called the peasantry, to the, you know, the workshop workers, the artisan craftsmen manufacturers, all this. There's a, you know, there are class contradictions. And the Taiping movement, you know, is a, it is a class movement. And so, you know, once that dichotomy is clear, once that contradiction is fully manifest, the ruling elites, the ruling class, they're going to mobilize their resources. And the Manchus and the Han are like, yep, you know, we're in this together. And so once that happens,

then, you know, they are able militarily to isolate and defeat the Taiping movement. You know, the Taiping's are a movement that for, you know, for all the good in their ideology, it's a, it's a mystical, you know, it's a kind of false consciousness, you know, and it is not, you know, they're not a communist movement. They're not a movement which has the ideological clarity of a disciplined party and an understanding of the dynamics of modern, you know, modern capitalism. They don't have a fully developed analysis and all that.

They're working within this more, you know, cosmological, you know, framework. And, you know, they're simply not able to be to mount a completely effective movement. And so ultimately, by 1864, the movement is militarily defeated. There's some offshoots that try to hang on for a couple more years. But it's basically over by the middle of the 1860s. It has this great run and seriously challenges the power of the dynasty. But it is not able to bring about an effective. political transformation, you know, do basically to limitations in its ideological.

Yeah, and of course that just highlights, you know, the utter essential nature of really good materialist analysis and thus revolutionary theory that, of course, emerges a little bit later. We've seen many movements, even in the last several years here in the United States, that because of their lack of theoretical coherency, because of the lack of guidance of revolutionary theory and all the hard-won insights of previous revolutionary iterations. We find ourselves in the U.S. sort of trapped in a sort of spontaneity that is often and easily co-opted and ended and beaten down with brutal state force, etc. So I think it's something that those of us today interested in changing the world for the better,

learn from these historical movements and internalize this importance of revolutionary theory. I know we're going to get to the Boxer Rebellion here, and I only want one or two more questions on this. But this is not, the Taiping movement, of course, is not merely a rhetorical movement, not merely an insurgent movement, but as you said earlier,

they did capture territory. Was there an ability to start to implement certain policies? And if so, can you talk about in those areas where the Taiping movement did control? Is it just about fighting war, or did they get the chance to put into practice some of their ideas and make policy

for a limited time. Oh, yeah. Well, that's, of course, that was a significant part of the appeal. It wasn't just, it wasn't just talk, but it was the combination of what their, what their program was, in a sense, what their goals were, what their ideals were, with the practical application of those. Yeah, I mean, the Taiping community, you know, was one that that tried to establish a much more egalitarian economic order, socioeconomic order, social economic order. you know, a kind of leveling out of society and, you know, helping those at the bottom up a bit, taking, you know, people, to a large degree, willingly, you know, contributing assets and resources that they had to try to achieve a kind of more balanced, more equitable society. Of course, that's taking place in the context of conflict. So, you know, it was hardly a, you know, a pure utopian bing group hug kind of thing. But they did do very practical efforts to implement those kinds of policies, you know. And they did have significant achievements. And that, too, of course, is a significant part of their appeal, that people saw that

these people were living, that the masses of the Taiping movement. And, of course, we're talking tens of millions of people, you know, this isn't just, this isn't a little elite, you know, group, buscule somewhere. This is a mass movement, right? And it was a mass movement that was living the idea, living the goals. Now, having said that, it's also true. A couple of things need to be, to be recognized. One is that like many egalitarian, but in many ways, essentially spiritual movements, you know, there were, there were some problematic aspects to this. For one thing, as a rejection of the traditional Confucian hierarchical family system, the Taiping adopted policies of sort of gender segregation that men tended to live

in sort of male dormitories, women in female dormitories. On the progressive side of that, child care was socialized, right? Children were raised collectively. You know, and so, you know, that was, that was a critique and rejection of the, the traditional family hierarchical organization, but it was, you know, that probably, you know, there might have been some tensions and contradictions that that emerged around those policies. There was also, and this is the critique that you hear all the time from, from bourgeois historians, that the leadership did tend to, uh, uh, a assume as time went by a more commandist kind of attitude, you know, of trying to, again, in a context of intense conflict, of warfare, of defending there, what they had accomplished from increasingly intense attacks and onslaunts, they're, you know, it became a more top down. And because there was a top-down, a more hierarchical at the core, at the center movement. And that, you know,

that may have contributed in the long run to some alienation and disaffection as time went by and as those contradictions intensified. You know, we don't want to portray the Taiping rebellion as a perfect thing. It's a flawed historical process. But one in which what we want to look at and what we want to emphasize are, you know, the sort of the force. shadowing to the glimmerings of hope, and of course, that profound spirit of working people to fight for a better society. Those are the things that I think that we need to draw out and learn from, as well as the contradictions and the mistakes that contributed to its ultimate failure, although the overwhelming reason, of course, was military defeat by the reactionary

forces. So I want to wrap up the Taiping Rebellion. I know Brett will transition us to the Boxer Rebellion. I have one other brief question. It's related to something that you had said earlier, but we can be brief on it because I know that we've been talking about the Taiping Rebellion for about 45 minutes already. So one of the things that you would, and of course we could talk for many more hours, but we do want to be respectful of your time today, Ken. One of the things that you had mentioned is that, of course, the Taiping Rebellion is, in many ways, a Christian movement. And one might think that being a Christian movement, that this movement might get some sympathy from the Western imperialists who were on, you know, mostly the coastal areas of the Qing

Empire, but that, of course, is not what happens. Can you tell us about why there was this dynamic of this Christian movement that was being directly confronted by the Western imperialists in collaboration with the Qing dynasty and how that obviously then resulted in the crushing of the rebellion. Yeah, there's a there is a moment where the the the British in particular but but you know the Westerners in general as they as they become more aware of the the nature of the movement as they you know, they hear about Heng Shuo Tuan and this idea of that it's in some ways a Christian movement. There is a, you know, of course, as imperialists, they're calculating what's going to be the most beneficial for their interest.

And there are those who think, you know, well, look, these guys are against the Qing. We would love to see a new regime here, a new government here, which was more sympathetic to us. You know, we've defeated the Qing militarily. And, of course, they fight a second opium war with the Qing dynasty right in the middle of the Taiping rebellion. So, you know, this is all, you have to put this into the geopolitical context. They're thinking maybe we should ally with the Taiping movement and maybe get rid of the Qing dynasty and have them be a new government that we could work with more closely because we're, you know, we're all Christians here, right? And they actually send a diplomatic delegation to meet with the Taiping leadership.

but that doesn't go well. It doesn't go well, partly because they're not comfortable with the idea that Heng Shuo Tuan thinks that he's Jesus' younger brother. That's difficult for them to embrace theologically. But I think perhaps even more so because they see the radical egalitarianism that is both the theory and practice within the mass movement. And so they decide, well, you know, we don't like the Qing Dynasty. Maybe, though, what we could do is leverage this, is use, you know, the menace of the Taiping Rebellion. And they do actually commit some military forces, not so much to defeating the rebellion as to defeating as to defending the imperialist enclave at Shanghai. You know, the Taiping never get into Shanghai.

They never approach Shanghai. They get as far as Sujo and they don't really threaten Shanghai because the Western military deploys itself and, you know, in that area to defend the city. So, you know, they extract further concessions from the Qing, you know, by not supporting the Taiping. It's obviously, it's a very cynical effort on the part of the imperialists. but they back away pretty quickly once they recognize both the theological problems, but more importantly, I think, the political problems of this, of their egalitarianism. Yeah, so fascinating. I'm learning so much. genuinely did not know much about the typing movement at all before prepping for this episode, and I could sit back and lose myself as being a listener

instead of a co-host. But I just wanted to make a couple of points really quick and then move into the Boxer rebellion. I mean, one point, as you were mentioning earlier, the commandous nature that the Taiping movement eventually took under the external pressure of, obviously, war, conflict, etc. This is something we see in almost every egalitarian revolution attempt, the French revolution we saw it, the Russian revolution, the Cuban revolution, immediately this sort of shift towards a more commandist centralized structure becomes the object of criticism for people who, you know, want to diminish those movements. Oh, look it, they're doing this again they never of course contextualize why that's happening and i think you know mao is somebody that

studied other socialist experiments as well as new chinese history incredibly deeply and he i think a lot of his leadership was premised on this idea of trying to find that interesting balance that dialectical balance between top down leadership which is essential and bottom-up revolutionary mass energy which is also essential and when one of those two things gets obliterated the movement as a whole can suffer so i just think it's worth a pondering on for a second for anybody listening. But I also want to say that, you know, it's, it is a truly bloody war. This is no small kerfuffle. I mean, this is 20 to 30 million human beings dead at the end of this. It's the bloodiest civil war. One of the largest conflicts of the century. And, you know,

in terms of deaths, I'm reading on Wikipedia, it's comparable to World War I. So this is just a massive amount of human suffering that, you know, we should never just wrinkle over. We should we should take a second to reflect on that as well and to think about the psychological and cultural legacy of such moments of upheaval and bloodshed, really. So I just wanted to mention that. But let's go ahead and move into the Boxer Rebellion. So the Taiping Rebellion, just for people chronologically, roughly 1850 to 1864, a couple holdouts until 1871. And then you have about 20, 30 years before the formal beginning of what we now know as the Boxer Rebellion. Can you kind of fill in some of that gap between the end of the Taiping movement and the beginning of the

Boxer Rebellion to sort of contextualize this next rebellion that we're going to get into? Sure. There's two, I think, sort of two dynamics that we want to think about for that, for that phase, the period between the end of the Taiping Rebellion and the rise of the uprising of the boxers. which begins around 1898 or so. On the one hand, there are, of course, the continued encroachments of Western imperialists. You know, there are more treaty ports being opened,

more concessions being extracted from the Qing Dynasty. And as we had touched on earlier, this is the period where the activities of Western missionaries just sort of roll over China like an incoming tide, you know. Pretty soon there are Western missionaries, you know, in every province, every, you know, rural area in remote mountain communities out in the southwest and the northwest and all this, there's a swarming of missionary activity. Supported, you know, from home, they're all writing letters home.

you know, more and more money being contributed by congregations, you know, all over in the West. So this is a major endeavor. And, of course, that's running in tandem with the economic penetration, that, you know, Western goods, now it's no longer just imported Western goods coming in. But now, you know, the Western powers are establishing, often in collaboration with Chinese capitalists, productive activities, new productive activities, new technologies coming in, things like that. So, you know, the impact of imperialism is simply deepening, you know, and the hollowing out of the domestic economy, and the hollowing out of political sovereignty, you know, it just, just progresses steadily throughout this period. So that's, that's one dynamic that's going forward. The other is the contradictions within the imperial state in terms of how to deal with that.

They do. There are those within the imperial state, both a few amongst the Manchus, mostly amongst the Han Chinese officials, who want to figure out how to mount an effective resistance, what's called the self-strengthening movement. And prior to that, the what are called the Tongjur Reforms. Tongueur is the title for one of the periods when there's a particular emperor in the 1860s. And they try to make some reforms. They try to learn, you know, one of the big questions, of course, is what makes Western imperialism so powerful? And they try to figure that out.

They send delegations off to Europe, and they get, you know, they establish a translation bureau. people can read Western books and learn about what's going on out there, because they're trying to figure out, you know, what can we do to strengthen ourselves so that we could stand up to Western imperialism? Because clearly, they had not been effective at doing that, you know, the discrepancies in military technology, but also just sort of different, different political cultures, you know, it just, they hadn't figured out an effective mode of, of, uh, of defense and response. So there are those who are pushing for that,

the self-strengthening movement in the 1870s and 1880s, building new, more modern weapons systems. They establish an arsenal. They establish a shipyard. They're starting to construct more modern infrastructure, building railways and things like that. So there are efforts of that going on. But it's a very contradictory thing because other elements,

within the political elites. And this is predominantly amongst the manchus, but certainly amongst some ethnic Chinese officials as well who don't want to upset the apple cart. They don't want to embrace significant reform or change institutionally or even more importantly in terms of the political culture because they see that as threatening their class interests, their power, their privileges. And so they, you know, they put obstacles to these kinds of reforms. And they, and they oppose these kinds of developments, the self-strengthening movement and things like that. So the system is paralyzed in some ways. It's locked up in terms of it's, in terms of really mounting an effective response. And so that's kind of an internal dynamic that's going on. And just

just to mention because it becomes significant as a trigger for the, for the boxer movement, is that Japan, which is forcibly opened by American imperialism in the 1850s, goes through a political transformation in the late 1860s, what's called the Meiji Restoration, and then embarks on a very, very rapid program of modernization and in many ways westernization that allow Japan to become a modern industrial economy with a modern industrialized military capability so that in 1895, Japan is able to militarily defeat China. If they fight a war, they fight most of it in Korea, and it's kind of over-control of Korea. But the Sino-Japanese War is a even further humiliation for China. It's one thing to be defeated by the Western barbarians. You could at least

say, well, you know, we didn't understand how powerful they worked. But for the Japanese to defeat China, the Japanese had always been seen as a sort of secondary country, you know, and now they defeat China militarily. This was an even greater humiliation. And that's part of what precipitates the political and social crisis in the later 1890s, that that's the context for the boxer rebellion. Well, why don't we get into that? What was that context that precipitated the boxer rebellion? And then also, as we get into the rebellion itself, one of the things that I think will be quite interesting for the listeners to keep in mind is the role of the Qing dynasty vis-a-vis the Boxer Rebellion, because it does shift over time from the beginning of the Boxer Rebellion to, of course, when we have the eight imperialist alliance come rolling in. that role of the Qing dynasty does shift quite a bit, actually. So as we discuss the precipitation of the Boxer Rebellion,

where the base of support was, again, recruitment methods, kind of the same thing that we talked about with the Taiping Rebellion, how did they get their following, how did they mobilize people, and then the early stages of the Boxer Rebellion, while also talking about those things, can you let us also know what was the orientation of the Qing Dynasty the at that time vis-a-vis the Boxer Rebellion. Sure, sure.

I mean, the boxer rebellion, of course, the first thing that we have to take note of about it is the reason that it's called the Boxer Rebellion. It's called the Boxer Rebellion because the original impetus for the movement comes out of a kind of martial arts tradition, right? The Boxer Movement originates in the western part of Shandong province, which is, if you have an image of the mass, of China in your head, there's that peninsula that sticks out to the east into the sea north

of like where Shanghai is and all that. That's Shandong province. And the western part of Shandong province was a pretty poor area economically. I mean, even within the context of the hollowing out of the Chinese economy, this area was particularly hard hit, right? Particularly difficult. There were long traditions in that area of, as there were in many, many parts of China. This isn't something that's unique to Western Shandom, but of martial arts traditions. And in many instances, they were bound up with these kinds of popular rebellions that we talked about earlier in terms of, you know, this idea of a transformation in the social hierarchy

that was needed, you know, raising up the lowly, casting down the mighty, all that. The boxers, you know, practiced a particular form of martial arts discipline, and they were an organized presence in the village societies of Western Shandong. Okay. So that was just an established thing. Shandong province had a particular imperialist sort of, I suppose you could say, which was that the Germans had acquired. the concession of the city of Qingdao on the south coast of Shandong province.

And Qingdao, of course, is famous because the Germans established a brewery there. And, you know, that's still around, thank goodness. You know, so Qingdao beer is, you know, a sort of national label that gets exported all over the world. But that German concession becomes the sort of launch pad for their missionary activities. in rural Shandong province. And, you know, this is part of that wider process that we've talked about of this wave of missionary activity sweeping across the empire. In Shandong, as in many other places, the presence of the missionaries was very disruptive

in rural society, in part, and in shandong, apparently in large part, because it created contradictions within the village communities themselves. People who embraced Christianity, Chinese people who accepted Christianity, who at least presented themselves as Christians, found themselves in privileged positions, and the missionaries actively promoted this. There were economic benefits because the missionaries would share, you know, resources, food, other kinds of things, clothing donations from, you know, where, you know, where but they also became socially and economically and politically privileged

because the Qing state was, you know, deferential to say the least, to Western imperialism, local officials, county magistrates and such, if there was a conflict between people in a particular village or in a particular area, and one party, were, you know, regular Chinese and the other party were Christians. The officials were going to rule in favor of the Christians because they didn't want to upset the missionaries. They didn't want to upset the Germans. They didn't want to upset the Qing hierarchy. And of course, this generated tremendous frustration and resentment for the vast majority of these village communities who were not Christians. You know, a relatively small number of people accepted Christianity. Because, of course,

it was a fundamental break with very, very deep traditional values in local society. But those who did, who were often called by their neighbors, often called rice Christians because they were sort of getting, you know, getting extra food benefits by allying with the imperialist missionaries, you know, they were the subject of significant resentment. But that resentment was really primarily directed at the missionaries, at the Germans, at the foreigners. and at the collaborationist stance of the Qing state. So 1895, China's defeated by Japan. It's a big national humiliation.

Everybody's aware of that. Ramps up further sort of, I suppose, we could say, patriotic feeling amongst people. 1898, there's a brief, last just about three months, reform effort in Beijing, that fails and is suppressed by the sort of reactionary Qing authorities. But that sends a sort of ripple through much of Chinese society that, you know, things have got to change. And in that context, the boxers have begun in, you know, this martial arts grouping in Western Shandong. They've begun to challenge the power and the privilege of the Chinese Christians, of the missionaries, and of the government officials who are, you know, supporting Western imperialism.

And they are becoming increasingly rebellious. They're building larger and larger units. And they're now challenging, you know, attacking missionary churches, attacking facilities that the missionaries were operating, attacking local what are called Yemen, the government offices. And at first, at first, the Qing state, seize the boxers as rebels that need to be repressed. Because at first, the boxers, they start to raise political slogans.

And at first, the slogan is, expel the barbarians, overthrow the chain. And, of course, the Qing leaders are like, well, that's not cool, you know. But as the rebellion grows, and as it begins to manifest itself, as a truly, you know, mass movement and as the leadership in Beijing, especially in the wake of the suppression of the reforms in 1898, they're beginning to think, you know,

we've got to do something. You know, these imperialist powers, they're just, they're just bleeding us drive. Maybe, maybe we could use this popular movement. We could use the boxers as a force to drive out the imperialists. drive out the westerners.

And so now the Qing state throws its power behind the boxer movement. And now the boxers, you know, willing to accept that, changed their slogan from, you know, expel the barbarians

overthrow the Qing to expel the barbarians support the Qing, right? The idea being that we're going to, you know, the Qing dynasty officials and our movement will work together to get rid of the imperialists. And this grows through 1899, by the beginning of 1900, a large cohort, a large force of boxers march from western Shandong. It's not that far.

Shandong is very close to Beijing. But they make their way there. They come into the city. And remember that at this point, Beijing is still an ancient walled city. So they come in through the gates. They're in the city. And they lay siege to what's called the legation quarter, where the foreign, basically, the foreign embassies are located.

And, you know, they want to get at them. They want to destroy the foreign embassies. And they have the backing of the Qing state. Interestingly, the Qing do not make available to the boxers imperial military forces, right? So the siege of the litigations is carried on by the boxers themselves. The Qing state is kind of hedging its bets at this point. And we have to recognize that the support for the boxers by the Qing, yes, it's a sincere effort, I believe, to unite to oppose the imperialists.

But it isn't that, again, as with the Taiping, the Qing state is still, you know, a ruling class state. And they're not interested in the popular, you know, egalitarianism of movements like the Taiping or the boxers. So it's a complex political landscape. but the kind of thing that we see in revolutionary crises historically, where, you know, bourgeois elements and proletarian elements may align, but that doesn't mean that the bourgeoisie gives up its own interests. So here, of course, it's not a bourgeoisie so much as the imperial state. But, you know, there's a, you know, the VED diagrams overlap considerably, but not totally, right? Let's just say it that way. So that's the context in which, as was mentioned, the eight-power expeditionary force, this alliance, this grand alliance of imperialism, comes to the capital, comes to Beijing, breaks up the siege of the legations, slaughters thousands of boxers, and many ordinary Chinese, imposes, you know, penalties on the imperial state, this huge financial indemnity that further bankrupts the Qing regime

and kind of puts, you know, one of the last nails in the cost. of imperial China. Just very briefly before Brett goes in with his question, I just have a little question. I know I think that this is somebody who we brought up in the last episode, but if not, it was somebody who was brought up in your book, which it would be hard not to. That would be the Empress Dowager at the time. Can you talk just a little bit about who that was and her relations to both the Western imperialist countries over time?

because she did kind of rule for about 50 years, you know, and there was changing relations with the West throughout those 50 years, and then how her relations to these kind of rebel groups throughout her reign kind of were up until this point when we're talking about the Boxer Rebellion when we're going to be talking about, you know, the massive influx of foreign troops. Yeah, yeah, the Empress Dowager, whose name was Tsushi, it's a hard name to pronounce, but Tsushi,

There was a reason I didn't say the actual name of her. She had been, she was, she was an empress, obviously, and her husband, her emperor husband, passed away as a young man. And so she was around. She didn't have a son who succeeded to the throne, but one of her nephews succeeds to the throne, the Guangzhou emperor, the last, well, the penultimate emperor. But she becomes the real power behind the throne.

She is able to manipulate him when he's a young man. And then even when he reaches maturity and tries to take the reins of government into his own hands, he's the one that launches this brief reform effort in 1898. But she is the one who works with reactionary elements in the military and the government to stop the reforms. Some of the reform leaders are executed. and the emperor is effectively placed under house arrest. So she really comes to be the controlling figure in the Qing government. And yeah, her view of things, you know, evolves over time.

She had been part, she had been a bit of a supporter of the self-strengthening movement, but she's always watching out for the interests of the Manchin nobility, right? And so as time goes by, that's why she suppresses the reforms. She thought that that was going to lead to the erosion, the loss of power, of the Manchu nobility, if the government was modernized and made more rational and effective. And by 1898-99, she's the one, she's really kind of at the heart of this shift in the view of the boxers, you know, calling for a lying with them to help try to expel the barbarians. She really wanted to, to, you know, get the Qing dynasty back onto a very traditional, very, you know, reactionary basis. but reassert its authority.

And if they could drive out the imperialists or at least put a lot of pressure on the Imperials, back them off, she was willing to take that risk. And obviously, in the end, that didn't work out so well. But that was, that was, she's a key figure in that, in that moment. Yeah, I mean, I hope listeners who, you know, might not have had all these details fleshed out from Chinese history are now starting to understand why this period of time is called the, the century of humiliation, but also underneath that humiliation is this anti-humiliation of the dignified Chinese people in various forms rising up and trying to fight against, you know, first in egalitarianism

and then, you know, more explicitly foreign imperialism. And that's kind of something I kind of want to just take a second to reflect on and correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Taiping movement's ideological orientation is fundamentally about a more egalitarian China with these really intense religious content, this Christian Protestant content to it. The Boxer Rebellion is now sort of anti-Christian because this missionary process has spread out all over China. You were talking about all these privileges and unfairnesses. And then so you can think of the Boxer Rebellion as a much more explicitly anti-imperialist

a movement, which I think is interesting. But you talked about the Eight Nation Alliance, their eventual victory over this, almost like a national liberation movement, which we'll see again about a half century later, which is very interesting. But yeah, ultimately in this instantiation of the conflict, the Eight Nation Alliance more or less wins, plunders, the countryside and the city, does summary executions of, you know, fighters and non-fighters alike. What is the immediate fallout politically for China in the wake of this sort of defeat? And then how does this legacy of this defeat go on to influence and direct, you know, political and social movements and upheavals coming in the next

several decades? Yeah. I mean, the immediate impact, of course, is the treaty that's imposed in 2001, the indemnity that is part of that agreement, what was called the Boxer Protocol. They don't call it a treaty, the Boxer Protocol. And the indemnity, the indemnity, you know, is a huge payment to the eight powers, to each of the eight powers, you know, sort of paying the expense of their invasion and oppression of China. You know, it's like, you're going to invade us and we're going to pay you to do so. It's, you know, it's pretty, pretty bad. But, and of course, politically, it's yet another tremendous humiliation for the Qing dynasty. It does seem to have precipitated an awareness on the part of at least some elements within the Qing leadership

that they were going to have to at least consider making some serious changes. And you get, in the following years, in the last decade of the dynasty, you get some efforts at reform and modernization. They abolish the old imperial examination system in 1905. They begin a process of developing sort of consultative assemblies, not legislative assemblies, but consultative assemblies in some of the provinces, Houdan province, as a pioneer in that regard. They set up a plan for sort of constitutional reform, although the, you know, the framework that they're thinking of, they're projecting that they, they, they, might try to have a more democratic republic in place by like, and remember, this is the first decade of the 20th century, they're talking about maybe getting that up and running by 1956. So it's a, to say the least, a long-term program or vision. All of that, of course, is

way too little too late. The dynasty, the imperial system itself has been demonstrated its bankruptcy, revolutionary movements, nationalist movements. Sanyat Sen, who becomes the great nationalist leader, has already been at work, you know, back in the 1890s, the first decade of the 20th century. You know, the dynasty is kind of, you know, rolling along with its wheels about to come off in this final decade. All that falls apart, you know, the Empress Dowager and and the Guangzhou emperor die within about 24 hours of each other in 1908. A little boy, a little, you know, three-year-old boy becomes the final emperor, the last emperor. Finally in 1911, mutinies break out in the armed forces and the dynasty just collapses.

And, you know, that moves us into another phase, the abortive efforts to establish a republic, the warlord era, all that. We'll pick up that, I think, as background for the Civil War episode. when we get to that. But the defeat of the boxers and the imposition of the boxer protocol and the indemnity really are kind of the final humiliation,

not of China, but of the imperial system. There's bad stuff still to come and plenty of it. But that's kind of the final turning point after which the dynasty is just in sort of crash mode until it disappears.

Yeah. And you mentioned, in the last emperor of China. That's something that I think we'll have a passing note on when we talk about the aftermath of the civil war, because his existence in revolutionary China in the People's Republic is very interesting. He does not have the end that you would have expected for an imperial ruler of a country after a communist revolution takes place. So listeners, stay tuned for that in the next and stuff. Solomon of this mini-series.

But what I do want to mention is that, and I had mentioned this in our previous episode with you, Ken, but it's worth reiterating that in, at least within the United States' educational system, which is what I am familiar with because I was, I haven't lived in the U.S. for six years, but that's the educational system that I was raised in. When we learned about the Boxer Rebellion in school, and I know that I will be far from the only one who will have been given this portrayal of the Boxer Rebellion, we were told that they were basically crazed fanatics, these psychopaths brandishing fisticups against any foreigner that they came across. Whereas, as we've laid out in both that last conversation and this

conversation, that's not at all the case. And in reality, there was actually a fairly substantial anti-imperialist almost ideology that was underlying the rebellion. And the thing that I'm kind of pushing towards at this moment is that raising popular consciousness is a

very important thing when we think about the role of these rebellions. Yes, the Boxer Rebellion was crushed by the Eight Nation Alliance of Western Imperialist states. However, the legacy of the Boxer Rebellion did quite

a bit to raise anti-imperialist consciousness within the country. So I'm wondering, Ken, if you can talk a little bit about what the legacy of the Boxer Rebellion was in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, you know, after it was crushed by the Eight-Nation Alliance of Western Imperialists. And then what the lasting legacy of the Boxer Rebellion was and what role that played in maintaining something of an anti-imperialist popular consciousness. within the country writ large. Yeah, I mean, again, the immediate aftermath was not good. Lots of boxer fighters who had come to Beijing were killed.

Once the imperial state, the Qing dynasty, was sort of recaptured by Western imperialism. You know, boxer communities in Shandong were repressed. You know, the fate of the movement is fairly bleak in the immediate aftermath. But, you know, the legacy of the boxers, you know, lived on, shall we say. These popular movements did not go away. There were other uprisings in other parts of the empire. There were other, you know, popular movements that, you know, carried on and persisted as the 20th century gets underway. And as more, how shall we say, more sophisticated.

sophisticated political organizations began to emerge, like Sanyat Sen and what's called the Tongbong Hui, the sort of broad coalition of anti-Ching and anti-imperialist movements around the country, as those movements became more, as I said, sort of more sophisticated in their ideological propagation and their public communication, the imagery of the boxers, the idea of the, the idea of the, the boxers, as fighters, essentially as Brett was saying, fighters for national liberation, you know, that that takes deep root. And of course, once the communist movement gets underway, they are looking back to foreshadowing, to predecessors, to, you know, people who were, who were part of the struggle. But at a moment when, you know, for material and ideological reasons, and circumstances were not mature for the success of a revolutionary movement. But now, you know, as the movement is building, as the movement is growing, you don't want to just abandon them, you don't want to just toss them off to the dustbin of history.

You know, you want to emphasize that this movement now is an extension, is a culmination, is a fulfillment of the dreams, the hopes, the aspirations for egalitarianism, for justice, for equity, for national independence, for liberation, that we can see in these earlier episodes. And so the legacy of the boxers is certainly one that is presented very, very differently in education in 20th century China, not just in the People's Republic, but even in the, during the years of the revolutionary struggle. This is a legacy of national pride that was, you know, was, was widely embraced as history marched on, shall we say. Yeah, absolutely.

Very fascinating to learn about the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions and see how those threads of, in the former case, egalitarian economic structures. And in the latter case, you know, really hard-nosed anti-imperialism, those threads are picked up later from Chinese society and different movements, but specifically, ultimately, the Chinese Communist Party, which is very, very cool to sort of think about. As a way to wrap up this conversation, I'm wondering, you're mentioning the miseducation of people in the West about these historical events. And I'm wondering what ultimately you hope people, young people, people in the West, people interested in changing the world, right? What ultimate lessons can we today in 2024 extract from these periods of Chinese history? Well, I think that actually this pairing of the typing and the boxers as we've talked about it today kind of sets up, you know, the messages or the lessons, the things that we need to attend to, which is that on the one hand, of course, for us, you know, the people that I work with primarily

here in the United States, you know, we're trying to figure out how to carry forward a revolutionary program here in this country. And given the critical role of the United States in the global imperialist system, you know, revolution in the United States is something that that is in everybody's interest. So we have these sort of, again, kind of dual tracks that we want to advance along of building a movement that will, you know, educate people and organize people around issues of economic justice, about the equitable distribution of the fruits of labor to those who actually perform the labor, about building a socialist economy and a socialist society.

But as part of that, we have to recognize that for us, and certainly for people in other parts of the world, anti-imperialism is at the heart of that struggle, you know, that American imperialism needs to be defeated both at home and abroad. And that is the endeavor that, you know, this work forms a part of. So, you know, the lessons coming out of the Taiping and the Boxer Rebellions, even though they were historically defeated, is that, you know, this will for progressive, radical, revolutionary change is something that oppressed people, working people have shared and fought for and died for, but also lived for, you know, throughout history. And as we, you know, as we follow those traces in the past, you know, I think we want to be inspired and we want to take resolution to devote ourselves to our struggles.

with the same kind of determination and forbearance that these predecessors did. Beautifully said. Absolutely. Terrific conversation on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions. Listeners, as I had mentioned at the top of this recording, this is the beginning of a four-part mini-series that we're conducting with Ken on modern Chinese history, which is an extension of our past overview of modern Chinese history that we did with Ken in the fall of last year. As mentioned, also at the top of the recording, the next episode is going to be on the Chinese Civil War, which I know I am really looking forward to.

Ken, is there anything that you would like to say as a teaser for that conversation, something to get people excited for that next installment about? I'm sure that you have a lot to say, but like, you know, give a 15 second pitch to get people excited. Well, guys, you know, the revolutionary struggle is still felt by people in China today as one of the great epic stories of human history. And we're going to talk a lot, I think, about specifically about the Long March, you know, which is a tale of talk about the tale of inspiration and heroism and sacrifice, but also of perseverance and ultimately a victory. So I think that, you know, it's it's the superheroes without the superpowers. Yeah, absolutely. I know the Long March was kind of the event of the Civil War that I am the most excited to talk about because as you mentioned, it's a very inspiring. story despite incredible hardship and incredible, seemingly insurmountable odds, really one of the most inspiring events in modern human history in my book. And we'll certainly talk quite a bit

about that in the next episode of this mini series. So listeners, be sure to stay tuned. We may have one episode between this one and the next installment of this mini series. It's kind of to be worked out whether or not we'll have these four episodes. one after another, or maybe we'll have something interspersed in between that Adnan and I are doing in the interim, because we have a lot of things recorded already, that we have to get out in a timely manner at some point. But this was a great conversation, a great way to kick off this miniseries. Again, listeners, our guest was Ken Hammond, professor of East Asian and global history at New Mexico State University and author of the book, China's Revolution and the

quest for a socialist future. Ken, can you just let the listeners know how they can find your book We'll kind of pitch it at the end of each of these installments for you. Yeah, the book is available at this point from the publisher, which is 1804 Books.com. 1804 Books is a radical and revolutionary publisher based in New York City, and I'm really delighted to be working with them. I'll put in a little advance plug that we hope by the end of this year to have another volume out on China and the world. China's foreign relations, 1949 to 2024. for. And I can guarantee you that when that book comes out, you'll be back on the show whether

you like it or not. I am always glad to be here. Well, I'm glad to hear it, but regardless, you're back on the show when that book comes out. Brett, as my wonderful guest host for this episode, which I'm going to have to get used to saying, because we are going to have you back again, both for the rest of this mini-series, as well as periodically in the future. Can you let the listeners know how they can find your podcasts. And it's going to be really hard for me to remember to say, not say your other podcasts, because now those are your podcasts. Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, thank you so much, Ken. Like, you're a really brilliant teacher. I mean, just to off the top of your head have all this history in there, it's fascinating. The way you deliver it is wonderful.

I was actually just kind of thinking. I'm like, where have I, you know, heard him before outside of guerrilla history? And it's because I've, I've actually listened to the great courses from Yao to Mao, 5,000 years of Chinese history. So if you won 5,000 years of Chinese history, Ken is your man, and there's a great course of series out there for you. So very, very cool. As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Yeah, Brett, I knew you did that course.

I didn't know that you didn't recognize that Ken was kind of forgot. Kind of forgot. Oh, there you go. Now we put all of these pieces together. And I'm looking forward to seeing you again when we continue this mini-series with the Chinese Revolution. Listeners, you can find my co-host, again, going to be hard to remember to say this, but my co-host, Adnan, who was not able to make it for this conversation on Twitter at Adnan A. H-U-S-A-I-N. Check out his other podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S. It's available wherever

you get your podcasts and is focused on the Italy East Islamic World Muslim Diaspras and a lot of great episodes that the Mudge list has put out. I highly recommend it. As for me listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995. It was recently added to the editorial board of Iskra Books. So I'm also going to highly recommend everybody. Check out iscrabbooks.org and follow them on social media because I've already involved with several projects that are going to be coming out. And whereas they had six books come out last year, it's looking like there's going to be more like 20 that come out this year from Iskra. So definitely a growing press and something to keep.

your eye on, especially considering that we make all of the PDFs available for free. Listeners, hint, hint, all of the PDFs are available for free, although you can also buy the print editions. As for guerrilla history, you can help support us and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow the show on Twitter to keep up with everything that's coming out from each of us individually as well as the show collectively at Gorilla underscore podcast.

again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.