One Billion Customers - James McGregor [19]
Li Hongzhang carefully noted how the West’s weapons and methods decimated the Chinese military. As he rose in stature among the bureaucrats and mandarins in the imperial court, he was constantly asked to negotiate settlements when Chinese peasants killed missionaries or ripped up train tracks and telegraph lines. The foreigners always wanted new trading or territorial rights in compensation. In the negotiations, Li was usually playing with an empty hand. Foreign military power was simply too powerful for China to resist. Li’s strategy was to offer expanded business opportunities instead of ceding territorial control to foreigners. When foreign powers did carve out land, Li directed local officials to make their life miserable in myriad bureaucratic ways.
Rebellion
Not everyone resented the missionaries. A failed imperial scholar named Hong Xiuquan was so smitten with the message of Protestant missionaries that he founded the Society of Godworshippers and titled himself the “Younger Brother of Jesus Christ.” Widespread poverty and the obvious corruption of the imperial court allowed Hong to recruit some five hundred thousand peasants to stage a revolt in 1851, known as the Taiping Rebellion. For a dozen years, he ruled much of southern China from his capital in Nanjing. Hong’s Taiping Tianguo, or Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, attracted the dispossessed and disgruntled from all over China. Land and private property were taken from landlords and distributed to peasants, foreshadowing the policies of Mao a century later.
Hong’s constant hostile presence in southern China threatened both the Empress Dowager and the Western merchants. To end that threat, Li helped organize an army of imperial troops and mercenaries under the leadership of British Major Charles George “Chinese” Gordon to end the Taiping Rebellion. In 1864 Gordon led his “Ever Victorious Army” out to crush Hong’s kingdom. On the way to Nanjing, Gordon was brought into negotiations between the Taiping officials ruling the city of Suzhou and the commander of imperial troops, General Ching. Through General Ching, Li had told the Taiping rebels that their lives would be spared if they surrendered without fighting. Gordon spoke almost no Chinese and didn’t understand what was being said during the negotiations, but he left the talks confident that his presence guaranteed that Li would abide by his promise to spare the rebels’ lives.
When Li himself met with the princes, their swaggering insolence enraged him. Li immediately ordered them beheaded and their heads hung on the city gates.
Gordon was astounded that a promise could so easily be broken. His word of honor had been violated. He grabbed a pistol and went into the city to kill Li. When he couldn’t find Li, a disconsolate Gordon took the head of one rebel from the city gate to his home where he talked to it, asking forgiveness. Gordon then ordered the Ever Victorious Army to retreat.
Gordon was persuaded to rejoin the Taiping campaign after Li declared publicly that Gordon had nothing to do with the broken promise. The Qing troops soon conquered Nanjing. Hong Xiuquan died from eating wild herbs to ward off starvation, and imperial Chinese troops slaughtered the remaining one hundred thousand Taiping followers who didn’t commit suicide.
Barbarian Rule
Li handled the barbarians as skillfully as anyone could have expected, yet he was often blamed for China’s problems at the hands of foreigners. Indeed, he was labeled a traitor after a Japanese army in 1895 decimated Chinese troops in a five-month conflict. Li ended the war when he signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki that forced China to cede influence over Korea and Taiwan to Japan and to open more of China to Japanese trade. Li was vilified at least in part because Japan’s victory so stunned China. Here was an island nation that had adopted its culture and civilization