Could China Have Gone Christian?

The Taiping Rebellion is arguably the most important event in modern history that even educated Westerners know very little about. It’s also known as the Taiping Civil War and it was one of the largest conflicts in human history (1850–1864), with death toll estimates ranging from 20 to 30 million, far exceeding deaths in the US civil war (~750,000) with which it overlapped.  The civil war destabilized Qing China, weakening it against foreign powers and shaped the trajectory of 19th- and 20th-century Chinese politics. In China the Taiping Civil War is considered the defining event of the 19th-century.

The most surprising aspect of the civil war is that the rebels were Christian. The rebellion has its genesis in 1837 with the dramatic visions of Hong Xiuquan. In his visions, Hong and his elder brother traveled the world slaying demons, guided onwards by an old man who berated Confucius for failing to teach proper doctrines to the Chinese people. (I draw here on Steven Platt’s excellent Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom). It is perhaps not coincidental that Hong began experiencing his visions after failing the infamously stressful Chinese civil service exams for the third time. It wasn’t until 1843, however, after he failed the exams for the fourth time, that he had an epiphany. A Christian tract that he had never read before suddenly unlocked the meaning of his visions–the elder brother was Jesus Christ, making Hong the second son of the old man, God.

With his visions unlocked, Hong threw himself into learning and then teaching the Gospels. He quickly converted his cousin and a neighbor and they baptized themselves and began taking down icons of Confucianism at their local school. Confucianism, of course, underpinned the exam system that Hong had grown to hate (Recall, that a similar pattern is visible in India today, where mass exams generate large numbers of educated but frustrated youth).

The wild visions of a lowly scholar wouldn’t seem to have the makings of a revolutionary movement but this was the beginning of the century of humiliation when China was forced to confront the idea that far from being the center of civilization it was in fact a backward and weak power on the world stage. Moreover, China was governed by foreigners, the Manchus, who despite ruling for 200 years had never really integrated with the Chinese population. Hence, Hong’s calls to kill the demons merged with a nationalist fervor to massacre the Manchus. Hong proclaimed himself the Heavenly King and his movement quickly grew to more than a million zealous warriors who captured significant territory including establishing the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with its capital at Nanjing.

The regime banned foot‑binding, prostitution and slavery, promoted the equality of men and women, distributed bibles, and instituted a 7-day week with strict observance of the sabbath. To be sure, this was a Sinicized, millenarian Christianity, more Old Testament than new but the Christianity was serious and real and the rebels appealed to British and Americans as their Christian brothers. One Taiping commander wrote to a British counterpart:

You and I are both sons of the Heavenly Father, God, and are both younger brothers of the Heavenly Elder Brother, Jesus. Our feelings towards each other are like those of brothers, and our friendship is as intimate as that of two brothers of the same parentage. (quoted in Platt p.40)

Now, as it happened, the Heavenly Kingdom fell to the Qing, but it was a close thing and could easily have gone the other way. Western powers—above all Britain, but also the United States—hedged their bets and at times fought both sides, yet for short-sighted reasons ultimately tilted toward the Qing, an intervention Ito Hirobumi later called “the most significant mistake the British ever made in China.” Internal purges fractured the movement, alliances went unmade, and crucial opportunities slipped away. Yet the moment was pregnant with possibility. Hong Rengan, Hong Xiuquan’s cousin and prime minister from 1859, pushed sweeping modernization: railroads, steamships, postal services, banks, and even democratic reforms. These initiatives would likely have brought what one might call Christianity with Chinese Characteristics into closer alignment with Western Christianity.

Indeed, it is entirely plausible that with only a few turns of history, China might now be the world’s most populous Christian nation. And if that seems hard to believe, consider what did happen. Sixty three years after the fall of Nanjing in 1864, China again erupted into civil war under Mao Zedong. This time the rebels triumphed, and instead of a Christian Heavenly Kingdom the world got a Communist People’s Republic. The parallels are striking: both Hong and Mao led vast zealous movements that promised equality, smashed tradition, and enthroned a single man as the embodiment of truth. Both drew on foreign creeds—Hong from Protestant Christianity, Mao from Marxism-Leninism. Both movement had excesses but of the counter-factual and the factual I have little doubt which promised more ruin. The Heavenly Kingdom pointed toward a biblical moral order aligned with the West, the People’s Republic toward a creed that delivered famine, purges, and economic stagnation. Such are the contingencies of history—an ill-timed purge in Nanjing, a foreign gunboat at Shanghai, a missed alliance with the Nian. Small events cascaded into vast consequences. For the want of a nail, the Heavenly Kingdom was lost, and with it perhaps an entirely different modern world.