God's Chinese Son
Spence, Jonathan D.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "God's Chinese Son" expropriated, and were condemned for, a decade or so later. They smeared their opponents by labeling all isolationists (including the American Legion and Reader's Digest) as fascists or...
...John had rendered what he saw and heard into a loud and tumultuous traditional Chinese drama, with the customary masks, scenery, and brilliant costumes...
...different from the highly intellectualized Jesuit-taught Roman Catholicism that had been an adornment to Peking's seventeenth century imperial court...
...In its splendor and terror and beauty, it is as if St...
...But Hong still remained obsessed with refining the Christian basis of his kingdom...
...Whether this was a fact, dream, seizure, or hallucination, he now understood God to be his father and Jesus his older brother...
...Hong also encountered a vast array of what we would think of as demons and goblins and other strange beings...
...Not inclined to quibble over coercion vs...
...He was prepared for a conventional Protestant Revival in Manchu China The American Spectator • April 199 6 69 ascent up China's ladder of success but he could not succeed at the civil service examinations...
...Gradually he came to understand himself as a founder of a new earthly order for China, akin to the founder of a Chinese dynasty...
...We cannot know what, if anything, was nipped in the bud...
...Eventually the empire gained the upper hand and was able slowly to shrink the area under Taiping control...
...The dynasty's final assault on Nanking, which came a month later, was one of the largest military operations in Chinese memory...
...Beginning in the southwest, it spread through the country and came close to Peking itself, remaining headquartered in Nanking for more than a decade...
...So if God's Chinese Son is a wonderfully interesting story, it is also a cautionary tale...
...These are fighting words, but I suspect that the response of critics from the academic left will be more measured God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan Jonathan D. Spence Norton /400 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Charles Horner Though we associate Chinese religion with gentleness, passivity, and deep contemplation, it has its bloodcurdling elements...
...Haynes—the co-author of a recently published collection of American Communist Party documents discovered in the KGB archives in Moscow—believes that the tactics of the anti-fascists, a group which included a fair number of Communists and their sympathizers, provoked some of the victims of "brown-smearing" to adopt similar measures against the Communists...
...Furthermore, many secret Communists engaged in espionage for the Soviets during the war, and others clearly would have if asked...
...He wrote treatises on the meaning of life, the origin of human discontent, and the causes of national and international disorder...
...In other parts of the country, Taiping units continued to fight on, but they eventually succumbed to the relentless pursuit that only a civil war can produce...
...the death sentence was carried out immediately after it was pronounced...
...He died on June 1, 1864, much interested in the Book of Revelation and working on annotations to it designed to convince doubters of his own divine origins...
...Hong Xiuquan was born in a small town in south China, not far from Canton...
...In the end, the West supported the imperial status quo...
...Beyond any of this, the Rebellion makes for a great story, springing as it does from an under-appreciated event in modem history...
...John had rendered what he saw and heard into a loud and tumultuous traditional Chinese drama...
...They berated witnesses, demanded that names be named, and called for the removal of ideologically suspect professors...
...Wherever they ruled, the rebels set about the remaking of society along recognizably collectivist, proto-socialist lines...
...Given its mass peasant base — millions had supported the "Heavenly King," as he had styled himself—the Taiping Rebellion became an object of study for a Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Tse-tung, bent on leading a peasant-based revolution of its own...
...They honeycombed various New Deal agencies, dominated several state Democratic parties, and came close to achieving dominance over the CIO...
...There his peculiar Sino-Christian theocracy began to build an earthly utopia "so that all can live together in perpetual joy, until at last they are raised to Heaven to greet their Father...
...Thus, both in style and substance, God's Chinese Son is an outstanding advance in the West's understanding of China...
...He had his own understanding of things, and often made alterations in the Chinese translations of the Bible in order that these versions accord with his own teachings...
...His following grew rapidly, and attracted men with natural gifts for military tactics...
...They exaggerated the dimensions of the menace, concocting lurid scenarios in which minuscule, impotent groups were depicted as major threats to the Republic...
...Like Powers, Haynes is harshly critical of McCarthyism, and he regrets the partisan uses to which anti-Communism was put by the Republicans...
...The complicated system was highly structured, often arbitrary and brutal, socially communal, and extremely puritanical...
...During the thirties, antifascists claimed that relatively weak pro-Hitler forces represented a dangerous Fifth Column within America...
...For all its sporadic ugliness, excesses, and silliness, the anti-Communism of the 1940's and 1950's was an understandable and rational response to a real danger to American democracy...
...consent, the authorities convicted him of eighteen counts of rape...
...Though rooted in its leader's close examination of Christian doctrine, the Taiping Rebellion—the term means "Great Peace"—also came to embody a social program...
...In the ensuing decade, Hong began to give a systematic presentation of the meaning of his vision both theologically and politically...
...It was suppressed at a cost of tens of millions of lives...
...Tens of millions were engaged on both sides of this struggle...
...Marxist doctrines, another foreign import to be Sinified a century later, also produced madness and upheaval mystifying to their foreign sponsors...
...The leaders of the Heavenly Kingdom began to quarrel among themselves...
...The suppression of the rebellion required a comparable scale of militarization and mobilization...
...than in the past...
...They used congressional investigatory committees to intimidate fascists and non-fascists alike...
...The debate over the Cold War will, no doubt, continue...
...70 April 19 9 6 • The American Spectator...
...At its apex was the Heavenly King, as Hong now styled himself, who held both spiritual and temporal power, an Ayatollah-like figure, but one with a splendid court and a palace filled with44 It is as if St...
...Protestant missionaries were already active there, and Hong learned something of Christianity from the Chinese-language tracts they distributed...
...Wu, it seems, had declared himself a god and had gained many devoted female followers...
...But even with the heavenly capital in Nanking besieged and surrounded in1864, Hong nonetheless continued his work of biblical exegesis and commentary, and even carried on theological disputation in correspondence with notable Western clergymen resident in China...
...How was traditional Confucianism to contest with this strange new faith...
...Unlike the fascists, with their paltry memberships and political impotence, the Communists held positions of real influence within New Deal America...
...In 1853 he captured the important Yangtze river city of Wuchang...
...Terrifying prophecies of awesome earthly destruction announce the coming of the millennium and, from time to time, people appear who try to hasten the day...
...They smeared their opponents by labeling all isolationists (including the American Legion and Reader's Digest) as fascists or crypto-Nazis...
...Chinese history is punctuated with mass uprisings and rebellions directed against reigning dynasties, and suppressed only after sustained repression and wide-scale destruction...
...He has, however, few regrets about the anti-Communist course adopted by America during the early Cold War...
...given their prominence, the Communists really did seem like a genuine Fifth Column in the postwar period...
...His portrayals of the complexities of Chinese society during one of the more stressful eras in the country's long history help us understand not only what was afoot then, but also what was to come...
...The Taipings represented a kind of social mobilization and militarization of society which in its scale and intensity had not been encountered in China before, and would not be encountered again until Mao's ascendancy...
...His power began to spread and, as the ruling house in Peking—the north Asian Manchu "barbarians," who were not Chinese, we must remember—began to face growing external pressures, Hong began to tap into pervasive social discontents...
...In the mid-nineteenth century, when China was crumbling under a welter of foreign and domestic pressures, there intruded into the home-grown tradition of Buddhist millenarian violence the militant Western doctrine of Christianity...
...To the accompaniment of huge explosions and with the city's great walls undermined by months of tunneling, the imperial armies poured into the city...
...Of course, it will be no easy thing to reduplicate Hong Xiuquan's achievements...
...The Taiping Rebellion, led by a Chinese man who had come to think of himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ, raged for fifteen years, until it petered out in the late 1866s...
...As Taiping power grew throughout the 185o's, Western governments had to decide whether to back the dynasty or the rebels, but they had no easy time fathoming what manner of Christians the Taipings had become...
...Among Chinese Buddhists, for example, there were believers in the imminent coming of Maitreya Buddha, whose rule on earth would be preceded by a cosmic holocaust, itself prefigured by societal purification on a grand scale...
...For those committed missionaries and evangelists who made a life's work of attempting to Christianize China, the Sinification of their teachings produced strange consequences indeed...
...In 1837 Hong understood himself to have visited heaven...
...And it was the tough Protestant variant, much CHARLES HORNER is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington...
...11 women...
...Spence's immense gifts as both biographer and historian make of these episodes more than a diversion or a curiosity...
...Meanwhile, the implications for the reigning dynasty were enormous...
...More important, however, was the Communists' behavior during the New Deal and the war...
...But at least now the playing field has been leveled a bit—and the process has begun of reclaiming an important piece of American history...
...And for the Manchu dynasty and its Chinese loyalists, ideological rearmament was also required...
...The Canton of 1836, where Hong sat for one of his failed exams, was a wild place, cosmopolitan by Chinese standards and the West's commercial and cultural frontier in the Middle Kingdom...
...The resultant explosion was spectacular...
...How best to stigmatize it as "un-Chinese...
...Today, China is being subjected to stiff doses of capitalism and constitutionalism, and what will result from that is far from certain...
...On February 1, China Women's News reported the execution of a religious cult leader, a certain Wu Yangming of Anhui province...
...One can detect in the early reviews of Powers's Not Without Honor a sense of shame at the intellectually shallow and morally bankrupt writings of revisionist historians about the Cold War...
...America, he says, "could not achieve the consensus needed for the Cold War commitment while accommodating...a political movement that adhered to the ideology and promoted the interests of the Cold War enemy...
...nists expropriated, and were condemned for, a decade or so later...
...And, with few exceptions, the Communists who held influential positions in the broader political world kept their party affiliation secret...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
