Civil War and Religion in China

Being an American, I have grown up being taught about the different crises that my country has gone through in its long history. The most severe one has to be our Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and cost more than 600,000 lives, mostly due to disease. Since antibiotics had not yet been introduced, soldiers wounded in battle often had their injured limb(s) amputated as a preventative measure to prevent gangrene from fatally infecting them. I remember seeing a photograph once of the surgeon’s area in one of these outdoor army “hospitals” following a battle that show a large pile of sawed off arms and legs. For decades after the war, the whole country had a very large number of men coping with the burden of living out the rest of their lives without arms and/or legs. And the southern part of the country (along with border states loyal to the Union like Kentucky and Missouri) was devastated and took many decades to recover. As severe as the scale of carnage and damage was to us in this country during the U.S. Civil War, though, it was insignificant in comparison to what occurred in China during the same general period.

In south central China, during the mid-nineteenth century, an ostensibly Christian movement rose up, proclaiming the arrival of a self-proclaimed Christ-Messiah figure in the carnation of a Chinese man, Hong Xiuquan. Together with his associate, Yang Xiuqing, they began a campaign of religious and class warfare that swept through central and south China, destroying anything and anybody in its path that could be remotely construed as straying from the Taiping movement’s doctrine. They were enormously successful for the first few years and took over many large cities, including Nanjing. They, seeing themselves as Christians, invited the Western nations to support them in the rebellion. But the West instead uniformly aided the Qing government to hold them off, and ultimately the rebels were defeated, both by outside attacks and by inside weakness and corruption. The leaders of the rebellion died. The Taiping Rebellion lasted from 1851 to 1864. The most conservative estimates put the dead from this conflict at twenty million, giving it the second highest death toll ever in a war (after World War II)! Some of the tactics used by the Taipings, including show trials of landowners and communal sharing of property looked like forerunners of the Communists in the following century. But this movement also rightly put the fear of spontaneous grass-roots religious movements in the hearts of the Chinese leadership, a fear that explains to a great degree why the government only tolerates some long-established religious denominations (or, better yet, state-controlled denominations) and persecutes a group like Falun Gong, especially after they showed their ability to quickly mobilize a protest demonstration a few years ago.

Although it would be tempting to judge the actions of the current Chinese regime regarding banned religious activity from our perspective as members of Western society with its long-established respect for the principles of religious freedom, it is very important to understand the traumatic historical experience of China with regard to a religious movement that grew out of control and spread like a cancer across this great nation. Certainly the China back then is much different than the China today, and there may be some “victim as aggressor” in play as they hold down growing religious movements that are out of the state’s control. But traumatic experiences in history do play a big role in a country’s take on later events. Just look at how the American Civil War and our more recent experiences with Vietnam and 9/11 have painted our outlook on society and history in this country.