God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.

In the mid-nineteenth century, about the time that Americans were deciding the future of the Union on their own battlefields, another far greater struggle had broken out on the other side of the world. Some comparative statistics: our Civil War left roughly 600,000 dead in the armies of both sides. Assuming another 200,000 civilian deaths--surely an overestimate--would mean roughly 2.5 percent dead in a population of 32 million. In China, as Jonathan Spence points out in his new book, tens of millions died as a result of the Taiping wars. How many tens of millions? We don't know. If we assume 20 million deaths, that would be roughly 5 percent of a population of some 400 million (and, though it is no part of Spence's subject, there was an enormous number of additional casualties caused by three other widespread midcentury rebellions).

In America, the Union emerged stronger from the war; in China, the Qing dynasty was fatally weakened, though it would be almost another half-century before it collapsed. America's war was fought with modern weapons and modern communications; in the Taiping war, though there were some signs of modernity, by and large traditional means were used. There was, however, at least one similarity: in each war, on the rebel side, on of the best generals was named Lee (though Li Xiucheng never quite achieved the fame of Robert E. of Virginia). Another Li--Li Hongzhang--campaigned with distinction on the government side.

God's Chinese Son is not a history of the Taiping rebellion, and the author disclaims any desire to do what others have done (although it's fair to say we have no history of the rebellion that combines both the readability and historical accuracy Spence brings to his task). It is, rather, a biography of its extraordinary leader and guiding spirit, Hong Xiuquan. Hong and his Taipings have always had a special fascination for Westerners, in large part because of the Protestant influence on the rebellion and its leaders, and some have even suggested that, if the Taipings had triumphed, China would have been Christianized.

That stretches the imagination. Hong, falling ill after one of his periodic failures in the examinations for an official career, had found himself taken up into Heaven, where he not only met God, but realized that he, as Jesus' younger brother, was himself part of God's heavenly family. There he (the account of his visit grew more elaborate over the years) was armed with a sword, and after some hard fighting driving demons out of Heaven, was told to return below and rid the earth of the demons there, demons who, it became clear, consisted of the Qing dynasty and their supporters. In an extraordinary set of military campaigns, beginning in 1851, he led his followers up from southwest China to the Yangtze Valley, and into the great city of Nanjing, which he entered in triumph, wearing the yellow dragon robe that was the prerogative of an emperor.

For the next eleven years the Taipings sought to establish the heavenly kingdom in Nanjing, and to extend their sway over the lower Yangtze Valley. They drew up elaborate social and administrative codes (which, incidentally, gave women rather more freedom than they enjoyed in Chinese society), though how far any of them were actually put into practice is still an open question. Meanwhile Hong--whose instruction in Christianity had come largely from the Southern Baptist missionary Issachar Roberts--worked to systematize and expound Taiping Christianity, in the course of it bowdlerizing parts of the Bible (Noah's drunkenness, Lot's incest, and Jacob's tricking Esau out of his inheritance, for example; all offended Chinese family values). Meanwhile he sought--unsuccessfully--the neutrality, if not the friendship, of what he imagined to be his Western Protestant coreligionists, particularly the British and the Americans. In 1856, a terrible power struggle came to a climax, in which Hong had one of his rivals killed, and thousands of his followers put to the sword. Meanwhile, the forces loyal to the Qing fought back, ineffectively at first, but by 1964 their power was too great for the Taipings to combat, and Nanjing fell in May of that year. Again, there was massive bloodshed.

Spence is a writer who has often been willing to take more risks than most of his fellow academic historians. God's Chinese Son, for example, is written entirely in the present tense, thus giving it a very real sense of immediacy. Moreover, he is extraordinarily good at calling up the color and life of cities like Canton and Shanghai, or a Chinese village, its folk rituals skirting the borders of the unorthodox, or in describing the social dislocations of the Opium War, and the sense of uncertainty, of worried anticipation, that helped give the early Taipings a climate in which to flourish. "The air of Thistle Mountain is thick with other holy visits, dreams, and portents," he writes of the early days, while the Taipings were gathering in Guangxi. "A martial host descends from heaven and fights the bandits....Another time it is angels in yellow robes who descend to earth, and save Hong in the nick of time from devils carrying firearms...."

Such a style from a historian may put some on edge; how does he really know what was going on? But colorful writing is no crime, and it would be hard to charge Spence with going beyond his evidence. At the same time, I should have liked more on the effect Hong's movement had Chinese history of the period. Spence does, for instance, a superb job of placing the Taipings within the context of a native Chinese millenarianist tradition while also showing the influence, through Protestantism, of Western millenarianism as well. But--as the himself has made clear in The Search for Modern China (1990)--there was a lot more to the rebellion than Hong Xiuquan, and it would help to see the rebellion's place in the larger picture of nineteenth-century history.

On the other hand, as any writer knows, there is a special circle in Hell reserved for those reviewers who take authors to task, not for the books they have written, but for the books reviewers think they should have written. Spence has chosen to restrict himself largely to Hong's life, and has produced an immensely readable account of it.