Yingcong Dai. The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late
Imperial China. seattle University of Washington Press, 2019. 664
pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-74545-9.
Reviewed by Daniel Burton-Rose (Seoul National University Language
Education Institute)
Published on H-Buddhism (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Jessica Zu
With _The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial
China_, Yingcong Dai provides the definitive history of a key
juncture in the trajectory of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Scholars
have long identified the uprising of White Lotus sectarians and the
prolonged campaign to squelch it as the pivot between
eighteenth-century florescence and nineteenth-century declension.
Before the rebellion, the Qing ranked along with the Habsburgs and
the Ottomans as one of the early modern world's most capable empires.
Under the energetic management of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-95),
they vastly expanded the boundaries of the preceding Ming dynasty
(1368-1644), incorporating broad swaths of Inner and Northeast Asia
into a self-consciously multiethnic empire. After the rebellion--with
a depleted treasury and Qianlong's son, the Jiaqing emperor (r.
1796-1820), chastened by the failure of his early reform efforts--the
internal dislocations and foreigner-inflicted humiliations to come
gradually shifted from inconceivable to inevitable.
Dai performs an autopsy of unprecedented precision, laying bare the
exact combinations of personal interest and institutional
vulnerabilities that catalyzed the rupture in the capacity of Qing
rule. As is often the case with Qing history, a surfeit rather than
deficit of sources has been the obstacle to past scholarly efforts.
_The White Lotus War _does an immense service in combing through the
vast material produced by the Qing state during the war and its
contentious aftermath. It details with clarity the complicated
interface of moving parts, from emperors and metropolitan officials
to imperial kinsmen and Mongols in the banner armies, Green Standard
Army fighters, and locally raised troops deployed outside their own
region, down to the provincial and county officials charged with
provisioning the soldiers.
Challenging conventional wisdom at every turn, Dai consistently
highlights the import of her own findings while providing minute
details of the campaign. Her most significant contribution is
convincingly demonstrating that the greatest damage inflicted on the
Qing imperial apparatus during the conflict came not from the
sectarian partisans, but from the Qing's own generals in the field
and officials in the impacted provinces. Wartime salary hikes and
ample opportunities for embezzlement effectively disincentivized
decisive victory for the generals and their civilian collaborators.
Dai concludes counterintuitively that it was precisely the lack of
military threat posed by the rebels that permitted Qing generals to
focus on their own self-enrichment. Dai's other significant
interventions in the existing scholarly literature include: an
assertion of primacy of economic interest over devotional fervor as a
motivating factor for sectarian organizers; explanation of how
late-Qianlong-period efforts to formalize procedures for military
spending prompted fiduciary workarounds that spiraled out of control
in the White Lotus conflict; documentation of the prominent role of
militias _qua _mercenaries paid by the state--rather than
self-defense troupes mobilized by local elites--in conducting the
campaigns and complicating the demobilizations; and demonstrating
that construction of fortifications was _not _a decisive factor in
resolving the conflict.
_The White Lotus War_ consists of seven chapters bookended by an
introduction and conclusion. The chapters effectively fall into two
parts: a chronological narrative of the campaign (chapters 1-5) and
diachronic analyses of military staffing (chapter 6) and a tally of
the overall expenditures in the conflict (chapter 7). Fourteen maps
provide welcome guidance in the geographical contours of the
conflict, which centered in the topographically and administratively
challenging mountainous regions of the shared border between Sichuan,
Shaanxi, and Hubei.
The account of the campaign itself begins with the clandestine
organization of multicentered uprisings, proceeding through the
quasi-coordinated outbreak of the rebellion and its quick descent
into quagmire. It continues with a discussion of the reform efforts
Jiaqing implemented after his father's passing, including the removal
of his father's notorious favorite, Hešen, and Jiaqing's own failed
effort to create an analogous figure for himself in Nayancheng, whom
he dispatched to the front to acquire military experience. Jiaqing's
reforms soon failed; Dai attributes this to the power of vested
interests and Jiaqing's own indecisiveness, which caused a rapid loss
of credibility with those serving under him. The first part ends in
tapering anticlimax, with Jiaqing declaring a definitive victory
after years of blown deadlines and with pockets of rebels defiantly
unpacified. Educators considering this book for classroom use should
not be dissuaded by its length: these first five chapters can stand
on their own and are within the upper limit of a week's assignment
for an upper-division undergraduate course or graduate seminar.
Given the nature of the primary-source base, there is little in the
way of impacted civilians speaking for themselves in _The White Lotus
War_. Those arrested as sectarian partisans were often interpellated
as the enemy the Qing state told itself it was fighting: the
inappropriateness of the White Lotus moniker to the groups involved
in conflict is ample testimony to the extent to which lay Buddhists
were and remain defined by others. Dai does not convey a vivid sense
of what it felt like to live in the tidal zone of conflict, a
perspective that has become increasingly visible in recent works on
the Taiping Civil War (1851-64), such as Stephen R. Platt's _Autumn
in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the
Taiping Civil War_ (2012), Tobie Meyer-Fong's _What Remains: Coming
to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China_ (2013), and Xiaofei
Tian's translation of Zhang Daye's _The World of a Tiny Insect: A
Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath_ (2013). Dai does
convey the brutality suffered by the noncombatants caught between
dueling forces prone to conscription/kidnapping and mass executions.
Many battles were waged with cushions of civilians protecting
sectarian and Qing forces; as Jiaqing was well aware, the dead then
bolstered the Qing generals' headcounts of slain rebels. To the index
entries "women, roles in sectarian movement" and "women, sale of,"
one could also add "women and children, violence against," as fleeing
sectarian partisans often abandoned or slaughtered their own
intimates, while sexual violence was also committed by Qing militias.
In terms of human-scale perspectives on this conflict, Dai's remarks
on injured and wounded soldiers raise the possibility that her
sources could be used for a needed cultural and social history of
disability in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China.
_The White Lotus War_ builds on Dai's previous monograph, _The
Sichuan Frontier and Tibets: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing
_(2009), in enhancing the vitality of the field of Qing military
history in a manner that will be of interest to anyone whose work
deals with Qing studies, early modern empires, and military
modernization.
Citation: Daniel Burton-Rose. Review of Dai, Yingcong, _The White
Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China_.
H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55361
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
