China’s Civil War(s) Could Not Have Been Worse
Adolf-Nikolay Erazmovich Boiarskii/Wikimedia CommonsTroops in the Gansu Province, 1875.
The American Civil War displaced millions of people and cost billions of dollars, leaving even the victorious Union deep in debt. The economy was savaged, and many Southern states were totally devastated by the passage of federal troops who burned homes and destroyed property records in an effort to permanently crush the South.
Yet for all its devastation, the Civil War doesn’t come close to the scale of the multiple disasters that China suffered around the same time. In the 27 years between 1850 and 1877, multiple insurrections and civil wars broke out against the Qing Dynasty all over China, blowing apart infrastructure and trade routes, triggering famine after famine, and killing as many as 100 million people in what was likely the deadliest period in the entirety of human history to date.
Wu Youru/Wikimedia CommonsFighting at Ruizhou during the Taiping Rebellion.
In 1850, the Qing Dynasty was in its 206th year of ruling China. Things had been relatively quiet for generations, but in that year a religious leader named Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the human brother of Jesus Christ, raised an insurrection in the southwestern province of Guanxi, where local officials had been persecuting his cult.
What became known as the Taiping Rebellion quickly spread, and soon sympathetic militias all over China were on the march against the Qing authorities. Over the next 14 years, they overran every province in China and waged a scorched-earth campaign that left tens of millions of peasants starving to death and cities such as Nanking nearly depopulated.
Estimates of the dead range from 20 to 30 million dead from the fighting, with an unknown (but possibly enormous) number dead from the various famines that the rebellion triggered. Some estimates put the total death toll at around 100 million, but it’s hard to be sure because this wasn’t the only civil war that China was fighting at the time.
Adolf-Nikolay Erazmovich Boiarskii/Wikimedia CommonsRuins after fighting at Anxi, 1875.
Three years after the Christians rose up in Guanxi, Muslims staged their own revolt in another southwestern province, Yunnan. The Panthay Rebellion, as it became known, worked on a smaller scale than the Taiping Rebellion, killing “only” a million or so people, but it lasted significantly longer. Qing forces managed to put down the last of the rebels by 1873.
Meanwhile, in 1862, another Muslim revolt got underway in the western provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia, as well as Xinjiang. This was the much larger and more serious Dungan Revolt, which lasted 15 years and saw Beijing sacked. As many as 20 million people died in this fight.
Naturally, local strongmen took advantage of all this chaos to declare themselves warlords and start their own freelance governments in almost every province. By 1875, most of the resistance from these warring factions was finished, and the Qing were back in control and mopping up.
Wu Youru/Wikimedia CommonsQing forces retaking Jinling during the Taiping Rebellion.
Unfortunately, that year China was struck by a drought. The 1876 crop failure triggered another famine that killed somewhere between 9 and 14 million people.
By 1880, things were getting back to normal – not long before the 1899 Boxer Rebellion, which eventually segued into the Nationalist-Communist civil war of the 1920s and ’30s, the famine of the ’20s that killed several million, the Japanese occupation, the renewed civil war of the late ’40s, the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward, the famine in the ’50s that killed perhaps 40 million, the Cultural Revolution…
