Jesus’s Hakka Chinese Brother Who Went to War with an Emperor – God’s Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence | Book Review

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Author Across Cultures Yang-May Ooi’s trail of her Hakka roots takes her to Jonathan Spence’s book God’s Chinese Son, the true story of Hong Xiuquan, who believed he was Jesus’s younger brother. In this extraordinary real life history, Spence weaves a tale of  Christianity, Chinese religion and political discontent that all came together in the failures, visions and zealotry of one man to fire up more than a million people in rebellion. Yang-May explains…

China’s Tumultuous Century

I have been revisiting the story of my great-great-grandfather while exploring my Hakka roots. As a young boy, his life was ruptured by the turmoil of mid-nineteenth-century China. We know tantalisingly little about those early years, except that he was a Hakka and that he was abducted by Long-Haired Brigands from his village around the time of the Taiping Rebellion in China and later escaped to Malaya.

I wanted to understand the background of that tumultuous period that he live through. That research led me to God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan by  one of the foremost scholars of Chinese history, Jonathan D. Spence.

A Failure and a Vision

Hong Xiuquan was another Hakka from a poor farming family. Born in Guangdong in 1814, his family made sacrifices to make sure he was educated and he was able to become a schoolteacher. But he had greater ambitions. He repeatedly attempted the notoriously difficult imperial civil-service examinations, hoping to enter the Qing establishment. He repeatedly failed.

During one examination trip, Hong received Christian literature written in Chinese by Liang Afa, a Chinese convert and evangelist who had worked with Protestant missionaries. Hong initially paid little attention to the tracts.

But after another examination failure, he became seriously ill – I think it was a mental health breakdown due to the repeated failures and the pressure he put himself under to justify his family’s investment in his education. During this mental crisis, he experienced extraordinary visions. He saw an old man with a golden beard who gave him a sword and commanded him to destroy demons. Another figure, whom Hong understood to be his elder brother, helped him.

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Hong recovered and returned to teaching, still unsuccessfully pursuing the examinations. In 1843, a relative encouraged him to reread Liang’s Christian tracts. This time he recognised striking parallels with his earlier visions. He realised that the old man was the Christian God. The figure who had been his elder brother was Jesus Christ. And if Jesus was his elder brother, then that made Hong himself God’s second son, His Chinese son.

A Heavenly Kingdom on Earth

Hong began preaching his interpretation of Christianity, destroying Confucian tablets and denouncing idols. He declared the Manchu Qing rulers enemies of God and promised a new order: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, or Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.

His message emerged when Qing China was under immense strain. Population growth, poverty and local conflict had destabilised communities. Britain had humiliated China in the First Opium War. In southern China, tensions between established communities and Hakka migrants sometimes erupted into violence.

Hong’s message appealed to people already dissatisfied and angry with the existing order, including fellow Hakka who had experienced exclusion from established institutions and in Chinese society generally. He promised a new order where land and wealth would be more fairly shared and old hierarchies overturned. His followers heard in Hong’s “Good News” a common identity and the prospect of changing their lives.

More than a million people eventually took up arms in the Taiping cause. Their rebellion sought to overthrow the Qing dynasty and establish Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom in its place.

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Given the rag tag beginnings and the mass of untrained mobs, extraordinarily, Hong and his leading “disciples” were able to build a force that could take on the Imperial powers. The Taiping captured Nanjing and made it their capital. They established officials, armies, laws and religious observances, attempting reforms including restrictions on opium smoking, gambling and footbinding.

Although the Taiping Rebellion was crushed in 1864, over a decade after it began, it devastated China and severely weakened the Qing dynasty, contributing to its eventual overthrow by republican revolutionaries in 1911.  My understanding is that some later Chinese Communist historians regarded the Taiping Rebellion as a precursor in spirit to the revolutionary struggles that ultimately led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

An Unexpected Way into Chinese History – and Today’s Tumultous World

The story of Hong’s extraordinary life, as told by Spence, is fascinating on so many levels. It is an insight into one man’s personal journey from a Hakka outsider to becoming a warlord that could take on the Emperor. This one human story opens out to give us the social, political and historical context of what was happening in China in the mid-nineteenth century that takes in the sweeping history of Qing rule over the Han Chinese, the arrival of Western powers, the First Opium War, and the lives of ordinary Chinese people caught up in these tumultuous period.

Hong is largely forgotten now and the Christian roots of the Taiping rebellion are often overlooked in most broad histories of China and the Opium Wars. For me, his story reveals the complexity of Chinese history and especially China’s relationship with the West and Western ideas.

It also casts light, I think, on how religion and ideology can be used to justify violence and domination. I am sure we can all think of rebellion, wars, violence and persecution in the name of religion in the Western context throughout history – not just in the Christian world but also in other religious traditions. In modern times, ideology in the secular context is now also being used to justify uprisings, war, violence, death threats, psychological and social control.

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For me, one of the values of stories from history, especially such epic ones like God’s Chinese Son, is how the past can help us look at urgent contemporary issues today in our world. The theme that emerged strongly in my reading is around religiosity and also secular ideology and zealotry can take hold at certain times among a certain population. Such ideas seem to draw people in who are already dissatisfied and feeling an intense sense of grievance in times of financial and social instability and injustice. Reaching critical mass, ideas harden into ideology and gain a driving momentum that can erupt into violence and upheaval.

The book is a fascinating insight into an overlooked part of history that, I feel, throws light on our modern times. And it is also a great read on an epic scale – written by an authority in Chinese history in a novelistic style. So do pick it up if you love history, adventure and thought-provoking ideas.

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Sources:

God’s Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence – https://amzn.to/4hWyxwc

Jonathan Spence biography, American Historical Association – https://www.historians.org/person/jonathan-spence/

Images:

Jonathan Spence – https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/03/jonathan-d-spence-renowned-scholar-chinese-civilization

Hong Xiuquan engraving – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alleged_engraving_of_Hong_Xiuquan_%28full%29.jpg

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