God's Chinese Son

by Jonathan Spence

  The accusations that Wang Zuoxin levels against the God-worshipers cover a wide front. They have pledged themselves into a brotherhood, he charges, which now numbers in the thousands. Through their magical books they trample down the local gods of the land and grain. The Zeng family should be rigorously investigated for the evildoers they have been secretly harboring. For more than two years the God-worshipers have been deluding the country folk, leading them astray through their reli­gious teachings and practices. They wish their believers to follow the teachings in a foreign book, called "An Old Testament," thus abandoning the laws and regulations of the reigning Qing dynasty. They have dese­crated temples and overturned and smashed to pieces the incense burners that are used in worship of the local gods along the shores of the rivers that flow through Guiping county. Describing the procedures by which he has acted, the licentiate Wang Zuoxin explains that first he invited the "local elders" to check with him if the charges were true. Convinced that they were, he then assembled a militia to make the arrest, and held Feng Yunshan in the temple till he could be handed over to the mutual security forces. It was at this point that the Zeng clan leaders and Lu Liu assem­bled their own men and counterattacked, forcibly releasing Feng. This prompted Wang's own second assault on the God-worshipers in which he recaptured Feng and took Lu Liu into custody as well.14

  Feng Yunshan's defense is both moral and legalistic. Firstly, the God-worshipers are a simple religious group, in no way planning to cause trouble in the area, but merely seeking to worship their God in peace. To prove this, he gives the examining magistrate copies of the God-worship­ers' books and a summary of their doctrine. At the same time, he reminds the investigators that since the new treaties with the Western powers ended the old Canton system and the restrictions on foreign religion, proc­lamations by the governor-general of the two provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi have been hung in front of the churches of Canton and in other public places, quoting the emperor's edict giving freedom to foreign missionaries and Chinese people to worship the One True God.15

  Wang Zuoxin's "invitations" to the "elders," his "assembling" of the militia force, and his "arrest" of Feng Yunshan are typical of the actions of the various well-off families who live in the fertile farmlands that lie between Thistle Mountain and the township of Guiping as the God-wor­shiper ranks are growing. These local leaders are adept at trying to protect their home areas from traditional enemies of law and order, and more recently both from the Heaven-and-Earth Society and from the water pirates who are entering their inland rivers from the sea. Now they add the God-worshipers to the list.16

  The ancestors of many of these influential families had migrated from eastern China at the time of civil war and fragmentation that accompanied the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the 1640s. Settling land, much of it taken by military force with connivance of the local authorities from the Yao inhabitants of the region, or bought at the cheapest prices, they assem­bled groups of Chinese migrant tenants to work their land and produce surplus crops of rice and grain that could be shipped in bulk down the rivers to Canton. Since many of this merchant elite were Hakkas, their success brought tension both with poorer Hakkas and with local Chinese families aspiring to higher levels of education and economic power. By the end of the eighteenth century such Hakka elite families might possess estates of hundreds of acres, as well as owning stores in several market and county towns, and bulk shipping businesses for rice transport.17 With their large incomes, such family heads could educate their sons to obtain the licentiate's degree with ease, and in many cases also to win the higher national degrees; if they lacked the intellectual power to pass the examina­tions, these sons had wealth enough to purchase degrees from a Qing government always short of funds, and even to purchase offices in neigh­boring provinces.

  Because they maintained their personal registration at the sites of their former homes, the men from such families could often serve in office in the Guiping region, even though technically one could not serve as an official in the province in which one lived.18 Such trans-provincial family linkages gave them extra prestige and influence with incumbent officials even when they themselves were not in office. And further local solidarity and lineage strength came from their building of assembly halls and lodges in the various market towns where family members congregated to run their overlapping businesses, putting some of their income into the central lineage treasury to maintain an impressive level of sacrifices to their ancestors.19

  Since the various clerks and underlings in the bureaucracy were always after the merchants' money—even going so far as to press loans upon them, connive at bandit raids on merchant shipping, or set up entrapments through prostitutes, to force them into debt and hence dependency—the fates of these wealthy families depended on the local officials' support, as their grateful testimonies hung in the local temples showed. The officials, for their part, were willing to take the merchants' side because the smooth transfer of bulk grain from Guangxi to the Canton delta region was seen as a high economic priority. Official support made "business smooth, life stable, and left nothing to worry about while trading."20 The merchants' influence could, through intermediaries, reach to the emperor himself, and bring crucial tax relief in troubled times. Merchant money, paid out judiciously, could also bring relief to their communities from bandit gangs and military procurers who, left unpaid, would take the grain and live­stock and even kidnap local men or women.21

  Intricate marriage connections were forged among these wealthy fami­lies, whose own dialects, lovingly preserved, acted as further buttresses to their local solidarity. Concurrently, they strengthened their reputation among both Hakka and non-Hakka local inhabitants by their construction of irrigation works, embankments, and bridges, paving the streets of the towns in which they lived, building multistoried cultural and religious halls (one soared five stories high), and establishing local schools and libraries. It was the members of such elites who were "the elders" Wang Zuoxin "invited" to check the charges against the God-worshipers, and by this period they were forming their own "pacification groups."22

  The most important of these families, in the fertile farming area of Jintian that lay on the road and river route between Guiping and Thistle Mountain, assembled seventy of their members to serve as "elders" in their pacification group. In their ranks were several Hakka migrants who had made their money from lead mines and pawnshops as well as farming.23 Such families of "elders" protected their long-range interests by imposing rigid limitations on lineage spending and expenses, as shown by the sur­viving records of one such family in Gucheng village, at the foot of Thistle Mountain. This elite family's rules for self-discipline were not so different from those Hong Xiuquan was slowly forming for his God-worshipers: they forbade all their lineage members to visit prostitutes, tried to curb their gambling or drinking, and threatened with "incarceration for life" any family member who took opium. They controlled their lineage costs through meticulous regulations, estimating their expenses in jin, one jin being roughly equivalent to a month's wages for a poor artisan or farm laborer, but a comparative trifle to a wealthy landlord or merchant:

  As for all the expenses of the entire household, receiving a bride into the household must not exceed 30 jin, and giving a daughter in marriage must not exceed 20 jin. Make the cost of attending a school the same as giving a daughter in marriage, and make the cost of taking an examination the same as receiving a bride. The closest friends of the family can be invited in a small group and drink together, but do not accept gifts from them, and do not invite lots of other guests.

  As for the cost of a funeral, for an elderly family member, do not exceed 40 jin. For others, do not exceed 20 jin. Do not use musical instruments for the ceremony, do not prepare expensive food for the funeral banquet, and do not have a Buddhist service for carrying a coffin out of the house. Follow these rules for any auspicious and inauspicious matters of the house. . . . The monthly amount of grain and rice for our house mus
t not exceed 700 catties |about 1,000 lbs). The volume of cooking fuel must not exceed 1,500 catties. The oil that is used for lamps and cooking must not exceed 20 catties, and salt must not exceed 10 catties. Soy sauce, vinegar, and tea leaves must not exceed 200 copper cash, and vegetables must not exceed 100 copper cash per day. ... If there is anybody in this village or market area who goes ahead on his own and builds a temple or collects money from people and holds a festival for gods, do not list his name, because he is violating the rules. As for the building of bridges and paving of roads, make donations only if the project is confirmed to be beneficial, and is within our ability to pay.24

  Such careful money management, in turn, gave them added prestige within the community, and extra money to contribute to formal militia organizations and to local county projects. Obviously, their community as a whole would be resistant to God-worshiping recruitment in a way that upland villages of Thistle Mountain would not, whether or not each was dominated by Hakkas who felt in some ways isolated either from the non- Hakka Chinese or from the local Yao tribesmen.25

  Furthermore, there was a self-defining snobbery built into the leader­ship levels of the pacification groups and those who enforced the local law-and-order contracts in the name of the state: to be a leader in the pacification group was to be a member of the elite, and being in the elite entitled one to lead the pacification group. They were people who claimed to be "loved by the officials as if they were their sons and younger broth­ers" and in return "they respected the officials as if they were their fathers and elder brothers."26 The methods they employed to identify, isolate, and eventually punish secret-society brothers in the Heaven-and-Earth Society could be applied unchanged to the God-worshipers: in each case what was required were finer distinctions than those based merely on factors such as socioeconomic status or educational level and examination success:

  The regulations of the baojia [village registration groups] blend the rich, the poor, the wise, and the foolish in a given village all together into one group and enforce the same rules upon all of them. Meanwhile, niceties of ranking are all confounded and different levels of knowledge are discounted. To lump everyone together indiscriminately like this is as if one were cooping up chickens and ducks with a flock of fabulous luan birds and cranes, or as if organizing tigers and leopards to be in a group of dogs and goats. Their differences in background, and their mutual suspicions, would be obvious to everyone. If one wants to group people together, one should first choose those who belong to the same kind, then make a compact among them, and so give strength to their hearts. That is to say, through the compact, they will be able to gather together all their resources, and make the best possible use of them.27

  To refine the categories properly, the same village regulations stated, one had to distinguish those who are truly "talented and knowledgeable" from those who are "foolish and cowardly" or "violent." Associated categories separated out those "who know things" from "those who are afraid of things" and those "who like things to happen"—the implication being that this last group were "troublemakers," linked specifically to the "wan­dering bandits from Guangdong province."28

  "Guest people" in a village—the phrase might mean Hakkas or could mean simply immigrants or outsiders in some cases—had to be checked out with especial care, and literally expelled from their villages if they proved to have bandit contacts. Every single person in every local village should be registered by name, household, family, occupation, relationship, marital status, and status as "native" or "visitor." Anyone "trusted by the whole village" would be rewarded with the label of "publicly registered" and issued with a certificate to that effect to be hung on their door. Those not worthy of such trust would be given no such certificate, pending fur­ther investigation.29 Found lacking by these standards are certain power­ful and extremely wealthy people, like the Wei family of Jintian, who have been excluded by this pattern of discrimination from membership in the pacification groups, and in return have refused to make more than the most token contributions to local public projects, and become eager mem­bers of the God-worshipers, who do not make the same kinds of distinc­tions.30

  There is a tight meshing of the pacification groups and the government, and even though by no means all those who lead such groups have passed the examinations at even the licentiate's level, anyone who has passed is likely to be in a leadership position. And few if any ot those who have passed the examinations join the God-worshipers. Though there are many God-worshipers who are literate, they come from among the failed candi­dates, or from those who make their literacy serve in the edges of society: those employed in junior positions in the magistrate's office or who can read the law codes enough to help plaintiffs in certain legal cases, some who practice types of medicine that demand a knowledge of old texts, merchants and pawnshop owners, clerks in shops or small businesses, and even—in a strange reversal of roles—those who secretly act as substitutes and take the examinations for men eager for the titles who have no hopes of passing.31

  While Feng is still in Guiping prison, trying to construct a meaningful defense, Hong Xiuquan has been safely out of harm's way, down in Sigu village with his distant relatives the Huangs. The charges against Feng are too serious, and the forces arrayed against him seem too powerful, for Hong to win his friend's freedom with a simple elegant literary petition to the magistrate, as he had for the Huangs' own son on his first visit to Guangxi in 1844. So instead Hong decides to press the curious new international law aspects of Feng's defense by going to Canton city to plead the case of Feng in person before the current Manchu governor- general of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, Qiying, by coincidence the very man who negotiated the 1842 treaty with the British on which Feng bases his claims for pardon. There is urgency in Hong's journey, for mag­istrates customarily use harsh tortures on their prisoners in cases involving "heterodox beliefs," and the prisons themselves are often death traps of disease—Lu Liu has already died, from either illness or maltreatment.32

  When Hong gets to Canton in the spring of 1848, he finds that Gover­nor-general Qiying is no longer there, having been summoned to Peking by the emperor for a special audience. Hong visits his own family briefly, but does not linger. Within a month he heads back to Thistle Mountain, bearing the bad news of his mission's failure to Feng. Feng, in the mean­time, has powerfully argued his cause and that of the God-worshipers with the local officials in Guiping county, and his arguments (backed by cash gifts to the magistrate from the local God-worshipers) have led to his release. But as the cost of his freedom the local officials of Guiping decide to remove Feng from their jurisdiction. They categorize him as "an unem­ployed vagrant," and order him to return under escort to Guanlubu, his village of birth and registration. So in the early summer of 1848 Feng and Hong pass, somewhere on the road or river, perhaps only a few feet apart as they head in different directions to find each other.33 Now it is Feng who is with his wife and sons again after three years away, free to preach in his home. And Hong once again is far from his wife and daughters, and his father, who is ill and old.

  In Thistle Mountain, the feuds, the fighting, the trial, Feng's release and Hong's return, all bring new passion to the God-worshipers. Now it is the local mountain dwellers, used to their local shamans' practices, and witnesses in the past to spirit possession among their number, who have the celestial visions.34 It is in the late spring of 1848, while both Hong and Feng are absent from Thistle Mountain, that a Hakka charcoal burner called Yang Xiuqing, drawn to the God-worshipers by his poverty and their message of salvation, becomes the mouthpiece for God the Father, who speaks now through Yang's voice as Yang enters a trance-like state, a voice that Hong accepts as authentically divine on his return to Thistle Mountain. It is in the autumn, when Hong has been back some months, that Xiao Chaogui, a Hakka peasant, also among the poorest of the poor and devoted to the new religion, becomes the vehicle by which Jesus Christ speaks to his younger brother Hong, and to all his other followers on ea
rth. Again, Hong accepts this second intermediary with Heaven. Xiao's trances, in which Jesus speaks through him, can last an hour or more; but others, both men and women, have shorter dreams of Hong's impending glory.35

  Jesus comes back to earth many times in 1848, and through the mouth of Xiao brings varied messages to Hong Xiuquan and the God-worship­ers. He sings them songs newly composed by God; and patiently teaches God's poems to the congregation, word by word.36 At other times his message is doctrinal, as when he repeats the point that Hong has already mentioned in his own writings, that only their Father has the right to bear the name of Di, "Ruler of All," while both Jesus and Hong Xiuquan must claim no title higher than that of zhu, or "lord."3/ Jesus tells Hong that the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, also lives in Heaven, and that though God will not allow her to descend to earth again, because her message can be misunderstood, He knows her heart is good, and permits both Hong and Jesus to call her "sister."38

  Jesus tells Hong of all the events in Heaven since Hong left eleven years before. They talk of Hong's young son, conceived and born in Heaven, but still unnamed, who lives in Heaven with his grandmother, the wife of God. They talk of the boy's mother, the First Chief Moon, of how she lives in turn with her divine in-laws, or with Jesus and his wife, and of how she yearns for her husband to come back to her. Once the First Chief Moon herself comes back to earth and chides Hong sadly—in Hakka idioms—for his protracted absence. She talks of the kindness shown to her and her son by Jesus' wife, and of Jesus' five children, three boys, two girls. Jesus' boys at eighteen, fifteen, and thirteen are older than Hong's heavenly son, as is Jesus' older girl, now sixteen years old. But Jesus' younger daughter was born since Hong was last in Heaven, and thus Hong's son has at least one younger playmate.3''