Social Dissidence and Government Suppression on the Sino-Vietnam Frontier: The Black Flag Army in Tonkin

113 SOCIAL DISSIDENCE AND GOVERNMENT SUPPRESSION ON THE SINO-VIETNAM FRONTIER:1 THE BLACK FLAG ARMY IN TONKIN Ella S. Laffey, McGill University, Montreal During the 1870s and 1880s a band of Chinese outlaws known as the Black Flag Army (Hei Ch1i ChUn ^ ) played a prominent role in the affair s of northern Tonkin. Originally fugitives from the post-Taiping suppression cam­ paigns in the Chinese southwest, the Black Flags carved out a niche for themselves on the Vietnamese side of the border. By the time France took over Vietnam in 1885 and the Black Flags returned to China, their activities during the two preceding decades had included involving themselves in the tribal politics and feuds of the local montagnard peoples, warring with other Chinese bands in upper Tonkin, maintaining their own customs posts along the upper Red River, and— twice---armed resistance to French expansion in northern Vietnam. For most practi­ cal purposes, they were only nominally under the control of the Vietnamese, and 2 they were notorious for their exactions from the local population. At best this is a mixed record. While some of the Black FLags' activities were in co-operation with the Chinese and Vietnamese authorities and upheld the established order, other acts limited the direct control of local civil and military officials and even tended, as in the Black Flags' involvement in tribal feuds, to disrupt the usually fragile hold which the Chinese and Vietnamese governments exercised over the borderlands. Yet their presence in the strategic and volatile frontier areas was tolerated and utilized for twenty years by the Chinese and Vietnamese authorities, with whose representatives they negotiated on occasion as virtual equals. How this situation occurred suggests certain things about the nature of the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands and how these areas were controlled by the central governments of China and Vietnam, acting unilaterally or in cooperation It also casts light on the relative weight of Confucian and pragmatic values in dealing with the problem of the borderlands generally and under the disturbed conditions of the late 19th century in particular. The Black Flag Army originated in southwest China, where it was one of hundreds of similar armed outlaw bands which devastated the border province of Kwangsi In the wake of the Taiping rebellion. For their entire existence as an autonomous group they were led by one man, an opportunistic and capable Hakka born in western Kwangtung but raised in Kwangsi, named Liu Yung-fu (/^ . y During the 18th century Liu's ancestors had lived in Chia-ying-chou ffo , ) ,| . l, modern Mei Hsien^S-^i [£jL ), a heavily Hakka district in the extreme northeastern part of Kwangtung. Land hunger had pushed Yung-fu's great-greatgrandfather out of Chia-ying-chou to the west and south. The family stayed a few generations in Kwangsi's Po-pai hsien )» until extreme poverty prompted Yung-fu1s father and uncle to move on again. Liu Yung-fu was born in 1837 in Ch'in-chou ‘ I ' l ' l ) in the extreme west of Kwangtung, but the family moved on into Kwangsi when Liu was about six years old. By the time of his father's death when Yung-fu was 17 sui, they were living in a grass shack in the hills of one of Kwangsi's aboriginal areas (t'u-ssu H b ). This migrant life, an experience which the Lius shared with large numbers of the poorest peasants in the far south, ended by detaching Yung-fu from the soil forever. Yung-fu himself apparently never even attempted to follow his father in the difficult and insecure life of the marginal farmer. He did menial odd jobs instead, mostly in the forests or as a boatman. In 1857, when Liu was 21 sui, he became an active participant in the widespread unrest which was then making large parts of southwestern Kwangsi virtually ungovernable. Eventually he made contact with a band led by men from his native district of Ch*in-chou and in a fairly short time became one of the band's military leaders. It is important to make clear what kind of a rebel movement Liu joined. Kwangsi had been one of the...