White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire by Wensheng Wang (review)

Wensheng Wang’s well-researched and beautifully written book White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Social Crises and State Retreat in the Qing Empire makes a significant contribution to the historical scholarship on China by doing exactly what the author sets forth in the introduction: reconceptualizing the significance of the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820) and reassessing its position in history. In challenging the prevailing view of the status quo by which historians have long regarded the Jiaqing reign as a “dead middle hiatus” connected neither to the past that preceded it nor the future that followed, Wang has clearly shown how the emperor Jiaqing carried out a series of reforms that shifted China from the unsupportable, expansionistic empire building of his predecessor to a more moderate and sustainable development, which, Wang argues, not only enabled the dynasty to survive another century to 1911, but also saw the beginning of China’s global repositioning in a world of multistate relations much earlier than previously supposed, throughout the final century of Qing rule rather than its last few decades. This is indeed a pathbreaking revision.

In the course of his investigation, Wang further contends that it was the politics of social protest and Jiaqing’s skills at crisis management of the simultaneous White Lotus uprising in the interior and outbreak of piracy on the South China coast that led to his reorientation of the state in the early nineteenth century. During his reign, Emperor Jiaqing readjusted the priorities of governance through modifications in policy making and the bureaucratic organization of both the Grand Council and the Imperial Household, local military mobilization of the local gentry elites, more flexible approaches to state–society relations (which included greater flexibility in dealing with popular religion, social protest, and the maritime world), and more pragmatic foreign relations with both Vietnam and Great Britain. This book, however, is far more than another top-down study of governments in action, for what Wang so brilliantly does is provide a much more comprehensive “big” picture of a dynasty in action by looking at top-down history in response to the challenges of bottom-up governance during two of the most widespread upheavals of the early nineteenth century. In doing so, he links the insurrection of the White Lotus rebels in the Han River frontier region to the piratical disturbances of the South China coast in ways no previous scholar has done, and at the same time shows how coping with them not only took the state in new directions, but also how these moves tied in with the statecraft scholarship of scholar-official elites and tributary relations with both Asian and European countries.

To accomplish this feat, Wang has mastered and synthesized the entire range of secondary literature of both Qing history and the relevant critical theory of anthropology, political science, and cultural studies. He has used the latter to help us understand the significance of the former. Through these means, Wang has taken the field and his own research in exactly the direction it should go at this point in time: revisiting major events of the past in light of the new scholarship of the last two or three decades to present a far more comprehensive picture of the Qing world than was possible ever before. Under Wang’s pen, the emperor Jiaqing comes off not as a flashy, epoch-making suzerain, but rather as a modest, pragmatic ruler who, in quelling rebellion, gave respite to an over-extended and exhausted dynasty.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part sets the stage for the crises of the Jiaqing reign by focusing on the upheavals (Wang Lun, Lin Shuang-wen, and Miao) of the late Qianlong period as examples of the structural limits of the Qing state in a context where sporadic, non-state violence was converging...