WI: Zeng Guofan rebels against the Qing dynasty

Mort the Reaper

To help the Qing government put down the Taiping Rebellion, a Hunanese official named Zeng Guofan raised the Xiang Army, a massive force from his home province completely loyal to him. By the time the rebellion was crushed, the Qing dynasty had almost no military force left, and relied almost entirely on the Xiang Army and the much smaller foreign-led Ever Victorious Army to fight the rebels. Zeng's brothers advised him to march north to Beijing, overthrow the Qing dynasty, and install himself as emperor. Instead, he declined and disbanded his army.

What if, for whatever reason, Zeng had turned on the Qing government like his brothers advised him to?
 

raharris1973

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China gets invigorated by the Zeng restoration. Hopefully some of the leading Han talent of late Qing China like Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang choose the correct, anti-Manchu side, and help China get "Zeng strong", and don't need to get cut down by the new dynasty. He lived to 1872. His eldest son lived to 1890. He had two younger sons.
 
LostInNewDelhi

LostInNewDelhi

From what I remember of Stephen Platt's book about the Taiping (it's organized as a sort of narrative collection, a series of interlocking biographies about major figures on all sides of the war) his reading seems to be that Zeng was depressed and pretty much wanted to give up his job as soon as possible; not to mention he was old and had health problems that made him even more miserable. And despite being an excellent logistician/organizer (what let him build an army from nothing and with no personal experience in the first place) as a tactician he was outshone by his contemporaries, including his brother Guoquan.
He's really not the right person to found a new dynasty, but if somehow he did do it... well, a lot of the people he elevated (Li, Zuo) ended up in power within the Qing structure OTL anyways, and they still failed-- and not just due to Manchu obstructionism either. The Xiang and later the Huai Armies were not perfect structures. The model of recruitment Zeng used for the Xiang (and later taught Li to use for the Huai) was recruiting through webs of connections, sweeping up particular age-cohorts from villages and organizing them as a unit, then a cluster of nearby villages as a larger unit, such that each person was fighting along people who they knew/felt some obligation to (and who would know where to find them if they deserted). It was effective for putting together a cohesive, motivated force against the Taiping (especially when on the defensive). But in the longer term... "Xiang" is an abbreviation for Hunan, and "Huai" for Anhui, they're fundamentally built around provincial loyalty and personal approval for the commanders rather than any ideology. The connection between this and the later warlordism is not particularly cut-and-dry, but there was a lot of factionalist "us vs. them" sentiment among leading figures and their powerbases that led to absurdities like China splitting its resources among four different fleets in the lead-up to the Sino-Japanese War and then soundly losing the naval theater of that war.
A hypothetical new dynasty would already be starting off on the wrong foot due to an unenthusiastic and ailing leader, and from there the built-in tendencies toward factionalism and private-armies-in-all-but-name will assert themselves. End result: Yuan Shikai probably enjoys a very similar career as OTL, w/ similar results
 
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EnglishCanuck

EnglishCanuck

LostInNewDelhi said:
From what I remember of Stephen Platt's book about the Taiping (it's organized as a sort of narrative collection, a series of interlocking biographies about major figures on all sides of the war) his reading seems to be that Zeng was depressed and pretty much wanted to give up his job as soon as possible; not to mention he was old and had health problems that made him even more miserable. And despite being an excellent logistician/organizer (what let him build an army from nothing and with no personal experience in the first place) as a tactician he was outshone by his contemporaries, including his brother Guoquan.
He's really not the right person to found a new dynasty, but if somehow he did do it... well, a lot of the people he elevated (Li, Zuo) ended up in power within the Qing structure OTL anyways, and they still failed-- and not just due to Manchu obstructionism either. The Xiang and later the Huai Armies were not perfect structures. The model of recruitment Zeng used for the Xiang (and later taught Li to use for the Huai) was recruiting through webs of connections, sweeping up particular age-cohorts from villages and organizing them as a unit, then a cluster of nearby villages as a larger unit, such that each person was fighting along people who they knew/felt some obligation to (and who would know where to find them if they deserted). It was effective for putting together a cohesive, motivated force against the Taiping (especially when on the defensive). But in the longer term... "Xiang" is an abbreviation for Hunan, and "Huai" for Anhui, they're fundamentally built around provincial loyalty and personal approval for the commanders rather than any ideology. The connection between this and the later warlordism is not particularly cut-and-dry, but there was a lot of factionalist "us vs. them" sentiment among leading figures and their powerbases that led to absurdities like China splitting its resources among four different fleets in the lead-up to the Sino-Japanese War and then soundly losing the naval theater of that war.
A hypothetical new dynasty would already be starting off on the wrong foot due to an unenthusiastic and ailing leader, and from there the built-in tendencies toward factionalism and private-armies-in-all-but-name will assert themselves. End result: Yuan Shikai probably enjoys a very similar career as OTL, w/ similar results
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Great analysis. I just read the book recently as well, and I got some of that impression. I believe his other brothers were also more hawkish than him and often felt betrayed by the Manchu dynasty, and didn't feel much more than residual loyalty to it, and a few of the other provincial armies felt the same and probably respected Zeng more than the Emperor or Cixi. The Imperial Court also plied him with titles to keep him loyal, and at one point his base in Anqing was essentially the de facto center of power in China. That Cixi killed his mentor in the 1861 palace coup could have, possibly, been used as leverage if his brothers or other warlords prodded him to overthrow the dynasty.

In many ways he might have been convinced to see it as his duty, the old emperor had fled allowing Beijing to be burned, there was almost no real loyalty to the dynasty, and the Han Chinese people simply had more power in both symbolic and practical terms than the Qing themselves could have hoped to mobilize. In all honesty, Guofan's almost insane faith in the system is probably the only thing that kept China together in this period.

You're right about the potential weaknesses though. The regional warlords would all expect something in exchange, his brothers who survive would have their own agendas and favorites, and the country is still a mess, and Guofan himself was hardly a master innovator and only grudgingly came to accept the need for Western weaponry at the Siege of Nanjing. So he would probably live to see his son inherit the new dynasty, but much might still be lost in the process.
 
EnglishCanuck

EnglishCanuck

kholieken said:
So earlier and prolonged warring warlord period ?
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Maybe, but maybe not. It really depends on how well the Zeng family can put together a cohesive network of allies and regional interests that keep them in power. They're arguably starting from a strong base and would have the support of at least a few of the other regional armies that aided in the capture of Nanjing. He would probably have had a great deal of legitimacy to fall back on having "restored balance to the empire" and being an ethnic Han would not have hurt his appeal to broader sections of China.

However, he would have probably had to fight to hold china beyond Beijing as it would involve invading Manchuria. The Dungan revolt was ongoing in northwestern China near and around modern Xinjiang, and Tibet might have chosen to slip the pretext of Chinese government. There were large bandit forces around the Vietnamese/China border, and Russia would probably be covetously eyeing Manchuria and Korea.

If a reasonable coalition of self-strengten minded warlords was able to establish a new dynasty and piggyback off Western ideas, semi similar to what Japan did, this could be a reasonably prosperous and powerful China. However, there are the pitfalls of regionalism and civil unrest at the edges of the empire and having another vast and powerful empire squatting to your north.
 
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