Counterinsurgency in China and India: an Introduction

KEYWORDS:

• China
• India
• counterinsurgency

In Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History, Jeremy Black argued that insurgencies should be studied, ‘without political blinkers, national prejudices, or conceptual and historiographical confusion’.¹ As a military historian, Professor Black emphasized that insurgency was neither a new phenomenon, nor one confined to the concerns of Western powers. He was, however, writing in response to the majority of current studies in the field that seldom concern themselves with either pre-19^th century history or the non-West except from a Western perspective. Of course, military theorists have taken an ahistorical view of insurgencies from at least the 16^th century, so the current state of the field has a long, and scarcely recognized, tradition. Black is also not the first scholar to lament the lack of cultural awareness in studies of insurgency and will not be the last. He, at least, has a long record of arguing for, and writing about, the rest of the world in his many military histories.

Studies of insurgency in the West have naturally been connected to ‘pragmatic’ concerns of current events and tend toward 20^th century studies and Western interests. An edited volume, by Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir, Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures, has one or two chapters that look further back in history, but it is mostly about the 20^th and 21^st centuries, and mostly Western-centric.² The Middle East and Afghanistan are longstanding interests of Western powers, as is, at least theoretically, modern China. The successful Communist Chinese insurgency, and Mao Zedong’s influential theoretical writings about insurgency, established a place for modern China in the security studies and political science fields that developed in the Cold War. Yet Mao and China have been abstracted from historical context in order to accommodate them to theoretical models that do not allow for cultural or temporal variables.

Looming over all of these discussions is the Cold War, and its effect on thinking about insurgencies. Steve Metz divides insurgency, which he defines as, ‘when guerrilla techniques were incorporated into a comprehensive strategy’, into the period of ‘the expansion and collapse of European empires’ between the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and the Cold War, when ‘The communist bloc supported and, in some cases, created insurgencies as a method of proxy warfare against the West’.³ Scholarly discussion of insurgency dropped off after the end of the Cold War, only to return in the 21^st century as a new set of innovations on the part of insurgents prompted new studies on how to suppress them. These new practices, however, are still examined, ‘through a Cold War lens, using twentieth century insurgencies as the template for twenty-first century ones, thus deriving a general model from the context-specific pattern of the Cold War’.⁴ More generally, twentieth century insurgencies have often formed the template for the study of even pre-twentieth century insurgencies.

The field of modern Asian studies is far more concerned with issues of imperialism, colonialism, and anti-colonialism than with insurgency and counterinsurgency. There is thus a split between the fields of history on the one hand, and security studies and political science on the other, partly as the result of the Cold War and partly from the general academic historians’ aversion to military history. Insurgency is seldom written about in Asian history, and certainly does not constitute a sub-discipline. It is just possible to discuss insurgency in early modern Asian history, but earlier period studies are more oddities than anything else. The field of pre-modern insurgency studies, let alone Asian pre-modern insurgency studies, has yet to be undertaken.

With the above limitations in mind, the articles in this collection make two general points. First, that ‘Asia’ must be disaggregated into individual cultures, regions, and historical actors, and second, that the impacts and approaches to insurgencies and their opponents should reach beyond the simply military and political spheres. Neither of these points are particularly radical, but they aren’t often presented in a sustained and coherent discussion. These articles are intentionally not formed around any of the pre-existing theories of insurgency or counterinsurgency. They are not an effort to prove or disprove specific theories because the available theoretical approaches are, by definition, universalizing and erase or diminish the distinctions of culture. Moreover, this collection discusses many aspects of insurgency and counterinsurgency that are not usually included in the existing theoretical frameworks.

Counter-insurgency operations are often studied from the purely military and political perspective of the power attempting to suppress the ‘insurgent’ force. In contrast, these articles seek a broader approach that includes the concerns of both sides of a conflict. Sameetah Agha’s discussion of British efforts to suppress the Afridis on India’s North-West Frontier examines the very real and reasonable grievances of those tribesmen against the British. British descriptions reduced them to ‘turbulent’ tribesmen who were fundamentally barbaric, rather than a functional society trying to address British incursions and unfaithful negotiations. Armed resistance was their only way to protest British administrative practices and seek redress.

Turning to the North-Eastern Frontier of India, Pum Khan Pau argues that the resistance to British rule changed as British governance moved to take full control of the hill tribes. Like Sameetah Agha, he spends considerable attention on the perspective of the ‘uncivilized’ tribesmen and what drove their fighting. The terms used are important here, and Pum Khan Pau argues that the earlier practice of raiding transformed into war as the tribes fought for their land and freedom. Most of our historical sources, however, were written by the centralizing, bureaucratic power that fundamentally rejected the idea of uncontrolled populations living by their own societal values.

Kuashik Roy takes up the question of martial culture with respect to the Sikh’s, arguing, contrary to previous scholarship, that they had already become a ‘martial race’ before the arrival of the British. He focuses on the inherent martial ethos within Sikhism that pre-existed their rebellion against the Mughals in the late 17^th century. That rebellion strengthened the martial ethos well before the English further amplified it. In a second article for this issue, Kaushik Roy turns to logistics in the suppression of insurgency. Here Professor Roy explores an important gap in discussions of these sorts of operations and connects counterinsurgency to new trends in environmental studies. Efforts to suppress dispersed, loosely affiliated groups in difficult terrain have long troubled conventional armies. Terminology is again a sensitive issue as defeating non-state actors (a very contemporary concern) with a conventional force frequently moved between the poles of policing and conventional warfare. It is this sort of ground level research, however, that offers a better explanation of the course of events and the tactics used.

Turning to China, Barend Noordam examines the complicated intellectual and ethnic aspects of the 16^th century Miao rebellion in south and southwestern China. The rebellion highlights the confluence of a changing Neo-Confucian orthodoxy along with the extensive employment by the Ming dynasty state of ethnic minority troops and adds in the use of new technology in the form of arquebuses. The result was a response that meets none of the previous generalizations of late imperial Chinese military history or culture. Supposedly anti-military, technology-averse civil officials commanded harsh suppression campaigns that took advantage of advanced military technology. The Bozhou Rebellion and its suppression encompassed the full range of military activities, guerrilla fighting, sieges, and pitched battles, and displayed a broad and full expression of Neo-Confucian ideology in the military context.

James Bonk engages the new scholarly approach to emotion by bringing in the surprisingly diverse emotional aspects of three groups of women in the White Lotus War, the wives of the officers, the wives of the common soldiers, and the women who took part in the rebellion. The Qing state treated the wives of officers killed in battle quite well while often ignoring the wives of common soldiers killed in battle. Among the rebels, Qing officers and officials understood and exploited the genuine feelings of husbands and wives to identify leaders. There were also female rebel leaders who chose to commit suicide rather than be captured by the Qing army. All of this broadens our perspective on the effects of a rebellion to show a state demonstrating its values through the manipulation of emotions.

Weiting Guo’s contribution in many ways continues Bonk’s focus on the feelings and responses of the participants and victims of insurgency. Guo describes the efforts of local officials to respond to the massive Taiping Rebellion. At the local level ordinary people and officials had to negotiate the trauma of widespread violence along with its disruption of the existing social and political order. It was not just a question of choosing sides in a rebellion, or even just survival, it was also a high stakes balancing of powers and relationships in uncertain times.

To bring the consideration of the factors behind an insurgency and its suppression into even finer-grained detail, Linh Vu explores the personal networks involved in the Li Yangcai Rebellion (1878–1879). In the late 19^th century Qing authorities shifted to allowing extensive personal connections within Qing military forces. These personal ties of loyalty substituted for the lack of reliable loyalty of Chinese officers to the dynasty, though it also endangered the dynasty by creating less trustworthy imperial military forces. Personal ties also linked local officials throughout China’s southern border region with Vietnam. Even the Vietnamese government cultivated direct ties with local Chinese officials rather than only working through established Qing government channels. As Vu shows, the complex personal relationships were a key feature prompting rebellion as well as suppressing it. The personal was political and no consideration of the rebellion without these microhistorical factors can explain its course.

Taken as a whole, these articles provide not only critical cultural details of insurgencies and their suppression, but also new approaches to those events. These detailed works span environments, emotions, cultures, and personal connections opening-up new ways to examine insurgencies. A rebellion was not just resistance to centralized authority, but a multi-faceted process that began well before the outbreak of armed resistance and continued well beyond its suppression. Relationships changed in unpredictable ways and different levels of government experienced them in different ways. More work is obviously needed, and particularly for old cultures like China and India it would be interesting to stretch further back into the past to examine rebellions in a similarly multi-faceted and nuanced way. At the very least, these articles are an attempt to move that research along.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Lorge

Peter Lorge is an Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo American Art of War (2022). An award-winning teacher, he is currently completing an epistolary history of 11th century China

Notes

1. Jeremy Black, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History, Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, 240.

2. Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

3. Steve Metz, “Insurgency,” in Karl Erik Haug and Ole Jørgen Maaø (eds.), Conceptualizing Modern War, London: Hurst and Company, 2011, 111–112.

4. I bid.