Confronting modernization: rethinking Changsha’s rice riot of 1910

Abstract

By analyzing the role of urban commoners who participated in Changsha’s rice riot of April 1910, we can better understand how the city’s folk traditions and unique urban culture contributed to the intense climate that characterized state/society relations during the late Qing dynasty. Oral history interviews conducted by Liu Duping during the 1970s mainly describe the attack on the government yamen, an attack carried out and led by local carpenters. After reading some of these accounts we can also appreciate how the rioters were not simply an unruly mob incited by local gentry. By attacking a specific government compound and symbols of state authority, in some ways local carpenters expressed their own justification for rioting. While the role of Ye Dehui and other gentry in helping lead the rioters should not be discounted, such characters also need to be understood not simply as conservative hardliners, but within the broader context of late Qing intellectuals.

Keywords:

• rice riot
• yamen
• oral history
• Changsha
• Ye Dehui

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Fulbright IIE for providing the funding to live and conduct research in China during the 2012–2013 academic year. In Changsha I also owe a great deal of thanks to Zhou Qiuguang, Rao Huaimin, and Zhang Jingping of Hunan Normal University, as well as Yu Pengyuan, Ren Bo, Tang Ying, Zeng Zhaojin, and Nathan Montgomery for valuable help and support during the writing process. Additional thanks to Wang Qisheng and the graduate students in the History Department at Beijing University, for giving me valuable feedback during a conference in the summer of 2013, as well as to Joseph Esherick for taking the time to meet to discuss the work. Finally, I would also like to thank Liu Duping especially for allowing me to visit with him at his home in Changsha.

Notes

¹ In Chinese the term qiangmi combines the character qiang, meaning “to fight over, grab, rob,” or “snatch,” and the character mi, meaning “rice.” Also see Rosenbaum, “Gentry Power.”

² Esherick, Reform and Revolution, 144.

³ Liu Duping has long been a name associated with the historiography of Changsha’s qiangmi. He used the data from his oral history interviews to write his own article about the event. See Liu Duping, “Qingmo Changsha qiangmi.” Another important source that provides some clue as to the perspectives of Changsha’s late Qing commoners are 74 zhuzhi ci, or folk ballads, collected from various diaries and other sources specifically related to the qiangmi. Although many of these ballads are invective denunciations of Westerners, local officials, and gentry, many also reveal the superstitions and folk beliefs held by Changsha’s urban commoners and as such help us better understand what motivated their actions for rioting, as well as their distrust of Westerners. See Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou. While Yang Shiji acknowledged the importance of these ballads, he believed their perspective was limited and as such he classified them as products of late Qing Changsha’s “petty urban bourgeoisie,” or xiaoshimin, establishing their contribution to Hunan’s history within the framework of a revolutionary narrative. Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou, 169.

⁴ In Chinese language scholarship Liu Duping’s interviews have appeared in three separate sources. They first appeared in Liu’s own article “Qingmo Changsha qiangmi” published in volume six of Changsha wenshi ziliao in 1988. A few of them also appear at the end of Rao Huaimin and Fujiya Koetsu’s edited volume on primary documents from the qiangmi, Changsha qiangmi fengchao. Most recently they have also appeared, mostly in their entirety, in the appendix to Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi.

⁵ Liu Duping, “Huiyi fuqin.”

⁶ Liu Duping, “Diaocha caifang,” 320–321.

⁷ Esherick, Origins of the Boxer Uprising, xvi.

⁸ Mao stated, “I never forgot it. I felt that there with the rebels were ordinary people like my own family and I deeply resented the injustice of the treatment given to them.” Snow, Red Star Over China, 135. Also see Esherick, Reform and Revolution, 123.

⁹ Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi, 211–270. Zhou Shizhao had been a classmate of Chairman Mao and had later served as the headmaster of Changsha Number One Teacher’s College and vice-governor of Hunan Province. Yuan Fuqing had been vice-chairman of Hunan Province. Xie Jusheng, whose interview is one of the longest and most detailed, providing useful information not only about the qiangmi, but also about Changsha society in the late Qing, served as a delegate in the Changsha People’s Congress. Ibid., 213–214, 221–231.

¹⁰ Interview with Zhan Bingsheng, Ibid., 231–233. Another interviewee, Wang Yulin, also lived on Bixiang Street during the riot. See Interview with Wang Yulin, Ibid., 243.

¹¹ “Hunan shengcheng,” 267.

¹² “Hunan,” April 26, 1910.

¹³ Li Xizhu, “Pangguanzhe guancha Qingmo minbian,” 153–161.

¹⁴ “Hunan shengcheng,” 260.

¹⁵ Esherick, Reform and Revolution, 123.

¹⁶ Schoppa, Columbia Guide, 21.

¹⁷ Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou, 153; Esherick, Reform and Revolution, 129.

¹⁸ “Hunan shengcheng,” 268.

¹⁹ Liu Duping, “Qingmo Changsha qiangmi,” 44.

²⁰ Interview with Xie Jusheng, in Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi, 223.

²¹ “Huang Guisun quanjia,” 323.

²² Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou, 170.

²³ Hume, Doctors East, Doctors West, 96–97.

²⁴ “Porters Carrying Pails up Steps, Changsha,” Historical Photographs of China Project, copyright Peter Lockhart Smith, http://hpc.vcea.net/Asset/Preview/dbImage_ID-22396_No-1.jpeg (accessed on March 4, 2014).

²⁵ Interview with Huang Guikun, in Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi, 234–235.

²⁶ Ibid, 234.

²⁷ Interview with Li Zhengting, Ibid., 270.

²⁸ Interview with Li Runbai, Ibid., 258–259.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Interview with Li Zhengting, Ibid., 270.

³¹ Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou, 171.

³² Rowe, Hankow, 20.

³³ Wakefield, “Changsha: Report (1904–1911).”

³⁴ Platt, Provincial Patriots, 138.

³⁵ Interview with Yu Changchun, in Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi, 253–254.

³⁶ Interview with Zhang Liansheng, Ibid., 216.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Interview with Ling Shaomei, Ibid., 268.

³⁹ Skinner, “Introduction,” 254.

⁴⁰ Interview with Yu Changchun, in Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi, 253.

⁴¹ Interview with Fan Yuanquan and Tan Chunsheng, Ibid., 260ff.

⁴² Interview with Zhang Liansheng, Ibid., 217–218.

⁴³ Interview with Yu Changchun, Ibid., 253–254.

⁴⁴ Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou, 171.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ “Zhurong yuxing fu yangyang, fenba yanghang you jiaotang.” Ibid, 173.

⁴⁷ Rosenbaum, “Gentry Power,” 698.

⁴⁸ According to Joseph Esherick “The most convincing evidence of gentry direction is the pattern of destruction.” Esherick also lists the specific buildings/institutions destroyed during the riot which included: the governor’s yamen, five government schools, seven missions, two British steam boats, and two owned in part by foreigners. Other buildings had their interiors looted and destroyed. See Esherick, Reform and Revolution, 134–136.

⁴⁹ Liu Duping, “Qingmo Changsha qiangmi,” 45.

⁵⁰ “Hunan shengcheng,” 268.

⁵¹ Interview with Xiong Pingsheng, in Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi, 248. Ye Dehui was said to have played the part of a young female role. A popular idiom related to the derogatory reputation of actors in imperial China was biaozi wuqing, xizi wuyi [whores have no feeling, actors have no meaning].

⁵² Ibid. Ye also owned and operated some of Changsha’s opera houses. Also see Interview with Lei Runbai, Ibid., 259.

⁵³ Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou, 153, 177.

⁵⁴ Interview with Yi Ren’gai, in Liu Duping and Tang Ying, Changsha jiyi, 265.

⁵⁵ Zhang Jingping, Ye Dehui, 246ff. Also see Yang Shiji, Xinhai geming qianhou, 177.

⁵⁶ McDonald, Urban Origins of Rural Revolution, 66–67.

⁵⁷ Rosenbaum, “Gentry Power,” 692.

⁵⁸ Liu, “Confucian as Patriot,” 5–45.

⁵⁹ Ye Dehui to Miao Quansun, in Zhang Jingping, Ye Dehui shengping, 223–224. For the full text of the letter see also, Miao Quansun, ed. “Ye Dehuizhi zhi Miao Quansun,” 542.

⁶⁰ Ding Wenjiang and Zhao Fengtian, Liang Qichao nianpu, 1145.

⁶¹ Gong Yuzhi, “Cong Ye Dehui zhisi.”

⁶² “Xiangluan weiyan,” 245.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James J. Hudson

James J. HUDSON is currently a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2012 to 2013 he was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Hunan Normal University. His dissertation research focuses on popular unrest, folk history, and urban space in Changsha, Hunan during the late Qing and early Republican periods. He has previously published two articles: “Discontinuous Elements: Nationalism, Poverty, and Representation in Sidney Gamble’s Photographs of China (1917–1927),” in The Chinese Historical Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 2011); and with William Hurst and Christian Sorace, he is co-author of “Workers in Post-Socialist China: Shattered Rice Bowls, Fragmented Subjectivities,” in Chinese Capitalisms: Historical Emergence and Political Implications, edited by Yin-wah Chu (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).