Taiping Rebellion - Total War

Total War

The Taiping Rebellion was the first instance of total war in modern China. Almost every citizen of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was given military training and conscripted into the army to fight against Qing imperial forces.

During this conflict both sides tried to deprive each other of resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in general exact a brutal price from captured enemy lands in order to drastically weaken the opposition's war effort. This war was total in the sense that civilians on both sides participated to a significant extent in the war effort and in the sense that armies on both sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military forces.

This resulted in massive civilian death toll with some 600 cities destroyed and other bloody policies resulting. Since the rebellion began in the province of Guangxi, Imperial forces allowed no rebels speaking its dialect to surrender. Reportedly in the province of Guangdong, it is written that 1,000,000 were executed. These policies of mass civilian murder occurred elsewhere including in Anhui, Nanjing and Guangdong (Canton).