Nien Rebellion - Origin

Origin

Nian is a word borrowed from the Beihua dialect, where it was used to refer to loosely affiliated gangs or groups. The Nian movement was formed in the late 1840s by Zhang Lexing, and by 1851 numbered approximately 40,000. Unlike the Taiping Rebellion movement though, the Nien initially had no clear goals or objectives aside from criticism of the Qing government. However, the Nien were provoked into taking direct action against the Imperial regime following a series of environmental disasters. The 1851 flood of the massive Yellow River deluged hundreds of thousands of square miles and caused immense loss of life. The Qing government slowly began cleaning up after the disaster, but were unable to provide effective aid as government finances had been drained during a recent war with Great Britain and the ongoing slaughter of the Taiping Rebellion. The damage created by the disaster had still not been repaired when, in 1855, the river burst its banks again, drowning thousands and devastating the fertile province of Jiangsu. At the time, the Qing government was trying to negotiate a deal with the European powers, and as state finances had been so severely depleted, the regime was again unable to provide effective relief. This enraged the Nien movement, which blamed the Europeans for contributing to China's troubles, and increasingly viewed the Qing government as incompetent and cowardly in the face of the Western powers.

Political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer suggest that the rebellion was fueled, at least in part, by decades of female infanticide caused by the floods related economic misery, leading to a large population of frustrated young men without any women to marry, perhaps as many as 25 percent of all young men in the area being in this category of "bare branches".