Li Hongzhang

Biography

Li Hongzhang was born on February 15, 1823, in Hefei, Anhui Province, the son of a successful civil examination candidate who had befriended the young Zeng Guofan in Beijing. Li passed the jinshi examination in 1847 and entered Zeng Guofan's circle as a protégé — a relationship that proved transformative for both Chinese history and Li's career. When the Taiping Rebellion swept through Anhui, Li helped Zeng organize the Hunan Army and then created his own parallel force: the Huai Army (named for the Huai River region), which became the most modern Chinese military force of the nineteenth century. Li Hongzhang's Huai Army differed from Zeng's Hunan Army in one critical respect: Li equipped his soldiers with Western weapons — rifles, artillery, steamships — and trained them in Western tactical methods, using foreign officers as instructors. The Ever Victorious Army under Gordon was effectively attached to the Huai Army's operations, and Li's combination of Western-style forces with the scale and local knowledge of his Chinese army proved more effective than either element alone. His campaigns in Jiangsu Province from 1862 to 1864 gradually destroyed the Taiping network around Shanghai and contributed to the isolation of Nanjing. Li Hongzhang's post-rebellion career was even more consequential than his military record. He became the dominant Chinese statesman of the second half of the nineteenth century, conducting China's foreign affairs through a series of humiliating crises — the Sino-French War (1884–85), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Boxer Rebellion (1900) — in which China consistently lost territory and sovereignty to better-organized foreign powers. Li was the man who negotiated the Treaty of Shimonoseki after the Sino-Japanese War, ceding Taiwan and Korea — a deal so humiliating that he was shot in the face by a Japanese nationalist during the negotiations, which is why the treaty's terms were slightly less harsh than Japan had initially demanded. Li was simultaneously a sincere modernizer — he built arsenals, shipyards, telegraph lines, and railways in a sustained attempt to build Chinese industrial and military capacity — and a pragmatist so deep that he was accused of selling China's interests for personal advantage. The combination made him the central figure of the 'Self-Strengthening Movement' that attempted to modernize China's military technology without abandoning Confucian social structures — an attempt that ultimately failed, but that laid the foundations for the industrial capacity China would develop in the twentieth century.

Key Battles