The Black Flag Army: Violence in the Borderlands of China and Southeast Asia

• In Event: Chinese Borderlands: Violence, Ethnicity, and Religion at the Edges of the Qing Empire

Abstract

Founded by a former opium dealer, the Black Flag Army existed in the shadow of the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s. After moving to northern Vietnam from southern China, they became allies of Vietnamese imperial authorities. However, for many uplands communities such as the Yao and the Tai, the Black Flags were bandits that exploited their imperial connections to pursue wealth and brought devastation to the mountainous borderlands, extending as far south as northern Laos in the 1890s.

This presentation revisits the history of the Black Flags as imperial bandits to examine the role of violence in borderlands spaces. As the Black Flags negotiated a position of sanctified power in Vietnam, they pushed the limits of imperial sovereignty. The officials of modern empires such as Nguyen Vietnam, the Qing Empire, and even early French Indochina, all relied on violence to establish their authority and to perform power over subjects. In the case of the Black Flags, the imperial use of violence, which often contradicted the imperial rhetoric of rationalization, enables us to consider the flexible divisions between banditry and governance and to appreciate the strategies of resistance, as inverted forms of violence, that met imperial projects in the borderlands.

Author

• Bradley Camp Davis, Eastern Connecticut State University