The Discursive Construction of Green Standard Deserters during the Burma Campaign

• In Event: Cowards, Criminals, and Scapegoats: The Forgotten History of Desertion in East Asia

Abstract

The Qianlong emperor’s Burma Campaigns between 1765 and 1770 were collectively the Qing’s worst military disaster prior to the nineteenth century. The difficulty of campaigning in a malaria-ridden marshland far away from supply lines led to the deaths of all four major campaign commanders. Yet, we see that despite the impossible conditions, the Qianlong emperor largely attributed military-operational failure to a lack of military discipline, manifested primarily in Green Standard desertion. It was also during these campaigns that the process of Manchu-Han differentiation noted by Mark Elliott collided with real military operational failure on the ground in an already militarizing legal culture that showed absolutely no mercy for campaign deserters, even if they turned themselves in. Still, the paucity of actual recorded campaign deserters raises the question of whether the emperor’s near obsession with apprehending every last one of them “in order to restore military discipline” was an instance of rhetorical over-extrapolation. Certainly several Green Standard routs were real and affected military operations negatively, but the Qing was also facing significant strategic odds and the number of actual deserters was not great. Overall, the discursive construction of Green Standard deserters during the Burma campaign presents a fascinating case study of how multiple origins – the imperial structure, ethnic sovereignty, failure in military operations – shaped both the definition and the attempts to resolve a serious strategic challenge.

Author

• Eugene Gregory, West Point