From The Observer:
In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The inability of the Imperial armies to quell the rebellion for so long was a sign of the system’s vulnerability that would eventually lead to its collapse.
Importantly, the Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China – Huai-pei – where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for more economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.[Full Text]
