I start with the Taipings in the mid nineteenth century, the first of the modern revolutions in China, and I end with today’s Xi Jinping regime, a powerful counterrevolutionary tendency that nevertheless must be counted as revolutionary. In between, I narrate revolutionary moments during which temporality—the experience of time—and historicity—historical becoming—were thoroughly scrambled; that is, when the rereading of the past in the present required and also facilitated a reconceptualization of the future. This is, to be sure, a retrospective and selective narrative, as is every presentation of any past. My narrative, therefore, is not offered as an attempt to unify a putative “China” existing outside of time. Rather, it is intended to show how revolution—that quintessentially modern form of fundamental social transformation—repeatedly created and recreated “China” and “the world,” with its fissures and unevenness, its unresolved politics and social turbulences, its economic organizations and claims to exceptionalism, its cultural and historical pretensions, as well as its suppressions and oppressions. It treats revolutions as discrete spatial events, as well as latent historical challenges in and through both global and domestic time. The narrative rejects any ahistorical premise of China’s inevitable overcoming or ethno-cultural rise to destined global power and nationalist hegemony. The book hence challenges the contemporary state’s cultural narrative of “restoring China to its ancient prominence and glory,” as Xi Jinping put it in 2012, by denaturalizing the nationalist aspirations for what is called the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (weidade zhongguo fuxing /
It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire … than on any other political cause that now exists.
—Karl Marx (1853)1
The War of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a peasant revolutionary war waged against the feudal rule and national oppression of the Qing Dynasty in the middle of the 19th century.
—Mao Zedong (1949)2
In 1850–1851, a group of dispossessed peasants and disappointed scholars banded together in the marginal wild regions of Guangxi Province, in the South of Qing China, under the banner of an idiosyncratic ideology in opposition to local authorities bent on disciplining them. With a leader, Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ—thus the Christian God’s younger son—this unlikely group propelled themselves and their movement, now named the Taipings, from their mountainous redoubt to become one of the major internal threats to the stability of the Qing dynasty in the mid nineteenth century. In the course of fifteen or so years, those who came to identify with the Taipings (whether strongly or loosely) swept north in ever larger and more violent military campaigns, finally to occupy much of the most fertile regions of the South while centering their rule in the old Ming dynastic capital city, Nanjing. Initially, Qing dynastic forces were quite ineffective in quashing what they called a “heterodox rebellion”—that is, one led by a non-Confucian and thus nonorthodox vision of the world. Eventually, however, the Qing was able to organize an effective military strategy to vanquish completely and thoroughly these pretenders to an alternative state and ideological form. By 1865, the Taipings were being systematically wiped out and their movement crushed; with an estimated 50 to 70 million dead at the hands of both sides, the Qing was able to re-establish some form of dynastic and domestic order over a destroyed and depopulated Southern landscape.
The Taiping Revolution (or Rebellion or Uprising or Insurrection) was a cataclysmic disordering of the Qing dynastic imperial world from within.3 It also profoundly unsettled the European world in its apparent demonstration of Chinese revolutionary fervor so soon after the abject defeat of the Qing in the First Opium War (1842), on the one hand, and the 1848 pan-European wave of revolutions, on the other. While any posited direct relationship between Europe’s 1848 and the Taipings must be seen as the result of a profound misrecognition or wishful thinking—Marx’s view notwithstanding—the chronological proximity of the upheavals to one another left a deep impression on anyone who bothered to pay attention. Yet, those who came to call themselves proponents of the taiping (great peace) and who attempted to establish what they called the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom” (1853–1864) were thoroughly products of mid-nineteenth-century southern Chinese conditions.
The initial mass of peasant participants had been displaced from their livelihoods in the decade after the First Opium War, when the geographical center of trade and commerce shifted from Canton (Guangzhou) up the coast toward Shanghai. Meanwhile, the Taiping leaders were mostly failed scholars, having repeatedly tried without success to pass the ever-narrowing funnel of civil service exams required of any educated man who wished to formally serve in the dynastic bureaucracy. Among the leaders and the led alike, many were susceptible—because of personal disappointments, individual intellectual propensities, or crass opportunism—to a number of different readings and interpretations of a variety of sacred texts excavated from China and abroad. These texts were syncretically mixed in a cauldron of social, political, economic, and cultural dislocation that soon lent newly created ideological precepts a social coherence and practical plausibility that found, at least at first, enthusiastic adherents. If, by the end of the revolution, the ideology had been rendered hollow; if, by the end of the revolution, its leaders had been corrupted and discredited; if, by the end of the revolution, its followers were disillusioned and felt trapped; if, by the end of the revolution, the forces of Qing dynastic order and stability proclaimed the righteousness of a sweeping, indiscriminate, and vengeful massacre of every last putative sympathizer … None of this denouement is particularly surprising, even if it was enormously deadly and tragic.
What is surprising, shocking even, is how attractive the Taipings were in the beginning stages of their movement’s development—an attraction that helped propel them from the confines of their intensely local birthplace into an empire-wide movement of social upheaval and ideological contestation. The combination of social and ideological claims allows us to consider the Taipings a modern revolutionary movement. Their process exhibits an important modal characteristic of all modern revolutionary movements in China: it drew upon a wide range of global and domestic textual, practical, and ritual resources to plant itself in Chinese society, thence to offer approaches to social change at an unprecedented depth and breadth. In their very conceptualizations of the world, moreover, the Taipings proposed a rereading of China’s past, present, and possible future in the light of a new form of historicity and temporality. Animated in large part by pre-modern or unmodern peasants and marginalized populations, the Taipings were nevertheless a very modern phenomenon.
Yet, unlike Mao Zedong and generations of Communist Party historians, we should not consider the Taipings the origin of the Chinese Communist Revolution that came to fruition a century later. Despite superficial resemblances—the huge peasant constituency of both revolutions, for example—there is no indication among Taiping texts or practices that there was even an embryonic understanding of class analysis and class struggle, or of socialist productive relations, both of critical importance to the Communist revolutionary movement a century later. Among the Taipings, there was an intense concern with land, its value-producing capacities, and its equitable redistribution; this is not surprising, given that China was at the time a predominantly socially and economically uneven agrarian society. Additionally, among the Taipings there was a concern with proper leadership and military tactics for what would come to be called, a century later,