China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl

dynastic leadership had failed them and who were contending with vastly better armed forces in the service of often-corrupt local and provincial bureaucrats. There was, as well, concern with hierarchies, and with gendered modes of social production and reproduction—the former a feature of many bottom-up movements in China’s past, and the latter perhaps more surprising than otherwise, as it had been foreshadowed in few prior domestic or global social movements. Maybe most intriguingly, there was great concern with what we might want to call, anachronistically, “propaganda” and “cultural information wars.” Indeed, the placards placed in cities under siege by Taiping rebels along the way from their nascent villages to what was to become their final destination of Nanjing display a canny sensibility about the relationship between possibly aggrieved historical experiences of the present and broader textual strategies aimed at mobilizing people into disruptive social activity. The combination of these concerns—the technics as well as the epistemic foundations—is an argument for the modernity of the Taipings as a movement, whose transformative grasp of temporality and historicity was potentially locally and globally world shattering. It is no less, and no more, than this general transformative temporality and historicity that renders the Taipings a recognizable genealogical antecedent to Mao’s Communist Revolution. Any claimed teleological relationship is entirely invented.

      The origin story told of the Taipings focuses on the charismatic figure of their leader, Hong Xiuquan, who, in the course of sitting for the provincial bureaucratic exams in Canton in the mid 1830s, picked up a Christian tract introducing God and Jesus, their sacrifices, and their proposed mode of world salvation. At the time, Christian missionaries were circulating illegally in China; however, a short few years later they won the privilege of operating freely, through a legal clause included in the Nanjing Treaty that ended the First Opium War (1842). In Qing China, missionary religious freedom—as with “free trade” more generally—thus grew out of the barrel of imperialist guns. The particular tract Hong picked up happened to be from the hands of a Chinese convert working with the American Congregationalist Edwin Stevens from the Seamen’s Friend Society. The tract was entitled “Good Words for Exhorting the Age.” Hong was not immediately struck with religious fervor. Yet after several more exam disappointments over the course of a decade or so, Hong apparently turned to the Christian texts, which helped explain his now-incoherent experience of his world: though highly educated, he was unable to pass the exams that would lend him social and cultural legitimacy; unemployed, he was unable to sustain himself or bring credit to his family. Through his reading of these accidentally obtained texts, Hong embraced the story of Jesus’s sacrifice. He began further study with the American Southern Baptist Isaacher Roberts, who encouraged him to defy local authorities and oppose traditional ancestor worship, among other prevalent social rituals.

      By the mid 1840s, Hong was driven out of his hometown for his unorthodox behaviors—smashing ancestor tablets among them. He left the cities, linked up with some desperados in the mountains of Guangxi, and began to formulate a new type of ideological and conceptual understanding of the world, now informed by a sense of monotheistic justice and righteousness against apostate, evil dynastic authorities and polytheistic beliefs. Leading the “Society of God Worshippers,” Hong declared himself Jesus’s younger brother, the designated spokesperson for the one true God, sent to China to save the Chinese and the world from heathenism, the devil’s depredations, and God’s vengeful wrath. As countless scholars have shown, the belief system informing Hong’s initial movement, a bit incoherent from the get-go, quickly got further muddled by the necessity to include more people in its leadership structures as a tool of social mobilization and cohesion. Monotheism, while retained as an ultimate principle, was stretched thin as different people came to claim the ability to channel and speak of and to God or Jesus, and as different leaders came to hold and wield power through their claimed channeling capacities. In the very beginning, however, Hong Xiuquan was the exclusive conduit of meaning from God/Jesus to his flock of believers.

      Through the late 1840s, the movement grew in its backwater locality—Guangxi—where it soon became threatening to local officials, who swooped down upon it to suppress the now-burgeoning number of adherents, most of whom were out-of-work migrants and social marginals: coal miners, itinerant charcoal producers, and former drug runners for the now-displaced Canton-based opium-for-tea dealers who had monopolized trade with the British until the Nanjing Treaty put an end to such monopolies. The proclaiming of the movement as a form of “heterodoxy”—a necessary move by local officials to qualify their ineffective military defenses for coordinated Qing imperial assistance—put Hong on the map as a formal opponent of Qing neo-Confucian orthodoxy; this brought the weight of dynastic ideological censure and military violence upon him and his followers. From the beginning of 1851, when Hong named his band of followers the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping tianguo / )—where tian (heaven) referred specifically to the Christian God, rather than to the “son of heaven” of Confucian dynastic ritual—the movement gained in strength and credibility as it defeated the first dynastic military foray into the area. Finally ousted from their base in late 1851, the denizens, now swollen in number, began a long trek out of the mountains, heading north along an uncertain path that ultimately led to Nanjing. With news of their military prowess preceding them, the economic and social disorder of southern China, which had fallen into disarray because of long-standing trends now accelerating under the impact of the Nanjing Treaty provisions, helped produce many followers for the Taiping, including a renowned and much-feared all-female military corps composed of fighting Hakka women. The military campaigns through 1852 and 1853 proceeded north along the Yangzi River. With victories, the movement spread.

      Meanwhile, ideological texts explaining and lending ideological coherence to the movement were promulgated, promoted, and often posted on placards hung on the walls of the cities under assault. Such texts as the “Taiping Ballad to Save the World” (Taiping jiushi ge / ) were meant to introduce the Taiping worldview while also competing with imperial dynastic classics for the attention and fealty of regular folks as well as of the educated classes. While most of educated society shunned the Taipings, and while Christian missionaries were supportive only until the blasphemous nature of the belief system became clear, those whose fortunes had been frustrated or destroyed by the Qing decline and imperialist assaults were particularly attracted to this new way of seeing the world and the future. At the same time, those in opposition attempted to escape before being swept up in the efforts of what were derisively called the “Yue bandits” to conquer ever-larger territories.⁴ The back-and-forth fighting between the Taipings and the military forces of provincial and dynastic authorities produced spectacular violence and succeeded, ultimately, in depopulating and laying waste to large swaths of the Qing empire’s most populous and economically productive regions.

      Taiping leaders—Hong Xiuquan, joined by a few other highly educated men, who would remain close allies until 1856, when internecine battles broke apart any remaining unity—elaborated an exceptionally detailed set of living and production precepts that were to provide guidance and educational materials to the rapidly developing settlements and fighting corps of Taiping rebels and their dependent families. Though never fully implemented, these precepts nevertheless indicate how thoroughly the temporal and the historical were being rethought through new conceptualizations of the ordering of everyday social life and the tasks of the present. In the most abstract terms, general introductory Taiping narratives tell of how God and Jesus came to earth to deliver sacred texts, and/or how Hong Xiuquan went to Heaven to directly discuss with God and Jesus the salvation of China and humankind; later, communication between Hong Xiuquan and God was narrated as having taken place via various outer-body voices. These direct and indirect visitations, and Hong’s own claim to being Jesus’s younger brother, conferred legitimacy upon Hong and gave the movement he led a source of textual and conceptual authority that lay well outside the dynastic order, even as it remained plausible to his followers. The salvation of the Han (Chinese) people from the evildoing of the Manchu Qing Empire—pictured in placards as snake demons—which worked its Satanism through Confucianism, was one major aim of the movement. Thus Confucius, at least in part, was rendered as the Devil in disguise, creating havoc on earth as part of the epic battle between God and Satan