Underscoring this abstract vision, Taiping textbooks, so-called “three-character classics,” were used in elementary schools and other institutions to inculcate the correct political and social attitudes and practices into children and adults. These books drew upon the common form of missionary-disseminated Bible study materials and classical Chinese primers to re-narrate all of history around the Creation, where the coming of Christ also then augurs the arrival of his younger brother, Hong Xiuquan, as savior. Hong’s coming is thus an integral part of the Heavenly story, and the Heavenly story is an integral part of China’s history. In this way, the “universalism” of Christianity, hitherto monopolized through the particular story of white Europeans, became inclusive of China, not coincidentally or incidentally, but as a matter of the very narrative of Christian creation and salvation. At the same time, China’s dynastic history was narrated through the idiom of the fall of China to Satan (Manchu Qing Confucianism) and the potential in the here and now to fight to be saved. This deracialized, departicularized, and globally universal historical narrative—based as it was on a Christian theme—de-exceptionalized white missionaries and lent to the Taipings (comprised mostly of Han and Hakka Chinese) full agency in world history and their own salvation. Thus was China’s contemporary temporality—as well as its past of the Three Dynasties and other more mythical times—written into world time as a matter not only of historical conceptualization but also of future experiential becoming.5 This was an eschatology through which China’s fate was narrated as inseparably intertwined with Europe’s.
Another important text was the Taiping Diary, published with copper plate technology in 1862; the diary served as the official account of the movement and its ideals after the death of Yang Xiuqing, one of the Taipings’ major figures. There were also plays, ballads, and popular forms used to promote Taiping ideology among the less literate and the less persuaded. The printed volumes by the Taipings were clearly aimed at proposing a textual—and thus ideological and practical—alternative to imperial dynastic authority; indeed, the number of volumes printed posed huge problems for the dynastic efforts to suppress the movement, during its high tide and in its aftermath. As scholar Huan Jin recently noted: “Their texts were so ubiquitous that Zhang Dejian
Perhaps most well known of the Taiping texts and practices were the land laws. Resting upon the conviction that private property, and particularly clan domination of land use rights, needed to be abolished, the Taiping proposed an equitable distribution of land as a mode of creating conditions for social justice. Remarkably, in their vision, land was to be distributed to men and women alike, although the heterosexual household remained the naturalized unit in which men and women were to be socially located and through which society was to be reproduced, while the village—comprised of groupings of twenty-five families—was designated the natural unit of social life for rural society more generally. In the 1853 “Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom” it is noted that
the division of land must be according to the number of individuals, whether male or female; calculating upon the number of individuals in a household, if they be numerous, then the amount of land will be larger, and if few, smaller … There being fields, let all cultivate them; there being food, let all eat; there being clothes, let all be dressed; there being money, let all use it, so that nowhere does inequality exist, and no man is not well fed and clothed.7
It was the aggregation of villages and the family households within them that would constitute the productive capacities of the Heavenly Kingdom; taxation would be levied on family production, and it would be equitable and far lower than the Manchu Qing rates then in effect. Rent to landlords was abolished. Gendered divisions of labor were specified—women were to tend mulberry trees (for silk production) and spin and weave, and men were to till fields and engage in animal husbandry; meanwhile, social life was to be devoted to production and reproduction, to worshiping God, and to providing military staffing when required. Wealth accumulation, academic honor, and personal ambition were not encouraged. With education offered to all, the exam system for selecting bureaucrats was closely modeled upon the dynastic exams, in which Hong and others had so spectacularly failed. It must be noted that, in the event, not much of this was actually implemented, because of difficulties in holding territories and the constant violence visited upon nominally Taiping-held areas by Qing military forces and resisters among the occupied populations.
For a number of reasons and in a variety of ways, the Taiping Revolution failed. It fell apart of its own internecine struggles over power and doctrinal interpretation; it fell to corruption and disease; it fell to the sieges and massacres endured at the hands of dynastic military hostilities and accumulating strategic strength; and it fell to the withdrawal of any and all Euro-American missionary support. Despite the fact that the Taiping movement was, particularly in its latter stages, coterminous with such dispersed and largely unrelated uprisings as those of the Red Turbans, the Nian, and the Hui—whose respective crushings stretched dynastic military resources to the limit—its internal weaknesses also rendered the Taipings far less formidable in these later years than they had been while gathering force in the beginning. Despite this, the Taipings’ vision of history as a global universal and of world time as providential and co-temporal competed for a while with the Qing dynastic defense of neo-Confucian social and political domination. Ultimately, though, its military forces were unable to defend the capital at Nanjing, and the increasing incoherence of the ideological sanction for Hong’s turn to despotic leadership meant that adherents fled when they could and remained passive when they couldn’t. As the noose tightened, the ideals of the Taipings receded ever further into a utopian abstraction that bore no relation to anyone’s life or to any mode of governance and rule.
The final destructive massacre and empire-wide hunting down of leaders, followers, and all plausible adherents and legitimating texts bespeaks the elemental fear that had been struck in the heart of the Qing dynastic order. In this light, both Marx and Mao were wrong and right: the disruption of the Chinese empire by the Taipings was indeed cataclysmic. The revolution was peasant led; it was historically consequential because it forced a rethinking of temporal and historical premises of the Qing Chinese sociopolitical order and of global history. However, it did not lead to the forms of internationalist solidarity upon which Marx hinged his ideas of global revolution in the 1850s, nor did it usher in Mao’s anti-feudal, anti-capitalist revolutionary movement. By the same token, Marx and Mao were right to designate the Taipings as a progressive phenomenon: in their reconceptualization of Chinese and global history as part of the same universal (Christian and millenarian though it was), and in their restructuring of temporality around a futurity secured by and through political and social transformative activity in the present, the Taipings proved themselves utterly modern.
China’s modern revolutions thus start from then.
Interlude: Post-Taiping “Restoration”
I read Western newspapers and they report on … the disorder in the Chinese polity … This has been going on for the past few decades. Since September or October of last year [1896], they have even more openly and brazenly publicized how wild and uncivilized the Chinese are, how ignorant and dishonest, how empty Chinese Confucianism is. The meaning is clear: they will move to eliminate China at once.
—Liang Qichao, “On the Future Strength of China” (1897)1
In the post-Taiping reordering of the empire, many sociopolitical and economic aspects of life were supposedly “restored,” when in fact they were being invented as part of an effort to stabilize the Qing and to ward off