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, “guerilla” or “asymmetrical” warfare; again, this is to be expected among those who believed 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 /
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 /
