Introduction

Following the demise of the "Gang of Four" and subsequent academic liberalization in China, a new outpouring of historical scholarship has commenced. A major handicap that anyone interested in the Nien, or for that matter most other peasant uprisings, must inevitably face is the unfortunate fact that the rebels themselves left very few documents for scholarly perusal. Valuable as the confessions are for understanding rebellion, one must not overlook the fact that these are nevertheless government documents. Extracted and prepared by state officials, the depositions may be unreliable on several counts. Some of the confessions were quite possibly embroidered by local officials so as to present their own efforts to the throne in the best possible light. Professor Chang explained that the Nien field investigation had been conceived when the Anhwei Social Science Institute was first founded after the Liberation.