ABSTRACT
References to hui—widely translated as "secret society"—proliferate in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Chinese sources, a fact that until recently has been explained in two complementary ways. Republican-period Chinese historians argued that secret societies emerged in the early Qing as popular "nationalistic" protests against the alien Manchu regime, anticipating Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution by some two centuries (Luo 1943; Murray 1993, ch. 4; Tao 1943; Xiao 1935). A few decades later, Western historians inspired by the radicalization of scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s rewrote the history of secret societies, adding their own Marxian convictions that secret society "rebels" were conscious or unconscious revolutionaries as well, responding to crises of im-miseration and social injustice (Chesneaux 1972; Davis 1977; Murray 1993, ch. 3). The first wave of historians wrote secret societies into the history of the Republican Revolution of 1911; the second wave wrote secret societies into the Communist Revolution of 1949. This chapter seeks to write secret societies into the history of early modern China, arguing that most "secret societies" are better understood as associations created by young men who found themselves at the margins of settled society.
