ABSTRACT
why was this rebellion different from all other rebellions? In all other rebellions such non-Confucian doctrine as the rebels held, Taoist or Buddhist in overtones, was not really a positive challenge to Confucianism as the intelligence of society; but the pseudo-Christianity of the Taipings was just such a challenge. In Taoist or Buddhist rebellions the doctrine, for the time of violence, was chiliastic —i.e., anti-social, anti-historical in the messianic sense of a vision of the ‘end of days’, with Confucianism left undisturbed as the dominant thought for prosaic social history. And when society struggled through the welter of violence, the Confucian arrangement with monarchy continued to govern history, while Taoism and Buddhism, losing their transitory associations with what Han ‘Yellow Turbans’ or Ch’ing ‘White Lotus’ felt almost as the ‘pangs of the Messiah’, resumed their low-temperature state in a continuing dynastic history. True, Taiping Christianity shared with earlier non-Confucianism movements a symbolic character, as a challenge to Confucian social superiors, a secession from the latter’s intellectual world when its social cleavage seemed hopelessly sharp. Yet, for all this common character, Taiping Christianity was a new departure.
