ABSTRACT
The tension between emperor and bureaucracy was not the old order's weakness but its strength. What preserved the quasi-aristocratic Chinese bureaucracy from parasitism was, quite simply, the fact that unlike the genuine aristocracy of France it had not been broken, then preserved. In Confucian eras, the Chinese masses and monarchs lacked that intimacy which one could see in pre-revolutionary Europe. Wei Yuan's hope for the redemption of Confucianists survived, for a while, the Taipings' rejection of Confucianists en masse, the princely with the small. True princes, such as the noble members of the Ming imperial family, could be deemed parasites by Confucian standards and out of Confucian motives, but when 'princely men' were despised, as the Taipings were ready to do, the Confucianists themselves were sent to the wall. Proto-revolutionary Taiping rebels took the Confucian- imperial order out of the path of rebellions, and set it up for the unmistakable revolutionaries who were to come.
