Elite and Peasant During the Taiping Occupation of the Jiangnan, 1860-1864

Bibliographic Data

ID6008518
AuthorsKathryn Bernhardt (Southern Methodist University, corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume13
Issue4
Pages379-410
Publication date1987-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern China (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-7004 • E-ISSN: 1552-6836
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/009770048701300401
OpenAlexW2010800857
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited7

This poem, related to Chinese scholars by peasants sometime in the 1950s, captures the sense of expectation with which their forebears throughout south and central China had awaited the arrival of the Taiping rebels a century earlier. As promised in their document The Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty, the Talpings would eliminate the rich and elevate the poor until all were equal in status and wealth. Other folk songs and tales suggest that the peasantry's hopes were not misplaced; they speak repeatedly of rebel prohibitions against rent collection, the expropriation of landlord property and its redistribution to the landless, and the divestment of the elite of its power.' Western scholarship conveys an entirely different impression of life under Taiping rule, maintaining that only in their capital at Nanjing did the rebels attempt in any serious fashion to implement some of the ideals of their movement. Elsewhere, the Talpings, however revolutionary in intent, tended to be very conservative in action. According to Philip Kuhn and Frederic Wakeman, the

Ancient history · China · Elite · Peasant · Political science · Politics · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law

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