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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Author(s)
LIU Chen
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DOI:10.17265/2328-2177/2022.05.001
Affiliation(s)
Peking University, Beijing, China
ABSTRACT
The “anti-Confucianism” constituted the main feature of the cultural policy of the Taiping Rebellion. However, the anti-Confucianism movement of the Taiping Rebellion was mainly in form rather than in content, and mainly in action rather than in thought, which manifested itself in a policy of banning and destroying the physical forms of Confucian memorial tablets, Confucian temples, and Confucian classics. The core elements of Confucianism were all inherited and retained by Hong Xiuquan, who was committed to subverting Confucius’ position as the cultural authority of Chinese society, so Confucianism, together with Christian thought and folk religious thought, constituted the main source of the ideology of the Taiping Rebellion. It was the influence of Confucianism and folk religious thought on Hong Xiuquan that gave the idea of worshipping God a localized character and made a new type of religion that combined Chinese and Western elements. The “anti-Confucianism” was mostly based on an irrational political movement, and the Taiping Rebellion never criticized the doctrine of Confucius and Mencius from a theoretical point of view. Thus the political submission of civil society to the Taiping Rebellion hardly rose to the level of political identification. Cultural antipathy, to some extent, led to the eventual defeat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
KEYWORDS
the Taiping Rebellion, anti-Confucianism, worshipping God, Confucian culture
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