Chinese Millenarian Traditions: The Formative Age

Abstract

TESTING THE WATERS OF FIELDWORK after years in musty archives, I ventured into the North China countryside in 1993, researching a Republican-period sect that had rebelled against both Nationalist and Communist authorities from the 1920s through the 1950s. I was astonished to find that the group-part of the revival of popular religion and popular culture in post-Mao China-was alive and well, holding temple fairs, exorcising illnesses, copying and circulating scriptures. Apocalyptic prophecies, cast in wholly traditional idiom, figured prominently in these scriptures, alongside stories of the paranormal powers of the tradition's founders and fundamentalist calls to strengthen village morality.' This discovery was striking for two reasons. First, it suggests that fifteen years after the introduction of Deng Xiaoping's market-Leninism, fifty years after the Communist revolution, a century and a half after the Opium War, these apocalyptic symbols remain relevant, at least to part of China's rural population. Second, the juxtaposition of apocalyptic prophecy with calls to strengthen family values suggests that we might want to rethink our notions about the Chinese millenarian tradition and its relationship to mainstream Chinese culture. Of course, many AHR readers may have few notions about the Chinese millenarian tradition to rethink. Traditionally, Western historians of Chinese apocalyptic movements have tended to highlight the catalytic role of foreign religions, be it in the many cases inspired by Maitreya, the future Buddha, or in the most famous instance: the Christian-influenced nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion. More recent scholarship has focused instead on indigenous Chinese sources of apocalyptic beliefs but has often presented such discourses and the groups that embraced them as self-conscious dissenters from the mainstream.2 The source of