Banner of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

Here is the banner from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, one of the two major powers that engaged in China’s civil war between 1851 to 1864. While accurate records of casualties are impossible to tally, the Taiping Rebellion resulted in the worst civil war in terms of deaths: upwards of 20 million people — as many as would die globally in the First World War.

The causes of such massive turmoil were many, but came into focus with a Chinese peasant named Hong Xiuquan. After having listened to European Protestant missionaries, Hong had a mystical religious vision in which he realized that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and should overthrow the corrupt Qing Dynasty and put in a totally new social order. Hong preached a message that fell on fertile soil to millions of Chinese peasants:.

“When the people of this earth keep nothing for their private use, but give all things to God for all to use in common, then every place shall have equal shares, and everyone be clothed and fed.”

Hong’s words were persuasive for many Chinese — the economy had been upended by famine and disruption of trade from the Opium wars caused by European intrusion. The weak Qing government presented no relief to the masses of the population, which had increased exponentially in recent years. As one of the Taiping leaders recounted, “each year they [the ruling government] transform tens of millions of China’s gold and silver into opium and extract several millions from the fat and marrow of the Chinese people and turn it into rouge and powder . . . . How could the rich not become poor? How could the poor abide the law?”.

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom committed its own atrocities, executing many ethnic Manchu non-combatants merely because of their association with the Qing government. Hong was a charismatic leader, hostile to a corrupt government, on an ego trip, who spread a belief in communally held property –Sound like someone else later in the 20th century?