RE: Bloody Christians - 20-30 millions killed in 14 years
October 20, 2012 at 9:29 pm
(This post was last modified: October 20, 2012 at 9:58 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(October 20, 2012 at 3:08 pm)kılıç_mehmet Wrote: In truth, this wasn't a Christian rebellion. Indeed, the man claimed something extraordinary. However, I believe that you fail to see the ethnic tensions beneath the whole Christian thing. The Qing dynasty was an ethnic Manchu dynasty. This was just one of the many rebellions that happened during those times. And I could tell you this that the man you speak of just now, is probably considered a national hero in China, despite the deaths that were caused due to the rebellion.
Actually, prior to 1949 and the communist take over, he was considered to be the worst that could possibly be imagined in the Chinese scheme of good and evil.
To start with, his conduct was the full and complete antithesis of the Confucian ideal. That alone would make him virtually subhuman. To add to that he was an adoptee and purveyor of "croaked cults", which is regarded as not only an offense against natural goodness of the realm, but also an unspeakable effort to reinflict the evil influences that are thought to have caused many particularly unfortunate periods in Chinese history.
Only after 1949 was he rehabilitated by none other than Mao. Mao regards him as something of a forerunner to Mao himself and his rebellion a failed developmental prototype to mao's own communist revolution.
Incidentally, much of the blood that flowed from the hong rebellion was actually shed by the Qing imperial forces. To fight against the rebels, the imperial army hired many western mercenaries to modernize and lead the combat formations. During this period, especially as the imperial forces eventually rolled up the rebels, it carried out numerous brutal reprisals and massacres on the direct order of the imperial court. Many were carried out against previously agrred terms of surrender or cease fire. In one case 300,000 surrendered rebels, including women and children, we're massacred on imperial orders in direct violation of the terms of surrender agreed to by the imperial forces. The stories of qing atrocities flowed out of china in the accounts of the western mercenaries, which were often wildly popular in the west and serialized in major newspapers. In someways the conduct of the Qing forces during hong rebellion was a watershed moment in western perception of china.
Prior to 180s, the west had a remarkably idealized view of china, as reflected in the writting of Russeau, Voltaire, Leibniz, etc, perhaps as a result of earlier accounts dating back to Marco polo. After the taiping rebellion, china was generally regarded in the west as brutal, cruel, despotic and backwards.
