| The nineteenth century was an age of utopian visions in China. As population growth, economic dislocation, and foreign encroachment weakened the ruling Qing dynasty (1644-1911), new political movements arose offering alternate sources of authority. This dissertation examines the devastating clash between two of these visions: that of the iconoclastic, Christianity-inspired Taiping rebellion (1850-1864) and that of the leadership of regional militias the Qing employed to crush the rebellion after regular government troops proved ineffective. Because the Taiping made Nanjing their capital, the city became the focus of this conflict. At war's end more than twenty million people had perished, and Nanjing was a ruin.; To rebuild Nanjing during the so-called Tongzhi Restoration, the dynasty relied on the same people who had defeated the Taiping. These men were inspired by their own utopia, one in which the actions of local elites rather than the virtue of the emperor formed the basis for solving social problems. A primary means for articulating and enacting this vision was offerings to a pantheon of gods, heroes, and martyrs. Although government officials normally performed these offerings, Nanjing elites found ways to change the system so that rituals honoring Confucius, virtuous women, and the war dead all celebrated local activism as a central feature of the polity. Nanjing residents thus shored up the Qing state at the expense of Qing emperors.; Previous scholarship on nineteenth-century China has been teleological, focusing on the rise of the nation state and the fall of the Qing. The concept of "utopian visions" addresses this issue by emphasizing the array of contemporary political alternatives while still offering a fresh context for later developments. One element of the power of the twentieth-century Chinese state was the claim that it derived its authority from the collective activity of its citizens. Such a vision had emerged in the wake of the violence of the mid-nineteenth century---with the difference that in the nineteenth century the central idiom for expressing a person's relationship to the state was not citizenship but ritual. |
