RURAL SOCIETY AND THE TAIPING REBELLION: THE JIANGNAN FROM 1820 TO 1911 (CHINA)

Of the rebellions which rocked China in the mid-nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) has most captured the attention of historians. Study after study details the ideology of the rebels, the strategies of the Qing commanders and the maneuverings of the foreign powers. Curiously absent from the literature on this peasant rebellion, however, are accounts of the course and the effect of the rebellion in the countryside. The assumption seems to be that since the Taipings did not implement their revolutionary land redistribution program, rural society passed through the rebellion untouched and unchanged.; This assumption is challenged by conclusions drawn from the experience of the Jiangnan (the lower Yangzi region) under Taiping rule. The rebel occupation precipitated a crisis in Jiangnan rural society. Although the Taiping government did not carry out its revolutionary ideals to the full, a number of its policies worked against the interests of landlords and for the interests of tenants. Moreover, the very presence of the rebels radicalized tenants, who engaged in a widespread resistance to landlord demands.; After the rebellion, landlordism regained its footing in the Jiangnan, but it was a footing rendered insecure by continuing peasant protest. The brief taste of reduced rents and nonpayment of rents of the Taiping years made the tenants less compliant in their relations with landlords after the Qing was restored. This continuing tenant resistance necessitated altering the rural order in several respects. First, the government in the post-Taiping period interceded into the landlord-tenant relationship to an unprecedented extent. This increased intervention entailed more government support for landlord rent collection and, at the same time, more effort to regulate landlord demands on tenants.; Second, landlords acted together as a class in a more direct fashion than they had prior to the rebellion. Instead of dealing with their tenants on an individual basis, landlords banded together to organize rent collection agencies and to determine uniform levels of rent. Class lines were thus drawn more clearly in the post-Taiping period. The resulting intensification or rural class conflict eventually fueled the twentieth-century communist revolution.