Oppositional Alignment and Rebellious Formation: Qing China 1853-1862

• In Event: 044 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Collective Action in Comparative and Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article proposes a processual and relational model to explain why local groups linked together and formed large-scale insurgent forces under Qing China in the middle nineteenth century. Between 1850 and 1862, the Taiping Rebellion and the Nien Rebellion, among many others, rose all over the empire and constituted the most violent period in human history. Two conventional theories highlight vertical oppositional structures of rebellious formation: the peasant against the landlord/state alliance (Moore 1966; Skocpol 1979), or the peasant/landlord alliance against state penetration (Tilly 1993; Barkey 1991), but they fail to account for the dynamics of rebellious mobilization and identity formation. Instead, an “Oppositional Alignment” model is proposed in this article to characterize the emergent and relational nature of rebellious formation. Due to its weak infrastructural power, the Qing Empire used to rely upon local militias whereas the local societies also tended to build their own forces for community defense and local order maintenance. In the heightened conflicting period, more and more communal groups militarized and made alliance competitively, and opposed each other in a horizontal manner. When the state intervened into these conflicts and took a side between rivalry blocs, originally similar militarized groups diverged as rebellious or repressive forces. Major rebel coalitions finally emerged. With a close analysis of court records including both imperial memorials and edicts as well as local gazetteers, the theory is illustrated by a few major rebellions and particularly the case of the Nien Rebellion formation in north China between 1853 and 1857.

Author

• Yang Zhang, University of Chicago