Bibliographical Essay

The first stop for any topic relating to violence in China is the excellent ‘Violence in Chinese Culture' bibliography maintained online by Barend ter Haar, http://faculty.orinst.ox.ac.uk/terhaar/violence.htm.

The legal regulation of religion both before and during the nineteenth century is introduced in Yonglin Jiang, The Mandate of Heaven and the Great Ming Code (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011) and Edward Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule, Sinica Leidensia 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). The step-by-step reaction of the mid-Qing to a religious threat is expertly outlined in Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Much of the content of this chapter is discussed in greater detail in Thomas David DuBois, Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

The most authoritative short account of the Taiping Rebellion remains Philip A. Kuhn, ‘The Taiping Rebellion', in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 264-317. Other influential works include Jonathan Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). More recently, Stephen R. Platt has written specifically on the declining years of the rebellion, and its inability to hold on to its early gains: Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Of specific interest is the multivolume collection of expertly compiled and translated documents, Franz H.

On the larger outbreak of White Lotus style millenarianism, see Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Although this book and her subsequent Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) record events that took place before the mid nineteenth century, both capture perfectly the interplay of beliefs, rumours and ideals that continued to coalesce in religious violence over the century. Sweeping overviews of the period may be found in Shao Yong, Zhongguo huidaomen [Chinese Sectarians] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1997) and Qin Baoqi, Qingmo Minchu mimi shehui de tuibian (The Late Qing and Early Republican Decline of Secret Societies) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2001).

Richard Shek traces the progress of smaller-scale outbreaks of violence in two important articles: ‘The Revolt of the Zaili, Jindan Sects in Rehe (Jehol), 1891', Modern China 6.2 (1980), 161-96, and ‘Millenarianism without Rebellion: The Huangtiandao in North China', Modern China 8.3 (1982), 305-36. On the 1891 rebellion, see also Cecily McCaffrey, ‘From Chaos to a New Order: Rebellion and Ethnic Regulation in Late Qing Inner Mongolia', Modern China 37.5 (2011), 528-56.

The volume Popular Religion and Shamanism edited by Ma Xisha and Meng Huiying (Brill Religious Studies in Contemporary China Collection 1, Leiden: Brill, 2011) presents the translated work of a number of important Chinese scholars, including classic articles by Han Bingfang on the Yellow Cliff Teaching, Lu Yao on the origins of the Society of Righteousness and Harmony, and Zhou Yumin on the early relationship between the Society of Righteousness and Harmony and the Way of Penetrating Unity.

On the Muslim rebellions, see Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), David G.

In English, the two classic accounts of the origins of the Boxer Uprising are Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). A volume edited by Robert Bickers and R. G. Tiedemann expands this field to include both Chinese and foreign perspectives on the progress and suppression of the movement: The Boxers, China, and the World (Lanham; Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

Much has been written on the development of religion in the early twentieth century but, as yet, little on violence by or against religion specifically. On the 1951 campaign against the Way of Penetrating Unity, see Thomas David DuBois, The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 127-51. On the development of official attitudes towards religion in the People's Republic, see the essays in Lu Daji and Gong Xuezeng (eds.), Marxism and Religion (Brill Religious Studies in Contemporary China Collection 4, Leiden: Brill, 2014). The interpretation of Marxism or Maoism as religion was first raised by Joseph Kitagawa in 1974. For recent analysis, see David E. Apter, ‘Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion', Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 22.1 (2006), 5-37, and Mark Gamsa, ‘The Religious Dimension of Politics in Maoist China', Religion Compass 3.3 (2009), 459-70.

On the resurgence of qigong since the 1980s, see David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). On Falungong specifically, see David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008) and Benjamin Penny, The Religion of Falun Gong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). On the early history of the True Jesus Church, see Melissa Wei-tsing Inouye, ‘Miraculous Modernity: Charismatic Traditions and Trajectories within Chinese Protestant Christianity', in Jan Kiely, Vincent Goossaert and John Lagerwey (eds.), Modern Chinese Religion, vol. ii, 1850-2015 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 884-919. On the mutated resurgence of one branch as the violent Eastern Lightning, see Emily Dunn, ‘“Cult”, Church, and the CCP: Introducing Eastern Lightning', Modern China 35.1 (2009), 96-119.