Religious Violence in the Early Twentieth Century
The early twentieth century was a period of significant turmoil, but relatively little organised violence by or against religion. Although there were smallscale uprisings by religious groups, such as the Vast Yang (Hong yang) and Yellow Yang (Huang yang) teachings, most of the violence was a reaction to the continued decline in public security.[76] The doddering Qing regime finally fell in 1911, and China was formally declared a Republic early the next year.
For a time, the Republic existed in name only; China was in fact divided among competing militarists until the first incomplete military unification under the Nanjing government in 1927. In response to the pressures of insecurity and the often exploitative nature of various powerholders (including the Nanjing regime itself), local society organised and militarised under a number of different networks. Armed groups that had once fed into the Boxers, such as the Red Spears (Hongqiang hui), the Golden Armour (Jinzhong zhao) and the Big Sword Society (Dadao hui), remained a force in local society, occasionally coming to blows with the forces of the central government, regional warlords or each other. Much of the violence was concentrated in places like Huaibei, Shandong and the north-east, all of which were known for popular militarisation. Like the Nian, these groups relied on rituals, protective magic and blood oaths, but were not religious in motivation. These networks grew as the Chinese security situation deteriorated, particularly during the chaos of the Japanese occupation (which gradually expanded between 1931 and 1945).Is there value in treating the growing communist insurgency during this period as a religious rebellion, or at least subjecting it to the same analytical criteria? The religious violence of the nineteenth century had encompassed an extremely diverse array of phenomena: it included influences and variations on the existing eschatology of the Eternal Venerable Mother, but also from Christianity and Islam; it sometimes sought to protect a private group, and at others to transform the world by hastening some culmination of sacred time. The one constant would seem to be social stress, to which religion provides intellectual coherence and organisational form.
Such would have been the view of the Chinese communists themselves, which took seriously Marx's view of religion not simply as a sedation of social discontent (that is, the ‘opiate of the masses'), but also as the seed of proto-revolution, a flawed but expedient method of organising and expressing class interests. The Chinese communists saw two dangers in religious violence: the first was that violence against religion might galvanise the forces of reaction, as had been the case in the early Soviet Union. The Chinese Communist Party, which in the 1920s shifted its organisational emphasis from the cities to the countryside, was thus emphatic that cadres should speak out against religion but not be seen to oppose it violently. The greater danger was that religious rebellion would serve as an imperfect substitute for, and thus sap the strength of, genuine revolution. While the communists saw a kinship with the grievances championed by groups such as the Taipings, they were also very keen to distance themselves from that legacy, not only of apocalyptic and superstitious belief, but also of rebellion in the absence of a revolutionary programme.
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