| Chapter : | Introduction |
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some similarities to “the Somali resistance activity, which was led by the famous shaykh, warrior, and poet Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, known to the Europeans of the time as the Mad Mullah.”3 All these movements shared features that were both utopian and retrogressive or backward looking.
There are many schools of thought on the Taiping movement, and many good scholars have contributed to the study of the Taiping movement with different approaches and interpretations. P. M. Yup argued, in his psychological interpretation of the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan, that the Taiping Rebellion was based on Hong's personal vision, which was caused by mental illness. As an explanation of the success of the movement, however, his argument is questionable. Hong Xiuquan cleverly used East Asian and Christian ideas to obtain leadership and to manipulate his members. He would have been able to destroy the Qing Dynasty and to establish his own kingdom under the name of Shangdi (God), if there had been no Western intervention. Hong's vision was produced by his intense drive to obtain power, and to reduce it to a mental condition may be rather simplistic.
When Karl Marx and subsequent Marxist historians interpreted the Taiping movement, they applied a socioeconomic approach and saw in it a class conflict between landlords and peasants and a revolution against feudalism. The majority of Chinese historians in China followed a Marxist approach. These arguments are not persuasive because the Taipings had religious-millenarian motivations, and they did not have class-consciousness (especially in Marx's terms) as the peasants did. They wanted to rule the people and to be rich landlords. Their mentality was different from the Middle Age European antifeudalistic movement against the Catholic Church and other large landlords because the Chinese remained essentially feudalistic after the Taiping rising.
Rudolf G. Wagner tried to reconstruct some of the categories that informed the Taiping perception of Hong Xiuquan's vision. He asserted that Hong rightly inferred that “old father” in heaven was none other than Shangdi, or God, and that he was mandated by