Career Options
Jason Kuznicki on Jul 25th 2006 05:47 pm |
Regarding my post on the academic job market, a trusted source writes,
In the 19th c. in China, of course, one disaffected degree-holder launched the Taiping Rebellion, which killed a few million people. So there are always career options.
Options, options…
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“A few million people” hardly captures it. The Taiping Rebellion’s death toll is calculated by some to be upwards of 20 million (counting both battle and civilian deaths). Entire cities equivalent in size to major Western cities of the time were simply leveled and their inhabitants slaughtered wholesale. It was an unprecedented calamity for China and the bloodshed is all the more remarkable considering that the weapons which made comparable death tolls possible in WWI and WWII had not yet been invented. I often encounter people who wonder why the Chinese government is so touchy about Falun Gong, and why they can’t just let these people practice their slightly weird religion in peace. The Taiping Rebellion is the answer. China has had bad experiences with slightly weird religions.
China has had bad experiences with slightly weird religions.
Of course, so did Europe. Consider the Munster anabaptists, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and Savonarola, to name just three incidents. True, these aren’t quite so recent as Taiping, but a similar amount of time — roughly a century and a half — passed between these and the writings of Locke. None are at all as large as Taiping, either, but then, China does have many more examples of working religious tolerance to follow. It’s not a radical new experiment anymore.
I agree with what you say, and from a pragmatic view it is far from clear that suppressing weird religions is ever really successful (after all, the imperial government in Peking at the time tried to suppress the Taipings and that didn’t work out too well). I pretty much buy into the idea that the best way to delegitimize bad ideas is to let them wither in the sunlight, rather than lend credence to the people who say “The state is suppressing us; that PROVES there’s something to what we’re saying!” All I wanted to say in the initial post was that China’s policy about Falun Gong and other religious sects has a recent historical context which can’t be ignored.
Another interesting distinguishing factor with the Taiping Rebellion was its sheer insanity. The Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War both had significant (and even dominant, in the latter case) dimensions of power politics. The TYW was as much about which side of the newly-fractured Hapsburg dynasty would dominate Europe as it was about religion (hence Catholic France, led by Richelieu, joining on the side of the German Protestants!). As far as I can tell, the Taiping Rebellion wasn’t about much of anything other than religious fanaticism and bloodlust. That arguably makes it scarier.