Christianity in the Middle Kingdom: Taiping Rebels and the Synthesis of Chinese Metaphysics with Christianity

Abstract

The Taiping Rebellion played a major role in weakening the Qing dynasty and shaping the political transformations that followed its decline. The Taipings’ embrace of Christianity has long divided both Christian observers and secular scholars. At the center of this debate is whether Taiping theology should be understood merely as a deviation from Protestant orthodoxy or as a creative vernacular reconstruction shaped by Chinese cosmology, ethics, and late Qing crisis. This paper argues that although the Taipings did not conform to Trinitarian orthodoxy, they nonetheless developed a distinctive localized form of Christianity. Drawing on close readings of Hong Xiuquan’s edicts, poems, and commentaries, this study shows how Taiping thinkers redefined God, heaven, kinship, and kingship through concepts intelligible to nineteenthcentury Chinese audiences. This localized faith was one which spoke to the moral and discursive frameworks indigenous to the social conditions of China. Seen in this light, the movement reveals how foreign religious ideas were localized in modern China and why the Taiping case remains central to debates on heterodoxy, indigenization, and political theology.