How to evaluate Hong Xiuquan
For Hong Xiuquan, in order to correctly evaluate him, we must first face him squarely and rationally look at him and the historical environment in which he is located. It is not possible to deify or demonize him excessively, but to treat him as an ordinary person in order to evaluate Hong Xiuquan objectively and fairly.
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Hong Xiuquan's greatest achievement in life was to guide the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement. Hong Xiuquan led the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to capture more than 600 cities in 14 years, dealing a heavy blow to the reactionary forces inside and outside China at that time. Secondly, unlike the previous peasant uprisings, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had its own systematic revolutionary program and specific reform measures, and after fixing the capital tianjing, Hong Xiuquan promulgated the "Tianchao Tianmu System", which showed the desire of the peasant masses to solve the land problem at that time.
First of all, after the establishment of the capital Tianjing, Hong Xiuquan's thinking underwent a huge change and became dim and decaying, from a revolutionary to a ruler, so that the nature of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom changed from a revolutionary regime to a new feudal regime, and such a change in style was also the main source of the internal contradictions that led to the later Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Second, hong xiuquan was nepotistic in the late Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and arbitrarily crowned the king, resulting in chaos in the late Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and too many princes. Moreover, in his later years, Hong Xiuquan not only had a strong sense of feudalism, but also fell into superstitious thoughts and could not extricate himself.
Hong Xiuquan led the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, making him a celebrity of a generation. After all, Because Hong Xiuquan was deeply influenced by feudal ideas, he began to be proud after the peasants achieved certain achievements in the use of it, and he had ambitions for power, so he would call himself the Heavenly King.
Hong Xiuquan's road to fame
Hong Xiuquan is a great celebrity in Chinese history, and he is famous because he caused a great uprising, which mixed up most of China and almost overturned the two-hundred-year-old Qing Dynasty. Now that I think about it, Hong Xiuquan is a person with a narrow mind and a flat mind, and the only place that is different from ordinary people is that there is some out-of-the-ordinary neuroticism, and there are more hallucinations. Such a temperament was not good for supporting a family or getting rich, but in China at that time, if you created a sect of your own, it was easier to win the worship of some fools and fools. It was a coincidence that such an opportunity really fell on Hong Xiuquan's head.
Originally, as a scholar of the three villages, Hong Xiuquan had to take the right path, Xiu Cai and Ju people were admitted all the way, but first, the public talent was average, and second, the Pearl River Delta at that time, as a Hakka, had no status, and the number of schools left to them by the counties was quite small, so Hong Xiuquan was repeatedly defeated, and finally the fire was burning and burning, and he was angry.
If it weren't for his unusual neuroticism, Hong Xiuquan could have been like many of the fallen first movers, while planting land, while teaching a few students to pass the day, but he couldn't, he had to find a way to get ahead, the right way was not working, so he had to find the left side of the door. At this time, the Christian popular pamphlet obtained from a trip to Guangzhou for the exam became an introduction. The missionary pamphlet "Persuasion to the World" written by Liang Fa was written by many historians on the mainland who studied the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and it was not until 1979 that they saw the true face. The text on this pamphlet, no matter how I look at it, feels similar to Hong Xiuquan's, not only many nouns, but also tastes like it.
Because of "Persuasion to the World", Hong Xiuquan defected to Christianity. At that time, under the American missionary Luo Xiaoquan, who was preaching in Guangzhou, Hong Xiuquan was definitely an excellent believer, but because of his unusual neuroticism, he often made some out-of-line remarks, which made Luo Xiaoquan feel a little unreliable, so Hong Xiuquan did not receive baptism for several months—organizationally it seemed that he still wanted to test him. However, Hong Xiuquan can't wait, here is not to raise a grandfather, there is a place to raise a grandfather, there is no place to raise a grandfather, he is a good grandfather. In this way, Hong Xiuquan used a little Christian knowledge he had learned to set up a worship society.
This cottage version of Christianity, in addition to also worshipping God, is actually a Chinese folk religion, and there are not many such sects in China, and the vast majority of them are the place where the founders seek money and women or personal worship. At that time, as long as someone created a religion, said something different, or revealed a small hand of kung fu, qigong was good, there would be people who believed, believers would worship the sect leader as usual, Hong Xiuquan was in HuaXian County, and also got such a small-scale worship. Unfortunately, the Hakka in this place were small in power, and there were many squires, and the local squires could not tolerate such a Hakka cult, so Hong Xiuquan and his backbone believers had to go to poor and marginal places, and in this way, he and Feng Yunshan came to the Zijing Mountains of Guangxi.
In this place of liangguang, the natives occupy the plains, the Hakka occupy the barren mountains, and the trend of the main guests has been like this for many years. The poor people of Bauhinia Mountain, mostly Hakka, came to teach such a person of their own, which was very popular. Usually, the Hakka people on the mountain can't stop fighting with the natives under the mountain, big fights and small fights, always fight, come to a sect, have their own organization, the war is definitely more vigorous, under the stimulation, the original dominant Turkish people rebound more strongly. Most of the official government was toward the natives, so they suppressed the Hakka again and again, and when the conflict was fierce, the black hand of the leading core of the Worship of God Society was blackmailed, Feng Yunshan was arrested, and Hong Xiuquan fled. The local believers took the opportunity to rise up and bring in the sorcery of the séance, not only stabilizing the position, but also growing their power.
Later, although the lawsuit was temporarily settled, the local forces of the Worship of God Society, Yang Xiuqing and Xiao Chaogui, had become anti-guests and had become the head of the family. Although the Sect Leader was still the nervous Hong Xiuquan, Yang Xiuqing, who was not nervous at all, as long as he was happy and rolled on the ground, he would become a true god god. Of course, the turk-Hakka conflict could not really be quelled, and the expanded Hakka worship society could not be tolerated by the local squires and the government, and the conflict continued to expand, and even the rich Hakka people Wei Changhui and Shi Dakai were involved. While fighting and walking, to the end, the worship of God will have to do the opposite. It seems that whether rich or poor or class cannot withstand the geographical division, Chinese, the most important thing is geography.