Since the Qing court relied on the Xiang and Huai armies, which were formed by Han Chinese, to defeat the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and other Han Chinese ministers were successful in fighting against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing court reused Han Chinese even more, and the power of the Han Chinese in the Qing court was greatly increased, and at the same time, the Manchu's control over the army was weakened.
Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and other foreigners have used Europe and the United States to suppress the Taiping Army, have seen the Western military power, prompted the later foreign affairs movement.
When the Taiping Army revolted in Jiangnan, a large number of rich families and civilians fled to Shanghai and Hong Kong for refuge, which to some extent contributed to the development of the two places.
According to Chinese scholar Wang Xiaoqiu and Japanese scholar Yoshihira Hirozawa, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement distracted to a certain extent the deepening of the colonization of Japan by the Western powers, relieved the pressure of the Rebellious clans, and facilitated the development of the Rebellious movement.
Scholarly evaluation
The Xinhai Revolution and its after a period of the revolutionaries mostly respected the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to fight for national liberation of the courage and achievements, on the whole, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom evaluation is very high, the national government more on the prohibition of vilification of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom has issued a special program.
After 1949, there were basically no scholars in Taiwan specializing in the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom because of the insinuations made by the KMT authorities against China. Taiwan scholars' evaluation of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom history is represented by Hu Shi, a scholar of nationalism, and Kuo Ting-yi, a scholar of modern history: Hu Shi believes that the "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Rebellion," which prevented China from regaining its vitality for several decades, should be condemned, while Kuo Ting-yi's case is more complicated, as he was influenced by the fact that most of the early patriarchs of the Kuomintang, as represented by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, were known as the successors of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. In his early years, he was influenced by the environment in which most of the early Kuomintang leaders, represented by Sun Yat-sen, regarded themselves as the successors of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and called the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom the "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolution or Rebellion", placing the word "revolution" before the word "rebellion", but his viewpoint changed significantly after he arrived in Taiwan, believing that the "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolution" should be condemned. After arriving in Taiwan, there was a significant change in his viewpoint, which was that "the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a low-grade superstition, an absolute violent group, and a theocratic, totalitarian, and ignorant rule, which only aimed to satisfy its own unlimited desires, without the slightest regard for the welfare of the general public, and which resulted in a land full of bones and thorns and the loss of at least 20 to 50 million lives. The provinces in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, which were famous for their affluence, were particularly hard hit, with no place left untouched by fire, no household left untouched by captivity, and the deaths were total. Survivors also have no color, moaning and dying. It was really a catastrophic tragedy in Chinese history." ("The Totalitarian Rule of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom")
In short, Taiwan's praise and criticism of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is more negative than positive, with the highest evaluation of women's rights, disobedience to the Qing court, the national interest, the spirit of fighting for ideals, and the prohibition of tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and gambling; and the worst evaluation of the men's and women's pavilions, the rule of theocracy, the feudal system, the brutality of internal strife, and the destruction of folk beliefs and Confucian culture; and the worst evaluation of the economy. Confucian culture; economic reforms and the national defense system of integrating the military and the people were rated as flat and neutral.
The top echelon of the Kuomintang
Sun Yat-sen: "Zhu Yuanzhang and Hong Xiuquan each started out as a man of cloth, carrying a three-foot sword and expelling foreigners, and were located in Nanjing. Zhu Ming not a few years. Amami Han's homeland, passed on for hundreds of years and the Royal Sacrifice suddenly declined: Hong dynasty is not more than ten years, and the body and died. The uneducated, singing all sorts of fallacies, is Zhu (Yuanzhang) non-Hong (Xiuquan), is the cover according to the success or failure of the great and the great." "This will be a foreign subterranean chaos, heaven and earth tragic militarism, people do not want to live, the responsibility of clarifying the world, so that the Zhu Ming of the line is not extinct, the peace of the division is not extinguished, it is like the Han family world, the government has been out of the relaxation of the self-easily." The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fifty years ago was purely a representative of the national revolution, but it was only a national revolution, and after the revolution, it was still not free from authoritarianism, and such revolutions were not considered to be successful."
Chiang Kai-shek said, "Hong's fall was due to the fact that he knew that there was a nation but not a people's right, and that he knew that there was a monarch but not a democracy."
Jiang Zhongzheng: "In the past, Hong Yang's ancestors rose up in the southeast to fight against the Manchus, and although their ambition was not yet realized and they were suddenly defeated, their nationalistic ideas were so powerful that they were enough to be remembered in history." The war of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was the first great war in the East in the nineteenth century. The history of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is the first glorious history of the nineteenth century in the East."
Bai Chongxi: "Our country since the Jin Dynasty, the foreigner generation Xing Chi County, China was repeatedly ravaged, the Manchurian Qing Dynasty rose in the Northeast, more than two hundred years in China, during which the hot-blooded soldiers, indignation of the Chinese Xuxu drowning, holding the recovery of the strong figure, at any time and any place to the rebels are not documented, and to promote the death of its to enlighten the thinking of the future generations, no better than Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. According to Hong, Yang sons from the field, unveiled the uprising, across more than ten provinces, lasted more than ten years, change the right date, easy to dress, set the system, the opening of the examination, the scale of the establishment of the country, has also been roughly prepared. Although the victory or defeat is not always, the rise and fall of soaring, but the majesty of the national thought, the collection of extraordinary ability, the greatness of the revolutionary construction, the new system of good governance measures, Bing Bing Linlin, so far there is still business."
Mainland scholars evaluate
The Chinese People's **** and the State in 1949 after the founding of the country, recognizes and agrees with Hong Xiuquan's advanced class under the leadership of the peasants' revolt, overthrowing the Manchu Qing dynasty's movement, and thus by the official attention of the Chinese ****, the centennial anniversary of the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in 1951, the People's Daily, by the pen of Hu Jiao, titled "Commemorating the centennial anniversary of the Taiping Revolution," an editorial, in addition, and recognized its revolutionary movement advocating the four equities. One of the reliefs on the Monument to the People's Heroes in Beijing's Tiananmen Square is based on the Jintian Uprising. In mainland China, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom once became an obvious subject of study, and most of China's senior history scholars from the 1950s to the 1980s were involved in this field, with hundreds of millions of words of collated and excavated documents and published academic papers, and the people involved in the investigation, study, and discussion of the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom ranged from specialists and scholars to ordinary peasants and citizens. In general, the evaluation of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Luo Ergang's "History of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" represents the mainstream evaluation of mainland Chinese scholars on Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the twentieth century, and its basic viewpoints include:
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom opened the prelude to China's democratization revolution, and put forward the basic program of China's democratization revolution. For example, it prepared to establish and develop modern enterprises of a capitalist nature, introduced Western science and technology, opened schools, set up newspapers, raised the Scholar's and Citizen's Association, created a democratic political system in which the people elected township officials and dismissed administrators, overthrew the idol of feudal society, Confucius, and issued a celestial calendar, advocating the principles of "documenting the truth" and "making things clear at a glance". The Chinese people wanted to establish China as a new country "on a par" with Europe and the United States.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom promoted the development of social productive forces. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom promulgated the Tianchao Tianmu system, abolished the feudal landlord land ownership system, according to the specific situation, in response to the aspirations of the peasants, adopted the policy of "sharecropping and grain payment", and issued to the peasants of the field certificate measures, and received the effect of "ploughing people with the field", so that the south of the Yangtze River area The increase in the number of homesteaders generally led to a number of changes in the rural production relations. The increase in the number of peasant farmers was a favorable factor for the activation of the commodity economy. After the revolution, many of the landlords "regarded the field as a fearful path" and invested part of their capital in industry and commerce, which became a source of national capital. The Taiping Revolution dealt a heavy blow to the feudal landlord land ownership system, promoted the development of social productive forces, and facilitated the emergence of modern industries with national capital.
The far-reaching influence and exciting revolutionary spirit of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom played the role of a great locomotive of historical progress in China's modern history. The achievements of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in fighting against invaders and rulers have been widely spread among the people, inspiring the Chinese people to wage a heroic struggle against imperialism and feudalism.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom paved the way for the Xinhai Revolution. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom swept away the Eight Banners and Green Battalions of the Qing Dynasty, which relied on the support of the Xiang Army of the Han landowner Zeng Guofan and the Huai Army of Li Hongzhang to maintain its dying rule. After the defeat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the military and financial power of the country was divided into the hands of the Xiang army of Zeng Guofan's line and the Huai army of Li Hongzhang's line, resulting in a situation where the central government of the late Qing Dynasty had no power, and the governors of the provinces were under the dictatorship of the governors. Due to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom broke the Qing dynasty's ruling machine, Aisin Gioro's imperial power in decline, it is impossible to establish a strong central government, thus losing the power to control the local. So the Wuchang Uprising, the whole country responded, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is not only a direct influence on the Xinhai Revolution, but also paved the way for the Xinhai Revolution.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom centrally demonstrated the heroism and patriotism of the Chinese people in opposing foreign invasions, and prevented the Western capitalist invaders from their attempts to rapidly turn China into a colony, so that they understood that the Chinese people were not to be bullied, and that they would never be able to directly rule over such a heroic and strong Chinese people, thus slowing down the process of semi-colonization of China.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had great world significance. In the middle of the 19th century, when the western capitalist countries were invading the Asian countries, the people of Asia set off the first climax of the national liberation movement, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom revolution, which was the flood peak of this Asian struggle against colonialism, gave impetus to the national liberation movement in Asia, and inspired the struggles of the oppressed classes and the oppressed peoples all over the world.
It is worth noting that with the change of political philosophy in mainland China from "liberation of the lower classes" to "harmony of society", the "elite class" has become more interested in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Boxer Rebellion and the Xinhai Revolution, which were previously revered, There has been a significant shift in the caliber of the "elite's" assessment of the previously revered "violent revolutions" such as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Xinhai Revolution, from glorifying the revolt of the lower classes to accusing the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of destruction, the Boxer Rebellion of ignorance and backwardness, and the Xinhai Revolution of aborting peaceful reforms and impeding the advancement of China's history. Into the twenty-first century, Xia Chuntao, Shi style and a group of mainland scholars on the one hand, continue to advocate for the previous evaluation of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom evaluation of the phenomenon of exaltation, beautification to be revealed, reflection, on the other hand, is opposed to going from one extreme to the other, such as Xia Chuntao in the "criticism of one-sided glorification of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of the bias is still faintly visible," at the same time Pointed out: "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom history research 'cold inside and hot outside' is another phenomenon that is remarkable. In recent years, some scholars outside the circle of guest research, its assertion is not not enlightenment, but often flow in bias, denial of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, for Zeng Guofan to reopen the case of the point of view was fired up, appeared on the previous research over the 'left' place to rebound too much of the tendency" (50 years of research on the history of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the twentieth century of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) (Research on the History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the Twentieth Century), that "the religious "cult" of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom has obvious flaws in the thesis. Instead of first discussing religion, lacking due research and understanding of the religion of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and distinguishing the different meanings of the word "cult" in different eras, the theorist avoids the important points and lists some historical facts one-sidedly, and makes inferences in the way of substituting one point for another.... ...The theorist's intention is not to discuss the religion of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, but to use the word "cult" to negate the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" ("Discussing and Correcting the "Cult" of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom"), and the historical formula is In the "let the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to restore the original face of" an article exposes the historiography for a long time on the stream of Hong Xiuquan glorification at the same time, stressed that can not be "because of Hong Xiuquan's perversity on the denial of the Taiping Great Power of all the people, including Feng Yunshan, Shi Dakai, Hong Rengan and so on," pointing out that "for the Taiping Great Power, a generalized affirmation is neither right nor a generalized denial, for different times, different circumstances, different characters, different events, comment separately, should affirm the affirmation, should be denied the denial" ("To the two sides of the controversy over the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom").
Evaluation by Overseas Scholars
Jane Yewen was one of the few scholars who had conducted in-depth and extensive academic research on the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom during the period of war and chaos, and he moved to Hong Kong and then overseas after 1949, taking a more neutral stance than the scholars in Taiwan and the mainland. On the one hand, he praised the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for its political advancement, love for the people and strict military discipline, which was a glorious page in the history of national revolution, and on the other hand, he thought that "objectively" "in the whole history of our country, if internal and external troubles are taken into account, in terms of destructive and destructive power, the revolutionary movement of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is only inferior to that of the Japanese invasion nowadays. In the whole history of our country, in terms of destructive and destructive power, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolutionary Movement is only inferior to the present Japanese invasion, and its predecessor is unrivaled".
Other countries and Europe and the United States on the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom also have a certain research, but because of the language, cultural differences, as well as more than a "history of the line", its results and impact are limited in Europe and the United States scholars, British scholars Kerwin Nan (C. A. Curwen) can be regarded as the premier experts on the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, his history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Among European and American scholars, the British scholar C. A. Curwen is the leading expert on the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, whose basic view on the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a revolutionary movement initiated by millions of poor peasants in order to survive and pursue equality and fairness with the spirit of sacrifices, but due to the objective limitations, the system of power did not reflect this ideal well. ("About Li Xiu Cheng and his <Autobiography>")
Evaluation of Causes
From the point of view of causes, the movement was anti-authoritarian and righteous
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement is considered the highest peak of the traditional peasant uprisings
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which used to hold a double halo in China's history textbooks: both the "the culmination of traditional peasant uprisings from Chen Sheng and Wu Guang to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" and "the largest of the three major revolutionary climaxes in modern Chinese history".
When it comes to peasant revolts, textbooks generally consider them to be caused by class conflicts within society, and the conflicts here refer to those between the peasant class and the landlord class in feudal society. In the final analysis, the peasants' revolt was to fight the landlords and divide the land. For the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement, the "Heavenly Mouland System", in which "all fields under heaven were divided into nine classes according to their yield", represented the advancement of its "land revolution", which was highly praised for a period of time in the 1950s and later.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement was also motivated by the conflict between civil society and the authoritarian court, and was justified.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement, of course, followed the same pattern of peasant revolts (or "civil unrest") that has always characterized China. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a religious revolt with anti-Manchu Han nationalism as its main rallying cry, and one of its social demands was the traditional resistance to the levying of food and taxes. Another cause of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement was the conflict between the local natives and the Hakka people. Hong Xiuquan, Feng Yunshan, Yang Xiuqing, Xiao Chaogui, Shi Dakai and Wei Changhui were all Hakka people. Therefore, some people said that this had nothing to do with the government, but was just an armed fight between the "natives and the Hakka". In fact, this is not true. The Hakka people from Guangdong to Guangxi were always rejected by the local government and local natives. After the Opium War, a large number of unemployed Guangdong nomads, soldiers and soldiers into Guangxi to make a living, and war reparations caused by the rise in the price of silver, heavy taxes, the original tense chain of survival is on the verge of breaking, exacerbating the pressure on the survival of the Hakka people and the local natives. 1849 Guangxi drought, and then the following year a large-scale outbreak of epidemics, so that the livelihood of the people of Guizhong, coupled with the cut-off of commercial routes, banditry, and in order to cope with the riot of Tiandiwei around the official government and in the Zhengzhou City, the official government of Guangxi, and then in the first half of the year the government of Guangdong. In order to cope with the riots in various places, the government also increased the tax in addition to the positive tax, the Hakka people and the local natives had to survive, in order to fight for a mouthful of rice and grain, to swing the steel knife to the competition for food "foreigners".
In summary, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement, like all large-scale peasant uprisings, had a just cause, and the problems of process, means and final destination could not negate this.
Evaluation of the process and results
The process and results of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement are not praiseworthy
The Tianchao Tianmu System was not implemented, and was not progressive per se
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement has always been most praiseworthy in two ways, the first for the Tianchao Tianmu System, and the second for the Zizhi Xinzhu (New Essay on Politics).
In fact, the Tianchao Tianmu System can almost be said to be an "internal document", although it is one of the official books of the Kingdom of Heaven "authorized to issue", and at least three times, but it seems that the number of copies printed each time is very small, and at that time not many people have seen it, and it is a very important part of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's history. It is also seldom mentioned in the numerous historical materials related to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
And even when it was actually implemented, there were major problems with the system. It didn't actually advocate "fighting the landlords and dividing up the fields," but rather stipulated that all the land in the country, along with the peasants on it, was the property of the Kingdom of Heaven or the King of Heaven, and that the country was organized into a highly disciplined, extra-large-scale military farm, or even a correctional farm, so to speak. Peasants in the tight military control by officials at all levels "supervise as a farm", and all the harvest in addition to each family to leave "can be connected to the new grain" a little bit of food rations are all collected into the state treasury for the "meritorious and other ministers of the world to eat heaven's pay! The whole harvest was returned to the state treasury for "the ministers of merit and other ministers of the world.
The "New Essay on Capitalism" was indeed very progressive, but it was always put on the shelf, just for show
The "New Essay on Capitalism", which was known as the two major platforms of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom together with the "Heavenly Mou System", was also a proof that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement was very progressive. With a strong capitalist color of the "new chapter of capitalism" is also really in the forefront of the times, very progressive. Unfortunately, it is much less influential than the "Tianchao Tianmu System", "New Essay on Capitalism" is Hong Rengan's personal signature, and does not belong to the "purpose of permission to promulgate the edict".
From the arrival of Tianjing in April 1859 to the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in June 1864, Hong Rengan lived in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for five years, with only one and a half years of greater power, and after February 1861, his power was weakened again and again, and he saw that the building was about to fall and was unable to do anything about it. So, although his ideas were exceptional at the time, they were only the result of his personal wisdom, and it is clearly inappropriate to use this to label the entire Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which, in fact, did nothing to capitalize China.
Hong Xiuquan's Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was more economically conservative and politically authoritarian than the Qing court
Marx was delighted to hear of the victorious march of the Taiping army in 1853 and had high hopes for the emergence of a new China in the East, but in 1862, when he learned of the tyrannical rule of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, he lamented that. "They did not give themselves any task except to change the dynasty." This is like many peasant revolts in ancient China, in which, after achieving victory, the insurgents transformed themselves into tyrannical rulers.
It is true that in terms of Taiping's practices, it was more economically conservative and politically authoritarian than the Qing court ever was. If this is because it was a wartime state can be ignored, but the cultural control of the dynasty is even more unprecedented, can be said to be much more authoritarian than the history of the first emperor Qin Shi Huang who is famous for burning books to curb the speech. From the time of the Jintian uprising, it implemented a policy of banning and burning all "heresies" other than God-worship, including traditional Chinese Confucian texts, and it burned books and smashed temples all the way to Nanjing. And in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom existed for 14 years, but 50 kinds of books, its cultural closure can be seen.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom did not look to the West to find the truth, but we can not say that this is a cult movement, not a revolution
Because of the "New Essay on Zizheng", and even more so because of the "faith in Christ", the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement was hit with the color of the "Westernization", and even the "Westernization" of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Hong Xiuquan was also evaluated as a figure who searched for truth from the West in some books. However, the "westernization" of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom lay in the fact that Hong Xiuquan established a Christian theocracy rather than in the introduction of any worthwhile political and economic system. It has been argued that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement was a cult rather than a peasant uprising.
While Hong Xiuquan's "worship of God" was still very different from orthodox Christianity, it was no more different than the difference between the many heresies of Christianity and the mainstream. If you say that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is a cult movement rather than a revolution, it is obviously biased, Hong Xiuquan engaged in cultural authoritarianism and other acts and cults have nothing to do with, and from the cause, it is clearly a revolutionary rather than for the religious ideological conflict, it can only be said that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement is an abortive revolution, a failed uprising.
But the bad things about the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom cannot be used to disprove how good the Qing Dynasty was
The despotism, cruelty, and corruption of the Qing Dynasty will not go away because of what the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was not
The mention of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Zeng Guofan, is an inextricable figure, and once you say that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was not good enough, it seems to be a reversal of the case for Zeng Guofan. -Hong Xiuquan went from a heavenly god to a devil, while Zeng Guofan changed from a traitor and executioner to Zeng Wenzheng Gong, who was praised by everyone and full of wisdom.
According to scholars' study of historical data, between 1851 and 1865, after a brutal civil war between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Qing army, China's population declined by more than 110 million people, or 26 percent of the total population. This was done both by the Qing army and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. And historians such as Jane Yewen have used a lot of historical materials to prove that the official corruption of the Qing Dynasty and the brutality of the official army at that time were much worse than that of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. There are historical records that every time Zeng Guofan captured prisoners, he personally authorized that all of them should be plucked out and lynched, so it can be seen that he was cruel.
So, you can't say that the Qing Dynasty or Zeng Guofan was honorable and great from all the things that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was not. The Qing is still as corrupt and authoritarian as ever, as oppressive as ever, and as much in need of revolution as ever.
Reflection Summary
Evaluation of this history can not be either positive or negative, or to do a simple compromise
Many historical events and the evaluation of historical figures are faced with two extremes, either to be held up to heaven or to be depreciated to hell, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, there are "great peasant revolt" and "extreme cult groups". In the case of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, there were two diametrically opposed evaluations: "great peasant uprising" and "extreme cult group". For example, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen praised the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, he was implicitly proclaiming the legitimacy of the revolution.
However, when we look at the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom today, we can no longer swing between the two extremes, nor can it be a simple compromise. We cannot just call out the tyrant and eulogize the mob, nor can we conversely just call out the mob and argue that the rulers were justified in their repression.
In any case, from the starting point, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement is righteous, only the process, means and consequences of the revolution appeared to be a big deviation, can not be used to say that the revolution is bad and undesirable. Many scholars believe that if Hong Rengan's New Essay on Ruling had been implemented, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and China at that time would have been in a different light.
Evaluating the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom cannot be either/or. No matter what the process and outcome of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement was, and no matter what Hong Xiuquan was like as a person, it cannot be reversed to say that the Qing Dynasty was good, that its suppression was just, and that the Qing Dynasty did not need to be revolutionized.
The tragedy of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fully demonstrated that the peasant class could not lead the Chinese revolution to victory because of the limitations of class and time. To accomplish the overthrow of the reactionary rule of the Qing government, we must overthrow it in one breath and not give it a period of recovery. The task of saving the country and the people could only be accomplished by opposing both feudalism and the capitalist powers. The subsequent opening up of the revolutionary road of socialism with Chinese characteristics precisely drew on the lessons of the failures of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Xinhai Revolution, etc., and achieved final victory. The glorious achievements of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom will always inspire the Chinese people.