Taiping Rebellion is successful.

Taiping Rebellion in China was lead by a Christian Sect and seeked conversion across China. What would change in Chinese history had it been successful?
 

Olmeka

Banned
They based their army structure on religious ideology, rather then strategy.
This wouldn't turn good without some major changes.

Also the beliefs of their leader were that they should conquer not only China, but in the longer term the whole world.
 
Taiping Rebellion in China was lead by a Christian Sect and seeked conversion across China. What would change in Chinese history had it been successful?

A difficult to awnser question . One thing that can affect how this turn out is whether the Radical Leaders of the Taiping leaders rapidly met their end .

Furthermore , the worse case scenario for China here is for a Russian Xinjiang and Gansu and Manchuria , a Japanese Eastern China , stretching from Liaodong all the way to perhaps Fujian , a British Colony of Guangdong ,Sichuan , Yunan and Guangxi , and Perhaps French Control of Parts of southern China , like Southern Guandong and Guangxi and Hainan Island .

Combined this with a Fashodan War Scenario , and assuming Alexander II still GETS assasinanted , and you will have a Nippon Wank .
 
Seeing as the Meiji Restoration happened around three years after the last major battle in the rebellion (Battle of Nanking), Japan isn't in a good position to grab territory from China. Furthermore, both Britain and France provided aid to the Qin, including troops, commanders, and training.

Even when the Taiping had a 5:1 numerical advantage, they lost to the Qing.


But possibly, if another European great power gets involved (as will happen in my AAR) on Hong's side, it could go better for the Heavenly Kingdom. I don't think there really is a realistic chance for the Taiping to conquer all of China. Possibly by allying with the Nien rebels, and without Mongol involvement on the Qing side, Taiping could have conquered souther China while Zhang Lexing topples the Qing and begins his own dynasty in the north. Russia would almost certainly seize the chance to annex the Amur region, Manchuria, maybe Mongolia.

China's history would be massively altered, the rebellion cost millions of lives and probably more would die. Southern China would probably collapse as Hong destroyed the Confucianism and related institutions there, attempting to force his heretical Christianity on the people. Hong and his successors probably wouldn't have any allies, and rule a much poorer southern China.
 
Seeing as the Meiji Restoration happened around three years after the last major battle in the rebellion (Battle of Nanking), Japan isn't in a good position to grab territory from China. Furthermore, both Britain and France provided aid to the Qin, including troops, commanders, and training.

Even when the Taiping had a 5:1 numerical advantage, they lost to the Qing.


But possibly, if another European great power gets involved (as will happen in my AAR) on Hong's side, it could go better for the Heavenly Kingdom. I don't think there really is a realistic chance for the Taiping to conquer all of China. Possibly by allying with the Nien rebels, and without Mongol involvement on the Qing side, Taiping could have conquered souther China while Zhang Lexing topples the Qing and begins his own dynasty in the north. Russia would almost certainly seize the chance to annex the Amur region, Manchuria, maybe Mongolia.

China's history would be massively altered, the rebellion cost millions of lives and probably more would die. Southern China would probably collapse as Hong destroyed the Confucianism and related institutions there, attempting to force his heretical Christianity on the people. Hong and his successors probably wouldn't have any allies, and rule a much poorer southern China.
have a link to that story?;):cool:
 
Even when the Qing were outnumbered 5-1, they still won?

Are you sure?

Perhaps units like the Ever-Victorious Army, but I was under the impression the Qing got slapped around most of the time.
 

MrP

Banned
If the Taiping Rebellion succeeds, from what I've read, China is majorly fucked.
 
Could someone describe just *why* China would be screwed up?

Not disagreeing, just curious. It seems the dominant consensus is "f***ed" but nobody said why.
 
Could someone describe just *why* China would be screwed up?

Not disagreeing, just curious. It seems the dominant consensus is "f***ed" but nobody said why.

Because the guy is like a theocratic Chinese insaner Hitler. Giggling Oriental Tyrant Tee Emm meets Underpants On Head meets Death Camps.
 
Because the guy is like a theocratic Chinese insaner Hitler. Giggling Oriental Tyrant Tee Emm meets Underpants On Head meets Death Camps.

Or for a perhaps better comparison, think the Khmer Rouge. It's that bad.

The Taiping Tianguo, or Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, was about as totalitarian as you could get back then; essentially Communism combined with the worst fundamentalist, quasi-Christian Talebanesque ideology you could think up if you tried. Land reform combined with complete celibacy and worship of the Divine Leader.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Could someone describe just *why* China would be screwed up?
Hong Xiuquan was in many ways Mao Zedong 1.0--a charismatic, power-hungry subversive who came across a proselyte Western ideology, cooked up his own version and proceeded to shoehorn Chinese society into it at tremendous human cost. In fact, I think that China under Mao gives a good idea of what the victorious Taipings would have been like. On the plus side, I think that they would have undergone the same evolution as the Communists in OTL, and after Hong's death, gradually reverted to the default style of governance in China, namely authoritarian bureaucracy; Christian trappings would have replaced Confucian ones but it would have made little difference for the people themselves.

As for their long-term fate, my guess is that they would ultimately have been deposed sometime in the 20th century, but I can't really back that up.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Land reform combined with complete celibacy and worship of the Divine Leader.
There's a movie by Yu Lik-wai, "All Tomorrow's Parties", which depicts an alternate China ruled by a totalitarian religious cult, obviously a reference to the Taipings (with some Falun Dafa thrown in for contemporary flavor). Halfway through the movie, the regime collapses, and the people just wander off and try to remake their lives in a bleak post-apocalyptic setting of abandoned factories and decaying tenements. Very depressing stuff.

all_parties.jpg
 

Hendryk

Banned
Is that so? I don't watch much Chinese film, but it sounds kind of interesting?
Yu Lik-wai's movies tend to be downers, and this one more so than the others. It's not just the dystopian premise, but the whole artistic approach: the images have had nearly all the colors bled out of them (somewhat like Kieslowski's early works), and the shooting was apparently done in China's northern rust belt.
 

Typo

Banned
Hong had already gone insane by the last stages of the rebellion, I suspect that it's more likely that someone else would have been the de facto emperor had the rebellion successeded.

And as someone else said, the Taiping is basically Mao-communism 0.1. The actual history of China post 1949 would be a pretty good indication of what would happen.
 
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