God's Chinese Son Read Free Page B

visions are fixed in space and time with such precision, and describe the behavior of specific Taiping leaders and their followers in such detail, that it seems to me they do illuminate the uprising in central ways. Furthermore they are so bunched as to offer us insight into two key Taiping periods: one group (those said to be from Jesus) being concentrated in the early years of the formation of the Taiping movement in the mountains of Guangxi province, and the other group (those said to be from God the Father) being focused on the early years of the Taiping rule in their New Jerusalem of Nanjing. The visions also relate to numerous other events in Taiping history: in the case of the two volumes dealing with Jesus' descents to earth, they give us much com­pletely new information about the rural society of the time; and in the case of the visions of God the Father they give essential information on the interconnection of events in Taiping history with the visits of Western­ers to the Heavenly Capital. Though to me the main interest of the new texts lies in the light they shed on Hong Xiuquan himself, they also help us understand the audience he attracted, and the way he and his followers responded to that audience. Such questions are of central importance as we try to grasp how millenarian leaders create a practical base from which to operate. 13
    Writing about Hong, I learned almost immediately, was writing about texts as much as about a man, and most especially about what many see as the text of texts, the Bible. Since I am no Bible scholar, and make no claims to be, this was a daunting prospect. But I was raised for over a decade in schools where the Bible was read daily, and I could see that there was no denying the strength, the inspiration, and the sense of purpose that Hong derived from the Bible, even though his response was intensely personal. Partly this was because the Bible was mediated for him in the
    Chinese language, either through Chinese converts to Christianity or through Western Protestant missionaries with some knowledge of Chi­nese who had settled in China's southeast coastal towns. The fact that it was these random acts of translation, with all their ambiguities, errors, and unexpected ironies, that brought him to his faith and his sense of destiny, rather than any formal religious instruction, was doubly intri­guing to me. 14 It not only reasserted the extraordinary dangers that may flow from the unguided transmission of a book so volatile, and thus high­lighted the central importance of the West to Hong's story; it also helped me understand how Hong, when he at last acquired the Bible, made it so peculiarly his own. And because it was his own, after a period of reflection, he felt free to alter it, so that he could pass God's message on to his followers in an even "purer" form.
    This book does not attempt to give a total picture of the Taiping move­ment, its formation, maturation, expansion, suppression, and effects on China as a whole. Many fine scholars have written on some or all of these aspects of the story, and I am happy to build on their work rather than attempt to duplicate it. 15 Instead, I focus on the mind of Hong Xiuquan and seek to understand — as far as I am able — how it could be that this particular man had such an astounding impact on his country for so many years. It is my belief that Hong's visions were shaped in some fashion by the overlapping layers of change that the Westerners were bringing to China along with their Christianity; these constituted an aura perhaps, as much as an influence, but an aura that was dense enough to give Hong a range of new feelings about the religious and social beliefs that he had absorbed at home as a child. When context is combined with vision in such a way, it seems to me, we can get at least an inkling of the logic that lay behind Hong's actions. This is not to deny that Hong's attempts at the social and religious transformation of China