Writing History or Collecting Facts? Different Ways of Representing Modern Chinese Rebellions

Writing History or Collecting Facts? Different Ways of Representing Modern Chinese Rebellions

Social rebellion, or the so-called peasant uprising, is one of several sub-fields that have been fully developed in Chinese Communist historiography since 1949. The White Lotus Rebellion (1796), the Taiping Rebellion, (1850), the Nien Rebellion (1853), and the Boxer Uprisings (1900), have all drawn wide attention among Chinese scholars specializing in Ch'ing history. Collections of rare materials, original documents, records of official interrogation, and confessions of the rebels, and oral interviews, are published in copious volumes, which offer valuable, handy reference works for later historians. For the purpose of this talk, it's interesting to see how Chinese historians build up their own research on the basis of this raw material.