Research Topics / 研究题目

I have a number of concepts that I’m considering, generally in the area of state-society relations and more specifically in comparative ideology and history of ideas. I’m less sure about my methodology, though I’m taking a course on methods in comparative/historical sociology right now and would like to take a course on content analysis or some kind of discourse analysis next quarter. I ideally want to do something qualitative but with a strong theoretical base.

My first idea is to build on research I conducted during a Fulbright fellowship from 2004-2005, about the transformation of popular interpretations and scholarly historiography on the Taiping Rebellion from the 1850 to the present or at least until the beginning of the Reform Era. Basically, this would look at the rise of Taiping apologetics and more sympathetic or even hagiographical accounts of Taiping leaders. I’ve got photocopies of major bibliographies of Taiping historiography compiled by Ssu-Yü Teng (邓嗣禹) at Harvard and Luo Ergang (罗尔纲) and Cui Zhiqing (崔之清) on the mainland. Another place to start would be the People’s Daily articles published every 5 years or so, commemorating major Taiping anniversaries starting with the 100th anniversary of the Jintian Uprising in 1950, which provide a nice survey of developments in “official” interpretations. I also have a suspicion that the more sympathetic portrayals of the Taiping in China may partially originate from contact with Western accounts or the sympathetic research of Chinese Christian scholars such as Jian Youwen (简又文, a fellow Oberlin graduate). I expect that such a study would tell us a great deal about a number of issues, including nationalism, historical memory, adapting history to the Communist teleology, conflicted feelings about the roles of Christianity and “superstition,” and similar uncertainties about the role of women in the rebellion and the Revolution as a whole.

A second, somewhat related idea would be to investigate how and why the surname Hong (洪) came to be associated with rebellious, apocalyptic, and messianic activities. I’ve seen a number of explanations offered by a number of sources, but it seems like a question that could be tracked down and answered. Some arguments place the surname as far back as Gong Gong, whose descendants supposedly added the water radical to their name, reflecting their water deity ancestor. This strikes me as a story invented much later, at least in the Ming. But Hong is the surname of the soldier who releases the 108 spirits in the introduction to the Water Margin, part of the title assumed by the Hongwu Emperor, the brotherhood name taken by members of the Heaven & Earth Society and other ritual underworld organizations, and – not entirely coincidentally – the surname of Taiping founder Hong Xiuquan and his relatives. Hong’s meaning of “flood” also seems to be important in apocalyptic and messianic texts predating the Taiping by quite a while and probably even pre-dates the Ming founder, since there was assuredly a reason he took that name. So far, the only references I’ve seen to the meaning and significance of Hong have been in studies of secret societies by folks like Hubert Seiwert and David Ownby, but I have not yet had time to track down useful Chinese sources. Suggestions in this regard would be much appreciated. I am excited by the topic for a number of reasons, but one is that it speaks to the interrelatedness of certain Chinese concepts about political and religious power, concepts that apply to both the central state and rebel groups that intend to replace it. Examining this topic might also be a way to consider the transformations that have occurred in thinking about the “mandate of heaven” and related concepts in late imperial and more recent times.

Looking at these two, it seems like I have one topic (Taiping historiography) that has a concrete starting point and research path, but may be less useful in advancing knowledge or enabling us to draw more general conclusions, while the latter topic (the significance of Hong) is a bit more amorphous right now in its research plan but whose findings might be much more significant in the long run.