The religious and ritual features of groups such as the Tiandihui did not resist the competition of Christianity, Communism, and the new religions. In the end, only the criminal element remained.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 6 of 6. Read article 1, article 2, article 3, article 4, and article 5.
The academic literature on the history of China of the 1980s and 1990s was dominated by the “archival school,” which followed favorable political conditions that allowed for the careful study of archives both in the Mainland and in Taiwan. When dealing with secret societies and the Tiandihui, this school, which includes historians Cai Shaoqing (1933–2019) and Qin Baoqi in China, and Zhuang Jifa in Taiwan, denies the primacy of the dynastic and national political element (“overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming”). By placing it in the context of Southeast China and Taiwan, these authors manage to see the Tiandihui as a mutual aid society and an evolution of village fraternal societies.
If Chinese historians remain Marxists and explain the “secret societies” by the social context (which Zhuang Jifa also does, from a different perspective), they emphasize solidarity and mutual protection rather than revolution, and this is where they differ from Sun Yat-Sen or Chesneaux.
One of the most important Western scholars of Chinese secret societies, David Ownby, builds his interpretation from the “archival school,” reading the Tiandihui in the context and evolution of those Chinese societies and associations that formed among the peasants without the guidance, and sometimes without the permission, of traditional elites. Even Dian H. Murray’s seminal work on the origins of Tiandihui, while taking into account some of Chesneaux’s suggestions, is largely based on the “archival school” and was in fact written in collaboration with Qin Baoqi.
The “archival school” is not overly interested in ritual or esoteric elements, either because of the authors’ adherence to a sociology that sees religion as a by-product of social tensions, or because it remains tied to a traditional pattern of Chinese historiography, which sees dissent as religious in the North (messianic movements, including the “White Lotus” tradition) and cultural or fraternal in the South (the “secret societies,” including the Tiandihui) At most, this school can concede that the Tiandihui, where religion would not originally have had much importance, took on an apocalyptic and religious tone in the 19th century in certain regions where it absorbed pre-existing Buddhist or Taoist messianic elements.
This has been challenged by a fifth interpretation, proposed by Barend J. ter Haar, According to ter Haar, author of a monumental work on the Tiandihui ritual, rituality has a foremost importance in this society. It reveals that it is indeed a form of messianism.
Ter Haar challenges the classic distinction between a “messianic” North and a “fraternal” South in the typology of Chinese organizations that opposed the Qing imperial power. The idea of “restoring the Ming,” far from being secondary, for ter Haar is revealed by the ritual in all its centrality. Yet, ter Haar downplays Ming legitimism as well. Indeed, he believes that the comparative study of Chinese messianisms shows that it was almost customary for the founders of new religious and esoteric movements to present themselves as “secret” descendants of emperors, thus in Qing times as descendants of the Ming.
In addition, the encounter of Buddhism and Chinese popular religiosity advocated the advent of the Buddha Maitreya to save humanity from apocalyptic disasters, sometimes assisted by a Young Moonlight Prince and a “King of Light.” This tradition was older than the Ming, but was appropriated by them. Indeed, the very founder of the Ming, the former monk Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), had followed the messianic movement of Han Lin’er (1340–1367), the “Young King of Light” to whom he had always remained loyal.
After Han’s death, Zhu and the Ming claimed his legacy and messianic charisma for themselves. The references to a “King of Light” and to founders who were sons of “Zhu” in the Tiandihui ritual did not necessary indicate a campaign for a Ming restoration. The idea of the advent of a “King of Light” was part of a messianic tradition that at the same time was used by, and utilized, Ming imperial symbolism.
Each interpretation brings useful elements to answer questions about the role and evolution of Tiandihui and “secret societies” in China. While some elements are linked to outdated ideological or political contexts, the interpretations should be seen as sometimes complementary rather than necessarily alternative.
The fraternal society, the religious brotherhood, the political protest movement are all antecedents of the Chinese “secret society” of the 18th century. However, the latter has real elements of novelty, which derive largely from the particular social context of certain Chinese regions.
Dealing with secret societies, sociologists cannot fail to mention the works on the subject by Georg Simmel (1858–1918). The secret society is an epiphenomenon of society. When it is successful notwithstanding opposition and persecution, according to Simmel, we may suspect that it is a response to real problems and demands of that same society.
But, as Jean-Pierre Laurant notes, in the secret society there is more than that. At the same time that it ensures the “intellectual functioning” of a society, the esoteric secret can have “the essential function of bringing into it, on the other hand, a tradition that goes beyond it.”
The Tiandihui of the origins is a “Simmelian” secret society insofar as it is strictly linked to a social context that the “archival school” has elucidated in its details. But at the same time the esoteric secret that ter Haar finds in its ritual inserts the Tiandihui into “something” that goes beyond its strictly social function and is at the same time part of the tradition of China’s messianic movements. This is a point that Matgioi had already noted, without necessarily being wrong.
In the case of the Tiandihui, it remains to be seen how a secret society lost much of its rituality in a process that lasted nearly two centuries, and was finally reduced to an association of criminals with ritual elements that sometimes are no longer understood by those very members who continue to use them. I have already mentioned theories of the amplification of deviance.
Tiandihui has been “criminalized” by the authorities in contexts where it may not have been criminal. But the application of these theories to the Chinese secret society meets an obvious limitation in cases where Tiandihui was engaged in criminal activities even before the Qing authorities discovered its existence and name. This “original” criminality also belies political theories that the Tiandihui became “criminalized” once its proto-political function ceased with the success of the Chinese revolutions of the 20th century.
The problem remains open. Chesneaux believed that, once the political functions of the Tiandihui had been taken over by other social actors (the political parties), it was left only with its criminal activities, which originally co-existed with the others. Chesneaux saw the parties as competitors of the Tiandihui. But he was mostly interested in political competition, and might have neglected the religious and esoteric context.
The problem of Tiandihui’s criminal drift should therefore be best approached in light of what Rodney Stark has called a “sociology of the gods.” Exchanges with the gods in a context like Tiandihui are particular rather than general. The gods guarantee certain benefits in exchange for certain rituals, but do not offer a general project of salvation.
The aversion of Chinese “secret societies” to Christianity is well known. But it would be interesting to ask whether the competition of several global systems of salvation, including Christianity, Communism, and a plethora of Chinese new religions, had not progressively weakened the capacity of the Tiandihui ritual to function as a religious and esoteric model and to transmit a “secret,” leaving only the criminal element, which had been present from the beginning, to remain.
