The Causes of Taiping Rebellion

The Causes of the Taiping Rebellion
  The causes of the Taiping Rebellion are extremely complicated and can be separated into two parts: internal and external. Generally, the internal factors include such as economic pressure, the decline of the Manchu; and the external factors are the negative effects of the Opium War and foreign trade. Taiping Rebellion is one of the most important events happened in the nineteenth century. As called as “founding a Christian community in China”, it was first of all an astonishing political and religious upheaval.[1] Although it failed because of the internal abruption and the subjugation from the Qing dynasty, this great peasant uprising is considered having a significant influence in the Chinese history. The revolutionary movement reached its height between 1853 and 1864 and was ruled by a self-styled man called Hong Xiuquan.
  Economic pressure is the most important causes of the Taiping Rebellion. Although the rebellion was organized during the Dao-guang’s reign, the signs of social instability and economic pressure had begun even before the death of Qian-long (1736-95). In feudalistic China, agriculture was the mainstay of economic. Almost people in China were peasants at that time. So having a reasonable land regulation was very important to each of the emperors.
  In the beginning of nineteenth century, a rapidly going population faced limited resources of agricultural land. This pressure can be most clearly seen by comparing the 1753 census with that of 1833. In the middle of the eighteenth century, China contained 184.7m people, and had 708m mou of land in cultivation - thus producing an average figure of 3.8mou per capita. The 1833 census reports a population of 398.9m people and a total of 738m mou of land in cultivation. Therefore the population had gone up by 116% while the land in cultivation had only increased by 5% - making the average amount of land per capita 1.8mou.[2] Moreover, during that period of China,...