At the end of the Qing Dynasty, due to the corruption and inaction of the first class, the class contradictions and internal and external troubles in Chinese society were unprecedentedly severe, in order to break the predicament, peasant uprisings broke out, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement led by Hong Xiuquan pushed the peasant uprising war to a peak. After 14 years of confrontation with the Qing court, which occupied almost half of the Qing Dynasty in its heyday, the vigorous Taiping Rebellion set off a climax in Chinese history but ended in disgrace, what is the reason for its failure?
There has been much discussion in academic circles about the reasons for the failure of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and many scholars believe that the most fundamental reason for its failure was that it was a peasant class revolution, which was doomed to fail due to the limitations of the peasant classSecondly, there are many subjective reasons, such as the existence of major mistakes in strategic deployment, which led to the siege of Tianjing;There are also objective reasons, the Qing Dynasty and foreign invading forces were too strong, which led to the defeat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the later period. Although this analysis is not unreasonable, the regime established by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement itself has great particularity, it is a regime with "four dissimilarities", and this deformed and immature political model makes the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom inevitable.
First of all, Hong Xiu's omnipotence in creating the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is itself a coincidence of the times. At that time, China had been reduced to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, large-scale peasant uprisings had already appeared, the Qing court was constantly suffering from internal and external troubles, and its rule was in jeopardy. Hong Xiuquan's greatest contribution to the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was the establishment of the Worship of God Religion, but Hong Xiuquan himself was not a true religious believer, and he only founded the religion because of repeated attempts and failures, and finally became angry and turned against Confucianism by converting to God. Therefore, although Hong Xiuquan's uprising slightly carries a hint of Western Reformation, there are still remnants of feudalism in his bones. Moreover, although Hong Xiuquan preached "saving the people from fire and water" when he founded the religion, he always emphasized his identity as the "second son of God" and created privileges for himself, which was still feudal and imperial in nature, which determined that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom regime could not reach the communist height it expected, and also made the people under his rule have a sense of "being deceived", and their support for the regime naturally decreased.
The regime established by Hong Xiuquan was neither a completely feudal regime, nor an authentic religious regime, nor a thoroughly revolutionary regime, nor could it truly establish communism. This kind of "four dislikes" regime made Hong Xiuquan unable to achieve a high degree of centralization, and could not really win the hearts of the people, and was strangled by both Chinese and foreign forces because of his anti-Confucianism, anti-Confucius, and anti-imperialist at the same time. Such a deformed "four dislikes" regime tied a dead knot to the development of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and also made its failure inevitable.