Comparative Millennialism: Apocalyptic Prediction and Revolutionary Struggle for the Future ′Heavenly Kingdom of Peace′ - the Case of the Taiping Revolution
The research project proposes making a comparative analysis of the ideas and semantics of modern revolutionary millennialism. Its particular focus is the revelatory knowledge of the irreversible coming of an intra-mundane future state of perfection by human agency that liberates human beings from the fetters of fate, thus coercing them into an ultimate freedom. The project considers the Taiping revolution, first, within the context of modern Western millennialism and its Christian beginnings in early modernity and, second, reconstructs from the plethora of available sources and scholarly literature Taiping’s symbolic universe engendered by the intercivilizational encounter with heterodox Christianity and transformed into a sinized hybrid millennialism in its own Chinese right, as it signals the emergence of a global millennialism in the different quarters of the world.
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