網路對同治年間回民起義的「另類解讀」
Sometime
in March 2019 the Baike Baidu page about the Great Northwestern Muslim Rebellion (陕甘回民起义), c.1862–1874, vanished. The topic has never been a comfortable
one in China, but even for the heavy-handed architects of China’s Great
Firewall, this was a blunt intervention into history. For a facile comparison,
this is a little as if Wikipedia had abruptly deleted their introduction to the
American Civil War.
The Great
Northwestern Muslim Rebellion was complex, messy and extremely violent. It began with a series of local feuds that mostly were not about religion
but which escalated when Qing officials took the side of Han disputants against
the Muslims and garrisons across the two provinces
mutinied, producing a domino effect. Rumour, banditry and socioeconomic
distress did the rest: by the end of the rebellion, the populations of Shaanxi
and Gansu had fallen by half, with millions dead or having fled to make new
lives elsewhere.
Despite
being described as a rebellion, there is limited evidence that
any of the various leaders intended to overthrow the Qing rulers. The rebellion was in truth a patchwork of different, highly local conflicts, where in each case the Hui participants
came to be viewed as the rebels.
