The prologue to Part II synthesizes the major causes of the resilience of early modern states despite their limited capacities. It explores the conditions that led to the collapse of state–society collaboration in pursuit of good governance. Big historical events – the English Civil War, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion – forced the state in each case to search for new institutions to safeguard various dimensions of the public interest in the new socioeconomic circumstances and so reestablish its legitimacy.

Chapter 6 takes the narrative from the Taiping Rebellion and its aftermath to the end of the dynasty. By the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional moral consensus that state taxation was inherently wrong had largely crumbled, and many of the most prominent statesmen in the country now openly embraced a new, pro-government investment mode of thinking. Nonagricultural taxes almost immediately began to expand rapidly once the Taiping Rebellion flared up in 1851, and continued to rise after it had been put down, despite the significant amount of political controversy and opposition that this generated throughout the later nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the “realist” assumption that the peasantry would not tolerate higher agricultural tax quotas remained firmly entrenched, unaffected - and even strengthened - by Taiping-era socioeconomic crises. Provincial land surveying made an institutional comeback in the late nineteenth century, but not until the Qing Court faced a complete fiscal collapse in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) did it finally throw caution to the wind and begin to systemically experiment with higher agricultural tax quotas. To the surprise of many contemporaries, these experiments were largely successful, and while they came much too late to save the Qing from political collapse, they nonetheless laid the intellectual and political foundations for a more robust tax regime in the Republican era and the People’s Republic.

East Asian religions are marked by diffuse spirituality and close ties to the state (e.g. Confucianism). When the state was weak, however, independent sects gained an appeal, which created a niche for Christianity. On the other hand, a resurgent state brought repression of these groups. Early modern Japan is the most vivid example, but also in China at the same time in milder form. The Taiping rebellion is a nineteenth-century example. Missionary incursion sparked resistance (the Boxer rebellion) but also acculturation (Western education). Japanese nationalism coopted Christianity through WW II, but its appeal has been limited since. Korea exemplifies how persecution of Christianity, first by its Confucian monarchs, then by the Japanese and then the communists, only strengthened its appeal.

Over its long reign, the Qing imperial state aggressively pursued unauthorized religion, both to uphold its own spiritual hegemony, and to avert religious militarization. With growing social dislocation over the nineteenth century, the dynasty faced a massive explosion of religious violence – a seemingly irrepressible series of millenarian “White Lotus” movements in central China, Muslim uprisings in the north and southwest, and the pseudo-Christian Taiping Rebellion that divided the country for more than a decade. Together, these rebellions and their suppression claimed the lives of tens of millions. The anti-Christian Boxer Uprising was brutally extirpated by a coalition of foreign forces, but at least as deadly were the waves of recriminations between Chinese villages. After coming to power in 1949, the Communist regime moved quickly to contain religion, expelling Catholic missionaries and initiating a suppression of native groups like Yiguandao. Policy towards religion appeared to soften in the 1990s, and yet remained highly vigilant towards any hint of millenarianism or religious sedition. Even knowing this, few observers were prepared for the sheer brutality of the 1999 campaign against Falungong (Dharma Wheel Practice).