>Zhang Xianzhong erects a stele called the 7 kill stele:>Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.>Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.>Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.>The last Ming census figure for Sichuan in 1578 (more than 60 years before Zhang entered Sichuan) gave a population of 3,102,073. By 1661, only 16,096 adult males were registered in Sichuan>Some modern Chinese historians such as Hu Zhaoxi considered him a proto-revolutionary, maintaining that accounts of the massacres were exaggerated, and many of the deaths were caused by others including the Qing, Ming and rebel forces, that his victims were Ming nobles, rich landlords, and other "counter-revolutionary" elements, and that his heinous reputation was the result of "Qing slanders" and "reactionary propaganda"What the actual fuck, in what world does Zhang Xianzhong depopulating Sichuan act as "counter-revolutionary" particularly when he was just a bandit with no affiliation with the Manchus and definitely no Marxism. Is Chinese academia all this mindraped about peasantry and rebellion? I'm aware that the stele may be fake, and I know that the Ming massively overinflated the death toll, but how does that turn him from a bloodthirsty bandit to a just revolutionary in the eyes of a genuine Chinese academic.
>>18731875Deng Xiaoping's ancestors survived the massacre, so clearly Zhang didn't go far enough.>>18731875
>>18731875he was just doing a little trolling
The legitimacy of the Maoist line comes from beating people up and breaking things, as Mao mistakenly assumed that a vanguardist party could be checked by internal forces. Thus without alternate modes of local control and democracy the peasants and peasant aligneds of China never really advanced beyond the riot as the main point of power.
>>18731875Why am I supposed to take for granted that he's viewed as a revolutionary figure in Chinese academia?
