Violence in Ming-Qing China : An The monotony of this message has led many historians including me to see this constructed norm as reflective of reality, whereas in fact it was a coping mechanism for dealing with a world which, as its inhabitants well knew, was violent and disorderly.
There is some truth to this, I think. The Taiping rebellion of , which killed by conservative estimates some thirty million people, was almost certainly the bloodiest civil war the world has ever seen. But it is not these events that will be my concern in this paper. Literally hundreds of thousands of cases of murder made their way up to the Qing Board of Punishments for review of the sentence, and clearly this only represented the tip of the iceberg.
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Butchering of animals, bloody religious sacrifices, executions in pubic marketplaces, and the display of severed heads, were all encountered as routine processes of childhood socialization.
I personally remember leading my young children through a market in Taipei just as a butcher was cutting heads off chickens, who ran around frantically before collapsing in a pool of blood. The remainder become ghosts or demons gui. These demons inhabit the material world in countless numbers. They have an insatiable hunger for human flesh, especially internal organs. Constant human effort must be devoted to warding off these hungry demons, via talismans and exorcistic rites, and to killing or smashing these supernatural predators wherever possible.
Thus, human beings not only have a right, but an obligation based on self-preservation, to engage in constant ongoing violence against demonic forces.
