{"id":418,"date":"2025-09-03T05:25:34","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T05:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/09\/03\/could-china-have-gone-christian-marginal-revolution\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T05:25:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T05:25:34","slug":"could-china-have-gone-christian-marginal-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/09\/03\/could-china-have-gone-christian-marginal-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Could China Have Gone Christian? &#8211; Marginal REVOLUTION"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Indeed, it is entirely plausible that with only a few turns of history, China might now be the world\u2019s most populous Christian nation. And if that seems hard to believe, consider what did happen. Sixty three years after the fall of Nanjing in 1864, China again erupted into civil war under Mao Zedong. This time the rebels triumphed, and instead of a Christian Heavenly Kingdom the world got a Communist People\u2019s Republic. The parallels are striking: both Hong and Mao led vast zealous movements that promised equality, smashed tradition, and enthroned a single man as the embodiment of truth. Both drew on foreign creeds\u2014Hong from Protestant Christianity, Mao from Marxism-Leninism. Both movement had excesses but of the counter-factual and the factual I have little doubt which promised more ruin. The Heavenly Kingdom pointed toward a biblical moral order aligned with the West, the People\u2019s Republic toward a creed that delivered famine, purges, and economic stagnation. Such are the contingencies of history\u2014an ill-timed purge in Nanjing, a foreign gunboat at Shanghai, a missed alliance with the Nian. Small events cascaded into vast consequences. For the want of a nail, the Heavenly Kingdom was lost, and with it perhaps an entirely different modern world.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2025\/09\/could-china-have-gone-christian.html\">marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2025\/09\/could-china-have-gone-christian.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Indeed, it is entirely plausible that with only a few turns of history, China might now be the world\u2019s most populous Christian nation. And if that seems hard to believe, consider what did happen. Sixty three years after the fall of Nanjing in 1864, China again erupted into civil war under Mao Zedong. This time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}