Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition.

In the past two decades western sinology on brotherhood associations and secret societies in late-imperial China has experienced an important breakthrough with newly available archival material from Beijing and Taipei. Traditionally, these popular organizations were formed by marginalized men for a common purpose, ranging from such mutual enterprise as pooling funds for the burial of parents to predatory activities that involved violence, petty crime, or subversion against the dynasty or central government. A ritual known as the blood oath provided both the solidarity of the membership and fictitious kinship relationships among the individual members of these societies, among which the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui) served as the focus of Dian Murray's The Origins of the Tiandihui (Stanford University Press, 1994). …