1 - Confluence of Fears: The 1923 Doomsday Hysteria in China

Summary

Abstract

Focusing on the public hysteria in August 1923 caused by the doomsday prophecy made and propagated by a redemptive society, the Society for the Great Unity of World Religions, this essay first explores the social, technical and intellectual infrastructure that facilitated the prophecy’s rapid spread. Second, it investigates the responses of the general public and religious organizations, in particular the Moral Study Society (Daode xueshe 道德學社). In the end, the eschatological fear confirmed the meliorism and universalism among Chinese religious groups. Finally, the swift transmission of the 1923 apocalyptic prophecy can be used to evaluate the role of traditional religious ideas, aligned with new techniques of modernity, amidst the socio-political turmoil that plagued China at the time.

Keywords: redemptive societies, Society for the Great Unity of World Religions (Shijie zongjiao datong hui), Moral Study Society (Daode xueshe), doomsday prophecy, Tang Huanzhang, printing industry and printing technology

Prologue

In August 1923, the year of kuihai 癸亥 (the last year of the sixty-year cycle in the Chinese calendrical system), placards containing a doomsday prophecy were found circulating through Beijing and Sichuan, Hebei, Hubei, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces. The public fell into paranoia. A few copies of the placards were preserved thanks to, for example, the acclaimed scholar Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) who collected them in his diary. Produced by a redemption society called the Society for the Great Unity of World Religions (Shijie zongjiao datong hui 世界宗教大同會), the placards warned that apocalypse would arrive on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, or September 25, 1923. Catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and meteorites would appear and kill one-third of the world population. The prophecy concluded with recommended methods of survival and urged readers to distribute the message. It so happened that on September 1, twenty-five days before the predicted doomsday, the Great Kantō Earthquake rocked Tokyo, claiming more than 100,000 lives and leaving horrific destruction. Suddenly it seemed that the end of the world really was near.

The 1923 doomsday hysteria has received some academic attention. Wang Chien-chuan 王見川 investigated the prophecy’s content and its primary advocate, the Society for the Great Unity of World Religions. He reconstructed chronical accounts of the founder, Tang Huanzhang 唐煥章 (1880–1923?), and the missionary activities of his principal followers.