Charismatic leaders and divine mandate in the boxer uprising: a study of religious authority and social mobilization
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications June 30, 2026 Gan Tan, Jie Yang, Lan Cheng
Charismatic authority in the Boxer Uprising operated through three distinct types—martial-performative, bureaucratic-organizational, and mystical-gendered—each with different vulnerabilities to disconfirmation and distinct patterns of organizational collapse. An integrative 'Sacred Mobilization System' model identifies cosmological belief, ritual practice, and charismatic leadership as mutually constitutive dimensions. A process-tracing analysis disaggregates the collapse of charismatic authority into three causal paths: battlefield falsification, organizational disintegration through incomplete routinization, and the Qing court's policy reversal. The study argues that charisma is not a unitary phenomenon but a family of related phenomena with structurally distinct logics of construction, exercise, and decay.