Originating in 1955 as a sectarian fantasy centered on a peasant’s aspiration to become emperor, the Han Dynasty expanded by April 1, 1957 to include more than thirty peasants whose grievances stemmed primarily from grain procurement policies and labor management under collectivization. Conflicts between villagers and production brigade cadres over work assessments and resource allocation further intensified these tensions. The resulting uprising, which unfolded in a remote border area of three Anhui counties, lasted only one day and led to the deaths of three policemen and two rebels. In its aftermath, local authorities arrested seventy-five suspects, executed fourteen of the seventeen sentenced to death, and imposed long prison terms on ten others.
This paper argues that dynastic symbolism functioned less as an ideological alternative to Communist rule than as a socially legible framework through which peasants articulated grievances and mobilized against local manifestations of state power. The rebellion thus reveals how coercive policy enforcement and everyday conflicts at the grassroots level transformed state–society frictions into violent confrontation, even in the absence of an explicit challenge to the Communist regime.