Chinese history is way outside what I'd normally be interested in, but I've been trying to find some info about the Dazexiang Uprising.
The problem is that outside of some very basic details, I can't find even a very basic overview of the uprising itself. Basically the only constant is that Chen Sheng and Wu Guang were leading a group of peasant soldiers to defend a city and were delayed by torrential rain; the draconian law mandated execution for anyone arriving late to a government job. Rather than be executed, the two men led the group of peasant soldiers in an uprising.
Outside of that, I can only find some snippets that may or may not be shrouded in legend or have been embellished over time. What exactly happened? Were these severe laws pretty standard, or was it something new? How did they come about? What do we know about the life of the two leaders of the uprising? Was there a great deal of peasant discontent before the uprising, or were the unlikely leaders unusually charismatic and able to raise an army very quickly on that basis? Do any records survive from the time?
I can't say much about the actual course of the rebellion, but I can say a few things that can illuminate the general situation.
At the time, China was united under the Qin Dynasty, which had existed as one of several warring kingdoms for a couple hundred years beforehand. The Kingdom of Qin ruled through a philosophy called Legalism, which held that people were basically selfish, and wanted to gain pleasure and avoid punishment. In light of this, the two pillars of the Qin state were harsh punishments and meritocracy. While these helped them to conquer the other warring states, the Qin kings, and later Emperors, were feared, but not loved, by the people, so there was a large reservoir of men who would take up arms against the state when given the opportunity. While the laws weren't new to the Kingdom of Qin, they had only been recently introduced over the rest of China. Chen and Wu didn't need inspirational charisma to get villagers from Chu's former territory in Anhui to take up arms against their new rulers.
While dynasties after the fall of the Qin didn't execute people for showing up late, it was severely punished; the standard punishment for showing up late under the Ming and Qing dynasties was 50-100 strokes of a cane, depending on how late you were