Boxer Rebellion Part 6: My Conclusions

Final Conclusions

            I do not, as many of the texts I consulted believe, that the Boxer Uprising was unique from a historical perspective.  Was it a fascinating case?  Definitely, and the individual accounts and the grander narrative of the whole affair come off as poetic in many instances.  It is a tragedy on a grand scale fueled by racism, religion, economics, and by the clash of progress and tradition.  It was the first conflict between East and West in the 20th century, and the last great conflict fought by a Chinese Dynasty.  It was the closing out of centuries of a government styled on myth, and the heralding of progress.

            Whenever a society steeped in tradition comes into conflict with an advanced military power their beliefs are challenged, 'why has god forsaken us' could be the sentiment used to describe these groups, and from these groups both violence and new reforms emerge.  The Sioux Indians after being driven deeper into the American continent by Westward United States expansion founded a religion about how one day the White man would be swept away from the world, the Ghost Dance movement believed that through mysticism they could see the future of this day coming and within their ceremonial garments they could not be harmed by gunfire, they like the Boxers' beliefs in their own martial arts, were mistaken.  Local magicians opposing French rule in Algeria claimed that their magical abilities would make them the scourge of white men, the French sent in a magician who put on his own magic shows and then revealed how they were performed, daring local mystics to do better, they were deemed schemers and French rule continued, a rebellion killed before it could walk.

            China had suffered from disaster, and lost faith in the leadership that had brought them there, but sadly rather than change before the tides of the world that beat down their temples with science and foreign ideas they tried to hold firm, banded together and stood against the tide, only to be drowned.  They couldn't have thought they would win, no Boxer truly believed themselves to be invincible, the people wanted miracles to bring back their crops, they wanted someone to blame, and the Boxers gave them some leadership that the Dynasty wasn't, they gave them an enemy, and they told the people that they were the living scions of nature's fury.  It is not unique, but it is certainly tragic.

            I like to look back with this conflict to the Opium Wars, where I believe China was entirely in the right and lost regardless, the British were drug dealers and were undermining the entire country.  Do I believe they had not been treated fairly initially when selling clocks and wool?  Yes, but that does not excuse selling drugs.  Compare that with the Boxer Rebellion, a case when I believe the Chinese were totally in the wrong.  While I do not like that missionaries were arrogant, and that too much foreign influence was causing China to loose identity, the Boxers killed innocent people because they were Christian, they spread lies about cannibalism to discredit orphanages that took in the hungry and the sick, and the Boxers killed innocent people simply because they were different.  That is evil.  And the government was so corrupt that they performed a coup' de tat just so they wouldn't have to reform and confront a world they were woefully unequipped to deal with, they were incompetent and foolish.

            The books I read often would try to make it seem that racism by missionaries on some level justifies the Boxer's sentiment.  Schoppa puts down the words of the German missionary Georg Stenz, "His contempt for the Chinese drips from his description of Shanghai: 'An entirely new world now opened before us.  Crowds of slit eyed Chinese swarmed about the harbor... Cunning, pride, and scorn flashed from the eyes that met our inquiring looks." (Schoppa, pg119)  No offense to Schoppa, but I do not hear the contempt.  This man has come from the other side of the planet in hopes of telling people about Jesus.  I'm not Christian, but I can admire his drive to journey far to help people find what he believes to be a great religion.  And even with the line about "cunning, pride, and contempt" I don't think he was far off, two of his friends were murdered in front of him by Boxers, and he was the target, how he got away I don't know but needless to say that if he saw some sort of anti-missionary vibe in the Chinese people around him, that doesn't make him racist, it makes him observant; even if he was as racist as anyone else in the world, he did not deserve to be murdered in the street because the Boxers blame him for the drought.

            In conclusion, the Boxers were not a unique type of movement in history, but they were most definitely an important terrorist movement in China at the birth of the 20th century.

References Quoted

Eshrick, Joseph W. 1987. "The Origins of the Boxer Uprising"

            I liked this book, I felt I could have easily gotten more passages out of it that would have provided a greater understanding of the material.

Preston, Diana. 1999. "The Boxer Rebellion"

            Good book because of its narrative strength, but I do not think its goal was to be an academic journal and as such gives notice to more sensational aspects of the conflict, fun to read, very informative, tempered by my understanding gathered from reading the other works.

Purcell, Victor. 1963.  "The Boxer Uprising"

            Nothing I couldn't have gotten from the other books, but more writer context on the incident to temper my digestion of the others.

Schoppa, R. Keith. 2002. "Revolution and its Past"

            Surprisingly short bit on this historical incident considering the title of the book, and a little biased in the presentation of some of the players.  Addressed directly in my conclusion.

References Consulted

Bickers, Robert and R.G. Tiedemann. edited 2007. "The Boxers, China, and the World"

            Nothing in here was quotable, though each article had very strong specific focus to an issue within the conflict, if this had been a longer paper I would have quoted from this for several different more focused things.

Spence, Jonathan D. 1990.  "The Search for Modern China"

            The section is a little short on the Boxer Rebellion, though I would have used it for some of its more poignant quotes if I were writing a longer paper.

Waley-Cohen, Joanna. 1999. "The Sextants of Beijing"

            Hardly used at all, I read its small section on the Rebellion, and was disappointed with it.  Generally it is too short a book covering far too large a span of history and comes off as a little glib.

Boxer Rebellion Part 5: Failure to Communicate

Stage Five: Failure to Communicate

            This is the stage in which I cannot really understand the course of action that is taking place.  The Alliance has seized the capital, leadership of the Chinese has either fled, been crushed under military marching, or committed suicide.  Huge territory was already controlled by each of the powers and they had an exiled Emperor ready to step into place as a replacement ruler who could help to legitimize China turning into a parliamentary democracy with the help of foreign ministers and political scientists.  And instead the foreign governments demand money, take away guns, dismantle forts, and put a stop to government testing, hardly an enlightened nation building effort.

            First was the fine calculated at 67,500,000 pounds.  Which was astronomical at the time.  "America objected that this was too high and would bankrupt China; they wanted the sum reduced by a third... America's policy was to bring 'permanent safety and peace to China' and to preserve China's territorial integrity." (Preston, pg310)  Needless to say other powers were not of the same sentiment, and under pressure China agreed that the debt would be paid in full, though it ultimately ended the payments after 39 years.

            Second were the restrictions.  To limit military growth and armament while tensions cooled and so money could be spent on domestic reconstruction, at least I optimistically project that was a motivator, China would be allowed to not buy weapons for two years.  During that same period the Civil Service Examination would be suspended, the motivations for this move I do not quite understand.

            The Civil Service examination was a centuries old system of creating some sort of meritocracy based system for the government, but had failed to be reformed in that time, so it stood as an un-evolving relic which was held in place because to remove it would call into question the entire body politics qualifications for their own positions.  And not removing it had caused any rival path of education to languish because there were no guaranteed benefits for any other form of social promotion.  Suspending this test was a good idea, a forward thinking one and was part of the reformist movements prior to the Dowager's take over and Boxer Rebellion, but suspending for such a short time is silly, and would not in and of itself prompt any other reform, so I have no idea why they insisted on this.

            I suspect a certain moderate and measured mentality is to blame for China not simply being sliced up into provinces for the various powers, but never the less with the deaths of so many leaders, and the Dynasty fleeing before the military power of the Alliance, the Dynasty was walking dead.  The long term authority and legitimacy of the institutions were shattered, the countdown to revolution, a revolution that would replace the Divine Right nature of the monarchy's authority, was begun.

Boxer Rebellion Part 4: All Together Now

Stage Four: All Together Now
            In August the Alliance of the Great Powers arrived to relieve those men and women in Beijing who had been under siege.  Comprised of roughly 50,000 soldiers with major contributions coming from Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom, and working through a complex joint command structure they took the city with vastly superior weapons and tactics.  The Boxers did often have fire arms, but many were armed with spears and swords.  Qing forces were defeated in a rout.  Again varying reports give me a mixed look at casualty numbers, but I think that to say close to 40,000 Chinese and Boxer forces were killed, while only about 3,000 Alliance forces were lost, not counting the Chinese Christians who had taken innumerable losses since the creation of the Boxers and their sporadic attacks against missions.

            A good deal of the loses seemed to come from the extremely irregular nature of the Boxers.  As many were the exact undesirable element that they had accused the 'Rice Christians' of being military leaders couldn't work with the greater body of them.  Yu-Lu a military leader said this, "'Boxers are too wild and difficult to train.  On pretext of enmity to the Christians, they loot everywhere and have no intention of attacking the foreign troops.'  When the battle came, the Boxers scattered without a trace." (Esherick, pg309)  They also focused efforts on Christian structures with anti Christian goals, rather than more tactically viable long term strategies for going against the foes.  Esherick illustrates this in the siege of the Northern Catholic Cathedral, were thousands of Boxers were trying to take and kill the 3,000 civilians and 40 or so marines, but couldn't get support from the regular troops who saw it as a waste in effort motivated out of cruelty rather than need, ultimately the marines held the Cathedral.

            The Boxers were not all to blame for the loses, the regular troops were under the command of leaders with wildly different ways of thinking about each other.  It was a regime established in a coup, suicidally facing off against vastly superior military forces under the pretext of a doctored diplomatic ultimatum.   They feared the Boxer movement too, a group that could very well turn into a new revolution against the Dynasty, I imagine that a large number of them sought to get the Boxers destroyed so they wouldn't have to deal with them post war.  A large amount of the leadership was in some sort of convoluted game of letting some other leader lose battles, pulling punches against a force they couldn't defeat, trying not to slaughter innocent foreigners, and somehow come out looking like a hero on both sides of the conflict so they wouldn't have to face exile or execution.  It was Byzantine politics of China, and not an environment which a government can be expected to win a war in.  In other words, they weren't working together, they had no clear goal, and they had a diverse and powerful enemy that many just wanted to make peace with.  They lacked the Moral Law to govern.  "The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger." (Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War', Chapter 1 lines 5 &6)

            Sadly, China was not fully aware of the level of destructive power they were going against.  China was a foreign land full of barbarians that had killed innocent Christians, or so it would have seemed to the typical marine or soldier moving toward Beijing.  The foreign military did not know about the politics involved on their opponent's side, nor did they care.  These men and women wanted revenge and they took it, burning their way to the capital before capturing it.  Nearly indiscriminant crimes were waged against local populations thought to be harboring Boxers, and the sheer lunacy of fighting guns with Boxer mysticism was laid bare to the world.  The Boxers United in Righteousness were stamped out brutally.  "Outside Beijing, troops went out on 'punitive picnics' to punish, by looting, rape, and arson, suburban villages suspected of harboring Boxers." (Esherick, pg310)  Preston mentions that the aftermath was brutal in a far range with German troops frequently leading the way destroying what the Kaiser called the Yellow Peril, with huge misgivings on the part of British and American forces, but little could be done to stop frequent indiscriminant carnage.

            A last ditch defense of the capital had crumbled, but it didn't really matter at that point, the Empress and the Court had fled, and continued fleeing for months allowing the capital to serve as the ultimate bargaining chip for the Allies who captured it in the negotiations for peace.  Many in the higher ranks of the Chinese leadership committed suicide, many more had died fighting earlier in the conflict, and any number of Boxer and Imperial leaders were facing executions from their own people and Alliance troops.

Boxer Rebellion Part 3: Pride and Prejudice

Stage Three: Pride and Prejudice

            While the groups were forming it was happening in a greater context of foreign relations.  China had been, as previously stated, moving toward being divided amongst the colonial powers of the world.  In an effort to head off this change an intellectual movement had started to call for drastic reforms in the status quo, and the Emperor seeing this as an opportunity at a legacy that would make him a founding father of China's future put into effect the Hundred Days reform.

            Massive overhauls in schools, military, and government bureaucracy were all planned, decreed, and then killed with the overthrown of the Emperor by the reactionary and corrupt upper levels of the Chinese government, with Empress Dowager being the leader, or at the very least the public face of this movement.

            Oddly the author Preston portrays the Empress Dowager as one part Catharine the Great and another Caligula, one side a cunning politician and capable administrator, having her hands very much on the controls of the whole movement, but she is also portrayed as sort of mad with luxury and privilege, taking her position more as an opportunity of indulgence and allowing those court members around her to control things, and stepping in with her own opinion at different times, though not being the constant master of the whole affair.  I am unsure which interpretation of Dowager was correct, but I prefer the compromise of the two.  That the Empress was the most identifiable entity among many in a larger conspiracy to keep China under their control, and that her collective court had more say and input about policy and that Dowager should not shoulder the bulk of blame for the events of the Boxer Rebellion.

            In the midst of this overthrow perpetrated by Reactionary government elements, foreign presence became more ill at ease.  The Emperor had been amicable with the foreign presence and for the most part I think that his reforms would have been welcomed by the international community in China.  The Boxers gathering and assaulting people were not serving as a calming effect to the tension.

            As I said in stage two, the Boxer movement was ostensibly recruiting from the same groups that the Christians were recruiting from, the poor and disenfranchised who were calling for both a personal direction, and looking for food.  Natural disasters had added considerably to the plight of the Chinese in the North East provinces, Schoppa singles out a flood that destroyed farmland which was quickly followed by drought which unemployed many Chinese as the key issue.  But the Boxer's in addition to using local folklore to speak to the spiritual side of the destitute Chinese, also had food to fill the stomachs of the hungry countrymen.  "An attraction of the Boxers as food became scarce was that they usually had good supplies of grain, gained in their pillaging of Christian households and sometimes their extortion from the wealthy."  (Schoppa, pg120)  Apparently no one in the Boxer Rebellion called the late joiners of the movement 'Rice Christians' when they showed up for the catering.

            The diplomatic friction hit a high note with murder of numerous missionaries and officials, along with several thousand Chinese Christians.  The first missionary victim according to Preston was an Englishman named Brooks, who was captured, stripped, led through the snowy countryside naked, and then while fleeing for his life was ridden down and decapitated.  Brook's murder was a thing of discussion in the capital as various foreign dignitaries sent for naval backup from their homelands and petitioned Dowager for concrete law enforcement action against the Boxer movement.

            A conspiracy took advantage of the Empress' insecurities when dealing with the Foreign demands for protection and their approaching navies, several ultimatums to the Empress Dowager asking for huge numbers of government duties to be handed over to the foreign presence and the Emperor to be restored to power were read at court and it enraged the Empress.  This series of demands was engineered by her own court to spur her into declaring war on the foreign presence.  "The Ultimatum was a forgery by Prince Duan... but it had its intended effect.  The Empress Dowager declared dramatically: 'Today they have opened hostilities, and the extinction of the nation is before us... Rather than wait for death, is it not better to die fighting?'" (Esherick, pg302)

            The Empress had previously been curious about the Boxer movement but now saw it as a set of troops that could be supported and utilized without need for pay.  They were all already fervent and directed at the enemy, and in many causes thought that they were invincible.  She allied her forces with the Boxers and ordered the extermination of the foreign presence in Beijing and then China as a whole.

            Considering the weight of the military forces in question, I have seen various estimates but all were measured in the tens of thousands, the weeks that the diplomatic quarter held out was a miracle.  The place was under siege until the middle of August and I can only imagine that it would not have lasted had it not been for more pragmatic members of the Chinese court blunting their attacks hoping that a more peaceful solution could still be reached.  A number in the court realized how poor their long term prospects of conflict were, "Several ministers... protested that China had been unable to defeat even one Power in past conflicts, and stood little chance of withstanding a united expedition of all the Great Powers now." (Esherick, pg302)  I also think that some more merciful members of the court saw the people in the diplomatic area as having families and would not suffer themselves to killing innocents.  Then there were ministers who simply didn't get the message to wage war, as the decree was not clearly and quickly distributed to the various provincial government heads, and the reaction to the directive was mixed, I imagine more than a few simply 'lost' the order.

Boxer Rebellion Part 2: Fight Club

Stage Two: Fight Club

            The Boxers full title, according to Preston was 'I Ho Tuan' or Boxers United in Righteousness and they emerged from the Shantung province from two previous groups, the Big/Great Swords and Spirit Boxers, both of which had originated in Shantung.  The Big Swords were a militia or vigilante group made primarily of land owners who sought to protect their property from bandits.  The Spirit Boxers came from a much poorer demographic and while they did proactive martial arts they also based a large amount of their practices around charms and mysticism.  Ultimately the Spirit Boxers were the stronger influence on the final dogma of the Boxer movement, having performed martial arts shows to draw in recruits and claiming that through spirit possession they could become invincible to bullets and swords.

            Spirit possession was, in my opinion, very similar to the religious practice of talking in tongues in some Christian sects, in which the believer takes on the presence of a spirit or angel and acts or speaks with the authority and power of that supernatural creature.  Boxer's used names of creatures from very well spread mythos in their martial arts demonstrations, speaking the cultural language of those they wished to recruit.  Using this cultural mythos their movement spoke to a large demographic within the Han of the province using symbols that had been taught to them since their birth.

            The Boxers appealed to, ironically in my view, many of the same demographics that the Christian Missionaries had been converting from.  The Boxers were more effective I think, because they professed a more active view point and spoke from a familiar native position to those groups.

            Aiding in the growth of this movement was large levels of disenfranchisement from a drought which struck the Shantung region forcing many directionless and poor young men into population centers looking for work and instead finding this militant anti foreign movement.

            As the Boxers United in Righteousness took on a more focused membership from those economically displaced by the presence of steam technology and telegraphs posts,  what could be considered manifestos or newsletters began to be distributed in large sums, "We support the Qing regime and aim to wipe out the foreigners; let us do our utmost to defend our country and safeguard the interests of our peasants" (Purcell, pg224) serving as a perfect example of what the ultimate goal would be for this movement.

            To further parallel this movement and the work of Missionaries, rather like nuns the Boxers had a position for women within their movement with its own responsibilities.  Much as nuns would serve as nurses and teachers in addition to being a part of the church hierarchy, the Boxers had the Red Lanterns who were mostly teenage girls and young women who carried red paper lanterns, in part used to help burn missions, and said to be the source of some level of mystical power.  "They were considered the equals of the male Boxers despite the Boxer belief that female impurities rendered Boxer Spells useless."  (Preston, pg32)

            I considered the idea that the anti-Christian sentiment might have stemmed in part from the Taiping Rebellion, granting a strong cultural memory to Chinese culture that might lead to a sort of demonizing folklore surrounding Chinese who have succumbed to the corrupting foreign influence of Christianity.  But that didn't really pan out in my view.  The Taiping Rebellion happened in the south, the Boxers emerged from the North, the Taiping Rebellion had little resemblance to Western Christianity and was not supported by them when they fought through China, where as the Boxers focused their attention on the idea that it was only corrupt Chinese who would join foreign missions to begin with and that the Christianity they followed was distinctly foreign and absent of Chinese influence.  The Boxers did not have a vendetta against some cultural memory of the Taiping Rebellion, they were against Christianity in the here and now of their lives.

            I have a difficult time understanding the nature of this movement at this stage.  They oppose the presence of new technology because it has economically damaged them, and because it violates taboos, and they oppose Christianity because it is divisive to communities, and because they think that they are performing inhuman practices on people, but in my research I have found no one in the movement attempting to negotiate on little things.  For instance, why is it the local people don't just ask the missionaries to show them around the mission one day so that they can see there are no jars of eyes?  Why not get a job with the railroad like so many Chinese workers had done for decades in America?  Why not learn how to put up and use telegraphs so they know what they are and how they work and really question the nature of how these things fit into ancient traditions of natural balance?  It seems like a step was skipped somewhere.  That people went from poor farmers, to really poor farmers too quickly, and that they went from disgruntled to violent too quickly.  Why was it that no one stopped, looked around, and asked whether there were compromises or deeper investigations that could happen?  I can not find evidence of a cultural apologist on either side of the conflict and that is unnerving to me, I feel something important has been edited out somewhere.

Boxer Rebellion Part 1: Pilgrims in an Unholy Land

            The Boxer Rebellion breaks down into several stages, the first being the growing incursion of Western technology and religion into mainland China; the second is the growing of the Boxer groups themselves, with various forms of recruitment and the formation of dogma as a group; third is the Boxer's initial threats/attacks and the Western diplomat's initial anxiety; fourth is the direct conflict between the Boxers and the Western world, from attacks on Diplomatic quarters and personnel, the response of the Chinese government, and the creation of a unified military response by the various Western powers to combat the threat; the fifth and final part is the resolution, the fining of China, and other Diplomatic concessions conceded as amends for the Boxer's actions.

Stage One: Pilgrims in an Unholy Land

            The Western world had been increasing their presence in China since the Opium Wars, each concession made to one foreign power was used by others as leverage and example to extend their own treaty, taking by inches China's sovereignty over the course of decades.  Every text sees the encroachment of the West deeper into China in certain smaller steps.

            It begins with Missionary work gathering up small tightly bound communities of Chinese citizens around Christianity.  These small communities are usually seen by non-converts as trouble makers and delinquents.  Missionaries carried with them certain diplomatic weight as members of the West, and could use this on behalf of their religious community within China; the Missionaries also brought with them church resources in the way of food for the hungry, medical treatment for the sick, and education and care for orphans.  Non-convert Chinese believed that these privileges motivated more conversation than any drive for real spiritual fulfillment.  "Many were from the poorest groups anyway and were disparagingly called 'Rice Christians' in the belief that they had converted only to fill there stomachs." (Preston, pg26)

            After missionaries move into the interior of China there starts cultural friction.  Since missionaries could and frequently did intervene on behalf of their converts, and they created a separate community that did not celebrate local holidays or superstitions, they could and frequently were seen as an undermining presence in the village that they were present within.  As with any minority group which is seen as hostile to the established order, rumors are created around religious misunderstandings to foster stigma against the group.  In the case of the Christians rumors of cannibalism has always been the most prevalent myth held against them, it was true in Ancient Rome and it was true in China; more than likely a poor understanding of the Catholic tradition of communion, symbolically ingesting the flesh and blood of Christ by eating bread and wine is the source of these rumors in either case.  Acting against this subversive cannibalistic cult violence erupts.  Eventually violence or tension would prompt military intervention to protect missions and the converts from angry local violence.

            Lastly, diplomats use the violence and need for military presence to justify deeper and deeper territorial presence, and the creation of railroads and telegraphs to keep the military and mission presence both supplied and informed.  This also carries with it a great deal of cultural friction.  European culture evolved with technology, superstition in various eras being eroded by the convenience provided by individual technological discoveries, China did not have that same cultural luxury.  China's culture was newly introduced to things without the context of watching them be invented, or learning how they worked.  You have in this instance poor peasant farmers who still have strongly pantheistic superstitions watching as foreigners with radically different appearances build machines that drastically change the economy, doing things that fall outside of the farmers view of the natural world.  "Telegraph lines were similarly feared.  Wind moaning through the high telegraph poles sounded like spirits in torment.  Rusty water dripping from the wire looked like the blood of the spirits of the air."  (Preston, pg30)