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Boxer Rebellion
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The Boxer Rebellion, or more properly Boxer Uprising, was a violent anti-foreign, anti-Christian movement by the "Righteous Fists of Harmony,” Yihe tuan or Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists in China. In response to imperialist expansion, growth of cosmopolitan influences, and missionary evangelism, and against the backdrop of state fiscal crisis and natural disasters, local organizations began to emerge in Shandong in 1898.
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The Boxer Rebellion, or more properly Boxer Uprising, was a violent anti-foreign, anti-Christian movement by the "Righteous Fists of Harmony,” Yihe tuan or Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists in China. In response to imperialist expansion, growth of cosmopolitan influences, and missionary evangelism, and against the backdrop of state fiscal crisis and natural disasters, local organizations began to emerge in Shandong in 1898. At first, they were relentlessly suppressed by the Qing Dynasty. Later, the Qing dynasty tried to expel western influence from China. Under the slogan “Support the Qing, destroy the foreign” Boxers across North China attacked mission compounds. They killed missionaries and Chinese Christians.
In June 1900, Boxer fighters, lightly armed or unarmed but believing in their supernatural power, gathered in Beijing to besiege the foreign embassies. On June 21, the conservative faction of the Manchu Court induced the Empress Dowager, who ruled in the emperor’s name, to declare war on the foreign powers that had diplomatic representation in Beijing. Diplomats, foreign civilians, soldiers and some Chinese Christians retreated to the legation quarter where they held out for fifty-five days until the Eight-Nation Alliance brought 20,000 troops to their rescue.
The Boxer Protocol of September 7, 1901 ended the uprising and provided for severe punishments, including an indemnity of 67 million pounds.
The Qing Dynasty was greatly weakened, and was eventually overthrown by the 1911 revolution, which lead to the establishment of the Chinese Republic.
Origins of the Boxers
The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists known by foreigners as the Boxers was a village sect founded in Shandong, a northern province of China. Westerners came to call well trained, athletic young men "Boxers" due to the martial arts and calisthenics they practiced. Despite the obvious differences between Wushu and Western pugilistic boxing, the training for unarmed combat took on the same name to the Europeans. The Boxers believed that they could, through training, diet, martial arts, and prayer, perform extraordinary feats, such as flight and could become immune to swords and bullets. Further, they popularly claimed that millions of "spirit soldiers," would descend from the heavens and assist them in purifying China from foreign influences.
The name “Boxer Rebellion,” also called “Boxer movement”. In its early stage, the Boxers’ slogan was “overthrow the Qing and exterminate the foreigners”(????), in which Qing was the dynasty at that time governed by the Manchurians. To the imperial court, the biggest threats to its power were “Boxers in the north, and revolutionaries in the south”. General Yuan Shikai established his first career by suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in its early stage.
After the Hundred Days Reform failed, the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi seized power and put the reformist Guangxu Emperor into house arrest. Western countries paid sympathy to the emperor, and opposed her plan to substitute the Guangxu emperor. After a demonstration of the supernatural powers by Boxers, Empress Dowager Cixi decided to use Boxers to expel western influences out of China, meanwhile the Boxers would be weakened by Western forces. Then the Boxer slogan became “support the Qing, destroy the Foreign." [3]
Beginnings of conflict
Anger over extraterritoriality
One of the first signs of unrest appeared in a small village in Shandong province, where there had been a long dispute over the property rights of a temple between locals and the Roman Catholic authorities. The Catholics claimed that the temple was originally a church abandoned after the Kangxi Emperor banned Christianity in China 200 years ago. The local court ruled in favor of the church, and angered villagers who claimed the temple for rituals. After the local authorities turned over the temple to the Catholics, the villagers (led by the Boxers) attacked the church building.
The exemption of missionaries from many laws further alienated local Chinese. In 1899, with the help of the French Minister in Peking, the missionaries obtained an edict granting official rank to each order in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Local priests, by means of this official status, were able to support their people in legal disputes or family feuds and go over the heads of local officials. After the German government took over territory in Shandong, many Chinese feared that the missionaries, and by extension all Christians, were part of an imperialist attempt to "carve the melon," that is, to divide China and make it into colonies.
The early months of the movement's growth coincided with the Hundred Days' Reform (11 June–21 September 1898). Reform officials persuaded the Guangxu Emperor to institute reforms which alienated many officials by their sweeping nature and led the Empress Dowager to step in and reverse the reforms. Making matters worse, massive floods in some areas and drought in others created poverty and refugees.
Commitment of Imperial Army
Now with a majority of conservatives in the Imperial Court, the Empress Dowager, changed her long policy of suppressing Boxers after viewing the supernatural powers demonstrated by Boxers, issued edicts in defense of the Boxers, drawing heated complaints from foreign diplomats in January, 1900. In June 1900 the Boxers, now joined by elements of the Imperial army, attacked foreign compounds in the cities of Tianjin and Peking. The legations of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States, Russia and Japan were all located on the Beijing Legation Quarter close to the Forbidden City in Peking. The legations were hurriedly linked into a fortified compound that became a refuge for foreign citizens in Peking. The Spanish and Belgian legations were a few streets away, and their staff were able to arrive safely at the compound. The German legation on the other side of the city was stormed before the staff could escape. When the Envoy for the German Empire, Klemens Freiherr von Ketteler, was murdered on June 20th by a Manchurian(?) man, the foreign powers demanded redress. On June 21st Empress Dowager Cixi declared war against all Western powers, but regional governors, including Li Hongzhang and Zhang Zhidong, quietly refused to cooperate. Shanghai's Chinese elite supported the provincial governors of southeastern China in resisting the imperial declaration of war.
Massacre of missionaries
The Taiyuan Massacre was the mass killing of foreign Christian missionaries and of local church members, including women and children, from July 1900, and was one of the more bloody and infamous parts of the Boxer Rebellion. 48 Catholic missionaries and 18,000 Chinese Catholics were murdered. 222 Chinese Eastern Orthodox Christians were also murdered, along with 182 Protestant missionaries and 500 Chinese Protestants known as the China Martyrs of 1900.
The Missionary Herald normally published letters and telegrams sent by priests and their families in Manchu Qing dynasty, in Shanxi province, Taiyuan city. In December 1900, after incrementally more ominous monthly reports, the Missionary Herald broke five month old news to its readers: "the entire mission staff in the Province of Shanxi has perished". At the end of June 1900, priests and their families had been lured out of hiding and cast into prison, then executed by the Manchu officials. The Taiyuan missionaries fled into a co-worker's house because Boxers were burning churches and houses, killing Christians and foreigners. Three days later, the Governor sent four deputies with soldiers, "promising to escort them in safety to the coast". Brought instead to a house near the Governor’s residence, they were then "taken to the open space in front of the Governor’s residence, and stripped to the waist, as usual with those beheaded".
In 2005 English Professor Henry Hart released a book: Lost in the Gobi Desert to commemorate his great-grandfather's efforts to save the life of western missionaries and their Chinese followers from the hands of the Boxer rebels.
Boxer siege of Peking
The compound in Peking remained under siege from Boxer forces from 20 June to 14 August. Under the command of the British minister to China, Claude Maxwell MacDonald, the legation staff and security personnel defended the compound with one old muzzle-loaded cannon; it was nicknamed the "International Gun" because the barrel was British, the carriage was Italian, the shells were Russian, and the crew was American.
During the defence of the Legations a small Japanese force of 1 officer and 24 sailors commanded by Colonel Shiba, distinguished itself in several ways. Of particular note was that it had the almost unique distinction of suffering greater than 100% casualties. This was possible because a great many of the Japanese troops were wounded, entered into the casualty lists, then returned to the line of battle only to be wounded once more and again entered in the casualty lists.
Foreign media described the fighting going on in Peking as well as the alleged torture and murder of captured foreigners. While it is true that thousands of Chinese Christians were massacred in north China, many horrible stories that appeared in world newspapers were based on the actual murder of men women and children within the foreign legation.
Nonetheless a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment arose in Europe, the United States and Japan.The poorly armed Boxer rebels were unable to break into the compound, which was relieved by an international army of the Eight-Nation Alliance in August.
Torching of native dwellings
On 23 June 1900, the Boxer rebels started setting fire to an area of native dwellings south of the British Legation, using it as a 'frightening tactic' to attack the defenders. And Hanlin Yuan, 'a complex of courtyards and buildings that housed "the quintessence of Chinese scholarship . . . the oldest and richest library in the world.'(Yongle Dadian) was just nearby.
Sir Claude MacDonald, the commander-in-chief, had become worried that the Boxer rebels might try to burn the Hanlin Yuan, the 'buildings at some point being only an arm's length from the British building walls'.
On 24 June 1900, when the winds shifted, the unanticipated happened:Hanlin Yuan's group of building had caught fire, and the fire was beginning to spread further.
Eyewitness' accounts:
"The old buildings burned like tinder with a roar which drowned the steady rattle of musketry as Tung Fu-shiang's Moslems fired wildly through the smoke from upper windows".
"Some of the incendiaries were shot down, but the buildings were an inferno and the old trees standing round them blazed like torches".
"An attempt was made to save the famous Yung Lo Ta Tien, now spelled Yongle Dadian, but heaps of volumes had been destroyed, so the attempt was given up." -eyewitness, Lancelot Giles, son of Herbert A. Giles.
The Manchu authority blamed the British for setting the fire as a defensive measure, whereas the British pointed to the direction of the wind, and claimed that it was either the Boxer rebels or the regular Manchu soldiers who 'set fire to the Hanlin, working systematically from one courtyard to the next.'
Arrival of reinforcements
Foreign navies started building up their presence along the northern China coast from the end of April 1900. On 31 May, before the sieges had started and upon the request of foreign embassies in Beijing, an International force of 435 navy troops from eight countries were dispatched by train from Takou to the capital (75 French, 75 Russian, 75 British, 60 U.S., 50 German, 40 Italian, 30 Japanese, 30 Austrian); these troops joined the legations and were able to contribute to their defense. The rebellion was ultimately quashed by the Eight-Nation Alliance of Austria-Hungary, French Third Republic, German Empire, Kingdom of Italy, Japanese Empire, Russian Empire, the United Kingdom and the United States.
First intervention
As the situation worsened, a second International force of 2,000 marines under the command of the British Vice Admiral Edward Seymour, the largest contingent being British, was dispatched from Takou to Beijing on 10 June. The troops were transported by train from Takou to Tianjin with the agreement of the Chinese government, but the railway between Tianjin and Beijing had been severed. Seymour however resolved to move forward and repair the rail or such as the train, or progress on foot as necessary, keeping in mind that the distance between Tianjin and Beijing was only 120 kilometers.
After Tianjin however, the convoy was surrounded, the railway behind and in front of them was destroyed, and they were attacked from all parts by Chinese irregulars and even Chinese governmental troops. News arrived on 18 June regarding attacks on foreign legations. Seymour decided to continue advancing, this time along the Pei-Ho river, towards Tong-Tcheou, 25 kilometers from Beijing. By the 19th, they had to abandon their efforts due to progressively stiffening resistance, and started to retreat southward along the river with over two hundred wounded. Commandeering four civilian Chinese junks along the river, they loaded all their wounded and remaining supplies onto them and pulled them along with ropes from the riverbanks. By this point, they were very low on food, ammunition and medical supplies. Luckily, they then happened upon The Great Hsi-Ku Arsenal, a hidden Qing munitions cache that the western powers had no knowledge of until then. They immediately captured and occupied it, discovering not only German Krupp-made field guns, but rifles with millions of rounds in ammunition, along with millions of pounds of rice and ample medical supplies.
There they dug in and awaited rescue. A Chinese servant was able to infiltrate through the boxer and Qing lines, informing the western powers of their predicament. Surrounded and attacked nearly around the clock by Qing troops and boxers, they were at the point of being overrun. On 25 June however a regiment composed of 1800 men, (900 Russian troops from Port-Arthur, 500 British seamen, with an ad hoc mix of other assorted western troops) finally arrived. Spiking the mounted field guns and setting fire to any munitions that they could not take (an estimate £3 million worth), they departed the Hsi-Ku Arsenal in the early morning of 26 June, with the loss of 62 killed and 228 wounded.
Second intervention
With a difficult military situation in Tianjin, and a total breakdown of communications between Tianjin and Beijing, the allied nations took steps to reinforce their military presence significantly. On 17 June, they took the Taku Forts commanding the approaches to Tianjin, and from there brought increasing numbers of troops on shore.
The international force, with British Lieutenant-General Alfred Gaselee acting as the commanding officer, called the Eight-Nation Alliance, eventually numbered 55,000, with the main contingent being composed of Japanese soldiers: Japanese (20,840), Russian (13,150), British (12,020), French (3,520), U.S.(3,420), German (900), Italian (80), Austro-Hungarian (75), and anti-Boxer Chinese troops. The international force finally captured Tianjin on 14 July under the command of the Japanese colonel Kuriya, after one day of fighting.
Notable exploits during the campaign were the seizure of the Taku Forts commanding the approaches to Tianjin, and the boarding and capture of four Chinese destroyers by Roger Keyes.
The march from Tianjin to Beijing of about 120 km consisted of about 20,000 allied troops. On 4 August there were approximately 70,000 Imperial troops with anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Boxers along the way.They only encountered minor resistance and the battle was engaged in Yangcun, about 30 km outside Tianjin, where the 14th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. and British troops led the assault. However, the weather was a major obstacle, extremely humid with temperatures sometimes reaching 110 °F (43 Celsius).
The International force reached and occupied Beijing on 14 August. The United States was able to play a secondary, but significant role in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion largely due to the presence of U.S. ships and troops deployed in the Philippines since the U.S conquest of the Spanish American and Philippine-American War. In the United States military, the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion was known as the China Relief Expedition.
End of the siege
The siege was finally ended when Indian troops of the international expeditionary force arrived under the command of German general Alfred Graf von Waldersee. The main German force arrived too late to take part in the fighting, but undertook several punitive expeditions against the Boxers. Troops from most nations engaged in plunder, looting and rape. German troops in particular were criticized for their enthusiasm in carrying out Kaiser Wilhelm II’s words. On 27 July 1900, when Wilhelm II spoke during departure ceremonies for the German contingent to the relief force in China, an impromptu, but intemperate reference to the Hun invaders of continental Europe would later be resurrected by British propaganda to mock Germany during World War I and World War II.
- "Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation by virtue of which they still live in historical tradition, so may the name Germany become known in such a manner in China, that no Chinese will ever again dare to look askance at a German."
In order to provide restitution to missionaries and Christian families whose property had been destroyed, American troops were guided through villages by the missionary William Ament. Boxers, or at least those identified as Boxers, were punished, even executed, and their property confiscated. When Mark Twain read of this expedition, he wrote a series of scathing attacks on the "Reverend bandits of the American Board."
War reparations
On 7 September 1901, the Qing court was compelled to sign the "Boxer Protocol" also known as Peace Agreement between the Eight-Nation Alliance and China. The protocol ordered the execution of ten high-ranking officials linked to the outbreak, and other officials who were found guilty for the slaughter of Westerners in China.
China was fined war reparations of 450,000,000 tael of fine silver (around 67.5 million pounds approximately equal to US$6.653 billion today.) for the loss that it caused. The reparation would be paid within 39 years, and would be 982,238,150 taels with interests (4% per year) included. To help meet the payment, it was agreed to increase the existing tariff from an actual 3.18% to 5%, and to tax hitherto duty-free merchandise. The sum of reparation was estimated by the Chinese population (roughly 450 million in 1900), to let each Chinese pay one tael. Chinese custom income and salt tax were enlisted as guarantee of the reparation. Russia got 30% of the reparation, Germany 20%, France 15.75%, Britain 11.25%, Japan 7.7% and the US share was 7%.
China paid 668,661,220 taels of silver from 1901 to 1939. The British signatory of the Protocol was Sir Ernest Satow.
The foreign privileges which had angered Chinese people were largely cancelled in the 1930s and 1940s.
An excess of the reparations paid to the United States was diverted to pay for the education of Chinese students in U.S. universities under the Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship Program. To prepare the students chosen for this program an institute was established to teach the English language and to serve as a preparatory school for the course of study chosen. When the first of these students returned to China they undertook the teaching of subsequent students, from this institute was born Tsinghua University. Some of the reparation due to Britain was later earmarked for a similar program.
US and some other countries gave up copyrights of books on science and technology within Chinese territory. This agreement technically lasted until the 1980's in mainland of China and Taiwan.
The China Inland Mission lost more members than any other missionary agency:
58 adults and 21 children were killed. However, in 1901, when the allied nations were demanding compensation from the Chinese government, Hudson Taylor refused to accept payment for loss of property or life in order to demonstrate the meekness of Christ to the Chinese.
Long term results
The western countries stopped short of finally colonizing China. From the Boxer rebellions, the westerners learned that the best way to govern China was through the Chinese dynasty, instead of direct dealing with the Chinese people (as a saying “The people are afraid of officials, the officials are afraid of foreigners, and the foreigners are afraid of the people ?????,?????,???????). Dowager Cixi used Boxers to fight westerners largely because western countries sympathized with the Guangxu Emperor, who had been house-arrested after an aborted reformation. However, eventually, as an unwritten agreement, Dowager Cixi was allowed to stay in power, since comparatively, Cixi could use her influence to suppress the Chinese anti-western sentiment better than the weak and ineffectual Guangxu Emperor. The Guangxu Emperor spent the rest of his life in house-arrest.
In October 1900, Russia was busy occupying much of the northeastern province of Manchuria, a move which threatened Anglo-American hopes of maintaining what remained of China's territorial integrity and an openness to commerce under the Open Door Policy. This behavior led ultimately to the Russo-Japanese War, where Russia was defeated at the hands of an increasingly confident Japan.
Among the Imperial powers, Japan gained prestige due to its military aid in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion and was now seen as a power. Its clash with Russia over Liaodong and other provinces in eastern Manchuria, long considered by the Japanese as part of their sphere of influence, led to the Russo-Japanese War when two years of negotiations broke down in February 1904. Germany earned itself the derogatory moniker "Hun" at the beginning of World War I when intrepid propagandists resurrected Wilhelm II’s 1900 speech. The Russian Lease of the Liaodong (1898) was confirmed.
The effect on China was a weakening of the dynasty as well as a weakened national defense. The structure was temporarily sustained by the Europeans.
Besides the compensation, Empress Dowager Cixi reluctantly started some reformations despite her previous view. The Imperial examination system for government service was eliminated; as a result, the classical system of education was replaced with a Westernized system that led to a university degree. After the death of Empress Dowager Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor (on the same day mysteriously) in 1908, the Regent (the Guangxu Emperor's brother) launched reformation. However, these efforts seemed to be too late. The revolutionaries within Han Chinese could not wait. The imperial government's humiliating failure to defend China against the foreign powers contributed to the growth of nationalist resentment against the "foreigner" Qing dynasty (who were descendants of the Manchu conquerors of China). By the chance that the Qing Dynasty became weakened by the war, the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-sen, ended the last dynasty in Chinese history.
Up to day, Chinese still use the Boxer movement as a history lesson for the Rise of China.
Conflicting depictions of Boxers
Views differ as to whether the Boxers are better seen as anti-imperialist or as futile opponents of inevitable change. In the People's Republic of China, orthodox textbooks analyze the Boxer movement as an anti-imperialist patriotic peasant movement whose failure was due to the lack of leadership from the modern working class. In recent decades, however, large scale projects of village interviews and explorations of archival sources have led historians to take a more nuanced view. Some Western scholars, such as Joseph Esherick, have seen the movement as anti-imperialist, while others view this interpretation as anachronistic in that the Chinese nation had not been formed and the Boxers were more concerned with regional issues. Esherick comments that "confusion about the Boxer Uprising is not simply a matter of popular misconceptions," for "there is no major incident in China's modern history on which the range of professional interpretation is so great." . Paul Cohen's recent history includes a survey of "the Boxers as myth," showing how their memory was used in changing ways in twentieth century China from the New Culture Movement to the Cultural Revolution.
In 2006 Yuan Weishi, a professor of philosophy at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China.
published an essay titled Modernisation and History Textbooks, criticizing the official theme of government issued middle schools history textbooks, claiming that they contain numbers of non-neutral historical interpretations. Yuan wrote that these "criminal actions brought unspeakable suffering to the nation and its people! These are all facts that everybody knows, and it is a national shame that the Chinese people cannot forget." For many years, history text books had been lacking in neutrality in presenting the Boxer Rebellion as a "magnificent feat of patriotism", and not presenting the view that the majority of the Boxer rebels both violent and xenophobic. Professor Yuan stated that Manchu rulers did not comply with signed international treaties, and that it is wrong to blame "the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s entirely on foreign nations".
Fictional interpretations
- The 1963 film 55 Days at Peking was a dramatization of the Boxer rebellion. Shot in Spain, it needed thousands of extras, and the company sent scouts throughout Spain to hire as many as they could find.
- In 1975, Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studio produced the film Boxer Rebellion(????, Pa kuo lien chun) under director Chang Cheh with one of the highest budget to tell a sweeping story of disillusionment and revenge. It depicted followers of the Boxer clan being duped into believing they were impervious to attacks by firearms. The film starred Alexander Fu Sheng, Chi Kuan Chun and Wang Lung-Wei.
- The novel Moment In Peking by Lin Yutang, opens during the Boxer Rebellion, and provides a child's-eye view of the turmoil through the eyes of the protagonist.
- The novel The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, by Adam Williams, describes the experiences of a small group of western missionaries, traders and railway engineers in a fictional town in Northern China shortly before and during the Boxer Rebellion.
- Parts I and II of C. Y. Lee's China Saga (1987) involve events leading up to and during the Boxer Rebellion, revolving around a character named Fong Tai.
- The horror play La Dernière torture (The Ultimate Torture), written by André de Lorde and Eugène Morel in 1904 for the Grand Guignol theater (just four years following the events depicted), is set during the Boxer Rebellion, in the French area of the fortified legation compound, specifically on 22 July 1900, the thirty-second day of the Boxers' siege of the compound.
- For More Than Glory by William C. Dietz claims to be a science fictionalized novel loosely based on the events of the Boxer rebellion.
- The Douglas Reeman novel 'The First to Land', part of the Blackwood saga, depicts an officer of Royal Marines during the siege of Peking.
- The novel Fenwick Travers and the Years of Empire by Raymond M. Saunders depicts American antihero Fenwick Travers taking an active role in the Boxer rebellion.
The Ultimate Torture by André de Lorde (play). 1901, The fortifications of the French Consulate. Boxers surround French Marines
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