by Odd Westad
The other main reality in the early twentieth century was the growth in Chinese capabilities in all sectors of society. After having been overwhelmed and numbed by the encounter with the West for almost two generations, China swung into action in ways that it had followed so often before: adapting Chinese means to foreign constructs, implementing foreign technologies (and amalgamating them with Chinese methods), learning through studies of the non-native, and inventing new forms of authority and concepts of self. By 1937 China had developed a Western-style sector of its economy that was open to the rest of the world. Industry, mining, transportation, communications, finance, and banking became increasingly international in technology, management, and ownership. Although this sector was only a small part (as low as ten percent, by some estimates) of a Chinese economy still dominated by agriculture, its visible manifestations became increasingly significant. Arsenals and shipyards, factories and railways, bore testimony to something new and strange being born. And new products, manners, and methods spread all over the country, including to regions far away from where a Chinese modernity was coming to life.1
By the early twentieth century, almost all Chinese were aware that the world they lived in was changing, but they had, of course, very different perspectives on this change. For some—many officials and intellectuals, for instance—the change was a collapse, pure and simple; a world that had been well-ordered and correct, with the Qing empire and China’s traditions at its center, was overturned. For others, the new world opened up new opportunities, new ways of leading their lives, chances to travel or to read in ways that had never existed before. For most Chinese, however, illiterate and bound to the earth by convention or by contract, what changed was not their personal position, but the constellations of power in their village, the origins of people who traveled through, or the armies they were asked to support. It was a changing world, and one where the changes helped split people apart, sometimes by their own will and sometimes against it.
IN OCTOBER 1898 a small group of peasants began a movement that would open a violent new phase in China’s confrontation with the West. They were inspired by martial arts and the secret societies that had long existed in their region of eastern Shandong, and they called themselves Yihequan or Fists of United Righteousness. Foreigners called them the Boxers. The group had long been involved in a conflict over rights to a local temple claimed both by Christians and non-Christians in the community. For the Boxers, the troubles of their region—Western incursions, Christian proselytizing, floods, and droughts—all seemed to have one cause: the willingness of Chinese to be overwhelmed by the foreign, and especially by foreign religion, without resistance. They dreamed of creating a China cleansed of the injustice of foreign ways, and they set out to free their region and their country from its humiliation by blood and fire.
The Boxers were a strange sight to Chinese and foreigners alike. Their red turbans and leather boots, their belief in magic, their invocations, shouts, and songs made them stand out even in a restless society where sects and secret societies were popping up all over—mad monks in Sichuan, sisters of Jesus in Guangdong, Ming descendants in Fujian, and Buddhists in Shanxi who believed in a nirvana on earth created by repeating mantras and smoking lots of opium. The Qing had their hands full catching and executing those who went too far in stirring up trouble or challenging authority. But the Boxers were different. In spite of their outlandish and often brutal behavior, they seemed to speak directly to China’s ills and offer the chance for young lower-class Chinese men to show themselves as patriotic and brave. In Shandong, Germans were a growing presence, and they mixed support for missionaries with brutality toward the native people. And so, Cixi and the Qing conservatives at Court hesitated in suppressing the Boxers, at least as long as they professed their loyalty to the state.
The Boxer movement’s attacks on foreigners, Westernized Chinese, and especially on Chinese Christians broke society wide open and unleashed a war that removed the last vestiges of international respectability from the Qing regime. In many parts of China, especially the north, news about the Boxers fed into ongoing conflicts between Chinese with links to the outside world and those who resisted such links. The result was violent confrontations. Western accounts focus on the killing of foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians. But during the three years of the Boxer Rebellion, only about a quarter of the total death toll of more than 120,000 were Christians; 250 were foreigners. The rest were non-Christian Chinese killed by foreign troops or by Chinese troops who joined them. One’s point of view is usually determined by one’s place of view: When in 2000 the Vatican canonized 116 Catholics who were killed by the Boxers, the Chinese Foreign Ministry referred to the very same people as “evil-doing sinners who raped, looted and worked as agents of Western imperialism.”2 For some, the Christians killed in China were saints; for others they were sinners against the natural order of things—then as now.3
The first Boxer groups began entering Beijing in the spring of 1900. The Qing state had already shown signs of fragmenting on the Boxer issue, just as it had fragmented over reform issues two years earlier. In some regions, officials and military commanders were hunting down Boxer bands or at least trying to keep the peace between Christians and anti-Christians, while helping foreigners evacuate. In other parts, however, commanders and officials were joining with the Boxers, either because they believed in the anti-Christian message or out of fear of the consequences if they confronted a popular movement. By early June, Qing soldiers and militia members in Beijing had joined in attacks against churches, foreign-style schools and hospitals, and the homes of foreign residents. At Court, Cixi was increasingly pro-Boxer, although she did not support the movement publicly until after foreign navy ships had attacked Chinese forts in an attempt to land forces in Tianjin, where the foreign community was also under attack by the Boxers. Cixi issued an edict on 21 June, in the name of the powerless Emperor Guangxu: “Our ancestors have come to Our aid, and the Gods have answered Our call, and never has there been so universal a manifestation of loyalty and patriotism. With tears We have announced the war in the ancestral shrines.”4
With China at war, the Court ordered all of its forces to join with the militias and armed groups, including the Boxers, to defend the empire. Many commanders and regional leaders disobeyed. In the south, most promised to protect resident foreigners if foreign forces did not attack. Other long-time Qing advisers, disgusted with the Boxers, withdrew from public life. Most of the core of the army in the north did follow orders, however, and by late June the diplomatic community and other foreigners in Beijing were besieged in the legation quarter in the center of the city. The Cathedral of the Immmaculate Conception had been burned down on 13 June, with great loss of life; in the Northern Cathedral more than 3,000 people held out against sporadic attacks for more than eight weeks. The German ambassador, the arrogant and reckless Prussian officer Baron Clemens von Ketteler, set off to the Zongli Yamen, where he intended to deliver a formal protest, but he was shot and killed as he was carried in his sedan chair through the streets.
By early August 1900 there was fighting in Beijing. The neighborhoods around the legation quarter, including the great imperial library at the Hanlin academy, were burned to the ground. Eighteen thousand foreign troops were making their way from Tianjin to the capital, battling imperial troops and Boxers as they advanced. Towns and villages were torched and tens of thousands of civilians killed. To many of the newly arrived foreign troops, any Chinese, including women and children, could be a Boxer in disguise, and rumors about the horrible ways in which foreign missionaries and their families had been put to death fueled the bloodlust. For foreign leaders, China was the first “failed state,” and the intervention in 1900 was the first “coalition of the willing,” meaning, in this case, an alliance of the main Western countries and Japan directed against Chinese “barbarity” and against the Qing state’s unwillingness to uphold “civilized” norms of government and public beh
avior.
The allied troops entered Beijing on 14 August with a vengeance. Cixi and the Court fled to Xi’an, and so it was the ordinary people of Beijing who felt the fury of the invasion. Russian and French soldiers massacred Chinese civilians. In one town near Beijing 500 young girls and women committed suicide because they had been raped by foreign soldiers or feared they would be. “There are things that I must not write, and that may not be printed in England, which would seem to show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over savagery,” noted the British journalist George Lynch, who witnessed the occupation. The Chinese capital, including the imperial palaces, was thoroughly looted. The orders of the commanders of the foreign troops and the behavior of their soldiers caused a scandal in many of the countries that contributed to the allied operation. A major Japanese newspaper lamented that its country’s army “purports to be an army that protects humanity and justice through a discourse of civilization. Our countrymen have been particularly proud of this honor since the war of 1894–95. . . . This looting . . . has resulted in the most outrageous disgrace to the military, the most appalling national disgrace to Japan.”5
In spite of the criticism of foreign behavior in China, it was the Boxers and the Qing Court that almost all outsiders (and a fair number of urban Chinese) blamed for the disasters of the summer of 1900. More fully than any event before it, the Boxer war had placed China outside the Western-led international system, a pariah state, the center of a 1900 axis of evil that incorporated resistance against colonial domination everywhere, from Sudan to Afghanistan to Korea. The empress dowager, desperate to cling to power, recalled old Li Hongzhang, for his final bow, to negotiate the survival of the Qing state and her own return to Beijing. The foreign diktat imposed on China, the so-called Boxer Protocols, signed in September 1901, in effect made China a ward of the allied powers that had intervened against her: A strict weapons embargo was put in place, the leading pro-Boxer members of the government exiled or executed. Chinese forts guarding Beijing were razed and foreign troops stationed on the roads between the capital and the sea. All of China’s state income was made to contribute toward paying a massive indemnity to the allied powers, totaling, over a forty-year amortization period, almost four times the Chinese state’s annual income in 1900. The Qing had become hostage to the political and economic interests of the West and Japan.6
BESIDES JAPAN, the two main newcomers to the pattern of exploiting China were the United States and Germany. While having to operate within what was basically a British-constructed system, Washington and Berlin chose two distinct directions for their activities, directions that were to have implications for China well beyond the nineteenth century. In the United States, from the 1890s on, there was a strong suspicion that the imperial ambitions of others could bar American business interests from the Chinese market. The Philadelphia Press declared that “the future must not be put in peril. . . . China holds one-fourth the human race. Its free access to our trade and manufactures is vital to our future.” In notes outlining the so-called Open Door Policy, sent in 1899 to all the great powers, US Secretary of State John Hay urged “the various powers claiming ‘spheres of interest’ that they shall enjoy perfect equality of treatment for their commerce and navigation within such ‘spheres.’”7 The United States sought to secure access for US products and capital to Chinese markets even though it was unwilling to establish its own areas of control and domination. Germany, united in 1871 into one strong imperial state, chose the more traditional route of requiring territorial concessions from China, but with specific aims of modernization along German lines in mind, as well as trade. After two German missionaries were murdered at Juye in Shandong province, the German navy took control of the port of Qingdao in 1897 and by the early twentieth century it had extended its power over much of the Shandong peninsula, aiming to make it into a model colony run from Berlin.
After the Spanish-American war of 1898, the United States was establishing its own overseas empire, which now included Cuba and the Philippines. But it refrained from trying to carve out regions of influence in China. Part of the reason was ideological; most Americans retained a solid portion of aversion against colonialism (and the entanglements with nonwhite peoples that it could lead to). Another part was based on perceptions of weakness: The United States would lose out to Britain and the other imperial powers that had already established themselves in China. Much better, then, for the Americans to claim lofty principles of free trade as the cornerstones of their policy. The Open Door notes demanded the right for trade from all countries to operate freely within the spheres of influence and even within the concessions granted to foreign powers in China. The US government also demanded that the great powers support China’s “territorial and administrative integrity.” But even if the other powers were happy to pay lip service to the US position, their policies in China were mostly unaffected by the Open Door principles. As Hay explained to President William McKinley, “The inherent weakness of our position is this: we do not want to rob China ourselves, and our public opinion will not permit us to interfere, with an army, to prevent others from robbing her. Besides, we have no army. The talk of the papers about ‘our preeminent moral position giving us the authority to dictate to the world’ is mere flap-doodle.”8
The US interest in the China market faded, but never disappeared. The part of the Open Door Policy that stayed intact through the wars and revolution of the early twentieth century was the US determination not to be pushed out of China by other powers. As Japan’s power grew, this resolve meant an increasing degree of conflict between the two countries. It was a conflict that diplomacy could not overcome. In spite of the understandings signed between the two countries in 1917 (the Lansing-Ishii agreement) and during the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference (the Nine-Power Treaty), the Open Door remained more ideology than reality. US insistence on the right to trade and commercial operations in Manchuria, for instance, and its willingness to support the new Guomindang government in China after 1928, meant that Tokyo came to see Washington as a main enemy of its positions on the Asian mainland.
For Americans with an interest in the outside world, China also became a prime object of the American desire for reform and modernization. A powerful movement for reform at home took hold in the 1890s. Missionaries, health workers, economists, engineers, and businessmen went to China with lessons drawn from the American experiment. After China became a republic in 1912, some Americans believed that the US republican heritage would be of particular significance to the Chinese. But first the emphasis on improvement had to sink in in China itself. A part of the US portion of the Boxer indemnity was converted into scholarships for Chinese students to study in the United States. Another portion was used to establish an American college in Beijing, which later became Qinghua University (several Chinese Communist leaders, including President Hu Jintao, are Qinghua graduates). Other educational initiatives, mostly missionary-based, flourished as well. Yanjing University in Beijing was headed by John Leighton Stuart, who later became the US ambassador. Yanjing acquired the former imperial gardens between the old and new summer palaces, and set up a modern college that is now part of Peking University, the country’s premier teaching institution. American missionaries and educators also helped establish Nanjing University, St. John’s University in Shanghai, and Lingnan University in Guangzhou.9
Many Chinese had a love-hate relationship with the United States. The attraction was for American ideals and aid, the aversion because of America’s racism and consequent immigration restrictions. Ordinary Chinese could not understand why European colonialists, having taken control of whole continents, would not even admit Chinese immigrants into these territories. In 1905 Chinese in China and abroad launched a boycott of American goods to change US policies and force the Qing authorities to stand firm in their opposition to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the United States. The boycott did not change Washington’s approach or Beijing’s wi
llingness to accede to it. But it did alert many to US racism and Qing powerlessness. They realized that the Open Door opened only one way. China was open to US capital, but the United States was closed to the Chinese people. Their realization led to a disenchantment with America that would echo for generations to come.
Germany, the other latecomer to foreign influence in China, attempted to copy what Britain and France were already doing. The German enterprise in Shandong, however, was different from them in important ways. It stressed improvement and modernization of China. In this respect it had much in common with American idealism. For Germany the penetration by missionaries and imperial expansion went hand in hand. The government in Berlin had had its eyes on Qingdao as a naval base for several years, and the German Christian missions—whose existence in Shandong gave rise to the Boxer movement—were planned with imperial expansion in mind. The colony they set up was also intended to be a model colony, better in every way than what the other European powers could do. The German governor in Shandong reported to Berlin in 1905 that the “tasks that we Germans are facing in this colony within the most important area of the cultural life of modern peoples, education . . . [must] to a significant degree influence its spirit and character and be a tool for infusing the whole province . . . with German knowledge and German spirit.”10
From its beginning to its end at the hands of Britain’s Japanese allies in 1914, the concession in Qingdao and the surrounding Jiaozhou bay area was run by the German navy. It aimed at protecting Berlin’s interests in East Asia and solidifying Germany’s hold on the region through large-scale projects, constructing educational institutions, medical services, and missionary stations. As in most colonies, the German projects in Shandong both attracted and repelled the native population. Elite Chinese were impressed by German efficiency and organization, but wanted to conquer these virtues, and what they had achieved in the province, for China. The first president of the republic, Sun Yat-sen, visited in 1912 and admonished the Chinese students in German institutions there to learn from Germany: