Inevitably the Qing’s weakness spawned further internal revolts, including the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64, whose messianic leader, Hong Xiuquan, promised a utopian future that included “both the end of the world and its perfection, possibly at the same time,” as historian David J. Silbey wryly noted. The Taipings captured Nanjing and ruled it for years before a Qing army brought them down. The struggle killed millions and further despoiled Chinese society.
During this time China’s rulers also fought Britain and France in the four-year Second Opium War, as it was called (though it had little to do with opium). The hostilities, stemming from an incident in Hong Kong Harbor involving a British sea captain and local Chinese officials, easily could have been settled diplomatically. But British arrogance and Chinese defensiveness stirred animosities that precluded a quick settlement. It finally ended in 1860 after a British-French force marched on Beijing and looted it “with great gusto and no small amount of destruction,” as Silbey wrote.
Shortly thereafter, China’s Emperor Xianfeng died and left the government to his five-year-old son, Tongzhi. His mother, Noble Lady Yi, methodically gained power through a series of crafty and sometimes brutal maneuvers and ruled China as Empress Dowager Cixi. A sharp-edged woman with a keen sense of survival, she was once described as “the only man in China.” She developed a festering anger over her country’s long struggles with the West that had produced Portugal’s acquisition of Macao, France’s takeover of Indochina through various actions of conquest and cession, and Britain’s two Opium War victories. The latest humiliation was China’s defeat in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War, which led to Japan’s acquisition of Formosa and the nearby Pescadores Islands, along with Japanese access to Chinese trading ports.
Through the early McKinley years, the Chinese exploitation gathered momentum. After Germany obtained rights to Kiao-Chau Bay, Russia demanded the same rights over Port Arthur and Ta Lien-Wan, along with permission to construct a railway in Manchuria. China complied. Britain demanded a lease for Wei-Hai-Wei, on the Shan Tung peninsula, as well as a strategically significant coastal island. France got a lease for a coaling station. When Italy demanded a coaling station at San-Mun Bay, China balked, but Western pressure soon forced a reconsideration. Former U.S. secretary of state John Foster explained the power calculus to reporters. “China,” he said, “cannot withstand any assault from the sea, and Italy knows her helplessness.” Italy stopped short of a military attack but hovered nearby with threatening military force.
The Washington Post captured the situation in a headline: “China Taken by the Throat.” Many international experts predicted the eradication of China as an independent nation with its partition into Western spheres of influence. One high European official at Beijing even suggested to the New York Times “that the moment has now arrived for international control of China.” He added that the “spheres of influence” surge likely would bring America into the fray, probably in pursuit of the province of Chi-Li.
The official was wrong. President McKinley had no interest in joining the frenzy and wanted to get Western hands off China’s throat. Britain, seeing the threat to its own extensive and established interests in China, twice sought Washington’s cooperation in behalf of an open trading system. The president demurred because, as Secretary Hay explained to a friend, “we think our best policy is one of vigilant protection of our commercial interests, without formal alliances with other Powers.” Besides, anti-British sentiment among German and Irish Americans discouraged any overt U.S.-British partnership.
But Hay watched events in China with alarm. In London he had befriended two China experts, both widely traveled in the kingdom, who later published books on the subject. Back in America, he devoured the books when they came out and became increasingly convinced that the exploitation should be stopped. One of the authors, Charles Beresford, popularized the “open door” term and argued that the concept’s strength “would lie in the fact that it would be too powerful to attack, and that it could maintain the peace while preserving the open door to all.” He added the agreement would “give a new lease of life to the Chinese Empire.”
When Beresford visited Washington in 1899, Hay honored him with a dinner party and introduced him to McKinley. Then came another expert, Alfred Hippisley, Britain’s inspector of Chinese maritime customs, who shared Beresford’s views. Hippisley enjoyed a longtime friendship with Hay’s Far Eastern adviser, William Rockhill, who introduced him to the secretary and encouraged him to draft a policy statement to serve as a guide for a U.S. open door initiative. After Hippisley produced the document, Rockhill edited it and commended it to the president. He later put it into diplomatic language for Hay, who embraced it.
It contained three points: first, that all powers would recognize the other powers’ vested interests, leased territory, and spheres of influence in China; second, that Chinese treaty tariffs would apply equally to all and would be collected by Chinese officials; and third, that no power would discriminate in favor of its own nationals with regard to harbor dues or railroad charges. In September 1899 Hay sent the document to Berlin, London, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Rome, and Paris. He urged each government to endorse the open door concept and promote it to the others. By January 4 Hay had favorable responses from all governments. He pronounced the informal compact “final and definitive” and “proof of . . . the untrammeled development of commerce and industry in the Chinese Empire.”
This was a brilliant diplomatic stratagem. Though McKinley didn’t want America involved in the sordid China landgrab, he feared his country’s diplomatic asceticism could lock it out of the vast China trade as the feeding frenzy continued. The open door policy ended that frenzy and put America on an equal footing with the other powers (leaving aside the concessions and spheres of interest already established). The high-sounding open door policy offered the industrial powers a way out of the China chaos while retaining prospects for further economic activity in East Asia. The New York Post praised the initiative’s simplicity: “No treaties; just an exchange of official notes. No alliances; no playing off of one Power against another; simply a quiet inclusion of them all in a common policy. . . . It was an exceeding daring and skillful stroke of diplomacy.” It also saved China from looming disintegration. Though Hay’s “open door” language didn’t mention China’s territorial integrity, the effect was to check the geopolitical avarice that had driven the great powers’ policies in China.
* * *
HAY’S HANDIWORK SOON was overtaken by the revolt that enveloped northern China when a call went forth that quickly inspired millions: “Support the Qing; exterminate the foreigners.” It came from yet another secret society, Yi-He quan, translated as Righteous and Harmonious Fists and known among Westerners as “the Boxers.” Like earlier Chinese secret societies, the Boxers emerged almost spontaneously among Chinese peasants, particularly in the fertile, densely populated northern province of Shandong, a strategic expanse that encompassed long stretches of the Yellow River and the Grand Canal and extended to the Chinese coastlands nearest Beijing. The Boxers of Shandong, displaying red sashes of defiance, were out for blood.
Their initial targets were Chinese Christians. Western missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, had arrived throughout the nineteenth century to spread the Word and deliver beneficent works through the establishment of churches, schools, and hospitals. By 1900 some 850 Catholic priests and nuns, mostly French, ministered to more than 700,000 Catholic converts. Another 2,800 Protestant missionaries, largely British and American, provided religious and humanitarian service to some 85,000 converts. Well-meaning, idealistic, and naïve, these Westerners didn’t comprehend how much they bruised the sensibilities of native Chinese devoted to their cultural and religious heritage. Many displayed what one Chinaman called a “patronizing impudence” toward the prevailing Chinese culture. Sir Robert Hart, British head of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, said the missionary presence constituted “a standing
insult” to many Chinese, “for does it not tell the Chinese their conduct is bad and requires change . . . their gods despicable and to be cast into the gutter, their forefathers lost and themselves only to be saved by accepting the missionary’s teaching?”
Worse, the missionaries established an independent power center within Chinese society, codified in various extraterritorial treaties that exempted missionaries from local laws. They often used this power to intervene on behalf of Christian converts in legal and civic disputes, thus upending traditional power arrangements and spreading frustration and anger among local officials. Chinese Christians, relying on this intervention, flouted local customs and laws with increasing brazenness. “These Chinese Christians are the worst people in China,” declared Cixi. “They rob the poor country people of their land and property, and the missionaries, of course, always protect them.”
Two natural disasters heightened frustration and anger in Shandong: an 1898 Yellow River flood that destroyed vast crops and a subsequent drought that wreaked further devastation. Thus did a combination of developments, social and natural, set off an explosion of anti-Christian and anti-Western savagery. The leaderless and loosely organized Boxer movement spread through the countryside, killing Chinese Christians initially but threatening Westerners with increasing menace.
Sitting on her Beijing throne, Cixi vacillated on how to respond, then placed her own stamp upon the movement by financing it and beheading a number of anti-Boxer officials. Resolving to use the Boxers as a spearhead against the despised Westerners, she both expanded and emboldened the movement. China entered an era of officially sanctioned upheaval. That became clear on New Year’s Eve, when a mob of Boxers accosted a British missionary named Sidney Brooks. They stripped him of his outer clothing, punctured his head and arms with swords, then beheaded him and threw him in a gully. This was a new development—a Boxer willingness to kill Westerners.
Most Westerners in China made a show of remaining cool in the face of the threat. These included U.S. minister Edwin Conger, a Civil War veteran and friend of McKinley who had studied at the Albany Law School when the Major was there and later served with him in Congress. He abandoned politics in 1890 for a diplomatic career that included two stints as minister to Brazil. Selected for his China post by McKinley, he arrived in Beijing with his lively wife, Sarah, in summer 1898. Conger brought to his assignment a strong conviction that the hapless kingdom should be carved up and Westernized, with America getting “at least one good port.” This struck Secretary Hay and his Far East expert, Rockhill, as so outlandish that they tended to discount Conger’s warnings of looming perils to Americans in China.
But the direction of events became clear when the British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, protested Brooks’s killing and demanded a Chinese response. Cixi issued an imperial decree condemning violence against Westerners—but not always. It said that “when peaceful and law-abiding people practice their skill in mechanical arts for the self-preservation of themselves and their families” or “combine . . . for the mutual protection of the rural populations, this is in accordance with the public spirited principles of keeping mutual watch and giving mutual help.” In other words, Brooks’s killers were protecting society.
The Chinese ultimately offered compensation and executed two men for Brooks’s murder, but it never was clear that they had executed the real killers, and Westerners remained wary of the government’s true motivations. Conger protested to the Chinese Zongli Yamen, the foreign ministry, that the imperial decree bolstered the view within the secret societies that “they have the secret sympathy and endorsement of the Throne.” But when Conger joined with the British, French, and German ministers to protest Boxer violence and threats, Hay administered a stern reminder that American policy was to act “singly and without the cooperation of other powers.” The State Department, he said, “would have preferred if you had made separate representation on the question.” Although Conger accepted the admonition, events were overtaking this studied unilateralism. The Boxer rebellion was spreading across the countryside of northern China so fast and with such force that not even Cixi or her army could contain it—and there was no evidence that they wanted to.
By May the Boxers were murdering Chinese Christians with increasing abandon, often with highly ritualistic cruelty. In one region a French bishop reported that seventy Christians had been massacred and three neophytes “cut in pieces.” Villages had been pillaged and burned, and some 2,000 Christians had fled. Reports of mass slaughter of Chinese Christians—and now of more and more Western missionaries—reached Beijing with increasing frequency.
When Conger peppered the empress dowager with atrocity reports and sought protection for the missionaries, he got in return soothing words. The Zongli Yamen assured Conger that a new imperial decree would “cause peace and quiet to be restored” and he “should cease being uneasy in his mind.” But in late May the first Boxers appeared in Beijing, their now-famous red sashes marking their boldness and danger. They swaggered through the streets, directing insolent looks at any Westerners who ventured forth from embassy compounds and replacing the familiar airs of Western superiority with the countenance of fear.
Fears mounted on May 28, when the Boxers destroyed the rail line between Beijing and the coast, where twenty Western warships had assembled at Dagu in April. Britain’s MacDonald called a meeting of ministers to determine what to do. These representatives of what became known as the Eight-Nation Alliance (Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) agreed to telegraph the Dagu fleet requesting troops to guard the embassies. On June 1, some 350 soldiers arrived, including fifty U.S. marines and seamen from the USS Newark. This brought the military contingent at the legations to 430 troops.
Undeterred, a Boxer mob burned down a racetrack outside Beijing on June 9. Two days later Chinese troops killed Japan’s embassy chancellor, Sugiyama Akira, at the train station. On June 14, several hundred Boxers stormed the legation compound; Western soldiers repulsed them, killing four. The Westerners congregated at the British legation, barricaded the streets surrounding it, and pulled together enough food, water, and ammunition for an anticipated siege. On June 19, Cixi demanded that all Westerners leave Beijing and travel to Dagu under her protection. Fearing a trap, the legation people sought clarification from the Zongli Yamen. When no reply came, the German ambassador, Baron Clemens August von Ketteler, set out to get an answer—and was killed. That ended talk of Westerners leaving their protective compound. Thousands of Boxers surrounded the legations, and a mass slaughter seemed imminent if a rescue party didn’t arrive soon.
In Washington, officials only slowly grasped the extent of the crisis. The idealistic China enthusiast Rockhill assured Hay on June 1 that the empress dowager wouldn’t allow any mass killing of diplomats. Hay continued to admonish Conger to avoid entanglements with other powers. “We have no policy in China except to protect with energy American interests, and especially American citizens,” the secretary wired Conger on June 10. “There must be no alliances.”
But the next day Washington got a dose of reality from Rear Admiral Louis Kempff, commanding U.S. naval forces at Dagu. Anticipating that communication with Beijing would be cut off, he wired Secretary Long that U.S. forces could not act alone in restoring rail traffic and telegraph lines or in getting more troops to Beijing to protect Americans. The danger was too great. “If other nations go will join to relieve Americans pending instructions. Situation serious. Battalion marines from Manila has been urgently requested.” Washington finally grasped the crisis. When Conger asked permission to join his colleagues in warning of Western action if the Boxers weren’t suppressed, Hay answered simply “Yes.”
Another jolt arrived on June 13 with news that the Boxers had destroyed the Beijing-Dagu telegraph lines, isolating the legations from outside communication. The Washington Post reported, “This absence of official reports has given rise to grave apprehension” in offi
cial Washington. McKinley devoted his June 15 Cabinet meeting entirely to China, and afterward ordered more ships from the Philippines to join Kempff at Dagu, despite protests from the commanding naval officer at Manila, Admiral George Remey. Notwithstanding a similar remonstrance from General MacArthur, now commanding the U.S. Philippine forces, a Philippine infantry regiment also was ordered to China.
McKinley understood that events in China contained political and global significance far beyond the fate of Beijing’s beleaguered Westerners. He was responsible for the safety of American citizens everywhere around the globe, and any horrendous outcome in Beijing would undermine his leadership in an election year. Further, not even Hay’s adroit diplomacy could forestall a China carve-up by the Western powers if a massacre should occur. The president’s China policy would be in ruins, along with Asian stability.
China developments now centered on three theaters of operation: Beijing; Dagu and the surrounding area, including the city of Tianjin; and the rail line between Tianjin and Beijing. In Beijing, the siege continued without any end in sight short of a military rescue or a massacre. Thus did British Admiral Edward Seymour fashion a plan to assemble an Alliance force of several thousand sailors, marines, and soldiers to restore the rail line, enter the capital city, and rescue the beleaguered Westerners. Meanwhile it was imperative that Alliance forces secure Tianjin, some fifteen miles inland on the Hai River. They also needed to control the mouth of the Hai, to guarantee access to Beijing from the sea. But the Chinese had four forts protecting the Hai. Without the forts, the river would be lost; without the river, Tianjin would fall; without Tianjin and the river, Beijing would be inaccessible. The forts had to be stormed and taken.
Seymour set out on his rail mission on June 10 with a force of about 2,000, mostly British. Seymour planned to place his troops on train cars and move toward Beijing, repairing the sabotaged rail line as they went. It was hopelessly ill-conceived, since he lacked sufficient troops to garrison the line behind him. Soon the Boxers destroyed the roadbed at his rear, cutting him off from his supply train. Ahead of Seymour’s troop train, meanwhile, the Boxers expanded their sabotage efforts, forcing Seymour’s men into more repair work that exposed them to more ambush attacks. Worse, the Seymour expedition had enraged the empress dowager, who on June 13 ordered her imperial army to halt the Seymour incursion. Seymour and his contingent now faced not only the frenzied Boxers but well-armed and disciplined Chinese troops. He and his men were dangerously exposed, with no prospect of reaching Beijing. It would be difficult enough just getting back to Tianjin.
President McKinley Page 49