by Chang, Jung
Backed as they were by gunboats, the missions had become a competing authority. As such they were able to protect their converts in numerous grass-roots disputes. The Rev. Arthur H. Smith, a missionary of the American Board in China for twenty-nine years, wrote (about the French mission):
Whenever a Christian has a dispute with a heathen, no matter what the subject in question may be, the quarrel is promptly taken up by the priest, who, if he cannot himself intimidate the local officials and compel them to give right to the Christian, represents the case as one of persecution, when the French consul is appealed to. Then is redress rigorously extorted, without the least reference to the justice of the demand.
As a consequence, some non-Christians were convinced, justifiably or not, that the local official would always judge in favour of Christians, to avoid trouble for his government and problems for his own career. Their sense of grievance sparked many a riot against Christians. Cixi’s order on dealing with disputes involving Christians was always ‘be fair and even-handed’. Her government clamped down on anti-Christian riots and punished officials who failed to exert sufficient force to quell the riot – or, as sometimes happened, had a hand in stirring up the disturbance in the first place. The number of riots was thus restricted to a few dozen in four decades, and none of them resulted in the kind of massacre witnessed in Tianjin in 1870.
After Germany snatched parts of Shandong in late 1897 and established a significant presence there, many villagers converted to Christianity in order to receive protection. In a number of counties, as the local authorities saw it, people joined the Church to avoid being punished for ‘owing debts and not wanting to pay them back . . . committing robbery or even murder.’ And there was one man who sought the shelter of the Church so that he did not have to answer a subpoena after ‘his father had filed a law suit against him for being seriously disobedient’. In one county, a Christian peasant was accused of taking wheat from his neighbour’s field. In another, a relatively rich Christian, it was alleged, refused to lend grain to the starving during a drought (which was contrary to tradition). In both cases, as the local magistrates judged in favour of the converts, riots broke out that led to churches being burned. Yet another riot was triggered by Christians trying to turn a temple dedicated to the Celestial Emperor into a church. The violence usually ended with the local government punishing the rioters and paying hefty compensation to the Church – which produced even greater resentment among the non-Christians.
In spring 1899, in a bid to put an end to riots in Shandong, Germany sent an expedition into some villages, where the soldiers burned down hundreds of houses and shot dead a number of villagers. In the wake of these atrocities, a group that had been known for about a year as the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, the Yi-he-quan, gained immense popularity and acquired hundreds of thousands of followers. (Shandong was famous for the male population’s fondness for martial arts, particularly a kind of fist-fighting similar to boxing.) This society blamed all the ills of the country and the hardship of their lives on foreigners, and vowed to drive them out. They were dubbed ‘the Boxers’ by the foreign press. People joined the Boxers for many different reasons. Some hated the Germans who had destroyed their homes – a hatred they now directed at all foreigners and local Christians. Others had scores to settle with neighbours who had converted. Still others sought release for their pent-up anxiety as the coming year’s harvest looked likely to fail. ‘On the whole . . . the Chinese is a fairly well-fed person,’ observed the beady-eyed traveller Isabella Bird, who was in the country at this time. But as soon as the weather turned bad – as it was then in Shandong – that same person immediately faced a struggle for survival.
When violence against Christians broke out, Cixi ordered the perpetrators arrested and ‘punished severely’, and the Christians protected. The governor of Shandong, Yuxian, hated Western powers and was unwilling to protect the Christians effectively. Cixi replaced him with General Yuan Shikai. Shortly after General Yuan’s arrival in Shandong, on 30 December 1899, the Rev. S. M. Brooks, a missionary of the Church of England, while travelling on a donkey on country paths, was murdered by a group of marauders who admired the Boxers. This was the first time in two years that a missionary had been murdered in China. An edict from Cixi declared that she was ‘most deeply aggrieved’, and commanded General Yuan to ‘catch the criminals and punish them severely’. Yuan soon found the culprits and brought them to justice. Some of them were executed. General Yuan also reported to Cixi that in that year the Boxers had destroyed ten family houses used as churches, raided 328 Christian homes and killed twenty-three Christian converts. The General was determined to use force to suppress the Boxers, which Cixi endorsed, at the same time cautioning him that he must be ‘extremely circumspect’ in taking large-scale military action. His aim must be to ‘disband’ the gangs, punishing only those who had actually committed crimes. As Yuan conducted his campaign against the Boxers, they began to disperse – helped by a much longed-for snowfall that lasted for days, promising a better harvest in the coming year, and a full stomach. The life-saving snow was followed by thorough rain in the spring, further reducing the Boxer ranks.
Still, some Boxers became bandits, living on robbery, and roamed into the neighbouring Zhili province surrounding Beijing. On 19 February 1900, Cixi banned the Boxers in Zhili as well as in Shandong, ordering ‘harsh punishment’ for anyone engaged in violence. Following standard practice, the decree was copied out and pasted on the walls in the two provinces.
The foreign legations, which had found Cixi’s edict about the Rev. Brooks’s murder ‘soothing’, were dissatisfied with her ban on the Boxers. What they – mainly Britain, America, Germany, Italy and France – wanted was a nationwide imperial proclamation against the Boxers and any affiliated society, ‘ordering by name [their] complete suppression’. They demanded that it must be ‘distinctively stated in the decree that to belong to either of these societies, or to harbour any of its members, is a criminal offence against the laws of China’. They further insisted that the proclamation must be published in the Peking Gazette, the government news bulletin.
Cixi declined to do as told. Apart from feeling defiant, she did not want to broadcast her ban to the whole empire, given that the Boxers only existed in two provinces. She would only ban the Boxers where they were active, Shandong and Zhili. She would punish those who had committed violence and broken the law, but would not criminalise the average members. She especially loathed being perceived by the population to be heavy-handedly suppressing anti-Western sentiment, and hated to be taken for a puppet of the foreign powers. Besides, she felt the legations were being unfair and unreasonable. None of them had so much as raised a murmur against the offending German soldiers, while she was actively clamping down on the Boxers. Moreover, her approach was working: the Boxers in Shandong had largely been dispersed. The more the legations insisted on their demands, the more she dug in. No mention of the Boxers was made in the Peking Gazette. Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister, wrote in frustration on 2 April: ‘I have never known the [Chinese Foreign Office] so pigheaded or so pleased with themselves . . .’ He blamed the Italian back-down: ‘their ships came, looked, and went away and their Minister was recalled – the pigtails winning all along the line.’ What Sir Claude did not know was that Cixi would have acted the same way with or without Italy’s debacle.
On 12 April, Sir Claude and his colleagues, whilst deciding ‘not to press further for a special Decree in the Gazette’, gave the Chinese government two months to exterminate the Boxers. Otherwise, they threatened, their forces would enter China to do the job themselves. This threat was backed up by an emphatic parade of gunboats outside the Dagu Forts. Not wishing for a confrontation, Cixi made concessions. Two days later, a memorandum from the Viceroy of Zhili describing how government troops were dispersing the Boxers was published in the Peking Gazette, thus announcing to the country that the Boxers were illegal. On the 17th, a d
ecree was carried in the Gazette condemning those who ‘make a pretext to oppress converts . . . and involve themselves in crime’. The legations read the translation: ‘the Throne sets no bounds to its principle of regarding all men with equal benevolence’; officials must ‘take every opportunity of making it clearly known to all, that every man must attend to his own business and live continually at peace with his fellow men.’ The decree did not mention the Boxers by name, and the tone was firm without being draconian.
That these items appeared at all in the Peking Gazette pleased Sir Claude and his colleagues, but the lack of desired severity in the decree left them far from satisfied. The gunboats remained outside the Dagu Forts, their presence sending a daily reminder that if Cixi did not wipe out the Boxers within two months, there would be an invasion. Western powers did not really want a war. As Mrs Sarah Conger, wife of the American minister, wrote, ‘none of them wish to get into war with China’. But she also noted that ‘there are many warships at Ta Ku [Dagu]’. These were part of the bluff. But as Britain’s Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, later remarked, ‘I have passed some time in trying to persuade my countrymen that bluffing with the Chinese was a dangerous amusement: but I did not anticipate such a very striking confirmation of my views.’ For Cixi, incensed, became more determined to defy the powers.
Ever since China’s disastrous war and ‘peace’ with Japan five years earlier, a pattern had been established: foreign powers would make demands, then threaten force, and Beijing would instantly do as it was told. Cixi had just broken the pattern by calling Italy’s bluff. She was committed to doing the same with the other, stronger powers. But if her challenge did lead to a war, how – and with what – could she fight? The navy had been destroyed and the army was weak. Defeat appeared inevitable. It was at this point, in desperation, that Cixi clutched at a straw: perhaps the Boxers would be able to fight a sort of ‘people’s war’ against the invaders. The Boxers’ hatred for foreigners would make them fierce and courageous soldiers, she thought.
Pragmatic men around Cixi, like Junglu, saw that a collision with the West was imminent and counselled accommodation with the legations in order to avoid it. Cixi turned a deaf ear. Fearing the worst, Junglu asked for sick leave, and stayed away from the court for sixty days. Her confidant, whose sensible advice she usually heeded, was thus absent when Cixi made her most fateful decision.
The man who had her ear now, Prince Duan, was the father of the newly appointed heir-apparent. Hating Westerners for snubbing his son, he vehemently promoted the idea of using the Boxers as soldiers. He and other like-minded princes and aristocrats tried to convince Cixi that the Boxers were loyal, fearless and ‘disciplined’. They offered to organise the Boxers into a fighting force, prepared for invasion. Cixi’s rational side told her that the Boxers were not remotely suited to such a conflict, but her emotional side desperately wanted to believe otherwise. They were her last resort. She may also have calculated that the Boxers could at least inflict some damage on the invaders, which could give her a chance to negotiate a compromise and so avoid a wholesale capitulation.
As she tilted towards using the Boxers as soldiers, her hand that was striking at them became hesitant. Although the army continued to try to disband the Boxers, Cixi’s half-heartedness and ambivalence were felt by the troops, whose own ardour slackened. The Boxers, emboldened, increased their ranks and spread like wildfire, right in the area around Beijing.
In spring 1900, while Shandong was relieved by rainfall, the region surrounding Beijing was hit by a devastating drought. A contemporary missionary wrote: ‘For the first time since the great famine in 1878 no winter wheat to speak of had been planted . . . Under the most favourable circumstances the spring rains are almost invariably insufficient, but that year they were almost wholly lacking. The ground was baked so hard that no crops could be put in, and at such times the idle and restless population are ready for any mischief . . .’ Tormented by fear of starvation, the Boxers claimed that the God of Rain was not answering their prayers because he was bewitched by the ‘foreign devils’ – those inhuman creatures who had blue eyes! As the Chinese have black eyes, the colour of foreigners’ eyes marked them out. There was a widely believed rumour that their multicoloured eyes could see through the surface of the Earth and spot underground treasures, which they proceeded to steal, leaving China poverty-stricken.
In May, the Boxers, mostly peasants hit hard by the bad weather, entered Beijing and crowded the capital’s streets in their many tens of thousands. They wore red head-kerchiefs, red shirts, with a red sash around the waist, and they wielded large carving knives. Moving in gangs, they set up shrines worshipping a variety of deities – very often characters from popular theatre like The Monkey King. In the course of a ceremony the chief of the gang would act as though the spirit of a deity had entered him, thus making him and his words sacred. He would jump up and down, howling and dancing wildly as if in a trance: gestures that were also copied from Peking Operas. Members recited meaningless incantations after him and they learned kung-fu kicking. They were told that protective spirits had now entered their bodies and had made them immune to bullets and weapons, so foreigners’ firearms could not hurt them.
Among them were some young women, who called themselves the Red Lanterners, and who had to be virgins or widows. Often carrying red lanterns as well as red-tasselled spears, the women wore red tops with short sleeves and tight trousers and paraded themselves in the streets. All this was a breach of tradition. And they went even further by waving to onlookers with their red handkerchiefs. These handkerchiefs were said to possess magical properties: place one on the ground and step on it and a Red Lantern girl would be carried to the sky (as in the theatre), where she could locate a foreign devil’s head and sever it with a knife. She could also dust a tall building (such as a church) with a handkerchief, and the building would be set on fire and reduced to ashes. These women, most of whom led downtrodden lives, were now enjoying their moment of liberation, not least seeing crowds of men prostrating themselves on the ground in homage when they strode by.
On the walls in the Beijing streets, right next to the imperial edicts banning them, the Boxers’ own eye-catching posters were defiantly displayed, calling for the ‘killing of all foreigners in three months’. On 31 May, as the situation was running out of control, Cixi gave permission for 400 Western troops to enter Beijing from Tianjin, to protect the foreign legations. The legations did not feel this was sufficient, so on 10 June more than 2,000 troops under Admiral Edward Seymour, Commander-in-Chief of the British navy’s China Station, set off for Beijing from Tianjin, 120 kilometres away, by railway. The expedition was not authorised by Cixi, who told her diplomats to persuade the legations to turn it back. The head of the Foreign Office, Prince Ching, was sympathetic to the coming of this foreign army, so Cixi in anger replaced him with the hardline Prince Duan. The legations refused to turn back the expedition.
Determined to halt a foreign army entering the capital unauthorised, Cixi endorsed the mobilisation of some Boxers along the railway line, in an attempt to stop it. The Boxers proved surprisingly effective. They thoroughly sabotaged the line and fought ‘with the utmost courage’, according to Captain Jellicoe, Admiral Seymour’s Chief of Staff. Lieutenant Fownes Luttrell also remarked on the ‘great bravery’ of the Boxers. Soon joined by the imperial army with modern weapons, they managed to hold back the Seymour Expedition. This success raised Cixi’s hope that the Boxers could indeed help repel invasion.
The fighting heightened tensions in Beijing. On 11 June, soldiers of a largely Muslim army defending the capital killed a chancellor of the Japanese Legation, Sugiyama Akira, while he was out on the street. Cixi publicly expressed ‘deep regret’ over the atrocity against a foreign diplomat, and promised punishment of the perpetrators. But when she gave the order to the commander of the army, Dong Fuxiang, he replied that if one single soldier from his army were executed for the murder, his forces would mutiny. After a
long silence, Cixi said, ‘Well, what’s done is done . . .’
Supported by the Muslim army, the Boxers began to destroy railways, trains and telegraph lines. Telegraphic communication from Beijing to the provinces was broken, and the Viceroys from the south had to send their cables to Shangdong, to be relayed to Beijing on horseback. In Beijing, the Boxers started to burn churches and foreign properties, cheered on by large crowds. In an act of extreme hatred the mob raided foreign cemeteries, smashing tombstones and monuments, dragging out of their graves the bodies of foreigners, striking them with spears before burning them.
Foreigners were often referred to as ‘Hairies’ – mao-zi – because they have more body hair than the Chinese. Chinese Christians were called ‘Secondary Hairies’ – er-mao-zi – and they bore the brunt of the Boxers’ ferocity. With their bodies horribly burned and lacerated, they fled into the legations for protection: ‘more than flesh and blood could stand to see,’ wrote a guard. Rescue parties were sent out in the hope of saving others, and they opened fire on the crowds, killing some 100 Boxers and other Chinese in a couple of days. Hatred overflowed. Frenzied men girt with red sashes and armed with swords, spears and knives crowded outside the Legation Quarter and laid siege to it.