China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949

Peter Zarrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134219766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Chinesische Geschichte

Providing historical insights essential to the understanding of contemporary China, this text presents a nation's story of trauma and growth during the early twentieth century. It explains how China's defeat by Japan in 1895 prompted an explosion of radical reform proposals and the beginning of elite Chinese disillusionment with the Qing government. The book explores how this event also prompted five decades of efforts to strengthen the state and the nation, democratize the political system, and build a fairer and more unified society.Peter Zarrow weaves narrative together with thematic chapters that pause to address in-depth themes central to China's transformation. While the book proceeds chronologically, the chapters in each part examine particular aspects of these decades in a more focused way, borrowing from methodologies of the social sciences, cultural studies, and empirical historicism. Essential reading for both students and instructors alike, it draws a picture of the personalities, ideas and processes by which a modern state was created out of the violence and trauma of these decades.

Part I: The road to revolution, 1895–1919

Telling time is a matter of politics, religion, and worldview. When Christian Europeans started to date events from the birth of Christ about 1,200 years ago, they began thinking in units of 100 and even 1,000 – hence the importance of millennia to the Western imagination. Chinese, however, demarcated time in terms of a 60-year cycle and also in terms of imperial reigns. When the Boxer rebels invaded Beijing, therefore, to Westerners the year was 1900 but to Chinese it was Guangxu 28 (the 28th year of the reign of the Guangxu emperor) or the gengzi year of the 60-year cycle scheme. Few Chinese thought of 1900 as a turning point – the end of one century and the beginning of another – but many educated Chinese felt their society and culture had already entered a fateful decline. Japan’s shocking defeat of Chinese troops in Korea, and of the Chinese navy in 1895 (or the jiawu year), had provoked furious self-reflection. It prompted a movement of radical reform that was, however, defeated by conservative court officials in 1898. Indeed, looking back, we might say most of China’s nineteenth century saw conflicts between reformism and conservatism.

Massive peasant rebellions that broke out at the end of the great emperor Qianlong’s reign were finally suppressed in the early 1800s. But the treasury was empty and foreign incursions were becoming more menacing. Opium, imported to China by the British, was spreading, and wars and peasant rebellion were to mark the century. Historians see the nineteenth century – or in Chinese terms, the period after Qianlong – as a time of dynastic decline and a failure to confront problems. Yet the cultural confidence of China’s elites was so great that these problems, though recognized, did not prompt a truly fundamental reappraisal of the culture until Japan’s military victory in 1895. And most conservatives were not forced to agree to reforms until the disaster of the Boxer Uprising five years later. The Western year of 1900 began with the usual patterns of life proceeding as pretty much normal in most of the country. The spring planting gave every reason to expect good harvests, and regional and international trade continued to give employment to hundreds of thousands, even millions.

As “normal” as 1900 may have seemed on the surface, a popular anti-foreign movement in the northern countryside was rapidly spreading out of control. Unlike the rest of the country, the north was experiencing a prolonged drought. Calling themselves “Boxers United in Righteousness,” thousands of peasants joined armies of men (and not a few women), who attacked local missionaries and Chinese Christians and unsteadily made their way to the capital, Beijing.¹ Why did they object to Christians? And why was the event to prove a milestone for Chinese political elites who lived in a different world from the Boxers?

A prologue: The Boxers

Angry and scared, the Boxers spread out of northwestern Shandong Province into adjoining Zhili, the capital province, as well as Henan, Shanxi, and even Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Rooted in north Chinese popular culture and without central organization, the Boxers produced hundreds of local bands rather than a centralized army. In the winter of 1899–1900, these community-based bands began to go on the move. By the spring, the Boxers were burning down Christian churches and looting convents, and they collected money and grain from local elites who either supported or feared them. Soon all foreigners, and foreign things such as railway tracks, became targets. A good many Boxers ended up in Beijing and Tianjin by June, and they virtually occupied these cities, though, again, in such an unorganized fashion that in Beijing the foreign legation quarter was able to withstand a siege until help arrived in August. Meanwhile, the Qing imperial court, after much indecision, decided to support the Boxers and declared war on the foreigners in June – but basically it had lost control of the situation.

It was the decision of the Empress Dowager Cixi to support the Boxers, but in fact the government remained divided. A number of powerful officials understood that success against Westerners would be worse than failure – that is, it would invite certain retaliation. Still, faced with the murders of missionaries in several provinces and the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing, the Western Powers and Japan put together an army that handily defeated both Boxers and Qing forces. Most Boxers then slipped back into the anonymous population. The Qing court, including the Empress Dowager and the Emperor, put on ordinary commoners’ blue cotton clothing and, so disguised, fled Beijing in a donkey cart as the foreign invaders arrived.

In the end, over 200 foreign missionaries and many thousands of Chinese Christians were killed in the initial Boxer attacks across north China; in the fighting between June and August nearly 800 foreigners and countless thousands of Boxers and Qing troops were killed. Many Chinese died as the foreign troops moved through hundreds of villages between the coast and Beijing, looting, raping, and burning along their route. The conquest of Beijing was followed by mopping-up operations carried out by Japanese and Western troops, who punished whole communities for former Boxer activities.

How could all this happen? The practices and beliefs of the Boxers were rooted in the popular culture of North China, and the long-simmering disputes between those Chinese following the traditional gods and the new Christians created flashpoints. As drought devastated the countryside in the late 1890s, thousands of farm boys with no crops to take care of learned the Boxer rituals that they believed would make them invulnerable to swords and bullets. Meanwhile, although missionaries and Chinese Christians had their own prayers for rain, the prayers to the traditional gods were going unheeded, it was said, because of the pollution of the Christians. Many Chinese Christians refused to join their neighbors in what had traditionally been community rituals. The crops continued to whither. Rumors told of Christians poisoning village wells. Moreover, stories spread about foreign missionaries and their traitorous Chinese followers. They were said to be devils who practiced incest, raped at random, and tore out the eyes and organs of Chinese for their evil magic: in other words, the embodiment of all that the people feared.

• No rain comes from Heaven.
• The earth is parched and dry.
• And all because the churches
• Have bottled up the sky.²

During the more than four decades of Christian proselytizing in the countryside, tensions between Chinese villagers and Western missionaries had often erupted. Missionaries were known to interfere in disputes over land or water rights, thus challenging one of the traditional prerogatives of local elites as well as upsetting villagers. If a Christian and a non-Christian argued about straying pigs, the missionary could pressure officials to find in favor of the Christian. Missionaries took complaints to their embassies, which in turn directly pressured the Qing government to force the hands of those local officials. It is probably not an accident that the origins of the Boxers can be traced to western Shandong, where a particularly aggressive order of German Catholics had alienated the local population. When two missionaries were murdered at the end of 1897, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm was glad to have such a splendid excuse for seizing the port of Jiaozhou to further build up the German presence in Shandong.³ Meanwhile, more and more young men banded together under religious and martial arts masters to learn the rituals that would make them invulnerable. In a word, these consisted of ways to call upon the gods to take possession of one’s body, turning it into an indestructible fighting machine. It is in this sense we can say that the Boxers were rooted in popular culture. Normally, god-possession was reserved for a few professional healers, fortune-tellers, or mystics, and ordinary Chinese could be as skeptical of charlatans as anyone. But that it was possible for the gods to play a role in the lives of humans no one doubted.

The Qing court, like all imperial governments, would have normally cracked down on a mass movement that made unsanctioned use of the gods. But the Qing’s best forces had recently been mauled in the Sino-Japanese war of 1895, and at first the early Boxer groups seemed to offer a way for communities to protect themselves in ways the Chinese imperial system had long countenanced. Boxer-type groups began as inward-looking village defense militia rather than outward-moving aggressors. And the Boxers themselves claimed that they were loyal to the Qing. Some high officials in the Qing court, including probably Cixi herself, wondered if there might not be something to the Boxers’ magic, or at least to their determination, morale, and enthusiasm.

The Allied Expedition of Western and Japanese troops that captured Tianjin and Beijing was determined simultaneously to “punish” the Qing while leaving it in power. Severity was measured. The British, for example, targeted the Summer Palace on the grounds that it belonged to the emperor and its destruction and plunder would not hurt ordinary people. On the other hand, discussing the need to avenge the murder of the German minister to the Qing court, Kaiser Wilhelm commented, “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 of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.”⁴ Pro-Boxer officials were executed – like the governor of Shanxi, who had offered forty-four missionaries and their families refuge from the Boxers and then had his troops kill them. But Cixi was spared to return to Beijing and lead the government.

The “Boxer Protocol” imposed on the Qing in 1901 fined the government 450 million taels of silver (just under US$334 million) to be paid over thirty-nine years at an interest rate of 4 percent (bringing the grand total to almost 1 billion taels).⁵ This was real money. Annual Qing revenues were only about 250 million taels. It meant that the Qing had to turn over to direct foreign control the last remaining revenue sources of any significance: maritime customs, native customs (i.e. internal transit taxes), and the salt tax.⁶ The Qing also promised to build monuments to the dead missionaries and to the German minister killed in Beijing. Military restrictions were imposed on the Qing, and the foreign military presence was increased. The Boxer Protocol thus had a lasting significance, further weakening the Qing state and increasing the powers of foreigners in China. The Boxers also marked a critical point in Chinese history; only after the humiliation of the Qing’s defeat did the imperial court turn to reform in earnest. Its reform policies, put into place once Cixi was back in Beijing, began the modern state-building and nation-building enterprises that marked China’s twentieth century.

Much of the Boxers’ importance lay in the images they left. While the conflagration they lit burned hotly, it was soon enough put out, leaving a few hundred foreigners and thousands of Chinese dead. Life on the north China plains soon returned to normal, but for Londoners, New Yorkers, and Berliners reading about the fate of their brave missionaries and soldiers in faraway benighted China, the Boxers represented everything fearful, evil, and dark in the world: that is to say, the mirror image of the Boxers’ views of the foreigners. The Boxers, then, unknowingly contributed to the age of the “yellow peril” that did so much to sell newspapers at the turn of the century. In the Hollywood version, the role of imperialism and drought in creating the Boxers is scarcely shown. In 55 Days At Peking, a 1963 color epic lasting some two-and-a-half hours, a ruggedly handsome Charlton Heston and an intrepid David Niven lead the besieged Westerners – including a stunningly beautiful and self-sacrificing Ava Gardner – until help arrives. Although the Empress Dowager makes an appearance in the cast of thousands, the audience does not see much of the Boxers themselves. The Boxers are a mere social force, a “wind” destined to pass destructively but quickly.

For the Chinese, the Boxers became something of a mirror in which what you saw depended mostly on who you were. The historian Paul A. Cohen has elegantly pointed to the ways the Boxers were “mythologized” by later generations.⁷ The Boxers could be read forward or backward. Forward, they patriotically stood for Chinese resistance against the forces of imperialism. They showed peasants standing up for themselves: they foreshadowed the revolution to come. Backward, they displayed ignorance and superstition. Supporters of the feudal dynasty of the Qing: they represented reactionary impulses. Modern-looking Chinese elites were convinced of the Boxers’ backwardness and took them as proof for the need for a complete national regeneration. It is worth noting, however, that these same elites agreed that if the masses were educated and properly mobilized they could become fit citizens of a modern state. This education in citizenship became a central task of the Chinese elite.

For some Chinese, on the other hand, the Boxers showed what could be done through hope, faith, and organization. As anti-imperialist nationalism strengthened in the 1920s, the Boxers were reclassified as patriots. In this view, the central problem facing China was not the ignorant masses or their superstitions; the problem was the forces of imperialism pressing down on the whole country. One way to think about this is to ask: what is worth remembering? The “superstitions” of the Boxers or the gross injustice of the Boxer Protocol? Chinese patriots accused British soldiers of greater barbarism than the Boxers ever displayed. Communists even tended to romanticize the Boxers as patriotic Robin Hoods.

Of course, the Boxers cannot be summed up as either (simply) superstitious and feudal or as (simply) progressive and patriotic. They show us much that was important in twentieth-century China. Consider these elements: the missionary presence in rural areas, which disrupted traditional power relations; the political economy of acute scarcity in the north China plains; the direct interference of the foreign powers (gunboat diplomacy, “unequal treaties”); the complex political pressures on the Qing court and on local officials; the vulnerability of the peasant economy to flood and drought; the hopefulness and resolution of reforming elites; a culture with the capacity to turn toward violence; and popular resources of resistance. Above all, the Boxers foreshadowed the politicization of the Chinese masses. Looking backward, they resembled the vast peasant armies of bandits and warlords (and occasionally future emperors) that passed like massive storms but with no way to reshape the political or social structure. But looking forward, they offered a glimpse of how ordinary people – under the right circumstances – could not only affect historical trends but also consciously join political movements.

The state of China at the dawn of the twentieth century

The Boxers thus offer a way into China’s twentieth century. In 1900 some 80 percent of a population of about 400 million tilled the land. On the surface the rhythms of rural China scarcely seem to have changed even today. The rice paddies of the south and the wheat and barley fields of the north are tilled so intensively that to Westerners Chinese agriculture looked more like gardening than farming. Until about 1750 or 1800, China’s “average” standard of living was probably slightly superior to Europe’s; it declined slightly but steadily over the course of the nineteenth century. Relatively speaking, however, compared to per capita growth rates in Europe and North America, the Chinese economy, like that of most of the rest of the world, declined dramatically in the nineteenth century. The peace that the Qing rulers had made in the seventeenth century, the development of agricultural techniques, and China’s advantageous participation in world trade had encouraged the population to increase from about 100 million in the late 1600s to well over 300 million in 1800. By that point, severe pressures were building as, essentially, too many people tried to divide up too little land. Landlord–tenant relations worsened, and an ecologically disastrous cycle of over-planting and soil erosion occurred.

At the same time, silver began to flow out of China: nine million taels annually by the 1830s to pay for opium imports from British India. The result was especially hard on farmers, whose rents and taxes increased (these were paid in silver, which farmers had to buy with the currency of daily life, copper). British troops defeated Qing defenders in the on-again, off-again series of battles known as the Opium War (1839–42): beginning the process by which China would be forced to accommodate foreign demands for more open trade, diplomatic exchanges, missionaries, foreign troops, indemnities, and after 1895 direct foreign investment. The Qing rulers thus lost control of an economy tied to international trade and capital flows. The first two decades of the twentieth century did not see economic crisis in overall national terms, though local crises were destabilizing. But neither did they see the accumulation of capital necessary for a qualitative leap into industrialization. Per capita GNP was still only 60 yuan (US$200–250).

The role of imperialism on the Chinese economy has been subject to considerable dispute, the terms of the debate ranging from the view that imperialism caused Chinese backwardness by preventing the natural development of the economy, to the view that it stimulated economic growth and progress. Analytically, foreign economic penetration (trade and investment) should be distinguished from the economic impact of essentially political decisions like imposing indemnities on China or taking over customs collection. These actions, whatever their economic impact, also weakened the Qing and Republican governments. Such political consequences also affected the economy as physical, legal, and even moral infrastructure was destroyed. It thus seems fair to conclude that, whether international trade disrupted or improved the Chinese economy (or both), the overall impact of imperialism was disastrous. Running a favorable balance of trade into the early nineteenth century, and with the government virtually debt-free before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, by the time of the 1911 Revolution, China’s foreign debt was a staggering 900 million taels. Anywhere from a quarter to a third of government revenue went to repay foreign debts and indemnities.

At the level of perceptions, the Chinese at the turn of the century were beginning to understand imperialism as a growing web that threatened to smother them. The foreign missionary, the foreign businessman, the foreign diplomat, and the foreign soldier were parts of a single enterprise dedicated to the exploitation of China. And laws preventing immigration by Chinese to America and Australia were even more widely resented. It is significant that railroads – that great nineteenth-century symbol of progress, domination over nature, and opening the land – were seen by some Chinese as symbols of foreign aggression: pushing China into debt, as the government borrowed foreign funds to build them; giving foreign goods and foreign troops easy access to the interior; throwing people out of work; and allowing foreign troops to move quickly across the nation. No wonder the Boxers tore up railroad tracks.

The forms of imperialism were many and various. After Britain’s victory in the Opium War, extraterritoriality protected foreigners from Chinese law everywhere, and treaty ports fell under foreign administration.⁸ By 1890 thirty-three cities were open to foreign trade and residence, and between 1894 and 1917, 59 more were added to the list (missionaries could legally set up missions anywhere after the 1860s, while businessmen were supposed to get a passport to travel inland). Not all the treaty ports housed sizeable foreign populations, but sixteen cities contained concessions which foreigners and their home governments directly administered: mini-colonies in effect beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese government. The largest concessions were in Shanghai. In 1898 China granted five leaseholds or more extensive territories:

• to Germany, Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong and over 500 square kilometers of the surrounding region, plus the right to build railroad lines and quarry mines, for 99 years;
• to Russia, the Liaodong peninsula in southern Manchuria, for 25 years, plus the right to build a railroad line from Port Arthur to Harbin and exploit timber and mines along it;
• to France, Guangzhouwan port in the southeast, for 99 years;
• to Britain, the New Territories opposite Hong Kong (already made a supposedly permanent British colony after the Opium War), for 99 years; and also
• to Britain, Weihaiwei port, “for as long a period as Port Arthur shall remain in the occupation of Russia.”

The role of great power rivalry is obvious here. This rivalry ensured that no single Power would colonize China. Naturally enough, Chinese grew afraid that foreigners would simply carve up their land. The Powers also lay looser claim to spheres of influence: areas dominated by one of the Powers through a combination of treaty rights and de...