Season 13, Episode 14: The Boxer Rebellion
In spite of its imperial ambitions, Japan had, without question, suffered some serious setbacks in the latter 1890s. In the spring of 1895 they were celebrating their great victory over long-time rival nation China and a month later they were forced to return the coveted Liaodong Peninsula under threat of a dangerous triple alliance. A few years later, their pet government in Korea was being lynched in the streets and their soldiers withdrawing from the peninsula.
Korea falling out of their sphere of influence and opting for the support of the Russian Empire instead was a disaster. The damage done to Japan’s diplomatic reputation worldwide in the wake of Queen Min’s assassination likewise made for a bitter pill. If not for the annexation of Taiwan and the Pescadores islands, Japan would have lost all of its gains from the First Sino-Japanese War. That is not to say, however, that Taiwan and its surrounding islands were entirely secure.
Shortly after the Qing Dynasty signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, their officials on the island of Taiwan decided to attempt a rather eccentric alternative. On May 23, 1895, a little over a month after the treaty had been signed, former Qing officials on Taiwan declared their independence, dubbing their new nation “The Republic of Formosa.” The name “Formosa” was originally given to Taiwan by Portuguese sailors in 1542 who dubbed the island “Ilha Formosa,” meaning “beautiful island.” The new government of Formosa proceeded to make serious preparations for war to keep the Japanese troops from gaining control, turning to Liu Yongfu, the retired former leader of the Black Flag Army whom we discussed in episode 10, to lead their resistance efforts. They also sought international recognition, hoping that they might convince at least one of the imperial powers to help them resist Japanese occupation.
Japanese troops landed about a week later and the ensuing pacification campaign lasted until October, about five months. The resistance from the native Taiwanese and local ethnic Hakka settlers was fierce and the campaign featured more than a few surprise victories from the resistance, who often utilized Liu Yongfu’s trademark irregular guerrilla tactics. However, the Japanese were determined to keep possession of what they viewed as their legitimate war prize and by late October, any hope of successfully forging an independent Republic of Formosa was essentially dead. Because the island and its neighbors had been ceded to Japan in a treaty, none of the imperial powers had any interest in helping the residents oppose foreign occupation. Many imperial holdings throughout the world were justified through similar such treaties, after all.
In spite of the war’s end, periodic flare-ups of insurgent violence would persist in the near future and beyond. The Japanese chose to place the island under military rule, a decision which they deemed necessary because of the considerable resistance they continued to encounter from its residents. For the near future, Taiwan would be under the domination of the Japanese military and its people subjected to brutal repression every time a new rebellion attempted to arise, which was alarmingly frequent.
In the previous episode, we discussed how the British, French, Germans, Russians, and Americans had taken advantage of China’s weakness, made evident by their loss to Japan, by forcing them to lease large, valuable tracts of land, entire cities, and especially prosperous ports. It’s worth exploring the nature of these leases in greater detail.
In some cases, the Qing Dynasty signed contracts with state-sponsored companies from imperial powers, granting them exclusive rights to build railroads through certain desirable areas and to later reap the profits which regular travel on those railroads promised. In the case of the leasing of ports, the nation which owned the lease was allowed to build improvements, collect customs duties, and supply their own navy and merchant fleets, often funding these supply ventures with the gains they had made running the ports.
The problem, for China, was that these leases were extremely cheap for the foreign powers and resulted in drastically reduced revenues. Over time, it also meant a gradual outflow of Chinese wealth, which lined the pockets of the western imperial powers. The result was nothing short of a death spiral for the government’s revenues and, indeed, for the Qing government itself. The loss of the First Sino-Japanese War was very likely the point of no return for the continued viability of the Qing.
As foreign powers once more scrambled for Chinese land, ports, contracts, and wealth, things got a little weird. One interesting phenomenon was that Chinese money itself had become so overinflated that it became almost useless as legal tender. Those who used money on a daily basis turned to more stable currencies for their mercantile needs, especially the silver-based Mexican peso.
A nation whose currency has become so debased that their people look to foreign currencies as an alternative is a situation which economists generally refer to as “a bad sign.” The lives of China’s peasants, which were rarely free and easy, became far more intolerable as the government sought to squeeze every peso they could from the populace to make up for shortfalls in their revenues.
The parallels between late Joseon Korea and the Late Qing Dynasty are remarkable. During their final decline, both governments seemed to exist solely to extract from the people while providing nothing in return. While in Korea this was largely due to generations of violent political turmoil, in China it was the result of predatory foreign avarice.
Also in a manner comparable to the Donghak of Korea, in China there developed a new religious movement which emphasized reforms, existed as a synthesis of many common Chinese traditions, and was explicitly xenophobic. This movement, called “Yi-huh Chun” 義和拳 or “The Society of Righteous Harmonious Fists,” differed greatly from Donghak in its primary innovative practice.
Members of the Society and its many like-minded groups frequently practiced martial arts in public. Europeans and Americans living in China during the late 1800s frequently mentioned these groups and described their traditional martial arts as “Chinese boxing.” Thus, many foreign residents referred to them broadly as “Boxers.”
Although the Boxer groups themselves initially arose as vigilante gangs who hunted bandits, often with the cooperation of local officials, many became convinced that the biggest problem facing China was the uninvited influence of imperial foreign nations. This was due, in part, to the interference of foreign missionaries in Chinese affairs. In spite of any humanitarian intentions, missionaries in China generally met with little success in converting the Chinese. Whenever a Chinese person would come to the mission, they would invite them in and, if necessary, conceal their presence from the local authorities. Many of these fugitives were bandits seeking protection from the law and the missions’ protection was resented by local law enforcement.
The behavior of the foreign powers present in China’s domains also served to fuel the Boxers’ xenophobic cause. In one famous incident, a group of boxers staged a protest against a German company building a railroad over a local burial site and the company responded by shooting into the crowd of protestors at random. Other incidents were of a similar conspiratorial nature as the rumors of child murder that preceded the Tienjin Massacre which we discussed in episode 10. Some of these may have been based on real events, but many were likely the result of the rumor mill, which tends to enlarge and exaggerate things regardless of truth.
The primary area of activity for the earliest Boxer groups was Shandong Province. Some of the fiercest fighting of the Sino-Japanese War occurred on the Shandong peninsula, which lies due south of Liaodong. The area was further devastated with the influx of foreign construction projects, which paid poverty wages for the few jobs they offered the local population.
Believing that they had developed a special ritual that would render them invulnerable in combat, in October of 1899 a large body of Boxers, over a thousand at least, converged on a temple in northern Shandong province which was occupied by a Qing garrison about three and a half thousand strong. Although the initial skirmish caused the Qing forces to fall back, the Boxers soon fled after the Chinese troops mounted a counterattack. The Battle of Senluo Temple, as it was later called, is generally considered the beginning of the Boxer Rebellion.
This battlefield defeat was the final deathblow for the Boxers in northern Shandong, but it was far from the end of the movement itself. Conservatives serving in the upper echelons of the Qing government praised the Boxer movements around the nation as they continued targeting foreign property and persons in small-scale conflicts.
The imperial powers whose property was now under imminent threat from a well-organized peasant mob moved quickly to respond. Much of the first half of the year 1900 was spent coordinating a large alliance bent on squashing the Boxer Rebellion, liberating the besieged embassies of their respective nations, and forcing China to once more submit to colonization, exploitation, and subordination. The resulting coalition was called “The Eight-Nation Alliance,” a rather bland, descriptive name. The nations who had joined and who would commit troops to this cause were: Italy, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, the United States, Britain, Russia, and Japan. That’s right- far from being a purely European-slash-American affair, this multi-nation expeditionary force included Japanese troops. It’s worth noting as well that many of the soldiers sent by Britain were actually Indian troops in part because Britain was in the midst of fighting the Boer War, which required more immediate attention.
Dowager Empress Cixi, who ruled on behalf of her nephew Emperor Guangxu, objected to this international intervention and believed there was an opportunity for the Qing Dynasty to recover from its former humiliation. She proclaimed an imperial edict announcing official support for the Boxer movement and calling upon all Chinese people to assist in expelling foreign powers from their domains. This edict was essentially a proclamation of war.
Dowager Empress Cixi’s edict was celebrated by the Boxers, but quickly divided loyalties throughout the Qing Dynasty’s government apparatus. Conservative officials were, obviously, thrilled that the empress had taken their side but a significant number of officials, particularly those in charge of military affairs, were flabbergasted at such an obvious blunder. The Qing generals were especially aware at this point, with the First Sino-Japanese War still very recent, that China in its present state could not hope to win a war against even a single foreign imperial entity, much less all of them at once. The Dowager was likely getting some very bad advice but her own willful self-deception certainly didn’t help. She believed that if the Chinese people rose as one and fought against the foreign occupation, they would win and grow stronger in the aftermath. In a previous era, with different military capabilities, this may have been true but superior numbers alone mean far less in modern warfare than they did in those previous eras.
What followed was yet another national disaster for the Qing Dynasty. The first order of business for most of the foreign expeditionary armies was protecting their embassies, most of which were being assailed by Boxer militias on a daily basis. Shortly after the coalition’s arrival in June, the Dowager Empress called upon the Qing army to support the Boxers in the field. However, most of the army commanders either made half-hearted attempts at support or withheld assistance outright.
Among these early skirmishes, the Battle of Langfang stands out. A party of about 2,100 coalition troops was ambushed by a Boxer army wielding melee weapons. While they were dealing with this sudden attack, a Qing army commanded by a sympathetic general attacked from the other side, threatening to pin the army in a pincer maneuver. The coalition army was forced to withdraw, making the battle technically a victory for the Boxers. The fact that it resulted in a Boxer victory, however, was what marked it as an outlier. In nearly every other engagement throughout the nation, Eight Nation Alliance forces triumphed easily over the poorly-armed Boxer army.
Part of the reason for their easy triumph was the application of one of the most fearsome and powerful battlefield weapons of modern warfare: the maxim gun. Previous attempts at crafting a gun which could fire multiple rounds in quick succession usually relied on multiple barrels, like the Gatling gun. The maxim gun, named for its creator Hiram Maxim, opted instead for a complex multi-fire mechanism which utilized a single barrel which was wrapped in a water-cooled sleeve. During peak operation, the weapon was capable of discharging 600 rounds per minute, an astounding rate of fire for the time.
The maxim gun quickly became very popular with expanding colonial empires after its initial creation in 1884, as it allowed relatively small platoons of soldiers to win battles over much more numerous foes, as long as those foes were less well-armed. The Anglo-French politician Hilaire Belloc famously concluded a poem about such colonial adventures in 1898 thus: (quote) “Whatever happens, we have got / the maxim gun, which they have not.” (endquote)
The large, rather unwieldy weapons were not easy to transport but once they were deployed they presented a difficult challenge for would-be attackers to overcome. Certainly the Boxers, who were usually armed only with melee weapons, had little chance at overcoming a defensive line which enjoyed the maxim gun’s protective sprays of bullets.
The expedition of the Eight-Nation Alliance was, unquestionably, a punitive mission and most of its member nations’ soldiers seem to have taken that punitive nature to heart. Eyewitness reports of foreign armies include accounts of widespread rape, murder, summary executions of suspected boxers or sympathizers, looting of temples, and wanton destruction of cultural properties. There was one nation, however, whose soldiers were generally observed to abstain from such destruction and mayhem, who even seemed to treat Chinese subjects with compassion and pity. That nation was Japan.
Although the Imperial Army had, just five years previous, committed the Massacre of Port Arthur during the First Sino-Japanese War, the Meiji Government was actually quite alarmed at the speed with which China was subsequently bullied into submission by foreign imperial powers. As the once mighty nation was forced to accept humiliating leases and foreign monopolies, a significant portion of the Japanese public came to sympathize with their Chinese neighbors in spite of their recent disagreement about Korea. They had joined the Eight-Nation Alliance not to further humiliate the Qing Dynasty but to help suppress a rebellion and hopefully re-establish friendly relations with the unfortunate Manchu leaders.
The largest single cohort from any one nation in the Eight Nation Alliance was Japan, who had sent over 20,000 of their soldiers to aid in crushing the Boxers. In spite of their own good behavior, however, humanitarian atrocities continued at the hands of European and American conquerors and there is little doubt that many of these victims had nothing to do with the Boxer rebellion in the first place.
There were, of course, plenty of atrocities committed by the Boxers as well. Christian Churches were favored targets because of their relatively undefended status. Chinese converts were singled out for specially cruel and painful deaths, often confined to church buildings and burned alive along with the structures. However, if the Dowager Empress was hoping that foreign invasion would galvanize a united national resistance, those hopes were soon proven ill-conceived.
As coalition forces continued scoring victories against both Boxer armies and those Qing armies who opted to support them, the imperial family was forced to take drastic action. In August of 1900, they abandoned Beijing and fled to Xi’an. Troops of the Eight Nation Alliance arrived at Beijing soon afterward and after a short siege they laid waste to the capital, burning, pillaging, raping, and murdering. The policy of alliance troops executing suspected Boxers and their sympathizers continued unabated, often using the most gruesome and painful methods available. Meanwhile, Russia launched its own invasion of Manchuria and eagerly gobbled up territory around the Amur river which had previously been Qing domains. This made their British and American allies very unhappy, as their broader policies vis-a-vis the Qing Dynasty was that the imperial domains should remain intact, recognized as the rightful property of the Chinese government. It was one thing to force China into agreeing to generous leases and profit from controlling large portions of their economy, but seizing their sovereign land, well, that was just rude!
By September of 1901 the war was very clearly over and the Dowager agreed to sign a peace treaty known as the Boxer Protocol. The treaty ordered the executions of over a dozen Qing officials of various ranks who had publicly supported the Boxer Rebellion and included yet another hefty war indemnity for China to pay. Interpreting the rebellion itself has proven a very diverse field with big-name contributors expressing very surprising opinions on the issue. Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy both wrote favorably about the Boxers. Vladimir Lenin wrote a scathingly snarky critique about the conduct of the Russian Empire which read, (quote) "Poor Imperial Government! So Christianly unselfish, and yet so unjustly maligned! Several years ago it unselfishly seized Port Arthur, and now it is unselfishly seizing Manchuria; it has unselfishly flooded the frontier provinces of China with hordes of contractors, engineers, and officers, who, by their conduct, have roused to indignation even the Chinese, known for their docility." (end quote) He went on to describe the Boxers as a sort of proletarian revolutionary army.
Of course, it is easy to project ideology upon failed causes, especially popular uprisings like the Boxer Rebellion. In truth, the Boxers were generally motivated by regional issues rather than something as abstract as national pride, and an honest assessment of their cause and conduct requires a great deal of nuance and contextual understanding. However, later Chinese revolutionary movements would sometimes openly welcome comparisons to the Boxer rebellion and even claim to be seizing the mantle which had been previously established by the ill-fated Boxers. For better or worse, the Boxers would be held up as a model of popular rebellion in China for many generations to come.
For the moment, however, China was in worse shape than ever before. Its armies were either defeated or unreliable, its economy now suffering the extra blow of wartime devastation, its national revenue weighed down by the requirements of yet another indemnity, and its ruling class busy accusing one another of causing, or at least failing to prevent, the latest national tragedy. There had already been a general tendency of Chinese people expatriating as laborers, farmers, or fishermen overseas and this trend would continue as desperate, impoverished workers sought their fortunes in foreign lands which they generally sent home in order to support their families in China.
Meanwhile, Meiji Japan had won another victory and even made inroads with peer nations who were actually starting to treat them like real peers. In spite of the bad press Japan had suffered after the Port Arthur Massacre and the even worse press they endured after the assassination of Queen Min by the coward Miura Goro, commanders from the United States, Britain, France, and many others wrote favorably about the conduct of the Japanese soldiers, remarking on their bravery in the face of Boxer fanatics and their overall competence on the battlefield. This was welcome praise for Japan because their government and populace were both still fairly dissatisfied about the bait-and-switch they felt had been pulled on them in the wake of their former war against China in 1895.
The seizure of Liaodong by the Russian Empire in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War served to irritate Japanese relations with their next-door European imperialist neighbors. As the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion progressed, they learned that Britain was also uneasy about Russia’s recent gains and extremely leery of potential Russian expansion into the Pacific theater.
Britain was, in the minds of the Meiji leaders, a good choice for a more permanent European ally. Britain had been approached by the Russian Empire about joining in their efforts to intervene in Japan’s seizure of the Liaodong Peninsula in 1895 but had refused to help. Britain had also been a key partner in Japan’s modernization efforts and the Meiji Constitution was arguably the most similar to Britain’s own Constitution than any other western nation.
The newspapers of both nations had, in fact, been writing relatively glowing stories about the other nation on a regular basis for years. As Russia flexed its imperial muscle and annexed Manchuria against the wishes of their fellow Eight-Nation Alliance members, papers in England called for an alliance with Japan.
Such an alliance, however, would not be a simple affair. British foreign policy had been to avoid such entangling alliances since at least 1815, a period referred to as the “Splendid Isolation.” There were also influential actors within the Meiji government who opposed the idea of a strong alliance with Britain, including Ito Hirobumi himself, who urgently sought to convince Russia to give Manchuria back to China in hopes of preserving the previous status quo.
However, the Russian government was unmoved by the pleas of Hirobumi and continued their process of annexation and assimilation. Even the Meiji ministers who feared rattling the saber with Russia conceded that their nearest European neighbor presented a strategic threat to Japan. In seizing Manchuria, they now shared a border directly with the Korean Empire, who continued to favor improving relations with the Russians and nurtured a legitimate beef with Japan.
In the end, the forces who favored an Anglo-Japanese alliance on both sides prevailed. On January 30, 1902, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty was signed. It specified that Japan or Britain would only join a war on behalf of their ally if that ally was being attacked by more than one enemy nation. While this might sound somewhat toothless, it had exactly the right amount of caution which the British needed. Their primary objective vis-a-vis the Russians was to send a gentle reminder that they expected them to abide by the Boxer Protocol which they had co-signed. However, the Japanese government interpreted this new alliance far differently than their new allies did. Next time, we will discuss the other developments during the early 1900s which led Japan once more, inexorably, toward war.