The Boxers, China, and the World (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Boxers, China, and the World John M. Carroll The Boxers, China, and the World. Edited by Robert Bickers and R. G. Tiedemann. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Based on a conference held in June 2001, this collection places the Boxer crisis in its global context, aiming to show, as co-editor Robert Bickers explains, how the crisis was “a wholly modern episode and a wholly modern resistance to globalizing power, representing new trends in modern China and in international relations” (xii). The Boxer Uprising and the allied invasion of China were “incidents inextricably tied in the world of 1899–1900, of global developments in imperial thought and practice, and in anti-imperial critique” (xxiv). Each chapter brings a new understanding to the events of summer 1900, which despite the proliferation of telegraphic and news technology at the time, are clouded by legend and rumor. Examining one of the most notorious incidents, Governor Yuxian's alleged murder of forty-five foreigners, Roger Thompson concludes that “mob violence, not Yuxian, was directly responsible for a massacre or massacres in Taiyuan” (79). More broadly, Thompson argues that the “Taiyuan Massacre” must be placed within the context of the China War of 1900 rather than within the Boxer Uprising: Yuxian and his colleagues believed they were “dealing with the repercussions of a Western invasion of China” (81). Lewis Bernstein's chapter on the Tientsin Provisional Government reveals how the foreign occupation of Tianjin from 1900 to 1922, generally overlooked because it represents a victory of Western civilization, “drastically changed the city's physical shape, showed the imperial government how cities could be turned into money-making machines using modern administrative methods, and was one of the few times foreign powers temporarily occupied, administered, and returned territory to China” (134). In his chapter on looting and the Japanese public sphere, Ben Middleton shows how support for Japan's participation in the invasion turned to criticism following publicized accounts of looting by Japanese troops. Middleton refutes the common belief that Japanese forces behaved exemplarily during the campaign. Still, the scope of the looting scandal focused “rather narrowly on looting and other property crimes,” while the Japanese press “generally and inexplicably overlooked the physical violence the Imperial Army perpetuated on Chinese civilians” (122). Paul Cohen tries to “reconstruct what it was like to be alive and conscious in north China in the spring and summer of 1900” (182). Cohen sees little that was particularly “Chinese” or “Boxer” in the Boxers' responses to the problems they faced. Although he agrees on the need to show how culturally specific and exotic the Western understanding of reality has been, Cohen prefers to do this by “emphasizing how unexotic, even universally human, was the Boxers' understanding of reality” (189). Several chapters will be of particular interest to specialists of colonial and imperial history. Anand Yang views the Boxer War through the perspective of Gadhadhar Singh, an Indian soldier who published an account of his year in China. Singh's involvement was unusual because “it thrust him as a colonial subject into the role of advancing the semicolonial project of the foreign powers in China” (45). This involvement also enabled him to question Western civilization (whose representatives in China looted and murdered), to draw comparisons between India and China (which appeared to be in danger of being colonized because of its weakness in warfare), and to observe the success of Japan in resisting European expansion. C. A. Bayly notes some of the parallels between China and India, even as both British and Indian interpretations of the Chinese crisis remained “quite ambiguous” (147). Similar developments in India included revolts, drought and famine, bubonic plague, predictions about the millennium and the end of British rule, the escalation of missionary efforts and Hindu revivalism, and the swadeshi movement. “What seems to be clear,” writes Bayly, “is the interconnectedness – and indeed the intertextuality – of the pervasive sense among both the imperial elite and Asian subjects and semi-subjects that a new phase in the history of empire and indigenous resistance had been reached about 1900” (152). In his chapter on the plunder of Beijing, James Hevia argues that whereas foreign observers...