Boxers come full circle

It’s a sobering thought.

I was trying to explain what little I knew about the Boxer Rebellion to some friends of mine, when it struck me how close the parallels were.

The Boxer Rebellion is a misnomer. It wasn’t a rebellion, at least it wasn’t one aimed at the government of the day. It was directed against foreign powers and cultural influences then besieging China.

That was in 1900, a neat century ago, when Qing Dynasty China was in steep decline. The Western powers – Britain, Germany, France and the US – had in the previous half century, established Treaty Ports up and down the Chinese coastline, where their merchants and customs agents lived haughtily with extraterritorial priviledges. Foreign gunboats sailed the length of the Yangzi with impunity. Their missionaries combed the villages of China, denouncing the backward, heathen Chinese culture as they preached their faith.

In the face of all this, the Chinese government, under Empress Cixi, was virtually bankrupt of ideas or effectiveness. Actually it was plain bankrupt, what with rampant corruption.

While millions of Chinese found the dying inward-looking regime detestable, their cultural pride -- and to this day, the Chinese are very prickly about their culture -- was offended by the sight of Westerners behaving as lords and masters over them. Xenophobia – the fear and hatred of things foreign – found fertile ground.

The origin of the Boxers are a bit obscure, at least to me. Maybe it’s just that I don’t know enough, but as I understand it, they came up as a spiritual revivalist cult, with tenuous roots in Chinese martial arts (thus "Boxers'). Christianity and Westerners were seen as the greatest threats to China and the Boxers dedicated themselves to fighting these vile influences. Literally. They took to sacking churches, murdering missionaries and traitorous local converts, and raiding the Western powers’ trading depots. It wasn’t long before the Boxers were a fully armed militia and a serious threat to the security of Western priviledges in China.

The Manchu court, long frustrated by their own impotence in the face of Western incursions, saw in the Boxers useful proxies for getting rid of the Western powers. The government tacitly encouraged the "rebels", who, by July 1900, were laying siege to the foreign legations in Beijing.

The foreign powers responded by organizing a joint expeditionary force that landed at Tanggu, near Tianjin and fought their way through the steamy summer heat to Beijing. There were conflicting accounts as to how brutal the Expeditionary Force was. The Chinese version was that they massacred, pillaged and raped as they pressed forward, in order to teach the Chinese a lesson. The Western version was that they were a well-disciplined multinational army. What is not in doubt was that when they reached the capital, they sacked the Forbidden City, and finally compelled the Qing government to accept yet another humiliating treaty.

Eventually, the Chinese people threw out the worm-infested Qings in the 1911 revolution, but Chinese attitudes to Westerners remain even today as ambivalent as ever. It only goes to show that one can hate one’s own government and curse foreigners at the same time.

The parallel to which I referred in the opening of this essay, was to East Timor, 1999-2000. Once again we had a private militia, the Aitarak, led by Eurico Guterres, on a rampage, burning churches and killing priests. Once again, the government (this time in Jakarta) claimed to have no control over them, but in fact was egging them on. Once again, the country as a whole was laid low, this time by the Asian financial crisis, and ordinary people loathed their corrupt government (the Suharto-Habibie regime). To top it all, we have the intervention of multinational forces (the UN’s) in what many Indonesians saw as a rightful part of their country.

A whole century separated the two events. In fact, just about everybody has forgotten about the Boxer Rebellion, even though July and August 2000 marked its centenary. It seems a distant history. Yet the similarities in both events are remarkable: the murderous passions fanned by cold political motives.

In an age when technology is ever accelerating, it’s easy to think of history as linear. We rush through space-time gateways, never to return. We can’t uninvent mobile telephony or the internet; wars can now be fought without a single casualty; there are sushi bars all over the West and burger joints all over the East. The future cannot but be markedly different from the past, we all say, without a doubt.

When the telegraph was first invented, people gushed about how through better communication, there’d be no more misunderstandings and wars. Some people invest the same faith in the internet today. Rubbish. They are only tools; channels of communication. They don’t dictate what messages – bluster, lies, ultimatums – are sent through them.

It’s good to remind ourselves that technology is only a small part of the story. Human nature and human madness form the greater part, and I don’t see how that can change without re-engineering the neuro-biology of a few billion of us.

The Boxer Rebellion wasn’t the first of its kind. East Timor won’t be the last. History may well be circular. That’s the sobering thought.

© Yawning Bread 

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