Restless Empire (18 page)

For Japan, the relationship to China was closely connected to the fear of foreign domination. As Japan’s power grew in the early twentieth century, some Japanese elites came to believe that their country’s survival depended on having an empire of its own, as the leading Western states had, and on not becoming isolated. To this form of Japanese thinking, which developed into the militarism of the 1930s, China was an object of conquest and subordination. But there were also Japanese who sincerely believed in East Asian cooperation as a barrier against the West, and who believed that Japan could help China protect itself and build a new state in close cooperation with its eastern neighbor. To both groups, however, Japan could not stay away from China: Either by conquest or by example, Japan had to prevent the country from becoming a Western dominion directed against Japan.

In China, the sense of enduring weakness that set in among some elites in the early twentieth century was projected onto the relationship with Japan. From being a model that could help China out of its despair, some Chinese came to see Japan as a root cause of their country’s problems. China was weak because Japan was strong. Tokyo was not just exploiting China’s condition but held it in place and extended it. Expanding on traditional stereotypes, some Chinese felt that it was only through destroying China that Japan could replace it as the dominant power in East Asia. The attempts by the Japanese to create an empire
in China’s place was so perverse, so against the natural order of things, that it was in its essence the worst problem China faced. Whatever existed otherwise and elsewhere, there was no room for two powers within the region. This attitude toward Japan is one that some Chinese have kept, even after their rival’s spectacular collapse in World War II.

I
N THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
, China went through a series of political convulsions that would shape all of its future foreign affairs. In 1900, large groups of ordinary Chinese organized violent protests against the foreign presence in what became known in the West as the Boxer Rebellion (but which should rather be known as the Boxer Revolution). In 1911, regional elites all over the country rose up against the Qing, and an army mutiny forced the mother of the last emperor, the four-year-old Puyi, to issue his abdication. By imperial decree, China became a republic, though very few people knew what a republic meant (the new Chinese word for it,
minguo
, means “people’s country” or “people and country”). Did the new order mean elections and a representative government? Or did it mean the rule of the best-qualified experts? Was China ripe for republicanism, or would old patterns of patronage and deference reassert themselves? Did a republic mean every man for himself, the dissolution of central power, the end of Confucianism, and, eventually, the breakup of China? Or could the new authorities fashion a new country, one that kept its Chineseness while becoming one with the rest of the world?

Between 1900 and the late 1920s, China saw many different regimes, foreign interventions, and provincial centers of power. The Qing empire was replaced by a succession of weak central governments,
which slowly ceased exerting full authority in most matters outside a section of northern China, around the capital, Beijing. Foreign powers, and especially Japan, were becoming more powerful within China than they had ever been during the Qing (though the political chaos made China less interesting for foreign investment than it might otherwise have been). Regional powerholders, some of them representing national minorities, became key political figures, often with effective control of both politics and commerce within their regions. It was a period of tremendous change, both in people’s daily lives and, not least, in how the Chinese viewed themselves and their country.

Understanding China’s foreign relations in this tumultuous period requires grasping two realities. Throughout the period and in spite of all challenges—domestic and foreign—China as a state retained enough cohesion to keep in place the semblance of a central government with a mandate to conduct foreign affairs. This mattered, because it would have been much easier for other countries to have shaved outlying provinces off China if there had not been a government of sorts claiming to represent the country as a whole. The remarkable fact that China’s borders today are almost identical to those of the Qing empire in its waning years is testimony to the significance of the idea of one integrated state, even when the republic was at its weakest. But it is also important to understand that no foreign great power wanted the complete dismemberment of China. Even Japan, which was moving ever closer to full control over Manchuria, did not want to see China south of the Great Wall carved up into zones of foreign occupation, because Tokyo (quite sensibly) believed that such a division would privilege Western states over Japan. And the Western powers—including the Russians/Soviets—were happy to work through local powerholders, factions, or political parties: Always watching each other for advantage, they were perfectly willing to work through those Chinese authorities that gave them the best deal, while preferring a weak central government over its abolition. Western businessmen felt that a little Chinese disunity was
good for business, but full dismemberment would unleash inner and outer power struggles that could do nothing but harm the prospects for the China trade.

The other main reality in the early twentieth century was the growth in Chinese capabilities in all sectors of society. After having been overwhelmed and numbed by the encounter with the West for almost two generations, China swung into action in ways that it had followed so often before: adapting Chinese means to foreign constructs, implementing foreign technologies (and amalgamating them with Chinese methods), learning through studies of the non-native, and inventing new forms of authority and concepts of self. By 1937 China had developed a Western-style sector of its economy that was open to the rest of the world. Industry, mining, transportation, communications, finance, and banking became increasingly international in technology, management, and ownership. Although this sector was only a small part (as low as ten percent, by some estimates) of a Chinese economy still dominated by agriculture, its visible manifestations became increasingly significant. Arsenals and shipyards, factories and railways, bore testimony to something new and strange being born. And new products, manners, and methods spread all over the country, including to regions far away from where a Chinese modernity was coming to life.
¹

By the early twentieth century, almost all Chinese were aware that the world they lived in was changing, but they had, of course, very different perspectives on this change. For some—many officials and intellectuals, for instance—the change was a collapse, pure and simple; a world that had been well-ordered and correct, with the Qing empire and China’s traditions at its center, was overturned. For others, the new world opened up new opportunities, new ways of leading their lives, chances to travel or to read in ways that had never existed before. For most Chinese, however, illiterate and bound to the earth by convention or by contract, what changed was not their personal position, but the constellations of power in their village, the origins of people who
traveled through, or the armies they were asked to support. It was a changing world, and one where the changes helped split people apart, sometimes by their own will and sometimes against it.

I
N
O
CTOBER
1898 a small group of peasants began a movement that would open a violent new phase in China’s confrontation with the West. They were inspired by martial arts and the secret societies that had long existed in their region of eastern Shandong, and they called themselves
Yihequan
or Fists of United Righteousness. Foreigners called them the Boxers. The group had long been involved in a conflict over rights to a local temple claimed both by Christians and non-Christians in the community. For the Boxers, the troubles of their region—Western incursions, Christian proselytizing, floods, and droughts—all seemed to have one cause: the willingness of Chinese to be overwhelmed by the foreign, and especially by foreign religion, without resistance. They dreamed of creating a China cleansed of the injustice of foreign ways, and they set out to free their region and their country from its humiliation by blood and fire.

The Boxers were a strange sight to Chinese and foreigners alike. Their red turbans and leather boots, their belief in magic, their invocations, shouts, and songs made them stand out even in a restless society where sects and secret societies were popping up all over—mad monks in Sichuan, sisters of Jesus in Guangdong, Ming descendants in Fujian, and Buddhists in Shanxi who believed in a nirvana on earth created by repeating mantras and smoking lots of opium. The Qing had their hands full catching and executing those who went too far in stirring up trouble or challenging authority. But the Boxers were different. In spite of their outlandish and often brutal behavior, they seemed to speak directly to China’s ills and offer the chance for young lower-class Chinese men to show themselves as patriotic and brave. In Shandong, Germans were a growing presence, and they mixed support for missionaries with brutality toward the native people. And so, Cixi and the Qing conservatives
at Court hesitated in suppressing the Boxers, at least as long as they professed their loyalty to the state.

The Boxer movement’s attacks on foreigners, Westernized Chinese, and especially on Chinese Christians broke society wide open and unleashed a war that removed the last vestiges of international respectability from the Qing regime. In many parts of China, especially the north, news about the Boxers fed into ongoing conflicts between Chinese with links to the outside world and those who resisted such links. The result was violent confrontations. Western accounts focus on the killing of foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians. But during the three years of the Boxer Rebellion, only about a quarter of the total death toll of more than 120,000 were Christians; 250 were foreigners. The rest were non-Christian Chinese killed by foreign troops or by Chinese troops who joined them. One’s point of view is usually determined by one’s place of view: When in 2000 the Vatican canonized 116 Catholics who were killed by the Boxers, the Chinese Foreign Ministry referred to the very same people as “evil-doing sinners who raped, looted and worked as agents of Western imperialism.”
²
For some, the Christians killed in China were saints; for others they were sinners against the natural order of things—then as now.
³

The first Boxer groups began entering Beijing in the spring of 1900. The Qing state had already shown signs of fragmenting on the Boxer issue, just as it had fragmented over reform issues two years earlier. In some regions, officials and military commanders were hunting down Boxer bands or at least trying to keep the peace between Christians and anti-Christians, while helping foreigners evacuate. In other parts, however, commanders and officials were joining with the Boxers, either because they believed in the anti-Christian message or out of fear of the consequences if they confronted a popular movement. By early June, Qing soldiers and militia members in Beijing had joined in attacks against churches, foreign-style schools and hospitals, and the homes of foreign residents. At Court, Cixi was increasingly pro-Boxer, although
she did not support the movement publicly until after foreign navy ships had attacked Chinese forts in an attempt to land forces in Tianjin, where the foreign community was also under attack by the Boxers. Cixi issued an edict on 21 June, in the name of the powerless Emperor Guangxu: “Our ancestors have come to Our aid, and the Gods have answered Our call, and never has there been so universal a manifestation of loyalty and patriotism. With tears We have announced the war in the ancestral shrines.”
⁴

With China at war, the Court ordered all of its forces to join with the militias and armed groups, including the Boxers, to defend the empire. Many commanders and regional leaders disobeyed. In the south, most promised to protect resident foreigners if foreign forces did not attack. Other long-time Qing advisers, disgusted with the Boxers, withdrew from public life. Most of the core of the army in the north did follow orders, however, and by late June the diplomatic community and other foreigners in Beijing were besieged in the legation quarter in the center of the city. The Cathedral of the Immmaculate Conception had been burned down on 13 June, with great loss of life; in the Northern Cathedral more than 3,000 people held out against sporadic attacks for more than eight weeks. The German ambassador, the arrogant and reckless Prussian officer Baron Clemens von Ketteler, set off to the Zongli Yamen, where he intended to deliver a formal protest, but he was shot and killed as he was carried in his sedan chair through the streets.

By early August 1900 there was fighting in Beijing. The neighborhoods around the legation quarter, including the great imperial library at the Hanlin academy, were burned to the ground. Eighteen thousand foreign troops were making their way from Tianjin to the capital, battling imperial troops and Boxers as they advanced. Towns and villages were torched and tens of thousands of civilians killed. To many of the newly arrived foreign troops, any Chinese, including women and children, could be a Boxer in disguise, and rumors about the horrible ways
in which foreign missionaries and their families had been put to death fueled the bloodlust. For foreign leaders, China was the first “failed state,” and the intervention in 1900 was the first “coalition of the willing,” meaning, in this case, an alliance of the main Western countries and Japan directed against Chinese “barbarity” and against the Qing state’s unwillingness to uphold “civilized” norms of government and public behavior.