The Boxers, China, and the World

About the Book

In 1900, China chose to take on imperialism by fighting a war with the world on the parched north China plain. This multidisciplinary volume explores the causes behind what is now known as the Boxer War, examining its particular cruelties and its impact on China, foreign imperialism in China, and on the foreign imagination. This war introduced the world to the "Boxers," the seemingly fanatical, violent xenophobes who, believing themselves invulnerable to foreign bullets, died in their thousands in front of foreign guns. But 1900 also saw the imperialism of the 1890s checked and the Qing rulers of China move to embark on a series of shattering reforms.

The Boxers have often been represented as a force from China's past, resisting an enforced modernity. Here, expert contributors argue that this rebellion was instead a wholly modern resistance to globalizing power, representing new trends in modern China and in international relations. The allied invasion of north China in late summer 1900 was the first multinational intervention in the name of "civilization," with the issues and attendant problems that have become all too familiar in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, understanding the Boxer rising and the Boxer war remains a pressing contemporary issue. This volume will appeal to readers interested in modern Chinese, East Asian, and European history as well as the history of imperialism, colonialism, warfare, missionary work, and Christianity.

Contributions by: C. A. Bayly, Lewis Bernstein, Robert Bickers, Paul A. Cohen, Henrietta Harrison, James L. Hevia, Ben Middleton, T. G. Otte, Roger R. Thompson, R. G. Tiedemann, and Anand A. Yang.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter 1: Village Politics and National Politics: The Boxer Movement in Central Shanxi
Chapter 2: The Church Militant: Armed Conflicts between Christians and Boxers in North China
Chapter 3: (A) Subaltern('s) Boxers: An Indian Soldier's Account of China and the World in 1900–1901
Chapter 4: Reporting the Taiyuan Massacre: Culture and Politics in the China War of 1900
Chapter 5: Looting and Its Discontents: Moral Discourse and the Plunder of Beijing 1900–1901
Chapter 6: Scandals of Empire: The Looting of North China and the Japanese Public Sphere
Chapter 7: After the Fall: Tianjin under Foreign Occupation, 1900–1902
Chapter 8: The Boxer Rebellion and India: Globalizing Myths
Chapter 9: The Boxer Uprising and British Foreign Policy: The End of Isolation
Chapter 10: Humanizing the Boxers

About the Author :
Robert Bickers is professor of history at the University of Bristol and co-director of the British Inter-University China Centre. R. G. Tiedemann is senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Christianity in China, King's College London.

Review :
This is an important book, representing the latest state of the art on the subject. A brilliant account. Several chapters will be of particular interest to specialists of colonial and imperial history. . . . These chapters, like the others in this excellent book, show that a myriad of forces, traditional and modern, local and international, came into play in that long, dry summer of 1900. This book sheds fascinating new light on many hitherto-ignored aspects of the Chinese anti-Christian insurgents known as the Boxers. Equally important, though, especially in our own troubled times, is the attention that contributors pay to the actions of foreign participants in the Boxer crisis, including the consortium of foreign troops marching under eight different flags that lifted the siege of Beijing—and then quickly squandered its claim to the moral high ground by looting Chinese national treasures and carrying out brutal campaigns of reprisal. The Boxers, China, and the World is a highly original work of scholarship that provides readers with a fittingly international and surprisingly topical lens through which to view the traumatic events of 1900. The essays in this volume range from detailed explorations of the sources of this violence to broader inquiries into its global consequences, including pan-Asian sympathies in India, widespread criticism of foreign looting in the Western and Japanese press, and a common understanding that indiscriminate retribution against people resisting alien intrusions can be counterproductive. This book is of great value to students of Chinese and world history and to anyone inclined to think about history's lessons for the contemporary world.