Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (42 page)

Now the situation is perilous, and the powers are glaring at us like tigers eyeing their prey, all trying to barge into our country. Considering the financial and military situation in China today, we will of course try to avoid a war . . . But if our powerful enemies try to force us to yield to demands to which we cannot possibly consent, then we have no alternative but to rely upon the justice of our cause and to unite and fight . . . If we are forced into a war, once the war is declared, all provincial chiefs must act together to fight those hateful enemies . . . No one is allowed to speak the word,
he
[appeasement], and no one must even think about it. China is a large country with rich resources and hundreds of millions of people. If the nation can be united in its devotion to the Emperor and Country, what powerful enemy is there to fear?

Italy, which in fact had no stomach for war, lowered its demands and eventually asked only for a concession in a Treaty Port. Cixi reportedly told the Italians:
‘Not a speck of Chinese mud.’ Italy climbed down and, by the end of the year, abandoned all its claims. A ‘
feeling of elation filled the hearts of patriotic Chinese’, Westerners noticed. But the victory did not lessen Cixi’s anxiety. She knew she was lucky, for Italy was ‘a small and poor country’ and did not really want a war.
It was only bluffing, and she called its bluff. But the support given to Italy by major European powers destroyed her ‘one family’ illusion and deepened her bitterness.
‘Foreign powers bully us too much, too much,’ she kept saying. ‘Foreign powers are ganging up on us’ and ‘I feel eaten up inside.’

Even the most open-minded and pro-Western members of the elite were enraged by the European powers’ scramble for China. They were appalled that America, the only major power that did not take their territory, had introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act, discriminating against Chinese immigration.
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Almost everyone had endured injury to their personal pride. One, Wu Tingfang, who had studied law in London, and headed China’s mission to the United States, was much hurt by one incident:
‘Western people are fond of horse-racing. In Shanghai they have secured from the Chinese a large piece of ground where they hold race meetings twice a year, but no Chinese are allowed on the grand-stand during the race days. They are provided with a separate entrance, and a separate enclosure, as though they were the victims of some infectious disease.’

Yung Wing, the first Chinese to graduate from Yale University, described an experience in a Shanghai auction room which marked him deeply:
‘I happened to be standing in a mixed crowd of Chinese and foreigners. A stalwart six-footer of a Scotsman happened to be standing behind me . . . He began to tie a bunch of cotton balls to my queue, simply for a lark. But I caught him at it and in a pleasant way held it up and asked him to untie it. He folded up his arms and drew himself straight up with a look of the utmost disdain and scorn.’ The matter ended in a fight when Yung Wing’s blows ‘drew blood in great profusion from [the Scot’s] lip and nose’. ‘The Scotsman, after the incident, did not appear in public for a whole week . . . but the reason . . . was more on account of being whipped by a little Chinaman in a public manner . . .’ Yung Wing reflected:

since the foreign settlement on the extra-territorial basis was established close to the city of Shanghai, no Chinese within its jurisdiction had ever been known to have the courage and pluck to defend his rights . . . when they had been violated or trampled upon by a foreigner. Their meek and mild disposition had allowed personal insults and affronts to pass unresented and unchallenged . . . The time would soon come, however, when the people of China will be so educated and enlightened as to know what their rights are, public and private, and to have the moral courage to assert and defend them.

It was Yung Wing who initiated the scheme to send Chinese teenagers to America to be educated, while Wu Tingfang would in time become one of the drafters of a Western-style legal code. Both turned their hurt into an impetus to reform China on the model of the West, for which they retained a lifelong affection and admiration. Wu wrote about going to America:

When an Oriental, who, throughout his life, has lived in his own country where the will of his Sovereign is supreme, and the personal liberty of the subject unknown, first sets foot on the soil of the United States, he breathes an atmosphere unlike anything he has ever known, and experiences curious sensations which are absolutely new. For the first time in his life he feels he can do whatever he pleases without restraint . . . he is lost in wonderment.

For the average villagers and small-town people, anti-Western feeling was mainly directed at the Christian missions established among them. By now there were more than 2,000 missionaries living and working in China. Being foreign, they easily became targets of hate when times were bad. The inflexibility of some priests did not help. Animosity arose particularly when there was a drought, which inflicted protracted agony on the peasants. At such times, villagers often staged elaborate ceremonies and prayed to the God of Rain, in the desperate hope that they might survive the coming year. This was a matter of life and death, and all villagers were required to participate in order to demonstrate their collective sincerity. Many Christian missions held that they were praying to the wrong God and condemned the ceremonies as ‘idolatrous’ theatre. E. H. Edwards, for twenty years a medical missionary in China, wrote, ‘It can scarcely be conceived by foreigners (to whom these theatrical displays are senseless and absurd) what a hold they have upon the people, and what immense sums are spent upon them every year.’ Thus missionaries would forbid their converts to pay their dues or to take part. As a result, when the drought was prolonged, villagers blamed the foreigners and converts for offending the God of Rain – and causing them starvation. When mandarins explained this to the priests, the answer was unyielding, as
Edwards observed: ‘The officials further asked the missionaries to urge the Christians to pay such dues in order to prevent future troubles. To this request there was, of course, but one answer; and it was further explained to the officials that attendance at theatres was not only discountenanced by the Protestant Church in China, but that if any member was found to frequent them habitually he was disciplined.’

Backed as they were by gunboats, the missions had become a competing authority. As such they were able to protect their converts in numerous grass-roots disputes. The Rev. Arthur H. Smith, a missionary of the American Board in China for twenty-nine years, wrote (about the French mission):

Whenever a Christian has a dispute with a heathen, no matter what the subject in question may be, the quarrel is promptly taken up by the priest, who, if he cannot himself intimidate the local officials and compel them to give right to the Christian, represents the case as one of persecution, when the French consul is appealed to. Then is redress rigorously extorted, without the least reference to the justice of the demand.

As a consequence, some non-Christians were convinced, justifiably or not, that the local official would always judge in favour of Christians, to avoid trouble for his government and problems for his own career. Their sense of grievance sparked many a riot against Christians. Cixi’s order on dealing with disputes involving Christians was always
‘be fair and even-handed’. Her government clamped down on anti-Christian riots and punished officials who failed to exert sufficient force to quell the riot – or, as sometimes happened, had a hand in stirring up the disturbance in the first place. The number of riots was thus restricted to a few dozen in four decades, and none of them resulted in the kind of massacre witnessed in Tianjin in 1870.

After Germany snatched parts of Shandong in late 1897 and established a significant presence there, many villagers converted to Christianity in order to receive protection. In a number of counties, as the local authorities saw it, people joined the Church to avoid being punished for ‘
owing debts and not wanting to pay them back . . . committing robbery or even murder.’ And there was one man who sought the shelter of the Church so that he did not have to answer a subpoena after ‘his father had filed a law suit against him for being seriously disobedient’. In one county, a Christian peasant was accused of taking wheat from his neighbour’s field. In another, a relatively rich Christian, it was alleged, refused to lend grain to the starving during a drought (which was contrary to tradition). In both cases, as the local magistrates judged in favour of the converts, riots broke out that led to churches being burned. Yet another riot was triggered by Christians trying to turn a temple dedicated to the Celestial Emperor into a church. The violence usually ended with the local government punishing the rioters and paying hefty compensation to the Church – which produced even greater resentment among the non-Christians.

In spring 1899, in a bid to put an end to riots in Shandong,
Germany sent an expedition into some villages, where the soldiers burned down hundreds of houses and shot dead a number of villagers. In the wake of these atrocities, a group that had been known for about a year as the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, the
Yi-he-quan
, gained immense popularity and acquired hundreds of thousands of followers. (Shandong was famous for the male population’s fondness for martial arts, particularly a kind of fist-fighting similar to boxing.) This society blamed all the ills of the country and the hardship of their lives on foreigners, and vowed to drive them out. They were dubbed ‘the Boxers’ by the foreign press. People joined the Boxers for many different reasons. Some hated the Germans who had destroyed their homes – a hatred they now directed at all foreigners and local Christians. Others had scores to settle with neighbours who had converted. Still others sought release for their pent-up anxiety as the coming year’s harvest looked likely to fail.
‘On the whole . . . the Chinese is a fairly well-fed person,’ observed the beady-eyed traveller Isabella Bird, who was in the country at this time. But as soon as the weather turned bad – as it was then in Shandong – that same person immediately faced a struggle for survival.

When violence against Christians broke out, Cixi ordered the perpetrators arrested and
‘punished severely’, and the Christians protected. The governor of Shandong, Yuxian, hated Western powers and was unwilling to protect the Christians effectively.
Cixi replaced him with General Yuan Shikai. Shortly after General Yuan’s arrival in Shandong, on 30 December 1899, the Rev. S. M. Brooks, a missionary of the Church of England, while travelling on a donkey on country paths, was murdered by a group of marauders who admired the Boxers. This was the first time in two years that a missionary had been murdered in China. An edict from Cixi declared that she was
‘most deeply aggrieved’, and commanded General Yuan to ‘catch the criminals and punish them severely’. Yuan soon found the culprits and brought them to justice. Some of them were executed. General Yuan also reported to Cixi that in that year the
Boxers had destroyed ten family houses used as churches, raided 328 Christian homes and killed twenty-three Christian converts. The General was determined to use force to suppress the Boxers, which Cixi endorsed, at the same time cautioning him that he must be
‘extremely circumspect’ in taking large-scale military action. His aim must be to ‘disband’ the gangs, punishing only those who had actually committed crimes. As Yuan conducted his campaign against the Boxers, they began to disperse – helped by a much longed-for snowfall that lasted for days, promising a better harvest in the coming year, and a full stomach. The life-saving snow was followed by thorough rain in the spring, further reducing the Boxer ranks.

Still, some Boxers became bandits, living on robbery, and roamed into the neighbouring Zhili province surrounding Beijing. On 19 February 1900,
Cixi banned the Boxers in Zhili as well as in Shandong, ordering ‘harsh punishment’ for anyone engaged in violence. Following standard practice, the decree was copied out and pasted on the walls in the two provinces.

The foreign
legations, which had found Cixi’s edict about the Rev. Brooks’s murder ‘soothing’, were dissatisfied with her ban on the Boxers. What they – mainly Britain, America, Germany, Italy and France – wanted was a nationwide imperial proclamation against the Boxers and any affiliated society, ‘ordering by name [their] complete suppression’. They demanded that it must be ‘distinctively stated in the decree that to belong to either of these societies, or to harbour any of its members, is a criminal offence against the laws of China’. They further insisted that the proclamation must be published in the
Peking Gazette
, the government news bulletin.

Cixi declined to do as told. Apart from feeling defiant, she did not want to broadcast her ban to the whole empire, given that the Boxers only existed in two provinces. She would only ban the Boxers where they were active, Shandong and Zhili. She would punish those who had committed violence and broken the law, but would not criminalise the average members. She especially loathed being perceived by the population to be heavy-handedly suppressing anti-Western sentiment, and hated to be taken for a puppet of the foreign powers. Besides, she felt the legations were being unfair and unreasonable. None of them had so much as raised a murmur against the offending German soldiers, while she was actively clamping down on the Boxers. Moreover, her approach was working: the Boxers in Shandong had largely been dispersed. The more the legations insisted on their demands, the more she dug in. No mention of the Boxers was made in the
Peking Gazette
. Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister, wrote in frustration on 2 April: ‘
I have never known the [Chinese Foreign Office] so pigheaded or so pleased with themselves . . .’ He blamed the Italian back-down: ‘their ships came, looked, and went away and their Minister was recalled – the pigtails winning all along the line.’ What Sir Claude did not know was that Cixi would have acted the same way with or without Italy’s debacle.