Desacralizing Qing Sovereignty, 1900-1901

The West targeted the imperial sovereignty of the Qing government by demanding it bring to justice those responsible for anti-Western atrocities. The indemnities were an additional humiliation. The ministers also sought to ensure no other anti-foreign outbursts in China would be nipped in the bud and that the foreign community be protected. The status of the emperor and the affixing of personal responsibility to transgressions committed against the West made the Qing regime altered, impotent, and archaic.

Who really controlled the writing of the treaty? The way the powers "collectively" framed the conflict? Context of the piece shows the beginning of the construction of a narrative aiming to assert the basis of Western intervention: Western action, thus extraordinary and justified lack of Chinese sovereignty. To become civilized then, required a formal apology for actions taken by Chinese against Westerners, punishment for those held most responsible for their actions, and the implementation of novel political structures into China that institutionalized the Western presence. China had to construct memorials for those who died. West revamped Chinese police and diplomatic procedures.

The emperor viewed by the West as an impediment to progress while necessary for stability. To remedy this situation, the emperor had tobe recalibrated as a monarch who was perfectly equal to other ones and would, on his own free will, listen to the West and conform to Western diplomatic practices. The site of diplomatic proceedings was moved to a primary audience hall in the Forbidden City, underscoring the importance of Chinese-Western relations as well as further undercutting the Qing. The movement into the home of the Chinese emperor signified the difference between real and imagined power. In restricting and mandating movements of the emperor, the protocol tore down the old hiearchy.

The product of the treaty was a patchwork of European universalism and Chinese particularity. While the Chinese succeeded in maintaining some privileges, they failed to prevent the greater scrutiny of the Manchu household.

Social transformation of Western societies by imperialism. New ocular advances in technology permitted physical objects or their reproductions to be sent to different places and reassmebled as necessarily new things in different relations to one another. This allowed for the presentation of the world as an exhibition. Viewers were expected to see the world and everything in it as an experience for viewing scrutiny and judgment: photography and tourism being paramount.

The exhibition of the exotic world of others at world's fairs involved a relationship of power marked most profoundly by a transgression of boundaries, of movement across the barriers of everyday life into the absolute realm of otherness. Tours of the forbidden city and colonial exhibitions served to disechant the viewer as well as the once celestial became mundane and became colonized as equivilent and less than Europe, a specimen. Photography made the city an immutable mobile. With the destruction of the signs, sites, and symbols of Qing sovereignty, the monarchy had been rendered low.

Motivated by a desire to win support for its perpetuation, the Qing accomodated Western demands. To some observers, they became an ethnographic display of an alien exhibitionary regime.

The media served to reassure the public that the looting and violence of 1900 need not concern Western perceptions of civilization. Visual narratives of conquest, humiliation, punishment, and symbolic approrpriation meshed with a master story of little wars breaking out all over the place, China became part of a global narrative of righteous warfare and just punishment of the guilty. No way the British are connected to the photographs only to prevent cruel and needless torture. Serve to enlist sympathy for an unfortunate people, arouse a strong abhorence to cruel practices, and provoke a feeling of thankfullness. British action justified and places the Chinese people into a colonial world: not where they had been before.