A Reign of Terror: Punishment and Retribution in Beijing and its Environs

The Boxer Uprising a reaction against the political impotence of the Qing dynasty, socioeconomic dislocation in the North, economic ambitions of Western companies, poor harvests, rivalries between the Western powers and friction between the West and China on numerous fronts.

The West saw it as an opportunity for altering Qing notions of imperial sovereignty. For the Chinese elite, it illuminated the bankruptcy of the government.

Western diplomatic and military elites planned a campaign designed to make the Chinese people and rulers lose face. This entailed American troops entering the Forbidden City and using sacred space as a parade ground while building a railroad through a Chinese temple. This meant erasing once and for all any real or imagined Qing claims to universal kingship.

The marching into the Forbidden City put race and nation in a place once off limits to both while serving as a beacon of progress. The British believed these actions served a larger purpose of subjugating the Chinese. The march into the city was informed by an identification of things that the Chinese held to be invested with mythical powers. Worries also persisted that the Chinese government might topple and leave the whole region under anarchy.

Given the self-righteous rhetoric calling for retributive justice for the savage and barbaric assaults on Chinese missionairies, how did the British justify such looting? Compare contrast: 1860: smaller force occupying a small area for a shorter amount of time. British auction system helped justify the plunder and sealed the army off from the moral chaos of plunder. The imperial British system best understood in this regard: necessary to maintain moral superiority of the British. The chaos in the wake of the war permitted Westerners and Chinese alike to take up brigandry.

With death reigning over the countryside, the Europeans seemed to think the Chinese were getting what they deserved. War made them callous and altered the manner of interaction between victor and Chinese. Rather than seeking to improve the Chinese character, they accepted it as what it was and morphed their own actions to better control it. Given the nature of the Boxer rebellion, the people were now held accountable: collective punishment now in vogue. Was this really anything new? Counterinsurgency tactics employed by the Spanish in Cuba and by our forces in the Philippines. Chinese culture distinct needed to be destroyed, as in other parts of the world: the distinctness of China that researchers strove to pull out was inherantly subordinate to the West. Qing officials, rather than the emperor or the government, were held responsible for their actions. Executions not only aimed to strike fear into the Chinese, but it provided a quasi-legal framework that differentiated Western behavior from Chinese while providing a shield against Europeans being seen as barbaric.

The Boxer uprising brought an uprupt end to the British civilizing mission in China. The destruction of Chinese culture and pride meant as a lesson to lift them out of barbarism. Western self-criticism emerging. There existed a tension between those who saw implementation of tough-love for the sake of order and those who wanted the West to retain its moral superiority. While they did little to alter the course of the war in China, the debate shifted the way people interpreted events. For Euroamericans, the link bertween race and progress of civilization remained paramaount for buttressing positive assessments of colonialism: could the Chinese destroy the West through contact? Western intervention no longer seen as clear European moral superiority. Western self-perception needed to reorder China so that the problem of barbarism within civilization could be effectively suppressed.