In a proclamation issued on June 21, , the admirals of the Allied fleet stated that they would limit hostilities to two categories of enemies: i. As long as the Chinese Imperial army was involved in the war, Chinese soldiers could be subsumed under the latter category.
Although some contemporary reports state that the expeditionary forces made attempts to win over the peaceful segments of the local population through friendly behavior Barnes, , ; Voyron, , whether or not they were meant seriously, these attempts were bound to fail. The latter, in particular, appear to have resorted to false accusations, frequently with the aim of getting the foreign armies involved in local conflicts Lessel, f.
Ordinary people also were trapped when Allied troops encircled towns and villages and were killed along with real Boxers. Moreover, it was difficult to determine what exactly constituted an act of resistance. When Chinese fired on Allied units or attacked individual soldiers from ambush, the matter was relatively clear. According to some reports, Allied sentries shot harmless Chinese because the latter did not understand the language in which they were being addressed Corbach, 20 f.
The Allied troops often provoked hostilities themselves, especially when requisitioning provisions from a population that was unwilling to share much-needed resources with the foreign soldiers. Although requisitions differed from outright looting in legal terms, in practice the difference was not so great.
There were instances of rape, and many Chinese women were reported to have killed themselves lest they might fall into the hands of the foreigners Cohen, ff. Qian, Just how many ordinary Chinese also became victims of warfare is impossible to assess. The first Chinese to record the events connected with the Boxer movement and the eight-power intervention were urban members of the educated elite, i.
Many of these accounts were published in a four-volume publication in the early s Jian Bozan, with only rare translations into European languages one such translation being Becker, Several field surveys conducted by the University of Shandong and Nankai University from the late s onwards collected oral testimonies of peasants and urbanites who were participants or victims of the movement or neutral bystanders Lu Yao et al.
When assessing the validity of these testimonies, it must be taken into account that the interviewees had to recollect past events from memory. Moreover, the Shandong surveys cover only the early stages of the Boxer movement and provide no information about atrocities committed in the course of the foreign intervention. These officials traced the spread of the Boxer movement and, in the wake of the peace settlement, carefully recorded the death toll among Christians and the damage done to their property e.
In doing this, they had to rely on oral and written testimony by missionaries and Chinese Christians. An enormous amount of archival material also exists on the Western side, both in government and mission archives, and only small portions of this material have been put to scholarly use. In addition, a lot of eyewitness accounts were published, especially in the immediate aftermath of the war. As is the case on the Chinese side, Western witnesses encompass all categories.
Of the Western men and women who were besieged in Beijing and Tianjin, many wrote accounts of the siege. As some of these people joined in the looting orgy that followed the relief of Beijing or took part in punitive expeditions, they assumed the double role of victims and perpetrators. Some of the survivors published accounts of hairbreadth escapes, often including lengthy descriptions of how their fellow missionaries were put to death by the Boxers.
As Roger Thompson has shown with regard to the Taiyuan massacre, accounts of missionary suffering are not always trustworthy and more often reflect a Protestant discourse on martyrdom than present an accurate description of what actually occurred.
On the other hand, missionaries were the only group of foreigners who sympathized with at least one segment of the Chinese population, i. Some of them also described and deplored acts of violence committed by the foreign troops. Other missionaries accompanied the Allied expeditionary forces e. Brown, or took part in punitive expeditions, acting as guides or interpreters. Many eyewitness accounts of soldiers were published in the wake of the war, others posthumously, and a vast number of unpublished reports still slumber in the archives.
Regardless of whether they were critical of the intervention and their own role in it, many of the published texts are quite outspoken about Allied atrocities, especially those not originally intended for publication e.
The same can be said of the private correspondence of German and French soldiers, some of which appeared in local newspapers. The last Western group were professional or amateur journalists who had set off for China, realizing the enormous potential of the warlike events there Wegener, ; Loti, Apart from their articles in newspapers and magazines, many of them published book-length accounts on their return to Europe.
Much like the other foreign groups, they were divided in their opinion: some ardently supported the war e.
Zabel, , others vociferously opposed it, providing detailed accounts of the appalling conduct of the foreign troops in China e. Lynch, and Memory of the Boxer War on both the Chinese and Western sides did not focus on the victims, the only noteworthy exception being the martyrologies produced by mission societies Broomhall, ; Coerper, ; Planchet, For the most part, memory served immediate political interests. On the Western side, where the production of memory commenced almost with the outbreak of the war, it was the partly conscious, partly subconscious, result of a collective effort to legitimize the intervention in China and to get the better of its discontents.
It should not be forgotten that public opinion in the Allied States was not unanimous in its support of the Boxer War and that a substantial and vociferous minority challenged the legitimacy of the war and criticized the way it was conducted Klein, One important function of memory being the justification of the war, there were numerous ways to achieve this end.
One was to impose on China a specific interpretation of the causes of war, namely that China had broken international law and committed crimes against humanity and civilization. Another important strain of politically charged collective memory was the cult of what may be called the heroes of civilization, i. By and large, however, the officially instituted memory was rather successful, all the more so as personal recollections of the Boxer War began to fade and other events notably the two World Wars and the mass violence connected with them shifted to the center of Western collective memory.
Only a few attempts were made to draw attention to the perspective of the Chinese victims. The college authorities immediately ordered that the new monument, which commemorated the Chinese killed by the Allied troops, be pulled down Hevia, The suffering of the Chinese victims has, however, been marked there by a commemorative plaque since In China, several narratives of the Boxer movement and the subsequent war competed with each another.
One version, championed by Confucian literati and modern intellectuals, decried the Boxers as superstitious rabble and held them responsible for the calamities that had befallen China. This view, which probably originated during the war, dominated the first two decades of the twentieth century and occasionally resurfaced thereafter. A second discourse focused on Western atrocities and Chinese suffering.
The concept of guochi identified events connected with foreign imperialism then still a force to be reckoned with as undermining Chinese self-respect, focusing not so much on individual victims, but on the suffering of the Chinese nation as a whole Cohen, ; Hevia, ff. This was the dominant narrative in the s and some former champions of the first version defected to it, most notably the intellectual-turned-Communist Chen Duxiu, one of the most influential thinkers of his time.
The third approach focused on heroic Chinese resistance in the Boxer War. Both official memory of the regular military and unofficial memory of the Boxer movement existed in the decade after the war. For example, a memorial was erected in Tianjin which was dedicated to General Nie Shichen who had tried in vain to defend the city against the Allied invasion and committed suicide after his defeat Koberstein, At the same time, recollections of the Boxers as popularized in folk operas fuelled peasant resistance against the policy of modernization advocated by the Qing dynasty in the last decade of its rule Prazniak, Few referred to the victims of the Allied invasion, one notable exception being the famous writer Lao She, who in the early s planned to write a play about the Boxer Uprising and recalled the sufferings of his family in Beijing Lao She, Those that were caught were raped as well as tortured and murdered.
As a result of these reports, a great deal of anti-Chinese sentiment was generated in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Despite their efforts, the Boxer rebels were unable to break into the compound, which was relieved by the international army of the Eight-Nation Alliance in July.
Japanese print, Foreign navies started to build up their presence along the northern China coast from the end of April Upon the request of foreign embassies in Beijing, troops from five countries were dispatched to the capital on May As the situation worsened, a second international force of 2, marines under the command of the British Vice Admiral Edward Hobart Seymour, the largest contingent being British, was dispatched from Tianjin to Beijing on June They were met with stiff resistance from Chinese governmental troops and were finally rescued by allied troops from Tianjin, where they retreated to on June 26, with the loss of men.
With a difficult military situation in Tianjin, and a total breakdown of communications between Tianjin and Beijing, the allied nations took steps to reinforce their military presence dramatically. On June 17, they took the Dagu Forts commanding the approaches to Tianjin, and from there brought more and more troops on shore.
The international force, with British Lt-General Alfred Gaselee acting as the commanding officer, called the Eight-Nation Alliance, eventually numbered 54,, with the main contingent being composed of Japanese soldiers: Japanese 20, , Russian 13, , British 12, , French 3, , American 3, , German , Italian 80 , Austro-Hungarian 75 , and anti-Boxer Chinese troops.
The international force finally captured Tianjin on July 14, under the command of the Japanese colonel Kuriya, after one day of fighting.
The capture of the southern gate of Tianjin. British troops were positioned on the left, Japanese troops at the center, French troops on the right. Notable exploits during the campaign were the seizure of the Dagu Forts commanding the approaches to Tianjin, and the boarding and capture of four Chinese destroyers by Roger John Brownlow Keyes, 1st Baron Keyes. The allied march on August 4—about kilometers from Tianjin to Beijing—was not particularly harsh, despite approximately 70, Imperial troops and anywhere from 50, to , Boxers along the way.
The weather was a major obstacle, as it was extremely humid, with temperatures sometimes reaching degrees Fahrenheit 43 Celsius. The United States was able to play a secondary but significant role in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion because of the large number of American ships and troops deployed in the Philippines as a result of the U.
Troops from most nations with the exception of American and Japanese engaged in plunder, looting, and rape. Much of it was later earmarked by both Britain and the U. The foreign privileges which had angered Chinese people were largely canceled in the s and s.
This behavior led ultimately to a disastrous Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War at the hands of an increasingly confident Japan , as they maintained garrisons and improved fortifications between Port Arthur and Harbin along the southern spur line of the Manchurian Railway constructed on their leased lands. During the incident, 48 Catholic missionaries and 18, members were killed, along with Protestant missionaries and five hundred Chinese Christians.
By , the rebellion had started to spread across northern China and included the capital Peking. One of the targets of the Boxers was the Manchu government. The inspiration behind the Manchu government was the Empress Dowager. She had been married to the former emperor and was a very clever person.
Empress Dowager Tzu realised what was going on and made secret contact with the Boxers offering them her support. This they accepted. This allowed the Boxers to turn their full attention to the Europeans.
Peking had many Europeans living in it in Their lifestyle was completely different to that of the Chinese who lived in the city. The Europeans effectively treated the Chinese in Peking as their slaves.
It was not surprising that the Boxers found many ready supporters in Peking. In June , it became clear that their lives were in danger and many prepared to leave the city. The German ambassador in China wanted to register one final protest at the way the Europeans were being treated in China.
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