Boxer Rebellion - Controversies and Changing Views of The Boxers

Controversies and Changing Views of The Boxers

From the beginning, views differed as to whether the Boxers were better seen as anti-imperialist or as "uncivilized" and futile opponents of inevitable change. The historian Joseph Esherick comments that "confusion about the Boxer Uprising is not simply a matter of popular misconceptions," for "there is no major incident in China's modern history on which the range of professional interpretation is so great."

The failures of the Boxer Rebellion initially humiliated educated Chinese nationalists, who disdained them for their superstition and aggression. Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China and of the Nationalist Party at first believed that the Boxer Movement was stirred up by the Qing government’s rumors, which “caused confusion among the populace,” and led to his “scathing criticism” of the Boxers’ “anti-foreignism and obscurantism.” Sun praised the Boxers for their "spirit of resistance" but called them "bandits," as many educated Chinese of his generation did. Students of the time shared an ambivalent attitude to the Boxers, stating that while the uprising originated from the "ignorant and stubborn people of the interior areas", their beliefs were "brave and righteous", and could "be transformed into a moving force for independence". After the fall of the Qing dynasty, nationalist Chinese too became sympathetic to the Boxers. In 1918 Sun praised the Boxers for fighting against foreign imperialism. He said the Boxers were courageous and fearless, fighting to the death against the Alliance armies,specifically the Battle of Yangcun. Chen Duxiu forgave the "barbarism of the Boxer... given the crime foreigners committed in China", and contended that it was those "subservient to the foreigners" that truly "deserved our resentment".

Views of the Boxers Chinese were complex and contentious even among certain foreigners. Mark Twain said that "the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success." The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy also praised the Boxers. He was harshly critical of the atrocities he heard reports of being committed by the Russians and other western troops. He accused them of engaging in slaughter when he heard reports about the lootings, rapes, and murders, in what he saw as Christian brutality. He accused Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany of being chiefly responsible.

In the People's Republic of China, orthodox textbooks used to analyze the Boxer movement as an anti-imperialist, patriotic peasant movement whose failure was due to the lack of leadership from the modern working class. In recent decades, however, large-scale projects of village interviews and explorations of archival sources have led historians to take a more nuanced view. Some non-Chinese scholars, such as Joseph Esherick, have seen the movement as anti-imperialist; while others view this interpretation as anachronistic in that the Chinese nation had not been formed and the Boxers were more concerned with regional issues. Paul Cohen's recent history includes a survey of "the Boxers as myth," showing how their memory was used in changing ways in 20th-century China from the New Culture Movement to the Cultural Revolution.

In recent years the Boxers have been debated in the People's Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The philosopher Tang Junyi viewed the Boxer Uprising as a religious war between the Chinese and Christianity. In 1998, the critical scholar Wang Yi argued that the Boxers had features in common with the Cultural Revolution. Both events had the external goal of “liquidating all harmful pests” and the domestic goal of “eliminating bad elements of all descriptions” and this relation was rooted in “cultural obscurantism.” Wang traced the changes in attitudes towards the Boxers from the condemnation of the May Fourth Movement to the approval expressed by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution. In 2006 Yuan Weishi, a professor of philosophy at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, criticized the official government-issued middle schools history textbooks. Yuan wrote that the Boxers by their "criminal actions brought unspeakable suffering to the nation and its people! These are all facts that everybody knows, and it is a national shame that the Chinese people cannot forget." For many years, history text books had been lacking in neutrality in presenting the Boxer Rebellion as a "magnificent feat of patriotism", and not presenting the view that the majority of the Boxer rebels were both violent and xenophobic. These views were criticized and some labeled Yuan Weishi "Hanjian" (漢奸, betrayer of the Han).