THE BOXER REVOLT
YEARS: 1900-1900 | DEATHS: 13000
The Boxer Rebellion was an uprising against Western commercial and political influence in China during the final years of the 19th century. By August 1900, over 230 foreigners, thousands of Chinese Christians and unknown numbers of rebels, their sympathisers and other Chinese had been killed in the revolt and its suppression.
The uprising is named for the revolutionary society known as the Fists of Righteous Harmony (in the then current Wade-Giles system of Romanisation of Mandarin Chinese transliteration, I-Ho Ch’üan) or in contemporary English parlance, Boxers, a group which initially opposed but later reconciled itself to China’s ruling Manchu Qing dynasty.
The uprising was concentrated in north-eastern China where the European powers had begun to demand territorial, railroad and mining concessions. Imperial Germany responded to the killing of two missionaries in Shandong province (November 1897) by seizing the port of Qingdao. The next month, a Russian squadron took possession of Lushun, in southern Lioayang. Britain and France followed, taking possession of Weihai and Zhanjiang respectively.
Boxer activity began in northern Shandong in March 1898, with the slogan "Overthrow the Qing, destroy the foreigner". The movement’s emergence was a response to both foreign penetration and the failure of the Imperial court’s "self-strengthening" strategy of officially-directed development, whose shortcomings had been shown graphically in China’s defeat by Japan in 1895.
The early months of the movement’s growth coincided with the "Hundred Days’ Reform" (June 11–September 21, 1898), during which the Guangxu Emperor sought to improve the central administration, before the process was reversed at the behest of his powerful aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi.
After a mauling at the hands of loyal Imperial troops in October 1899, the Boxers dropped their anti-court slogans, turning their attention to foreign missionaries (such as Hudson Taylor) and their converts, whom they saw as agents of foreign colonialist influence. The court, now under Cixi’s firm control, issued edicts in defence of the insurgents, drawing heated complaints from Western diplomats (January 1900).
The conflict came to a head in June 1900, when the rebels, now joined by elements of the Imperial army, boldly attacked foreign compounds within the cities of Tianjin and Beijing. The killing of the German minister on June 20 brought open war, the court proclaiming hostilities against the powers, who in turn prepared military intervention to relieve the legations, which were under the command of the British ex-soldier and Minister plenipotentiary Claude Maxwell MacDonald.
The insurgents finally fell to an international force eventually numbering 45,000 Japanese, United States, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Italian, Russian and anti-Boxer Chinese troops, which captured Tianjin on July 14 and Beijing on August 14. In the United States military, the surpression of the Boxer Rebellion was known as the China Relief Expedition.
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Source: excerpt from Wikipedia. License: GNU FDL