The Boxer Uprising and the New Era of Warring States
By the end of the
nineteenth century, the Chinese world order was totally out of
joint; the court in Beijing no longer functioned as a meaningful
factor in protecting either Chinese culture or autonomy. Popular
frustration boiled to the surface in 1898, in the so-called Boxer
Uprising. Practicing a form of ancient mysticism and claiming
magical immunity to foreign bullets, the Boxers—so called because
of their traditional martial arts exercises—mounted a campaign of
violent agitation against foreigners and the symbols of the new
order they had imposed. Diplomats, Chinese Christians, railroads,
telegraph lines, and Western schools all came under attack. Perhaps
judging that the Manchu court (itself a “foreign” imposition, and
no longer a particularly effective one) risked becoming the next
target, the Empress Dowager embraced the Boxers, praising their
attacks. The epicenter of the conflict was once again the
long-contested foreign embassies in Beijing—which the Boxers
besieged in the spring of 1900. After a century of vacillating
between haughty disdain, defiance, and anguished conciliation,
China now entered a state of war against all of the foreign powers
simultaneously.45
The consequence was
another harsh blow. An Eight-Power allied expeditionary
force—consisting of France, Britain, the United States, Japan,
Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy—arrived in Beijing in
August 1900 to relieve the embassies. After suppressing the Boxers
and allied Qing troops (and laying waste to much of the capital in
the process), they dictated another “unequal treaty” imposing a
cash indemnity and granting further occupation rights to the
foreign powers.46
A dynasty unable to
prevent repeated foreign marches on the Chinese capital or to
forestall foreign exactions from Chinese territory had plainly lost
the Mandate of Heaven. The Qing Dynasty, having prolonged its
existence for a remarkable seven decades since the initial clash
with the West, collapsed in 1912.
China’s central
authority was again fractured, and it entered another period of
warring states. A Chinese Republic, deeply divided from its birth,
emerged into a dangerous international environment. But it never
had the opportunity to practice democratic virtues. The nationalist
leader Sun Yat-sen was proclaimed president of the new republic in
January 1912. As if by some mysterious law commanding imperial
unity, Sun, after just six weeks in office, deferred to Yuan
Shikai, commander of the only military force capable of unifying
the country. After the failure of Yuan’s abortive declaration of a
new imperial dynasty in 1916, political power devolved into the
hands of regional governors and military commanders. Meanwhile in
the Chinese heartland, the new Chinese Communist Party, established
in 1921, administered a kind of shadow government and parallel
social order loosely aligned with the world Communist movement.
Each of these aspirants claimed the right to rule, but none was
strong enough to prevail over the others.
Left without a
universally acknowledged central authority, China lacked the
instrument for the conduct of its traditional diplomacy. By the end
of the 1920s the Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek,
exercised nominal control over the entirety of the ancient Qing
Empire. In practice, however, China’s traditional territorial
prerogatives were increasingly challenged.
Exhausted by their
exertions in the war and in a world influenced by Wilsonian
principles of self-determination, the Western powers were no longer
in a position to extend their spheres of influence in China; they
were barely able to sustain them. Russia was consolidating its
internal revolution and in no position to undertake further
expansion. Germany was deprived of its colonies
altogether.
Of the former
contestants for dominance in China, only one was left, albeit the
most dangerous to China’s independence: Japan. China was not strong
enough to defend itself. And no other country was available to
balance Japan militarily. After the defeat of Germany in the First
World War, Japan occupied the former German concessions in
Shandong. In 1932, Tokyo engineered the creation of a secessionist
Japanese-dominated state of Manchukuo in Manchuria. In 1937, it
embarked on a program of conquest across much of eastern
China.
Japan now found
itself in the position of previous conquerors. It was difficult
enough to conquer such a vast country; it was impossible to
administer it without relying on some of its cultural precepts,
which Japan, prizing the uniqueness of its own institutions, was
never prepared to do. Gradually, its erstwhile partners—the
European powers backed by the United States—began to move into
opposition to Japan, first politically and eventually militarily.
It was a kind of culmination of the policy of the
self-strengthening diplomacy, with the former colonialists now
cooperating to vindicate the integrity of China.
The leader of this
effort was the United States, and its instrument was the Open Door
policy proclaimed by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899.
Originally intended to claim for the United States the benefits of
other countries’ individual imperialism, it was transformed in the
1930s into a way to preserve China’s independence. The Western
powers joined the effort. China would now be able to overcome the
imperialist phase, provided it could survive the Second World War
and once again forge its unity.
With the Japanese
surrender in 1945, China was left devastated and divided. The
Nationalists and Communists both aspired to central authority. Two
million Japanese soldiers remained on Chinese territory for
repatriation. The Soviet Union recognized the Nationalist
government but had kept its options open by supplying arms to the
Communist Party; at the same time, it had rushed a massive and
uninvited Soviet military force into northeast China to restore
some of their erstwhile colonial claims. Beijing’s tenuous control
of Xinjiang had eroded further. Tibet and Mongolia had gravitated
into quasi-autonomy, aligned with the respective orbits of the
British Empire and the Soviet Union.
United States public
opinion sympathized with Chiang Kai-shek as a wartime ally. But
Chiang Kai-shek was governing a fragment of a country already
fragmented by foreign occupation. China was treated as one of the
“Big Five” who would organize the postwar world and were granted a
veto in the United Nations Security Council. Of the five, only the
United States and the Soviet Union possessed the power to carry out
this mission.
A renewal of the
Chinese civil war followed. Washington sought to apply its standard
solution to such civil conflict, which has failed time after time
then and in the decades afterward. It urged a coalition between the
Nationalists and Communists, who had been battling each other for
two decades. U.S. Ambassador Patrick Hurley convened a meeting
between Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Party leader Mao Zedong in
September 1945 at Chiang’s capital in Chongqing. Both leaders
dutifully attended while preparing for a final
showdown.
No sooner had the
Hurley meeting concluded than the two sides recommenced
hostilities. Chiang’s Nationalist forces opted for a strategy of
holding cities, while Mao’s guerrilla armies based themselves in
the countryside; each sought to surround the other using
wei qi strategies of
encirclement.47 Amidst clamor for American intervention in
support of the Nationalists, President Harry Truman sent General
George Marshall to China for a yearlong effort to encourage the two
sides to agree to work together. During that time, the Nationalist
military position was collapsing.
Defeated by the
Communists on the mainland, Nationalist troops retreated to the
island of Taiwan in 1949. The Nationalists brought with them their
military apparatus, political class, and remnants of national
authority (including Chinese artistic and cultural treasures from
the Imperial Palace collection).48 They declared the relocation of the
Republic of China’s capital to Taipei, and maintained that they
would husband their strength and someday return to the mainland.
They retained the Chinese seat in the United Nations Security
Council.
Meanwhile, China was
uniting again, under the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of
China. Communist China launched itself into a new world: in
structure, a new dynasty; in substance, a new ideology for the
first time in Chinese history. Strategically, it abutted over a
dozen neighbors, with open frontiers and inadequate means to deal
simultaneously with each potential threat—the same challenge that
had confronted Chinese governments throughout history. Overarching
all these concerns, the new leaders of China faced the involvement
in Asian affairs of the United States, which had emerged from the
Second World War as a confident superpower, with second thoughts
about its passivity when confronted with the Communist victory in
the Chinese civil war. Every statesman needs to balance the
experience of the past against the claims of the future. Nowhere
was this more true than in the China that Mao and the Communist
Party had just taken over.