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United In Righteousness: Slogans and Actions in the Boxer Movement A Dissertation Presented by Aimin Guo to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Stony Brook University May 2010 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Aimin Guo We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation Iona Man-Cheong----Dissertation Advisor Associate Professor History Department Janis Mimura----Chairperson of Defense Assistant Professor History Department Michael Barnhart Professor History Department Gregory Ruf Associate Professor Anthropology Department This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Lawrence Martin Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation United in Righteousness: Slogans and Actions in the Boxer Movement by Aimin Guo Doctor of Philosophy in History Stony Brook University 2010 The Boxer movement in 1900 came into world history as an armed conflict between China and Western Powers. However, there was no unanimity in attitudes and actions of Chinese social groups in the conflict. Although all these major groups took saving China from foreign aggression as their “righteous mission” and used the traditional Chinese concept of patriotism—“righteousness” (yi) – to legitimize their action in the movement, they interpreted “righteousness” differently to fit their own interests. These different interpretations prominently embodied in the slogans of these social groups. An analysis of the underlying meanings of their political slogans contributes to the exploration of their cultural assumptions and moral frameworks of their political actions. Although previous studies have suggested that Boxer actions were grounded in a sense of moral rectitude, the same interpretation has not been applied to the other main social actors. My research examines the moral framework of these formerly excluded social groups. My dissertation will examine the slogans of each of the five main social groups, the Boxers, the Qing court, the provincial officials, the reformers, and the local gentry, in the Boxer movement and explore the influence of these cultural interpretations of “righteousness” on their political actions. I argue that the traditional concept of “righteousness” (yi) played an important role in the movement; however, its meaning and function were a construction of the power relations between these social groups. iii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Preserve Confucianism to preserve the Country (Bao Jiao Yi Bao Guo) ……………………………………… 17 Chapter 2: Obey the Qing, Destroy the Foreign (Shun Qing Mie Yang) ………………………………………………………………… 45 Chapter 3: Support the Qing, Destroy the Foreign (Fu Qing Mie Yang) ………………………………………………………………….69 Chapter 4: Maintain the Orthodoxy, Dispel the Heterodoxy (Fu Zheng Qu Xie)……………………………………………96 Chapter 5: Depend on People’ Heart, Depend on Heaven’s Will (Yi Min Xin Shi Tian Yi) …………………………………. 124 Chapter 6: United in Righteousness (Yi He)……….……………………. 151 Conclusion ………………………………………………………….. 173 Bibliography ……………………………………………………….... 177 Appendix A: Table of Translation…..……………………………………190 Appendix B: Pictures………………………………………………….….196 iv United in Righteousness: Slogans and Actions in the Boxer Movement Introduction The Boxer movement in 1900 came into world history as an armed conflict between China and major Western Powers. However, there was no unanimity in attitudes and actions of Chinese social groups in the conflict. Although all these major groups took saving China from foreign aggression as their “righteous mission” and used the traditional Chinese concept of patriotism--- -“righteousness” (yi) ---- to legitimize their action in the movement, they interpreted “righteousness” differently to fit their own interests. These different interpretations prominently embodied in the slogans of these social groups. An analysis of the underlying meanings of their political slogans contributes to the exploration of their cultural assumptions and moral framework of their political actions. Although previous studies have suggested that Boxer actions were grounded in a sense of moral rectitude, the same interpretation has not been applied to the other main social actors. My research examines the moral framework of these formerly excluded social groups. My dissertation will examine the slogans of each of the five main social groups, the Boxers, the Qing court, the provincial officials, the reformers, and the local gentry, in the Boxer 1 movement and explore the influence of these cultural interpretations on their political actions. I argue that the traditional concept of “righteousness” (yi) played an important role in the movement; however, its meaning and function were a construction of the power relations between these social groups. The Boxers were a group of peasants in North China who practiced a particular set of boxing rituals. Through the ritual of “spirit possession” (jiangshen futi), the Boxers invited Chinese gods to possess them and endow them with the “invulnerability” to bullets. Because of these particular boxing rituals, they were called “Boxers” by the Westerners. 1 In June, 1900, thousands of Boxers streamed into Beijing, the capital of China, and confronted with the foreigners. The Boxers killed foreign Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians, attacked foreign legations and destroyed anything related to foreigners. The Boxers’ anti-foreign activities in Beijing led to allied military intervention of the Powers. On June 17, an allied army of eight nations occupied the Dagu Fort in 1 Although scholars have different views on the nature of the conflict, which was called “Boxer Rebellion”, “Boxer Movement”, “Boxer Uprising” or “Boxer War”, they all take the cultural feature of Boxing skills as the hallmark of the conflict. George Nye Steiger, China and the Occident: the Origin and Development of the Boxer Movement (Russell & Russell, first published in 1927, reissued in 1966). Victor Purcell, The Boxer Uprising: A Background Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.) Joseph Esherick, The Origins of Boxer Uprising (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Diana Preston, The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic story of China’s War on Foreigners that Shook the World in the summer of 1900 (New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, 2000);Jane Elliott, Some Did it for Civilization; Some Did it for their Country: A Revised View of the Boxer War (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002.) Lanxin Xiang, The Origins of the Boxer War: A Multinational Study (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003). 2 Tianjin and threatened to march on Beijing. On June 21, the Qing court declared war on all foreign Powers and ordered Qing forces to besiege all foreign legations in Beijing. The siege lasted 55 days until it was lifted by the arrival of the Allied army on August 14. As consequence of this conflict, the imperial court fled the capital which was occupied by the allied army for over a year. The Boxers were severely suppressed and several princes and high-ranking officials were executed and a huge indemnity (450 million taels of silver) was exacted. The Boxer event, as an important conflict between China and Western Powers in modern Chinese history, has been studied by many scholars in the past century.2 The relationship between the cultural practices of the Boxers, their Boxing rituals, and the armed conflict between China and Western Powers has always been a hot topic of the studies on the movement. What is the role of these cultural practices in the armed conflict between China and Western Powers? Before the 1960s, “conflict of civilization” explanations dominated studies of the Boxer movement. This model saw the movement as the result of a fundamental conflict between the supposed backward old Chinese civilization and the progressive new Western civilization. In the reports written by Western diplomats, missionaries, soldiers and journalists about the event, the Boxers were described 2 In 2000, the 100th anniversary of the Boxer war, a comprehensive review of earlier scholarship was published, providing full bibliography and reviews of works on the Boxer movement over the last century. Weizhi Su and Tianlu Liu, ed., Studies on the Boxers in the past 100 years (Yihetuan yanjiu yibai nian)( Qi lu publishing house, 2000). 3 as “xenophobic”, “superstitious” and “backward” people, who hated all new things and refused to reform.3 In 1927, George Steiger stated in the preface of his book, China and the Occident, the first academic research on the Boxer movement in the English-language world, that “It was the culmination of the four centuries of relationship between the nations of the West and those of Asia, and had its origins on the essential differences between the civilization of the ‘old East’ and that newer civilization which was being brought to its doors by the merchants, the missionaries, and the men-of -war of Europe and America.” 4 In 1978, William Duiker,