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Some Did It for Civilisation, Some Did It for Their Country: A Revised View of the Boxer War

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Jane Elliott is an independent scholar; if she were a professor at a University her peers would disinvite her to the next academic powwow. That's how unconventional her book on the Boxer uprising is. I doubt any Western press would publish this long, well-illustrated book, but the Chinese University Press did.

The conventional wisdom is that the Boxers and the Chinese Imperial government of 1900 were corrupt, cruel, and ineffective and that the Chinese army was incapable of fighting against the technologically advanced West. Legions of authors and scholars have exuded scorn for the Chinese, while also criticizing the plunder of northern China by the Western armies.

Elliott begins with a claim that many of the most prestigious news sources of the day -- especially The Times of London -- were inaccurate in their reporting from China. By contrast the World of New York, usually cited as the premier "yellow journalism" paper, got it mostly right. She then goes into a couple of long chapters on cartoons and illustrations in and about China. I didn't really read these, but I looked at the pictures -- which were good, some really good, and mostly unknown to the Western reader.

Elliott finishes the book with with two chapters and almost two hundred pages about the Chinese military, its capabilities and the battles it fought against the Western allies and Japan in 1900. She concludes that the Chinese army was not nearly so backward as usually portrayed in the West and that its performance was pretty good. She cites persusasively the Battle of Dagu where Chinese gunners damaged several Western ships and the Battle of Tianjin (Tientsin) where the Chinese held up the Western advance for a month. She claims that Chinese victories and military proficiency are rarely reported. Her attack on conventional wisdom is especially sharp and interesting when she writes of the Seymour expedition, a indusputable defeat for the West in which most authors have heaped scorn on the Chinese army despite the fact that the Chinese won. The Chinese, she says, got no respect -- for what in fact was a respectable performance.

I don't agree with everything Elliott says; some of her statements seem off to me -- such as her point that the flight of the Dowager Empress from Peking (Beijing) was not a humiliation. How could it be otherwise? But, on the whole, I enjoyed reading a well-documented, inconoclastic account of the Boxer uprising -- called in its day "the most exciting event of history."

Smallchief

Never can one find a worst account of the Boxer Rebellion. While it is true that most books on the subject, especially those written by western authors, are biased, this certainly is no better for it, too, is greatly biased. A worthless addition to the catalogues.