This is the last of an informal three-part series on violence and historical memory in China. It wasn’t my original intention to write a series, but the past week or so has seen several anniversaries of great significance in Chinese history. Last week was the 110th anniversary of the Qing government’s tacit declaration of war against the foreigners during the Boxer Uprising of 1900; last Friday was the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War; and 170 years ago this week the British launched the first major offensive of the Opium War against the Qing Empire.
While there were land and naval skirmishes starting in 1839, it was on June 28, 1840 that an expeditionary force of 16 warships and about 4000 troops reached the China coast and began to bombard the area around Guangzhou before turning northward to other, less well protected, cities. The fleet took the island of Zhoushan and threatened Tianjin before the Qing court dispatched the Manchu official Qishan to parley with the British forces. Negotiations broke down and the war continued until finally the Treaty of Nanjing was signed by Qing officials — quite literally at gunpoint from British ships parked in the adjacent
A 1950 Chinese propaganda poster showing a caricature of Douglas MacArthur committing wartime atrocities as a US plane bombs a Chinese factory in the background. Used with permission from the Stefan Landsberger/Chinese Posters collection.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, a war which six decades later is still surrounded in controversy. For decades, the Party line in the PRC was the same one that is alive and well and living in Pyongyang today: The American Imperialists, with the help of their lackeys in the right-wing militarist government in Seoul, invaded the North. As Tania Branigan reports from Dandong for The Guardian, it’s a belief that dies hard, especially because many Chinese living along the PRC/DPRK border personally witnessed bombing raids by American planes during the war.
But times are changing. For example, yesterday the Global Times English-language edition published an op-ed calling for PRC archives to be opened up for further study of the Korean War and Chinese involvement in the conflict. Chinese academia is not (quite) as bound and gagged by the Party as it once was, and many scholars accept the idea that it was the North who commenced aggressions against the
Today is an anniversary of sorts — actually two anniversaries — in the history of violence in China. June 21 marks the 110th anniversary of Empress Dowager’s fateful proclamation giving tacit support to the various groups known as “The Boxers” in their crusade of destruction and righteous anger against all things foreign. It is also the 140th anniversary of an earlier incident in the city of Tianjin, when tensions between local residents and the foreign community exploded into a day of violence that left at least 40 people dead. I’ll save the latter for a little thing I like to call “my dissertation.” Today, I’m talking Boxers.
I was looking at an electronic version of a Chinese high school textbook. Now, I’ve long been a critic of China’s so-called “Patriotic” Education policy but the account given in this textbook isn’t too off, at least in the parts of the story that are told.
The basic premise is that the “Chinese people,” having been pushed beyond endurance by the presence of foreign missionaries (“the spies of the imperialist powers”) began to organize self-defense groups in Hebei and Shandong. Eventually, these groups made their way to Tianjin and Beijing where they
On this date in 1915, the Japanese government submitted a list of “21 Demands” to the government of Yuan Shikai.
As is well known, Yuan Shikai had esteem issues and he needed money, basically the two reasons anybody becomes a stripper, but unlike Candi at Crazy Girls Yuan had a whole country to sell out not just his charming physique and delightful company.
You can see a list of the demands here, as well as an ultimatum from the Japanese government giving Yuan and his cronies until 6:00 p.m. on May 9th to respond and accept the terms or face the consequences.
For the purposes of visualizing this historical moment, it might be helpful to picture Yuan Shikai as Ned Beattie and the Japanese government as a group of moonshine-soaked demonic hillbillies.
And…scene.
During the 1920s the CCP operated from within the KMT party apparatus. Part of this was the doings of the Comintern, but it also made sense from a party development point of view. The KMT gave the CCP cover to grow as a party, and many once and future CCP leaders — people with names like ‘Mao’ and ‘Zhou’ — cut their political teeth working for the KMT. When Chiang Kai-shek began his Northern Expedition to reunite the country, the CCP softened up the ground for him by entering cities along the route and spreading propaganda, organizing general strikes, and generally agitation in advance of the KMT army. It’s a story most people know.
It was idyllic and peaceful on the outside. Kind of like Tiger and Elin.
Like Tiger though, Chiang enjoyed occasionally sleazing it up. But instead of banging cocktail waitresses two at a time, Chiang liked to mix with his boys from the Shanghai underworld, a group that included the notorious criminal boss ‘Big Eared’ Du Yuesheng.
Chiang was also about as a jumpy as a coked-up hamster in a bathtub full of cats. It wasn’t likely he was going to keep the Communists around even a
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