Review: Imperialism and the Chinese Peasants: The Background of the Boxer Uprising

Reviewed Work(s): The Origins of the Boxer Uprising by Joseph W. Esherick

Review by: Kwang-Ching Liu
Source: Modern China, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 102-116
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/189133
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 Review Article

Imperialism and
the Chinese Peasants
The Background of the Boxer Uprising

Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

KWANG-CHING LIU
University of California, Davis

On June 21, 1900, the Qing dynasty, presided over by the

Empress Dowager Cixi, declared war against all the powers
represented in Beijing, including the major European powers and
the United States. The Manchu court seemed to be relying on the
Boxers, groups of people-largely young peasants-characterized
by a cult of spirit-possession and physical invulnerability, who
stampeded into the capital during the 10 days preceding June 21.
Beijing's inhabitants were alarmed, especially after the Boxers set
fire, for no apparent reason, to blocks of the finest stores and
financial houses in the southern part of Beijing. Yet the highest of
the Manchu princes had openly patronized them; the effectiveness
of their magic had been certified by such statesmen as Yulu,
governor-general of Zhili, and Gangyi, a grand councillor. In a
meeting at court, the empress dowager had spoken in favor of the
Boxers. Behind this decision lay not only court intrigues and
politics, but also the crisis created by the powers' stern and
threatening response to the Boxers' antiforeignism. A few
hundred foreign guards were already in Beijing to protect the
legation quarters. On June 17 the powers attacked the Dagu

MODERN CHINA, Vol. 15 No. 1, January 1989 102-116

? 1989 Sage Publications, Inc.

102

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 Kwang-Ching Liu / IMPERIALISM AND PEASANTS 103

(Taku) forts, and an expedition led by the British was already,

apparently, on its way to the imperial capital.
The diplomatic context and aftermath of these sad events have
long been known.' Motion picture makers may yet bestir
themselves to do full justice to the dramatic potential of the 55
days the legations in Beijing were under siege in the summer of
1900. Meanwhile, the serious and tragic dimensions of the Boxer
uprising have here been surveyed in an accomplished and
scholarly monograph that will be ranked as one of the finest
achievements in American study of modern Chinese history.
Joseph Esherick's book will be valued by all social historians
seeking understanding of peasant movements in late imperial
China.
Among the many contributions of this well-researched and
forcefully written monograph is the disentanglement of the
Boxers of late nineteenth-century Shandong from the White
Lotus sectarian background with which the movement has often
been identified. Esherick faces a large historiography that argues
otherwise, but I believe him to be correct. When the movement
assumed its final form in the Spirit Boxers (shenquan) of
northwest Shandong in 1899, it was characterized not so much by
a distinct religion as by a spirit possession and martial-arts cult.
Esherick probably instinctively identifies the Boxers who emerged
on the stage of world politics in 1900 with the men who exhibit
their skills in martial arts at the country fairs in north China
today-not so much rebels as sportsmen. He also realizes,
however, that the Boxers about whom he writes were predatory,
rude, and often strife-ridden among themselves. Esherick has, in
any case, provided so much documentation and argued so
cogently that his interpretation is convincing, at least for the
Shandong phase of the cult's development in the late 1890s.
Esherick is obviously offended by the nature of Western
influence in the Shandong countryside. He must have enjoyed
writing Chapter 3, titled "Imperialism, for Christ's Sake." Here,
too, he has used his sources well and is convincing, yet "clearly"
(to use an expression that appears in almost every paragraph of
the book) there are aspects of the missionary record in

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104 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 1989

Shandong Christian schools and hospitals, for example-not

discussed at all.
There is little doubt that Christian proselytism in China had
relied heavily on diplomatic and sometimes military backing
from the powers. The Qing court continually compromised, and
by the 1890s the Catholic bishop in Shandong, for example, was
explicitly granted the rank and the hat-button of a governor, and
the monsignors and priests were accorded status parallel to that
of prefects and magistrates. There can be no doubt that the
missionaries, especially French and German priests, relied on
their special positions to extend extraterritoriality to their
converts and thus provided material incentive for the Chinese to
join the church. Such imperium in imperio developed over a long
period. As early as 1871, the American minister in Beijing,
Frederick Low, had written:

Roman Catholic missionaries, when residing away from the open

ports, claim to occupy a semi-official position, which places them
on an equality with the provincial officer: that they would deny the
authority of the Chinese officials over native Christians, which
practically removes this class from the jurisdiction of their own
rulers; that their action in this regard shields the native Christians
from the penalties of the law, and thus holds out inducements for
the lawless to join the Catholic Church, which is largely taken
advantage of [p. 83].

Yet the number of Chinese who became Christians was limited.

Figures for the missions centered at the Shandong capital of
Jinan just after the Boxer uprising show that for the Catholics
there were 85 missionaries (including both foreigners and Chinese)
and 47,221 converts, and for the Protestants, 180 missionaries
and 14,776 converts (p. 79). The disposition of the majority of the
Chinese-and this provides a basic explanation for the popularity
of the Boxer cause-was one of resentment against the mis-
sionaries and converts. By 1899, after the Germans had obtained
the leasehold of Jiaozhou and were invading Shandong towns
from that base, the differences between Christians and ordinary
Chinese had produced bitter community feuds such that humil-

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 Kwang-Ching Liu / IMPERIALISM AND PEASANTS 105

iation of the opposing community became an end in itself. It was

Chinese custom that, upon the settlement of a dispute, the
winning party would be feasted by the losing party as a
conciliatory gesture. Shandong officials reported in 1899 that
Christians who won a dispute with missionary backing would
require, as a condition for the settlement, a feast held in the
church:

The priest would force the fined "offenders" to serve each dish to
the Christians, on bended knee, while drums and firecrackers
announced the Christian victory to all. By turning rituals of
community solidarity into occasions for open flaunting of
Christian power, the Catholics of southern Shandong were
fostering a tremendous reservoir of popular resentment [p. 186].

In passing, Esherick refers to the radical nature of the Christian

message in the Chinese cultural context. Conversion not only
"meant casting out the household's Kitchen God and ending all
visits to local temples, it also meant abandoning the customary
ancestor worship and participation in local religious festivals, and
usually forsaking traditional wedding and funeral practices as
well." These were basic matters and it was not surprising that the
Chinese at large should be guarded in their attitude toward the
Christians:

Christianity was not only foreign, and thus suspect for xenophobic
reasons; it was also clearly heterodox-containing beliefs in
miracles and salvation, and rituals of congregational worship
which mixed men and women in the same church-which had led
earlier emperors to link it with such proscribed sects as the White
Lotus. Furthermore, most nineteenth century missionaries-
though Protestants more rigorously than Catholics-presented
Christianity as an either/ or alternative to Chinese popular culture
[pp. 85-86].

Underlying the book is Esherick's respect for this Chinese

popular culture-loyalist, fundamentally conservative, adopting
only aspects of shamanistic praxis that were "normal parts of the
folk culture of Shandong." Esherick draws a line between two

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106 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY1989

kinds of folk culture: (1) sectarianism of the White Lotus

persuasion, concerned with salvation and millennium, remi-
niscent of Christianity; and (2) the Boxer cult, which believed in
charms, incantation, spiritual possession, and invulnerability in
battle, shying away from eschatological concerns and ethical
radicalism. Esherick's insight into this dichotomy is his great
strength; it enables him to emerge with a clear theme, and I think a
correct one, out of the maze of historical sources and conflicting
interpretations.

Like many studies by Chinese historians themselves, Esherick's

sees the Boxers as an anti-imperialist peasant movement. Unlike
many scholars in Beijing or Jinan (where he spent a year as
Visiting Scholar at Shandong University), Esherick has no
previous commitment to the necessarily revolutionary potential
of the White Lotus sectarian tradition. He is broad-minded
enough at least to admit the White Lotus religion as part of the
folk culture of north China, yet he seems to regard it with
something of a patronizing disdain. Reinforcing studies on this
subject by Daniel Bays (1982) and David Buck (1987: 3-24),
Esherick finds evidence that members of the White Lotus, at least
in some parts of north China, frequently converted to Christianity.
A French Jesuit in southeastern Zhili, writing in the 1 870s, noted
that "the previous decade had seen five to six thousand White
Lotus sectarians converting to Christianity" (p. 88). This was to
be the pattern in parts of Shandong as well. A minor White Lotus
rising in northwest Shandong in 1882 set off searches and arrests
directed by officials. A "man of letters" among the sectarians had
the wits to realize that there was a clause in the Sino-Western
treaties that guaranteed protection of Christians:

This knowledge suggested to him the idea of becoming a Christian

in order to escape persecution as a member of a proscribed sect.
When he communicated this idea to others who were also in
danger, the good news spread like wildfire and before long
thousands of those who had belonged to the sects began requesting
reception into the Catholic Church for themselves and their entire
families [p. 87].

The missionaries were not to miss such opportunities. Mission

reports speak of similar conversions in southwest Shandong, in

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 Kwang-Ching Liu / IMPERIALISM AND PEASANTS 107

Shan county, Jiaxiang, Juye, and Wenshang. Some of the new

converts were not sectarians, however, but former bandits.
Esherick finds that the White Lotus and Christians share
comparable "concern for an afterlife and a quest for salvation,"
but suggests that the White Lotus cult from the 1 870s on was in an
advanced state of decay:

Government persecution appears to have destroyed the religiously

dedicated leadership, leaving the sectarians prey to a great variety
of scheming charlatans. Many of the conversions to Christianity
seem to have followed the exposure of particularly blatant fraud.
In effect, for a "doctrine-lover," Christianity was becoming a
better and better deal. The old sects were degenerating under
periodic government persecution, while Christianity could offer
many of the same spiritual rewards and at much lower cost in
terms of government persecution [p. 89].

One wishes that the author had provided more case studies of
the White Lotus sects and, for that matter, of the Christian
converts in northwest Shandong, the area where the Boxers
originated and where landlordism was weak and small peasant
owner-cultivators existed in overwhelming numbers. On the basis
of his excellent chapters on the rise of the anti-Christian Boxers in
the years 1897-1900 in Guan county, in Pingyuan, and in Chiping,
one finds it difficult to generalize on the social background of
Christians.2 Perhaps in this subregion of Shandong, Esherick's
remarks on a final category among Chinese Christians would
apply:

Finally there were undoubtedly many suffering economically, who

turned to the Church for financial support. That most Christians
were poor goes without saying. In the words of the Chinese
official: "The Catholics' clothes cannot cover their bodies. Their
eating quarters are not separated from their sleeping places. They
store their beds and stoves in one corner-that is how poor they
are."... There can be no doubt that both Catholic and Protestant
congregations included substantial numbers of law-abiding and
morally upright peasants. But it is also true that conversion to
Christianity and especially Catholicism was most attractive to
those in need of protection-be it from the police power of the
state, the economic exactions of the landlord, or the threat of
poverty and potential starvation in a hostile environment [pp.
90-9 1].

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108 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 1989

With these assumptions about Chinese sectarians and Christ-

ians in the late nineteenth century, Esherick proceeds to analyze
the various factors, socioeconomic and cultural, that culminated
in the rise of the Boxers (Yihequan, lit., Boxers United in
Righteousness; or Yihetuan, lit., Militia United in Righteousness).
In an introductory chapter, he gives a detailed analysis of the
ecological and social environment of the several subregions of
Shandong, citing the effects of flood and drought and using, for
example, the numbers of those who won civil and military degrees
as indicators of the elite's influence. But Esherick does much more
than explore local social history. He throws down the gauntlet to
much of the current historiography and he proposes a new
methodology for the study of Chinese rebellions in the nineteenth
century, the Taiping included. His discussion also encompasses
the role of the traditional state in provincial affairs, specifically in
Shandong. Once one gets used to Esherick's rather unqualified
anti-imperialist and anti-Christian assumptions, one can enjoy
the book. The following notes are offered as a brief discussion of
some of the issues raised.

With this book, a new era in Joseph Esherick's career as a

scholar begins. Hitherto, he has given his major attention to
analysis of elites and their behavior; here he has broadened his
concerns to include not only the peasant communities themselves,
but also popular culture. Esherick has shown, in a manner
comparable to French scholarship in this regard (e.g., Agulhon,
1982), how social structure fundamentally affected the makeup of
the popular movement that stemmed from it. He builds a model
of the Boxer rituals that emerged in complete form with the Spirit
Boxers of northwest Shandong in 1899, which were in fact to
spread quickly through boxing teachers to adjacent Zhili during
the climactic months of mid-1900. The Boxer rituals were
concerned with martial arts, but they claimed the capacity to
bestow invulnerability "to ward off spears or gunpower" (bi
qiang-pao) by virtue of spirit possession. In a development that
was perhaps unique in Chinese history, not just a few leaders but
all who joined were initiated to become spirit-mediums and could
be possessed by a god.

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 Kwang- Ching Liu / IMPERIA LISM A ND PEA SA NTS 109

Esherick is disposed to dismiss the theory of the Boxers' White

Lotus connection on two accounts: First, he has, as indicated
above, found that the sectarians were more likely to become
Christian converts; and second, his detailed research into the
Boxers' history in 1895-1899 has shown that they consistently
remained loyal to the Qing. Their motto had always been
"Support the Qing, destroy the foreign"-Victor Purcell's argu-
ments in his book of 1963 notwithstanding.3 In the background of
Esherick's judgment is the considerable knowledge and insight
gained since the 1 960s by American scholars regarding the White
Lotus tradition. Scholars in the PRC are hard put to defend the
belief in the transmutation of the White Lotus tradition from the
cult of the Eternal Mother into that of the Jade Emperor, from
faith in the Maitreya Buddha as messiah to honoring Sakyamuni
instead.4 The Spirit Boxers that arose in 1899 in Shandong may
have expected even greater disaster than that which followed the
flood of the preceding year:

Two, four, and one five;5

Even worse would not be bad.
When all under Heaven is the Red Lantern Shining,
That will be the time when things are really bad [p. 394].

This ditty is extremely interesting, but perhaps it does not quite

suggest the eschatology of the White Lotus tradition that spelt out
the disasters-flood, fire, and wind (alternatively, war) that
would accompany the cosmic crisis.6 It is Jerome Ch'en's
hypothesis, advanced in his 1970 article, that the name of the
Boxer leader Zhu Hongdeng (Vermilion Lantern), as well as that
of his Buddhist colleague, Benming (which could mean Originally
of the Ming Dynasty), suggests the influence of a Triad-like
brotherhood that grew out of the Luo sectarian tradition (Luo
jiao).7 The meaning, if any, of the names of the Spirit Boxer
leaders seems, however, to remain obscure.
Esherick has, in any case, presented a consistent version of the
development of the martial arts group in the southwest, south,
and northwest of Shandong toward an invulnerability cult based
not simply on "charms and incantations" but on individual spirit-
possession. In 1895-1896 in southwest Shandong, the Big Swords

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110 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY1989

Society that cooperated with the local officials in fighting

banditry in that area turned against Christian communities while
claiming invulnerability achieved through body-training with the
help of charms and incantations. "Long practice and arduous
physical training can teach people the intense concentration and
muscle-tightening techniques that enable practitioners to with-
stand sword chops or even steady pressure against the stomach
and chest with a pointed instrument" (p. 327). However, with the
rise of the Spirit Boxers in the spring of 1899, the martial arts
practices underwent qualitative change. These anti-Christian
Boxers of northwest Shandong, who also called themselves
Boxers United in Righteousness, taught formulae that anyone
could learn in a matter of days. Through simple ceremonies, the
Boxing Master (quanshi) could so hypnotize the young init-
iates or induce them to hypnotize themselves-that they would
each be possessed by a deity:

The standard format for the possession ritual involved kowtowing

to the southeast, burning incense, and performing a simple
purification ritual of drinking clear water [mixed with the ashes of
paper charms]. Then the boxer would usually sit on a chair on top
of a table, and call upon his "teacher" to "come down from the
mountain (qing laoshi xia-shan)." With his eyes closed, the boxer
would slowly go into a trance, begin wavering about and breathing
rapidly until he finally went into a frenzy of possession by his god
[p. 218].

What especially strikes Esherick is the presumed fact that "each

boxer would be a particular god, and that god would, in effect,
become part of the individual's identity" (p. 218; see also p. 329).
With the Taiping, only a top leader like Yang Xiuqing could
speak for a deity-in his case, the Holy Ghost. With the Boxers,
every young initiate could learn the ritual in a few days and gain
the capacity to be possessed by a deity that stemmed from the
heroic tales of Chinese fiction, often played out in village operas.
Although some of the Boxers' gods were deities of Daoism or of
the traditional popular worship, a large number of them were
from such novels as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
Journey to the West, and especially The Enfeoffment of the Gods

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 Kwang-Ching Liu / IMPERIALISM AND PEASANTS 111

(Fengshen yanyi or Fengshen ban).8 Despite their belief in such

folk deities as the Jade Emperor and Lu Dongbin, Esherick
writes:

I would suggest that it was especially operas based on such stories

as in the Enfeoffment of the Gods which provided the "narrative
context" for the actions of the possessed Boxers. Trances are a
very dangerous state-both for the individual and for the com-
munity. People's bodies are possessed by spirits and subject to the
spirits' control: in many cultures the spirits "capture" the indi-
vidual. It is accordingly important that certain accepted cultural
constructs-myths-define the ways in which spirits will behave,
and it is these myths which provide the "narrative context" for the
behavior of the possessed [p. 329].

Such behavior, Esherick has found, was basically loyalist, since

even the spirits that possessed the Boxers would behave according
to accepted cultural constructs. The Boxers, at least in the
Shandong phase, were not ideologically subversive. Esherick
finds the Boxers that enacted in real life the drama of the village
theater to be essentially conventional, except of course for their
plundering and burning. To borrow Elizabeth Perry's (1980)
phraseology, the Boxers, in venting their hatred of the churches
and Christians, were still either predatory or protective.9 For each
Boxer to be capable of being possessed by a god does not mean
that his quality as an individual was enhanced. The Boxers may
have enjoyed a degree of egalitarianism, but at best their
revolutionary potential was uncertain.

Esherick's book is not just about a peasant movement and its

socioeconomic and cultural background. Any treatment of the
Boxer movement has to include the part played by the Qing
officials, indeed the Qing court itself. The Boxer story is
instructive in showing how great a part the state could play at the
village level. On the eve of the twentieth century, the governor of
Shandong, who was the highest official within the province, was
in no way independent of central authority. Events were shaped
by his action or inaction. Despite prohibition of violence at the
county level, Boxers were encouraged, if only by the grapevine, to

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112 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY1989

believe that the governor-and indeed the court itself-was not in

sympathy with the Christians. The governor of Shandong was
consistently under pressure from missionaries and their respective
diplomatic representatives in Beijing, who reported local incidents
to the Zongli Yamen, often before provincial officials had a
chance to do so. The state's failure to send troops to suppress the
anti-Christians or to punish them in each case could be taken by
the Boxers to be tacit encouragement.
Although the main focus of his study is the Boxer movement
itself, Esherick, throughout the book, weighs the role played by
gentry and peasants, "natural leaders of the village communities,"
as well as drifters and hucksters, the "mobile class of marginal
men." Esherick believes that the historian's "liberal convictions"
call for equal-time treatment of the official's role as well (pp. I I 1,
198). While some of the magistrates and prefects are found to be
inept, and others unwitting shapers of policy, two governors, Li
Bingheng (August 1894-September 1897) and Yuxian (March-
December 1899), are positively evaluated. Li Bingheng was
opposed to reforms and Westernization; he was critical of
proposals for railways, privately financed mines that used
machines, or a new postal system. He was for resistance at all
costs; his indignation rose when the German warships sailed into
Jiaozhou in November 1897. Li was also an unusually good
governor. "Not only was he doing his utmost to check Christian
abuses but he was working hard to establish an uncorrupt
administration, to economize on official expenditures, and to
control the Yellow River" (p. 133). Esherick studies Li's work as
administrator in fascinating detail. It is certainly true that when
Li was relieved of his Shandong governorship and denied a
gazetted promotion to the governor-generalship in Sichuan,
antiforeignism among officials in Shandong was not encouraged.
Germany and other powers had also got what they wanted by
demanding the dismissal or transfer of many uncooperative lower
provincial officials.
Li's successor, Zhang Rumei, seems to have been an unusually
careless official. The dikes of the Yellow River broke in August
1898, during his governorship, resulting in the disastrous flood

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 Kwang-Ching Liu / IMPERIALISM AND PEASANTS 113

that affected 34 counties. Esherick believes that when Yuxian was

appointed to replace Zhang in March 1899, he was chosen not so
much because of his experience in handling martial arts groups as
on "his reputation for tough, efficient administration, and his
previous success in flood control-the key area in which Zhang
Rumei had failed" (p. 192). During his 10 months as governor of
Shandong, Yuxian did take a few weeks (late July to early
September) for an inspection tour of the Yellow River dikes and
flooding did not recur. Although natural disaster was abated,
Yuxian's energies had to be directed constantly to the crisis
created by incursions by the Germans into Shandong counties
from their leasehold in Jiaozhou. Regarding the rise of the Boxers
through summer and fall of 1899, Yuxian was on the whole
lenient, following the principle that Boxers who were merely
anti-Christian should be distinguished from those who were
outlaws. Scholars from G. N. Steiger to Dai Xuanzhi have
regarded official sponsorship of the militia as the principal reason
for the rise of the Boxers.'0 In October 1899, when the Spirit
Boxers under Zhu Hongdeng first adopted the name Militia
United in Righteousness, they had done so on their own initiative.
Nonetheless, some martial arts groups in the area had been
absorbed by local self-defense organizations and, under Yuxian,
anti-Christian outbreaks were on the whole encouraged.

In concluding, I would like to refer to the perspective of Lao

Naixuan, the famous magistrate of Wuqiao, Zhili, in late 1899
and early 1900. Lao is remembered by Esherick and other
scholars chiefly for his pamphlet Yihequan jiaomei yuanliu kao
(Examination of the Origins and Development of the Boxers
United in Righteousness), dated the ninth month of 1899. Lao's
pamphlet cites the authority of Nayancheng's memorial of 1815
to show that the Yihe Boxers that had existed in the early
nineteenth century were judged to be a heterodox sect (xiejiao)-
therefore the Boxers across the border in Shandong displaying
the same name must also be of sectarian origin. Actually Lao
Naixuan knew better than this. His effort to propagate Nayan-
cheng's 1815 memorial was not a scholarly exercise, but was

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114 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 1989

intended as an urgent policy proposal. In a postscript to the same

pamphlet, apparently published only in the third month of 1901,
he owned that when he published the pamphlet he did not really
know whether the Boxers in Guan county, Pingyuan, and
Chiping were sectarians. He was not writing as an academic. He
believed that the only way the court could stop the growth of the
Boxers was by branding them heterodox; it was not feasible to
declare against an anti-Christian movement, for that would be
taken to be partiality toward Christianity and its proponents. Lao
felt that the Boxer problem need not be solved militarily, if the
court would only take the lead in rectification of names. "An
Edict on a piece of paper would be better than an army of a
hundred thousand strong.""
Lao's comments at the end of his original pamphlet of 1899
actually went beyond Nayancheng's 1815 memorial to identify
the spirit-possession and invulnerability cult as lying at the heart
of heterodoxy. Esherick has indeed done yeoman service to the
Chinese studies profession by making it clear that Lao was quite
wrong in his historical claims, but it may be appropriate to make a
further point here. At the time Lao published his pamphlet, he
was facing a crisis in which the policy options of the Qing
government were fast diminishing. In his "postscript" of 1901, he
argues that the constructive policy would be to treat Christianity
tolerantly, much in the same way as Buddhism was treated. Of
course the Christians were backed at the time by the power of the
Europeans. Nonetheless, the real issue was whether the Chinese
could build up their own strength and thereby gain control in
foreign relations. As Lao wrote to a friend:

The Westerners proselytize all over the globe; it is not only in

China that this occurs. Whether they take advantage of others
depends on the strength or weakness of each country. We are being
taken advantage of because our country is weak. Men of purpose
must "sleep on wood and taste the spleen," work hard to make our
foundations secure and our country strong. When the country is
strong, they [the foreign missionaries] will be under our control;
this is not a matter of venting resentment of a moment and looking
for temporary satisfaction [Zhongguo shixue hui, 1951: 458459].

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 Kwang-Ching Liu / IMPERIALISM AND PEASANTS 115

Lao Naixuan's perspective is defensible, but he undoubtedly

knew less than the historian of today about the evolution of the
Boxers as a peasant movement. Esherick's feat in producing both
a socioeconomic and a cultural history of this movement deserves
the thanks of us all.

NOTES

1. For political and military background, see Tan (1955) and Fleming (1959). On the
Boxer indemnity, see Wang (1974).
2. Discussing the Christians of this area, Esherick cites one "classic case involving an
agricultural laborer who forced his employer to serve him a feast" (p. 215).
3. Purcell's book displays extensive documentation from archival sources, however.
It is still useful, despite its many deficiencies.
4. See articles by Li Shiyu, Lu Yao, Lu Jingqi, and others in the two symposia from
Chinese historians (Qilu shushe, 1982, and Yihetuan yundong shi yanjiu hui, 1984).
5. This line is usually interpreted to mean the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month.
6. The historian Cheng Xiao has studied the evidence for the Boxer belief in the
kalpic crisis. See his important article published in 1983.
7. Ch'en refers to the influence of the Qing men tradition. On this tradition, see
Kelley (1982).
8. For an analysis of the Boxer gods of various origins, see Jerome Ch'en (1960) and
Cheng Xiao (1983).
9. For Esherick's account of the Boxers'"peaceful and protective" activities, acting
only as "counterweight to the autonomous power of the Catholic Church," see pp. 202,
216.
10. Dai (1963) seems to reach his conclusions independently of Steiger (1927).
11. Lao (1901) is available in a photographic reprint dated 1972 and in the Zhongguo
shixue hui (1951, vol.4, pp.451-490, and esp. 453). Lao wrote in a letter that when he first
pronounced the Boxers heterodox, he was "only talking on paper" (zhi-shang zhi tan). He
said, however, that two monks captured at Jingzhou and Gucheng, Zhili, had confessed
that they were affiliated with "Eight Trigrams" and with the "Li Trigram," respectively
(Zhongguo shixue hui, 1951: 459).

REFERENCES

AGULHON, MAURICE (1982) The Republic of Village: The People of the Var from the
French Revolution to the Second Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
BAYS, D. (1982) "Christianism and the Chinese sectarian tradition." Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i
4, 7: 33-55.

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 116 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY1989

BUCK, DAVID D. [ed.] (1987) "Editor's introduction." Recent Studies of the Boxer
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Kwang- Ching Liu is Professor of History, University of California at Davis. He is

the editor of Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (University of California Press,
forthcoming).

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