“Oh,East is East,and West is West,and never the twain shall meet”: Economic imperialism and ecclesiastical imperialism

Taiping Rebellion

What is unique about the Taiping uprising (1850–1864) is that the leaders of the rebellion preached an ideology that contained elements of Christian teaching. As a result, some Christians in Britain naively believed that the movement’s Protestant features would eventually lead to an establishment of a potentially Christian government to occupy the dragon throne. The Taiping movement against the Qing rule must be seen within the wider context of Chinese domestic woes that coincided with the presence of foreign powers in the country. The movement began in the southwestern province of Guangxi.

Southern China was particularly prone to uprisings because it was the last region to be conquered by the Manchus and it was situated farthest from the seat of government in Peking. Furthermore, the southerners were exposed longer to foreign influence and contact. After the first opium war, many people in the Canton area suffered when the foreign trade was shifted to Shanghai. The economic crisis was also complicated by the conflict between the natives and “the guest settlers” known as the Hakkas. Originally residents from Central China, Hakkas migrated to Southern China during the 12th and 13th centuries. Due to their different dialect, habits, and customs, the Hakkas found it hard to adapt to the local way of life. Conflicts with the locals occurred especially when the Hakkas had gained ascendancy due to their hardworking and frugal way of life.

In addition, many Hakkas embraced Christianity and condemned the natives for their superstitious beliefs. ¹ Hence the hostilities between the two groups escalated. As a people, the Hakkas were on the whole more mobile, independent, daring, and active than the natives. Most were involved in small farming, charcoal-making, and mining. Many potential revolutionaries were recruited from the Hakkas and none more famous than Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), the leader of the Taiping Rebellion.

Hong Xiuquan

In 1847, Hong, after failing the civil service examination for the fourth time, went to Canton to study the Bible with an American Southern Baptist missionary called Issachar Roberts. Besides the Bible, Roberts also taught Hong how to pray, preach, sing hymns, catechize, confess one’s sins, and baptize. Other than these religious practices, what Roberts taught Hong was essentially the practice of fundamentalist Protestantism. Later Hong went to a rugged district in Guangxi known as Thistle Mountain to preach the gospel and to develop his own doctrine. In this remote region, Hong began to attract first the Hakkas, then other people in the provinces. He was also joined by members of the Triads, who were mainly dissenters against the Qing government.

Inspired by Triad philosophy, Hong began to construct a theology that combined his unique brand of Christianity with a commitment to overthrow the Qing whom he demonized. For Hong, the Qing represented evil demons fighting against God, the Father. Hong saw himself as being sent by God and his elder brother, Jesus, to destroy the demons and to restore China back to greatness and righteousness.

Hong’s adoption of Protestant Christianity fit well with his determination to protest against the existing order. His theology integrates Chinese and biblical ideals into a vision of a Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace and Equality. Taiping’s millennial quest coincided with the crisis that the Qing Dynasty had already been facing, namely the decline of the old order and the threat of Western aggression. The Taiping movement led by Hong attempted to solve the national crisis by promoting peace and equality through a Christian concept of a theocratic Kingdom of Heaven which was taught by the newly arrived Protestant missionaries in China (Bohr, 2006: 93).

Protestant missionaries from the West and their Chinese converts brought Chinese-language religious tracts to the interior of Guangdong and Guangxi, spreading its message among the poor and dispossessed. Hong was one of those deeply influenced by these literatures and he attempted to connect these theological ideas with Chinese history and culture. The result was a religion inspired by Protestant faith with Chinese characteristics suited to that particular time when China was going through political, economic, and social difficulties.

Theology of Liang

The main sources of Hong’s religious knowledge came from a tract written by Liang Fa, Good Words to Admonish the Age, and from Rev. Karl Gützlaff’s translation of the Bible. Most scholars of the Taiping Rebellion held that it was Liang’s nine-volume booklet, Good Words to Admonish the Age that influenced the Taiping leader. The author Liang was baptized by William Milne in November 1816 and became China’s second Protestant Christian. He followed evangelical activism and baptized his wife who became China’s first Protestant woman. Denouncing his Confucian background, Liang wrote pamphlets condemning opium smoking and established China’s first evangelical-style charity school to teach Christianity and Western sciences (Bohr, 2006: 96). Liang became an important Chinese evangelist nurtured by the London Missionary Society who published Robert Morrison’s New Testament translation.

Ordained by Morrison in 1822 as the first Chinese Protestant evangelist, Liang was convinced that only Christianity could save China from moral degradation (Bohr, 2006: 96). Opening the Good Words with the Fall, Liang claimed that the Chinese had abandoned their long-standing dependence on an omnipotent and merciful God. The Heavenly Father had chosen China, a sacred country, to be part of his global family and had lovingly provided her with all her material and spiritual needs. Unfortunately, Satan had seduced China into disobeying God by adopting three heretical religions, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism (Bohr, 2006: 97).

Liang taught that after the Fall, God had sent Jesus to earth to save sinners through merit or atonement. China was so full of evil that people lost all contact with God. Only the baptized believers who through sincere self-renewal, with a pure heart, and set upon doing good could secure salvation. Liang actually praised Confucianism, but insisted that it must be infused with Christian morality based on the Mosaic Law and Jesus’ New Law based on the Beatitudes. Once China became Christian, Liang believed that it would be part of the global Kingdom of Heaven and the new millennial age would usher in “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1; Bohr, 2006: 97). This teaching of Liang appealed to Hong’s understanding of the new millennium.

Gützlaff’s Bible

Another important source of Hong’s theology was his reading of Karl Gützlaff’s Bible, which itself is an interpretation. In this version of the Bible, salvation is presented in its historical, cultural, and political developments, especially in the Old Testament where God punished nations who performed wicked deeds and rewarded those who did good. It was a personal deity who cared about his people in all aspects of their lives—cultural, social, and political. Hong received this Bible and other tracts by foreign missionaries, interpreted them according to his vision and cultural tradition, and completed “the process of the translation and indigenization of Christianity” (Reilly, 2004: 78–79).

Presenting his religion as a revival of the classical era, Hong’s denunciation of the Qing rule was supported by evidences from these foreign translations of the Bible and Christian literature. More importantly, Hong’s preaching appealed to the people who were suffering under the Manchu government. It is significant that Gützlaff’s Bible contained words which have revolutionary connotations, and thus had an explosive impact on a disgruntled people ready to fight against what they perceived as alien and oppressive rule.

Chinese converts

It is important to understand that religious tolerance was forced upon China after the Tianjin Treaty and that Christian missionaries would never have the chance to preach the gospel if not for the guns of Western nations. As the missionaries were quick to call upon Western powers to protect them when disputes arose, the Chinese naturally regarded the Christian mission as an arm of Western imperial mission (Kirby, 1966: 665). Ecclesiastical imperialism was associated with economic imperialism, as it were. This relationship only served to increase the Chinese natural reticence to accept the barbarian’s religion.

The missionaries and their converts were often beaten and sometimes killed in places such as Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangdong, Yangzhou, and Shaanzi. The “Tianjin massacre” in 1879 which resulted in the death of sixteen French men and women on the first day and many more later, was the bloodiest clash of the 19th century. The educated Chinese often wrote provocative anti-Christian posters and pamphlets attacking Western missionaries and their followers, thus promoting anti-Christian feelings throughout the country (Spence, 2013: 196–97).

It was true that Christians preached a doctrine that was at variance with Confucianism, but the real grievance was that the missionaries protected their converts engaged in lawsuits with non-Christians and they often manipulated real-estate deals to turn private homes into churches. In their zeal to save souls, missionaries accepted seriously ill infants abandoned by their parents so that they could baptize them before they died. Thus when hostile Chinese found many tiny corpses in burial grounds, there was strong emotional outrage. Rumors began to spread that Christians tortured, killed infants, and indulged in all kinds of sexual perversions (Spence, 2013).

Anti-foreign feelings spread not only in the courts under the Empress Dowager, Cixi, but also among the scholars, officials, and common folk. Humiliation after humiliation for half a century, in wartime as well as in peaceful times, had deeply wounded the Chinese national pride and self-respect. The presence of arrogant foreign ministers, aggressive missionaries, and unscrupulous traders constantly reminded the Chinese of their misfortunes and failures. The aggravating sense of injustice and oppression in their own homeland served to inflame a desire for revenge against the foreigners and their religion.

The Chinese brought up in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism resented the spread of Christianity under the protection of Western gunboats. As mentioned earlier, the Treaties of Tianjin of 1858 permitted the propagation of the Christian faith in the interior of China and the Convention of Peking in 1860 gave missionaries the right to rent or buy land for the purpose of building churches. Protected by the flag and the unequal treaties, missionaries travelled freely in China, but they made few converts. As a result, they started offering converts financial benefits and protection against official and unofficial interventions in domestic disputes. Despised by the Chinese, the native converts were called “eat by religion.” In other words, they lived off the church and they were seldom people with strong convictions let alone high principles. In fact, they were people of low social standing who took advantage of their Christian status to evade the law (Hsü, 2000: 388).

The clause in the treaty regarding privileges given to the Christian missionaries and their converts contained a hazard. The provision in the treaty removed Chinese Christians from the jurisdiction of Chinese officials. It led to abuse when missionaries intervened in lawsuits to the advantage of their converts. The Protestant missionaries wanted a toleration distinct from that which the French had obtained for Roman Catholics, and they appealed to Lord Elgin who was wise enough to say that “extending the privileges of foreigners was a delicate matter, and that special foreign protection to Chinese converts would invite hypocritical professions of Christianity” (quoted in Neil, 1966: 140).

Failure to adapt

The missionaries of the 19th century did not attempt to adapt Christianity to the local culture. Chinese Christians were seen to be worshipping a foreign God and entering into a foreign community in their own country. They had become strangers to their own people, and in fact, were regarded as “half foreigners” because the mission station became a state within a state. These Chinese Christians were also under foreign protection because the opium trade and Christian mission were under the same foreign protection and above Chinese law. An enlightened Chinese official said to the British Ambassador in 1869, “Take away your opium and your missionaries and you will be welcome” (Neil, 1966: 140).

In addition, the ruling elites viewed Christian teaching as undermining the social fabric of Chinese society when the converts failed to kowtow to the idols, to worship Confucius, to pay respect to their ancestors and to participate in local festivals which involved honoring the spirits. Thus, “as self-appointed guardians of Confucian propriety, they resented the effrontery of inroads by any foreign religion or philosophy, and not infrequently they were the secret instigators of religious incidents” (Hsü, 2000: 388). Christianity viewed as a Western religion became a basic cause and focus for anti-foreignism. The aristocratic class who dominated the rural class in China feared the churches’ challenge to their authority. Mission schools also threatened the gentry’s traditional roles. The gentry thus decided to publish pamphlets, attacking the “evil practices” of the missionaries.

In spite of the positive contributions of Christianity, the fact that the Westerners, missionaries and their converts enjoyed special privileges, continued to live outside the jurisdiction of Chinese law, and engaged in outrageous military actions to humiliate the Chinese, directly led to anti-foreign sentiments culminating in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

Fist of Righteous Harmony

If I were Chinese, I would have been a Boxer myself.

Emerging as a revolt against foreigners and Christians, the Boxer Rebellion erupted in eastern China in 1899 and ended in 1901. Rosthorn summarized the cause of the Boxer Uprising as the Europeans’ attempts at dividing China and imposing unequal treaties on China through the use of gunboats and Christian missions. This provoked adverse reactions from the local population, the anti-foreign court officials, and the Empress Dowager herself (Xiang, 2003: 104). Besides these human causes, natural calamities such as famine and drought also played their part in arousing hostile sentiments among the Chinese towards Westerners. Foreign encroachment not only undermined China’s territorial integrity, it also threatened its Confucian ideology, which formed the ethical base of Chinese society. The flagrant flouting of laws by the missionaries and their converts also infuriated the local population.

Originally, the movement was a secret society called the Fists of Righteous Harmony and later named the Boxers by the Western press. As Boxers, they practiced a form of martial arts or “boxing” and induced the spirit of possession. Initially known as the Spirit Boxers, they had rituals that involved falling into trance, foaming at the mouth, and arising in preparation for battle. There was a belief that their bodies could withstand blows and even bullets (Fairbank and Goldman, 2006: 230). The Boxers believed that all the ills of China could be attributed to the presence of the foreigners A popular song expressed their sentiments:

When at last all the Foreign Devils

Are expelled to the very last man,

The Great Qing, united, together

will bring peace to this our land.

The Western powers during that time took advantage of China’s internal weakness and demanded more and more concessions. Therefore, the Boxers’ grievances were legitimate and shared by the local population. In November 1897, two German Catholic missionary priests, Fr. Henle and Fr. Nies, from the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) were murdered by members of the “Society of the Big Knives” in Shandong. It became another occasion for political interference and for demanding more concessions. The German Government used this as an excuse to send two gunboats to the Shandong coast and coerced the Qing rulers to approve a German sphere of influence in the province. ² Economic considerations and interests of power motivated the German government to use the gunboats. Protection of the Christian missions served merely as a pretext.

Hence, the origin of the Boxer Uprising can be traced to German aggression in Shandong. It should be noted that the relationship between the foreign missionaries and their governments’ military was not always cordial and supportive. For example, the German minister Baron Clemens von Ketteler was not sympathetic with the missionary cause. In fact, he detested the missionaries. An old China hand in an earlier period, his uncle, the progressive Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, had preached the necessity of fighting against the evils of capitalism by organizing Christian trade unions and helping the poor to raise the standard of living. Bishop Ketteler also detested missionaries who were willing tools of imperialism to serve the state machinery (Xiang, 2003: 113). But the von Kettelers were the exceptions. Most of the time, missionaries depended on their governments for protections and privileges.

Initially the Boxers wanted to overthrow the Qing regime, which they considered as corrupt and too weak to resist Western aggression, as we have just discussed. Besides, the Manchus themselves were foreigners. The movement had a broad base of support from a number of disparate groups, which felt that they had suffered from the foreigners’ presence. They included the literati, courtiers, laborers, and boatmen thrown out of work by the railroads built by Westerners, as well as peasants whose fields had been destroyed by droughts, and also the brigands who had nothing to lose (Brown, 2000: 194). The English press, North-China Herald, reported from Shandong on October 9, 1899, “A sect has arisen whose only reason for existence is their hatred for foreigners and the foreign religion. For some occult reason they have taken the name ‘Boxer,’ and last spring they tried to drive out the missionaries in Siaochang” (quoted in Xiang, 2003: 112).

Since the aim of the Boxers was to remove Manchu rule and foreign presence within the government, a minister, Li Hongzhang, condemned the Boxer Movement for this move with their ridiculous claims to supernatural powers. In 1899, the Qing appointed Yuan Shikai as governor of Shandong for the purpose of suppressing the Boxer rebellion in the province. But alliances shifted when the Empress Dowager thought that the Boxers might help in stopping the Seymour Expedition that was marching into Peking. She emphasized that “Magic power may not be relied upon, how can people’s hearts be relied upon? Today’s China is weak to the extreme, the only thing we can depend on now is the popular support” (in Xiang, 2003: 291). Hence the Empress Dowager gave her cautious backing to the Boxers.

By 1900, the Boxers had grown dramatically, with most of their recruits from among the poor in the countryside. Although most of the boxers were young males, there were also female boxers known as the Red Lanterns Shining. These girls were invoked to fight against the Chinese Christian women who were thought to have eroded the strength of the male Boxers. Without proper leadership, the Boxers began streaming into Peking and Tianjin, dressed in motley uniforms of red, black, or yellow turbans and red leggings. They attacked and sometimes killed missionaries, Chinese converts, and foreigners, and also destroyed railway tracks, burned stations, and cut telegraph lines. The attitude of the provincial officials was somewhat ambiguous—at times they protected the foreigners and at other times they seemed to approve of the Boxers’ anti-foreign sentiments (Spence, 2013: 223).

As mentioned earlier, the Empress Dowager was cautious in giving support to the Boxers. But on June 21, 1900, she approved the seizure of the foreign legation areas by the Boxers and regarded them as a “loyal militia” and thus as declaring war against foreign powers. She wrote that the foreigners have been aggressive against the Chinese by infringing upon their territories and blaspheming their gods. The common people had suffered, and it was the bravery of the Boxers that led them to burn churches and to kill Christians (Spence, 2013).

Encouraged by the Empress’s support, the Boxers launched a series of attacks on mission compounds and on foreigners, particularly in Shanxi, Hebei, and Henan.

In Peking, foreign diplomats and their families from nine different countries gathered inside a fortified compound. On August 4, 1900 they were rescued by 20,000 troops from the so-called Eight Nation Alliance (Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States). The foreign soldiers defeated the Boxers on August 14. The Empress Dowager and her nephew Emperor Guangxu fled to the west of China and established a temporary capital in the Wei River valley city of Xi’an. After a protracted campaign, conducted mostly by the German troops, on September 7, 1901 the fugitive court and Li Hongzhang signed a formal peace treaty known as the Boxer Protocol, which included punishing the guilty party and paying a huge sum of money as indemnity (see Hsü, 2000: 400–401; Miller, 1974: 273–80).

Causes of the Boxer Rebellion

The Boxer Rebellion was an odd war in the sense that the rebels were fighting against eleven of the most powerful nations on earth simultaneously (Xiang, 2003: viii). Peasant rebellions were common in China, but a war against powerful foreign states was something new. Some scholars regarded the Boxer phenomenon as a clash of civilizations—between the East and the West. Another approach to the Boxer Uprising is to put the blame squarely on the Christians. Here we see the aggression of the missionaries and the ignorance of the local and foreign diplomats. The third approach is to view the Boxer movement as the result of imperialism. The scramble for China would inevitably cause an uprising as massive as the Boxer Revolt. All these three approaches are valid. Although it is not fair to blame the missionaries entirely, it is indisputable that they played a very significant role in provoking anti-foreign sentiments among the Chinese in the late 19th century.

Some missionaries and their converts were disposed to violate Chinese cultural and moral values by worshipping openly and displaying their success and power symbolized by the expansion of churches and schools which were distinctly foreign in appearance. Disputes related to socio-religious practices, such as weddings and funerals, could be very violent. There were also anti-missionary rumors that spread like wildfire regarding foreigners’ engagements in atrocious practices, immoral licentiousness, sorcery, and the kidnapping of children (Tiedemann, 2000: 8). Such news was bound to give rise to xenophobic reactions.

When Chinese Christians set themselves apart to enjoy the privileges that the missionaries had won for them under the unequal treaties, their arrogant behavior was bound to exacerbate communal tension. Chinese Christians’ refusal to take part in communal practices, claiming that ancestor worship was superstitious, served to increase resentment and hatred towards them. Unprincipled and insincere converts often exploited the gullibility of the missionaries to induce them to intervene on their behalf in legal proceedings. If the missionary’s request was not accepted, he would appeal to the consul or envoy. Such behavior embittered and humiliated the Chinese officials involved in the case. Karl Josef Rivinius writes,

Because of the most diverse incidents, the local authorities constantly requested the foreign consuls to oblige the missionaries to avoid unauthorized interference in Chinese affairs. The reason given was that the hostilities against the foreigners and the indigenous Christians in the interior were to a great extent linked to such interventions. (Rivinius, 1990: 204)

Another cause of the Boxers’ expansion was the prolonged famine caused by the extensive drought of 1898–1900 which, when added to other factors, produced a devastating outcome of violence and massacres. This particular famine led the local people to believe that the presence of aliens was responsible for this calamity. There were also rumors that Christians were poisoning the wells. Needless to say, such reports at a time of life-threatening famine could only lead to panic, hysteria, and zero tolerance (Tiedemann, 2000: 11). The Boxer movement was thus driven by a volatile mixture of fear, resentment, and misery. These grievances were caused partly by the unfortunate alliance between secular and spiritual imperialism.

The Boxer Rebellion could also be regarded as a massive anti-missionary movement where all the worst aspects of previous uprisings during the last ten years were repeated in the most atrocious ways. Naturally, the missionaries, fearful of attacks, pleaded for foreign military interventions to protect themselves as well as their converts. Chinese hatred of foreigners, their religion, and followers, revealed a huge gulf that existed between the Confucian culture of China and the Christian culture of the West. In the end, it was Western guns that carried the day. The Chinese were forced to admit the technical superiority of European arms. But more significantly, Christianity was associated with the aggressive West (Wehrle, 1966: 191).

On a positive note, R. G. Tiedemann believed that the relationship between Christians and non-Christians was actually quite cordial when the foreign agents were not directly involved. There was peaceful coexistence between Christians and their non-Christian neighbors. In fact, Tiedemann believed in the emerging of a kind of Chinese folk Christianity as the result of Christian accommodation to the local social and cultural norms (Tiedemann, 2000: 12). However, we have seen that the Taiping movement’s effort at indigenization of Christianity had not only failed, but had caused widespread loss of lives and properties. Perhaps it could have succeeded if the theology behind the movement had been sound.

Conclusion

As we have observed, there is imperialistic complicity in the propagation of the Christian faith that caused deep resentment among the people in China during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Focused only on making converts among the Chinese, missionaries did not take into serious consideration the political problems that their evangelization created. Ignorant of local cultures, missionaries sometimes preached doctrines that were at odds with the teaching of Confucius, like forbidding their converts to pay respect to their ancestors or to take part in local festivals. Their sense of moral superiority caused them to despise the people they were trying convert. Worst of all, missionaries often relied on Western military intervention to spread the faith. In other words, guns and gospel went hand in hand. Thus most Chinese in their collective consciousness associated Christianity with gunboat diplomacy and war.