boxer legacy posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005
As China underwent her metamorphosis, the events of 1900 continued to resonate. The boxers were lauded and indeed reinvented for propaganda purposes. They achieved deeper significance as a metaphor for chinese pride and patriotism than their activities in 1900 deserve
In 1903 the republican Sun Yat-Sen praised the boxers for rising up in the face of an impotent court to prevent the dismemberment by the foreigners. During the 1920s the chinese communists depicted the boxers as anti-imperialist patriots
In 1955 Chou En-lai called the boxer revolt "one of the cornerstones of the great victory of the chinese people 50 years later". In 1960, to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the rising, a play was written about the boxers by a Manchu whose father had been in the Imperial Guard at the time
That the boxer rising was a kind of harbinger of the people's revolution was part of the official folklore of the cultural revolution. The rhetoric in one booklet published towards the tail end was typical: "Armed with swords and spears and shouting anti-imperialist slogans, they [ the boxers ] stood erect before the imperialists and their lackeys"
During the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, young protesters told foreigners they felt like the boxers of old, invulnerable against bullets
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As China underwent her metamorphosis, the events of 1900 continued to resonate. The boxers were lauded and indeed reinvented for propaganda purposes. They achieved deeper significance as a metaphor for chinese pride and patriotism than their activities in 1900 deserve
In 1903 the republican Sun Yat-Sen praised the boxers for rising up in the face of an impotent court to prevent the dismemberment by the foreigners. During the 1920s the chinese communists depicted the boxers as anti-imperialist patriots
In 1955 Chou En-lai called the boxer revolt "one of the cornerstones of the great victory of the chinese people 50 years later". In 1960, to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the rising, a play was written about the boxers by a Manchu whose father had been in the Imperial Guard at the time
That the boxer rising was a kind of harbinger of the people's revolution was part of the official folklore of the cultural revolution. The rhetoric in one booklet published towards the tail end was typical: "Armed with swords and spears and shouting anti-imperialist slogans, they [ the boxers ] stood erect before the imperialists and their lackeys"
During the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, young protesters told foreigners they felt like the boxers of old, invulnerable against bullets
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