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The Origins of the Boxer Uprising

University of California Press

The impact of the Boxer Uprising was truly global. The political context for the uprising was significantly influenced by national trends. But in the end, the Boxers were really a regional movement. With the exception of a few officially inspired Boxer "militia" in such places as Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and the Northeastern provinces of Manchuria during the summer of 1900, the movement was essentially confined to the Shandong and Zhili portions of the north China plain. Before all else, it is essential to look at the geography, the political economy and the social formations of this regionand in particular at Shandong, where it all began.

Late in the nineteenth century, an American medical missionary described a trip through the heartland of the Boxer movement:

We were now passing through a level farming country, which appeared, as usual, thickly inhabited. At an interval of about a mile we would pass through a village of adobe houses with straw or reed roofs. These villages were usually surrounded by a decrepit adobe wall, and some even had a gate-house and heavy wooden gate. Trees grew within these village enclosures, but the plain was entirely free from any tree or shrub, every available inch of ground being taken up by the cultivation of cereals. The dreary look of all these villages made me feel home-sick. Nothing but dirty, mud-dried brick houses falling to decay everywhere, with some remnants of the red paper mottoes pasted up last New Year's time, fading and filthy, still sticking to the miserable, rotten doorways.1

Behind the prejudice and disgust displayed by a Westerner newly arrived in China, we can see here some of the most important characteristics of the north China plain: flat land, cereal agriculture, dense population, and impoverished villages. This was the alluvial flood plain of the mighty Yellow River plus a number of lesser streams that flow from the Taihang Mountains along the Shanxi border into the Gulf of Bohai. To the naked eye, the ground lies utterly flat for hundreds of miles in every direction, and the eye is not much deceived. From the point at which the Yellow River leaves the mountains of Shanxi and flows onto the plain in northern Henan, it travels 550 kilometers before it reaches the seaand drops only 100 meters: less than 20 centimeters per kilometer. The muddiest great river in the world, its silt content reaches 25 percent. Millennia of such deposits have yielded the rich soil which makes this region one of China's most important agricultural areas. But the flatness of the plain makes drainage a major problem; and where water cannot easily be drained away, the soil grows saline and yields only the sparest of crops.2

The climate in this region is continental: temperatures average just above freezing during the winter months, with cold dry winds from the northwest, but the summers are hot and humid. Through most of the plain, rainfall averages less than 500 millimeters per year, and is heavily concentrated in the summer months of July and August. Along the coast and on the Shandong peninsula, rainfall is both more plentiful and more reliable, but on the plains, the variation from year to year can be considerable. Lacking any man-made irrigation network, the peasants lived wholly dependent on the heavens delivering summer rains in the right amount at the right time. All too often, the weather was not kind: too much rain would flood or waterlog the land; or too little precipitation would bring parching drought, leaving the soil hard and cracked and often covered with a thin white layer of salts risen to the surface.3

Though the vagaries of weather left this region prone to recurrent natural disasters, the plains had long been one of China's key agricultural regions. In fact, in the late nineteenth century agriculture was virtually the only source of livelihood there. Even in the 1930s, after the advent of the railway and some incipient commercialization, surveys showed roughly 90 percent (and often 95 percent) of the population classified as peasants. Though there were important areas where such commercial crops as cotton were grown, wheat, soy, millet, gaoliang (sorghum) and other subsistence grains dominated the

landscape.4 These crops supported an extraordinarily dense population. A 1950s economic geography puts the population density throughout the plain above 200 persons per square kilometer (over 500 per square mile), and in most regions over 300 persons per square kilometer.5 The population would have been somewhat less in the late nineteenth century, but extrapolating back from 1930s figures, I would estimate the average density in the critical western Shandong portion of the plain to have been about 250 persons per square kilometer.

The vast Yellow River plain lies in the heart of what G. William Skinner calls the "North China macroregion." In analyzing China's cultural geography, no schema has been more influential in recent years than Skinner's regional systems theory. He divides China south of the Great Wall into eight macroregions: North China, Northwest China, the Lower, Middle and Upper Yangzi, the Southeast Coast, Lingnan (centerered on Canton) and the Southwestern region around Yunnan and Guizhou. The North China macroregion is bounded by the Great Wall on the north, the Taihang Mountains of Shanxi on the west, and the Huai River drainage on the south (see map 1). By Skinner's estimate, it was second only to the Lower Yangzi in population density (163 persons per square kilometer in 1893, as compared to an average of 100 for the eight macroregions), but lowest in level of rural commercialization. The unirrigated agriculture produced little marketable surplus: the relatively uniform ecology of the north China plain discouraged local specialization in commercial crops or subsidiary activities within the macroregion; and the northern winters gave peasants a long slack period in which all could engage in handicraft production (especially spinning and weaving) for household consumption. In fact, trade in general was relatively under-developed in North China. There were few navigable rivers and the cost of overland transport of grain equalled its production cost every 200 miles. As a consequence of this retarded commercialization, North China had a lower level of urbanization than all but the substantially frontier regions of the Upper Yangzi and the Southwesta rather remarkable fact given that North China was one of the oldest centers of Chinese civilization, and the location of the national capital since the tenth century. More than any other part of China, the North China

Map 1.
Macroregions of China. Based on maps in G. William Skinner, The
City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977).

macroregion was a land of a few large cities and a densely populated, poor, and substantially self-sufficient rural hinterland.

China's macroregions, in Skinner's analysis, are defined by their fundamental economic independence: "The major commercial cities of the region had stronger economic links with one another than...