Waiting By The River.

Looking Sideways: To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends around the world, the United States must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900.

WATCHING THE SCREEN in Oamaru’s Majestic picture theatre, I struggled to make sense of Fifty-Five Days At Peking. Yes, it was exciting, but it was also, for a seven year-old, extremely confusing. What war was this? Not the First World War, and certainly not the Second. More to the point, why were the nations I had grown up regarding as enemies – the Germans, the Japanese, and the Russians – all counted among the “goodies” in this movie? Turns out that I was not the only person confused by Fifty-Five Days At Peking. In spite of an all-star cast, including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven, it was not a box-office success.

In 1963, a well-informed New Zealander in their seventies would not, however, have had anything like as much trouble understanding the plot. The blood-curdling “Boxer Rebellion” of 1899-1901; the consequent 55-day siege (20 June-14 August 1900) of the foreign legations in the Chinese capital; and the Eight Nation Alliance that lifted the siege and then proceeded to humiliate and punish the Chinese Empire; that was not an historical sequence any youngster following it in the newspapers was likely to forget. Certainly, it has never been forgotten by the Chinese, whose irreplaceable cultural treasures were destroyed by the armies of the “imperialists”.

Hardly surprising, when one considers how loudly those imperialists boasted of their victory. The intervention of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the United States, and Japan, had demonstrated to the whole world, or at least those few remaining parts of it not under the Eight’s complete control, what lay in store for any people who dared to raise their “harmonious fists” against them. The deliberate destruction of the Chinese emperors’ beautiful Summer Palace constituted a pretty big hint.

As always, the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, offered the most memorable quote:

Just as the Huns under their king Attila created for themselves a thousand years ago a name which men still respect, you should give the name of German such cause to be remembered in China that no Chinaman will dare look a German in the face.

That was the way the world was in 1900. The German Kaiser merely put into words (the “Huns” reference coming back to haunt him in 1914) what all the other leaders of the great imperial powers were thinking. The nations of Europe (and Japan) dominated the globe. Their cultures, and their technologies, were in every way superior.

Lest any reader assume that all such unabashed imperialist notions, following the horrors of World War II, had been set aside by the “international community”, here’s a memory-jogger from 1990-1991 – the Gulf War.

When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in 1990, the American President, George H.W. Bush, sternly informed him, and the rest of the world, that “this will not stand”.

He was as good as his word. With China still dealing with the fall-out from Tiananmen Square, and the Soviet Union in the process of disintegration, the United States was able to pull together a “coalition” of 42 nation states to intervene on behalf of the Kuwaiti government and drive the Iraqis back across the border. Dominated, overwhelmingly, by the military resources of the United States, the Coalition made short work of Saddam’s army. It was a stunning demonstration of the USA’s uncontested global hegemony.

Savouring his victory, George H.W. Bush made no reference to the Huns, but he did proclaim the arrival of a “New World Order” – one in which any nation bold and/or foolish enough to flout Washington’s rules of international engagement should expect to pay a very heavy price.

How the events of the last thirty years have changed the world’s geopolitical architecture!

When Bush senior’s “New World Order” still meant something, the idea of a rebel regime in Yemen forcing the world’s shipping companies to abandon the Suez Canal would have been dismissed as absurd.

With the Cold War won, and American hegemony an accomplished fact for most of the 1990s, the idea that the Suez Canal could be closed – as it was for seven years in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 – would not have stood. The impact on global oil prices, and the disruption of the international supply-chains so vital to the world’s increasingly interconnected economy, would have been regarded as unacceptable. The United States, the nations of Western Europe, and many of the Arab oil-states, would have unleashed upon Yemen the same overwhelming force that pummelled Iraq.

After 11 September 2001, however, the global game changed dramatically. Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States (itself an outgrowth of the USA’s co-option of the Saudi Kingdom in 1991) took place in an international setting very different from that which prevailed at the time of the Gulf War.

For a start, Russia and China were back in the game, stronger and more focused than they had been ten years earlier. Much of that strength was born out of both nations’ burgeoning trade with the European Union. Other states, Brazil, India and Iran in particular, were impatient to claim a more equitable share of the global economy. The USA remained strong – but not as strong as it had been at the end of the Cold War. It was an open question, in 2001, as to how many countries would respond to an American summons.

While joining the United States in a Global War on Terror made perfect sense in a world containing terroristic forces on the scale of Al Qaeda, partnering-up with Uncle Sam for what were obviously little more than punitive expeditions intended to slake the American thirst for vengeance after 9/11 was much less appealing. While the American overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan was given a pass (the regime had, after all, provided a base for Al Qaeda) the invasion of Iraq stepped over a line that most of the rest of the world would, ultimately, refuse to cross.

It would take twenty years for the Americans to comprehend, finally, that they were no longer in a position to issue orders to the rest of the world. Nor could they rely on the sort of racial and religious solidarity that prompted the world’s leading imperial powers to join together for yet another demonstration of White Supremacy on Chinese soil.

After the USA’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, the Russians and the Chinese must have exchanged knowing glances, and prepared to up-the-ante. The Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, while demonstrating the astonishing courage and resilience of the Ukrainians, also revealed the vacillation and disunity of the Nato states and, in the aftermath (and facing the possible return) of Donald Trump, of the USA itself.

In Fifty-Five Days At Peking the Chinese were the baddies, and the white imperialists (alongside their plucky Japanese ally) represented the clear moral and technological superiority of Western Civilisation. If, in American, Australian and, increasingly, in New Zealand eyes, the Chinese are still the baddies, the perspective from Beijing, and a large part of the rest of the world, is rather different.

To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends, the United States of 2024 must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900. In their own estimation, however, the Chinese people, once on their knees, have stood up.

And all those great empires that ravaged China in 1900, where are they now? Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria, Japan: all of them have become second-rate powers – at best. Even the United States, the great hegemon, is no longer equal to the task of preserving freedom of navigation along the Suez Canal.

In the words of China’s greatest sage, Confucius: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 October 2024.

Punishing The Barbarians

Imperialism To The Rescue? United States infantry storm the walls of Beijing as part of the Eight Nation Alliance's successful attempt to put down the "rebellion" of Boxer terrorists and restore "civilised values" to the benighted people of China. But, the actions of the imperialist powers in 1900 are regarded very differently with the hindsight of 115 years. How shall the West's imminent actions in the Middle East be judged in 2130?

 

IT WAS CALLED “The Eight Nation Alliance” and it had but one purpose: to punish the Chinese people. In 1899, the Shandong peasantry had resolved to drive all “foreign devils” out of their country, rising in their thousands under the leadership of a secret society known as the Brotherhood of Righteous and Harmonious Fists. The British, with characteristic disdain, referred to these patriots as “Boxers”, and dubbed their uprising the “Boxer Rebellion”.

 

By 1900 the Boxers were close to achieving their goal. They had shamed the Empress Dowager, Cixi, into supporting their movement and with the assistance of the Chinese army had the “foreign devils” bottled up in Beijing’s diplomatic quarter.

 

It was the unthinkable prospect of these legations being over-run, and their terrified inhabitants slaughtered, that persuaded the world’s leading imperialists: Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the USA, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Japan; to announce the formation of a joint force to lift the siege and restore the status quo ante.

 

The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, felt obliged to mark the departure of his own nation’s contingent with a speech. If you ever wondered why, in both world wars, the German’s were referred to as “The Hun” – wonder no more:

 

“Should you encounter the enemy,” said the Kaiser, “he will be defeated! No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.”

 

Confronting the Yellow Peril: The Christian West is enjoined by the archangel Michael to strike down the Asiatic threat from the East.

 

Needless to say, the Eight Nation Alliance – whose forces numbered in excess of 45,000 soldiers and marines – made short work of the poorly armed and inadequately led Chinese forces. Beijing was sacked and the Forbidden City ransacked of its treasures.

 

Never again would the imperial powers of Europe and Japan go to war alongside – as opposed to against – one another. Just 15 years after the subjugation of China, the members of the Eight Nation Alliance were tearing themselves to pieces in the First World War.

 

Of course, had you been reading the newspapers of the period, the foreign intervention in China would have seemed entirely reasonable. In an era when the Christian churches of the West were filled-to-bursting every Sunday, the stories of Christian missionary families being beheaded, burned alive, raped and even crucified by the brutal Boxer mobs, left Europeans feeling stunned and sickened.

 

These were not civilised people to be reasoned with. Indeed, the suicidal tactics of the Boxer “rebels” – many of them armed only with swords and spears – charging headlong into the murderous fire of the allies’ Maxim guns (an early type of machine-gun) struck the “reasonable men” of 1900 as the very antithesis of civilisation. In their ears, the bombastic racism of Kaiser Wilhelm did not sound nearly so shocking as it does in our own.

 

Perhaps the leaders of the world’s great powers should pause to contemplate the difference 115 years can make to way people interpret the behaviour of their forebears. In the minds of Presidents Hollande and Putin, the case for bringing together another Eight Nation Alliance to crush the barbaric Islamic State no doubt seems as strong as the arguments for punishing the murderous Boxers and their treacherous Empress Dowager, Cixi.

 

That the egregious behaviour of the imperial powers made such an uprising inevitable would have been dismissed by the political leaders of 1900 as an outrageous slur. The British Government’s open support for the 19^th Century opium trade, and its callous indifference to the enormous suffering it inflicted on the Chinese people, went largely unremarked. With the benefit of 115 years hindsight, however, Britain’s culpability is as obvious as it is detestable.

 

How shall our own generation of political and military leaders appear from the perspective of 115 years in the future? Given the West’s numerous interventions in Middle Eastern affairs since World War II, will the atrocities committed by Islamic State strike our great grandchildren as any more worthy of historical condemnation than the atrocities of the Boxers?

 

As China is today, so may the Islamic world be in 2130. What will its judgement be?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 November 2015.