warships to join the international force massing in Bohai Bay near Tianjin. diplomatic minister in Beijing called for U.S. With the Boxer crisis, the opportunity for more assertive intervention was at hand. By 1900 it had become an article of faith that China’s supposedly limitless market was the key to America’s global future. The Forbes, Delano, and Cabot families of Massachusetts used their narco-profits to found enduring political dynasties. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China. Some of the United States’ most powerful families had gotten rich in China. Many in Washington had been waiting for a moment like this one. Boxer bands looted foreign shops, burned churches, and destroyed train and telegraph lines. Drought refugees flowed north into Tianjin and Beijing, carrying stories of massacres on the plains. “Then we can drive the foreign devils back into the ocean and protect our homes.”Īs the movement spread, the fighters united under a single name: Yihequan, or “Righteous and Harmonious Fists.” Unfamiliar with Chinese martial arts, English-speaking missionaries described them with the closest word they had: “Boxers.”īy the summer of 1900, the situation was ready to explode. “We must practice hard,” the fighters told Wang. Finally, the visitors revealed their purpose: They were building a holy army. He trained for weeks, first with wheat stalks, then knives and swords. They traveled from village to village, spreading the word about a way to end the cycles of disaster through a magical style of fighting.Ī villager from Shandong province named Wang Qingen remembered his first encounter as a teenager. Others went bare-chested, sporting flowing black scarves around their waists. It was in this atmosphere of hunger and suspicion that a new kind of figure appeared on the plains. Some thought they might have even caused the flood and famine by offending the gods with their strange religion. But many of the plainspeople were suspicious of the foreigners. Christian missionaries-mostly Americans, British, and Germans-opened their doors to starving families. The ruling Qing dynasty, ensconced hundreds of miles away in the Forbidden City of Beijing, seemed indifferent to the farmers’ plight. Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, Jonathan M.
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