Guan Erdong | The Boxer Rebellion’s “Love”, I Can’t Bear It

Are the Boxers patriotic? I’ve been increasingly doubtful about this lately.

You say the Boxers emerged under a special historical background and made specific contributions to ‘eliminating foreigners,’ but there were also many incidents of the Boxers killing our own compatriots.

You can just use ‘Heavenly assistance and divine fists’ to eliminate foreigners, why hit your own people?

It’s like a husband at home, seeing a bully from another village come in, going out to fight a few rounds, but when he gets home, he beats his own wife. How can people believe that he loves his family?

If you were a Boxer’s family member, it would be truly terrifying. Who knows if those divine fists wouldn’t one day fall on your head?

The Boxers certainly made some positive contributions in defending the nation and resisting foreign powers.

However, because the Boxers wouldn’t reflect, they used an extremely abstract and crude worldview to view the people in this society, and also made their own compatriots suffer their beatings.

For example, the Boxers divided the Chinese people into different classes, from ‘second foreigners’ to ‘tenth foreigners,’ where ‘second foreigners’ were believers, ‘third foreigners’ spoke foreign languages, wore foreign clothes, and bought foreign goods. Up to ‘tenth foreigners,’ in other words, anyone related to foreigners would be killed.

It makes me, an English enthusiast, very worried, because according to this standard, I am also a target of the Boxer’s divine fists. Fortunately, I wasn’t born in the Boxer era.

In real history, the Boxers killed many compatriots, all because of the absurd standards they set themselves.

According to Yang Diangao’s record in ‘Gengzi Events’: ‘After the churches and church properties were burned, all foreign goods stored in shops inside and outside the city were destroyed, or the poor were allowed to plunder them. Residents were also forbidden to store foreign goods or light foreign lamps. So, every household poured kerosene or buckets of it onto the streets. It was also rumored that after the Christians were killed, students who read foreign books would be eliminated, so the students were in a panic, and all the families that stored foreign books burned them to ashes.’

‘Miscellaneous Records of the Boxer Rebellion’ records, ‘A family with a match, and eight people were killed together.’

What exactly did these people do wrong? They read some foreign books, or even had a match at home, and they were beaten by the Boxers? Where is the justice?

You can certainly say that the Boxers’ standards were also due to historical limitations. Because most of the Boxers were uneducated, hadn’t read foreign books, and didn’t understand foreign languages. So, killing compatriots was purely accidental.

But just because it was accidental, should we deliberately glorify the Boxers?

In my opinion, without sufficient understanding, all your so-called ‘righteous’ actions are questionable. Stupidity is evil. You can’t hurt innocent people because you don’t understand, because you’re illiterate, and then you’re considered not to have hurt them.

It’s certainly important to have good intentions. However, if these intentions lack sufficiently clear logic and understanding, they will evolve into uncontrolled violence.

So I can’t accept the praise that ‘Prince of the Plains’ gave to the Boxers. In my opinion, this is a bit too much elevation of the Boxers.

Let’s go back to the question at the beginning of the article, are the Boxers patriotic?

Maybe they are, perhaps the Boxers are patriotic.

But from the results, the Boxers’ iron fists also hit their own people. How do you explain this?

The Boxers’ love caused those Chinese who read foreign books, learned foreign languages, or even those who originally wanted to ‘learn from the barbarians to control the barbarians’ to suffer terribly.

So, isn’t this ‘love’ a bit unhealthy?

For example, on Huaihai Road in Shanghai on May 1st, a pair of parents in the middle of the sidewalk, in order to discipline their child (a four or five-year-old girl), ignored the girl’s privacy and loud crying, held the girl down together, took off the girl’s pants, and spanked her in public.

Are these parents loving their child?

I think it’s hard to say. Maybe they love her in their hearts, and in the hearts of some people who are accustomed to authority and obedience, this is also love.

But from the perspective of life and health, they are humiliating their child in public to gain a voyeuristic desire for power. The child will remember it, and then what?

In essence, they may still love themselves more.

Just as the Boxers may love an abstract national self-esteem more, rather than caring about the well-being of their compatriots.

Once it really goes from concrete to abstract, it becomes very scary. People will quickly be labeled with various terrible labels and then be punished by the ‘divine fists.’ Why ‘divine fists’? Because not only can it make the Boxers feel like they have divine help, but also, it can allow them to unconsciously perceive Mencius’s words, ‘The heart of compassion, the heart of shame, everyone has it,’ and they can block their conscience without guilt, allowing themselves to completely become a tool of violence that upholds justice.

On June 10th, the Beishan Park incident, you can read the report, I won’t go into the details.

I am very concerned about why even the ‘Chinese tourist who came forward to stop the violence’ was stabbed?

I always believe that a person who can cruelly harm innocent compatriots, no matter how patriotic his reasons are, is a terrible person, and he has nothing to do with the word ‘justice’.