The Origins of the Boxer Uprising

"One thing I should say about all of the books that I have chosen is that they are written by people who devoted an extraordinary effort into really getting inside these particular stories. And they did so either with an exceptional research effort, or with access to first-hand information about China. In the case of Joe Esherick, he spent 1979-80 in China. He was part of the first group of American academics (as was I) who came over to China that year. And he spent the year at Shandong University doing very detailed archival and oral history work. And what he comes up with is really a very novel interpretation of the Boxer Uprising, which emphasises the importance of local popular culture and local ecology in creating different strains of Boxer movements. The Boxer uprising was, as you may know, the 1899-1900 rebellion against the foreign Christian presence in China. The Boxers attacked foreigners as well as Chinese Christians. Esherick shows how there were several different elements to it, led by different kinds of leaders, that reflected different local environments in Shandong. These really quite separate movements came together, with a big flood that occurred in the late 19th century. The Chinese government moved in and tried to suppress some of these movements, while at the same time encouraging other ones. One of the things that I particularly like about the book is that it shows, first of all, the way in which many protest movements in China grow out of very local roots. They are very closely associated with different religious and cultural and socio-economic interests and traditions. And, secondly, the way in which much larger events – whether they’re natural disasters, or the involvement of foreign states or government officials – turn those local traditions into directions often quite different from the way they started. Esherick’s book won major awards – the Fairbank Prize in East Asian History and the Joseph Levenson Prize. It was a double winner. And the reason for that was the high quality of the research and the innovative way in which he showed that the Boxers grew not out of what the foreigners were doing in China, but out of very old and deep-seated traditions of rural protest in North China."