from obedience to Chinese laws.

By 1899, China’s best ports and cities lay in “spheres of influence” controlled by Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Japan. The United States had no such sphere, nor had it ever warred on China. So, although it had gained many of the same rights as the other nations, it could claim a certain neutrality.

That year Secretary of State John Hay, fearful that the huge but helpless Chinese nation might one day simply be partitioned like Africa, and the United States shut out, won international acceptance of the Open Door policy. China’s territorial integrity would be respected, but all economic privileges squeezed out of it would be equally shared among the powers. Hay may have seen it as a favor to the Chinese imperial court, but it was hardly the kind to provoke much popular gratitude.

Rankling as badly with many Chinese as these humiliations were the multiplying efforts of the missionaries. With the enforced opening of China in the 1840s, their ranks grew from fewer than five hundred at mid-century to twenty-eight hundred in 1899. Those from the United States were especially zealous, their enterprise having been kindled during great revivals that encouraged ambition on a Yankee scale—nothing less than bringing the entire world to Christ within one or two generations. The missionary impact was visible in thousands of Chinese converts, hundreds of schools, many hospitals and dispensaries, and other training institutions. Yet seeds of discord were planted. Some of the missionaries were open in their disdain for the “heathenish” customs of their Chinese neighbors. It was also clear that wittingly or not, their Victorian gospel of progress linked the worship of Christ with sanitation, steam power, industrialization, and other forces that had less to do with escaping damnation than with developing the huge Chinese market for Western benefit.

To give them their due, the missionaries also found a society cruelly indifferent to the sufferings of the lowly. Missionary good works embraced schooling, health care, and the building of self-respect among outrageously oppressed groups—foot-bound women, to give a single example. In their fashion the evangelists were fighting for “human rights.” Many genuinely loved their converts and chose to die with them rather than flee the storm. (A fine overview of one representative group of such missionaries can be found in a book by a former managing editor of this magazine, Nat Brandt, Massacre in Shansi .)

But, however benevolent, the missionaries and Christianity itself became lightning rods for the hostility of all Chinese who resented the blows of outsiders against local traditions, hierarchies, and economies. The resentment turned virulent among members of a semiclandestine group with the name of I Ho Chuan, or Society of Righteous Fists. Their distinctive mark was a set of physical-spiritual exercises in which they fought imaginary demons and fell into trances. The Boxers, as they came to be called, began to win recruits late in 1899. Their message of resisting Europeanization to preserve the

purity of China’s soul quickly was translated into one of death to the “foreign devils” and their Chinese collaborators. Without restraining leadership or organization, Boxers began in early 1900 to raid outposts and symbols of Western influence, including missions. Terrible scenes ensued. Men and women were hacked to death with swords, burned alive in their compounds, sometimes tortured and paraded publicly through howling mobs before execution, after which their severed heads were displayed in cages on village gates.

Foreign governments demanded that the dowager empress Tz’u-hsi control these activities, which nowadays would be labeled “terrorism.” But the imperial court was dominated by an anti-foreign bloc of nobles who were ready to get rid of the Western carriers of a “progress” that bore so many threats with it. The Boxers were not outlawed and in fact launched a new series of attacks in Tientsin and Peking (the 1900 spellings) itself with imperial consent. Churches were burned, offices sacked, diplomatic officials murdered, and by mid-June hundreds of foreigners and many more Chinese converts were besieged in the legation quarter of Peking, while the countryside was at the mercy of Boxers slaughtering any suspected Christians.

The revolt could not last, of course—not at that moment in history. Nations that in just fourteen years would be at one another’s throats in the First World War quickly agreed on rescuing the prisoners and rebuking China. An international relief force of some 9000 men (including about twenty-five hundred Americans), executing the will of the United States and all the major European powers, fought its way inland from the coast, where it had easily landed under naval cover. On August 14, 1900, after Tz’uhsi had fled the capital, the siege was lifted. The international press cheered the restoration of civilization, but the aftermath was hardly enlightened. The foreign troops indulged in widespread looting in Peking itself, and as they fanned out into the surrounding territory in pursuit of Boxers, unreckoned numbers of Chinese civilians fell before the fire of both sides.

In all, the European and American losses were not small. In Peking 56 people perished, while 134 Protestant missionaries and 52 of their children were murdered, as were 47 Catholic missionaries. But the number of Chinese Christians slaughtered by the Boxers was more than 30,000.

The official punishment of China came in 1901; it was forced into virtual disarmament and fined the equivalent of $333 million in reparations, to be paid over forty years with interest, which more than doubled the sum. The United States used its $24 million share to compensate the families of slain Americans but once more got an opportunity to act as China’s “friend” when, discovering an overpayment, it returned about half the money. The grateful Chinese government put the dollars into a fund to send Chinese students to American universities.

The missionaries returned in greater numbers and remained until expelled by the Communists. In the end their educational work had the most lasting impact. Many mission-trained young Chinese became involved

in the various revolutions that overthrew the Ch’ing Empire in 1911, consolidated republican China’s nationalism in the ensuing thirty years, and later established both the Taiwan government and the Marxist regime now drifting back toward capitalism. So, history works in its convoluted ways. The latest round of debate between Clinton and Jiang is only another twist in the maze.