One Billion Customers - James McGregor [20]
The Japanese victory was the last gasp of the Qing dynasty. As the century ended, Britain, Russia, Japan, Germany, and France all had pieces of China. The country was becoming another Africa, with separate colonies carved out by the West, when U.S. Secretary of State John Hay proposed an “open door” agreement among the countries that had “spheres of influence” in China. The agreement secured equal commercial opportunity for all throughout China. While the open door agreement kept the West from colonizing China, it also served the self-interest of the United States, which had fallen behind the other nations in China while preoccupied with developing the American West.
The foreign encroachments helped spawn a secret sect called the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists. The Boxers, as they were known to the West, combined martial arts, animistic rituals, and superstitions into a messianic movement aimed at toppling the government and chasing all foreigners out of China. As the movement grew in numbers, it became increasingly violent. Thousands of Boxers roamed China killing foreign missionaries, merchants, and their children. They also killed tens of thousands of Chinese Christian converts (many of them “rice Christians,” who prayed because they got free food) by skinning them alive or hacking them to pieces. Fearful for her life, the Empress Dowager co-opted the Boxers, urging them to rid China of the “foreign devils.” Soon some fifteen hundred foreign diplomats and businesspeople and their families were barricaded in the foreign legation districts in Beijing and Tianjin. The rebellion and siege generated global headlines and cemented an international image of the Chinese as fanatical savages.
Li counseled the Empress Dowager against aligning with the Boxers. He distrusted and disliked the foreigners in China as much as anyone, but he also respected their firepower. When she ignored his advice, Li knew that it was only a matter of time before foreign soldiers would come to Beijing to crush both the Boxers and the imperial army. It took an eight-power army two months to break the siege and then occupy and loot Beijing. Li once again assumed his role of de facto foreign minister, despite an illness that prevented him from attending many negotiation sessions aimed at settling the Boxer Rebellion.
The Boxer Protocol that Li negotiated and signed just weeks before his death was a simple document that required China to pay $335 million in reparations to the foreign powers (about $4.3 billion in year 2000 dollars), punish the Boxer leaders, and allow the foreigners to permanently station troops in Beijing. Few other details were needed. The ambassadors and ministers for Britain, America, Japan, and the other major foreign powers in Beijing formed a council that became a guiding hand for the Qing court. China was in the hands of the barbarians.
The Pro-Business Warlord
In 1911, the Qing dynasty finally fell, ending more than two thousand years of imperial dynastic rule in China and ushering in a period of unprecedented access for Western business. Sun Yat-sen, a Guangdong-born medical-doctor-turned-revolutionary, had brought together several anti-Manchu groups while in exile in Japan in 1905. His Nationalist party (the Kuomintang, or KMT) created and nurtured the new Republic of China using Soviet advisers and Soviet aid money. He formed a cooperative relationship with China’s budding Communist movement and the Communist party was formally established in 1921. But Sun died of cancer in 1925. His successor, Chiang Kai-shek, hated the Communists.
Generalissimo Chiang, who had been Sun’s military aide, drove out the Soviets and purged the Communists from KMT ranks, triggering the start of a twenty-five-year civil war. The generalissimo built a base of support among wealthy Chinese