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Cargando... The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in Chinapor David J. Silbey
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This account of the Boxer revolution reads a bit like the sequel to the Flashman adventure tale about the Taiping Rebellion. Plucky European and American agents and soldiers put down a crazy Chinese uprising with panache and style. The dying was mostly done by the Japanese understudy who acquired an unsound taste for colonizing from the European example. It is interesting to note how much of the crazy Boxer movement was caused by economic and agricultural misery. As soon as Mother Nature restored China's grace, the movement collapsed. Nobody was willing to test whether they were bullet-proof, in contrast to the earlier period when life was cheap indeed and attacking Christians and foreigners seemed like a good idea to get through a difficult time. The Qing dynasty in its final years chose to go along and try to use the Boxers as a cudgel to fight the European and Japanese aspirations on China. This was foolish and probably cost them their throne. Had the Qing instead embraced the Europeans, they might have stayed on as puppets on the Chinese throne. Overall, a short entertaining read about a strange episode of the colonial era that saw a strange mix of international forces lift the siege of Beijing. Who would have guessed that a tiny number of Austrian troops would one day assist in an attack on Beijing? This is a military history of the Boxer Rebellion in China and how the close the Boxers initially came to winning against the foreign forces in China in 1900. Their mission was to exterminate all foreigners in China and though their cause ended quickly, they inspired Chinese nationalism for years to come including Mao Zedong. Interesting Facts The Boxers were a bottom up phenomenon. No one controlled them from the top, so by sending a few people from village to village, town to town and city to city to train people, the movement grew incredibly fast. Boxers was a Western label from "Righteous Fists of Harmony." The foreign forces involved in relieving the foreign delegations in Beijing were the British, American, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Italian, and Austrian. A quick survey of the terminal climax of the Qing Dynasty, as the imperial government of China attempted to direct social revolution against the modern empires seeking to dominate the old Confucian state. The main virtue of this study is that it concentrates on putting the objectives of the assorted players in regards to each other in perspective, and takes the so-called Boxers as seriously as any of the other forces in the field.
Mr. Silbey places the war in a tradition that he says was long familiar to the British but brand-new to the Americans, one where empire is created "on the scene, and to the surprise of the mother county," by free-lancing representatives of faraway Western capitals.
A concise history of an uprising that took down a three-hundred-year-old dynasty and united the great powersThe year is 1900, and Western empires are locked in entanglements across the globe. The British are losing a bitter war against the Boers while the German kaiser is busy building a vast new navy. The United States is struggling to put down an insurgency in the South Pacific while the upstart imperialist Japan begins to make clear to neighboring Russia its territorial ambition. In China, a perennial pawn in the Great Game, a mysterious group of superstitious peasants is launching attacks on the Western powers they fear are corrupting their country. These ordinary Chinese - called Boxers by the West because of their martial arts showmanship - rise up seemingly out of nowhere. Foreshadowing the insurgencies of our recent past, they lack a centralized leadership and instead tap into latent nationalism and deep economic frustration to build their army. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)951.035History and Geography Asia China and region History 1644-1912 (Qing) 1864-1911Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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David SIlbey's book is far from the first work on the subject. Yet it is among the best as an introduction to the event, thanks to Silbey's clear writing and lucid analysis. He does a good job of explaining the underlying issues at play, both between the Chinese and the West and among the Western powers themselves. In doing so, he sets the Rebellion squarely within the context of contemporary events, helping readers better understand the whys and hows of the rising and its outcome. Though Silbey's favoring of English-language and translated sources limits the depth of his coverage, these limitations are understandable, and don't detract from his book's usefulness as a primer to a dramatic episode in the history of both China and Western imperialism. ( )