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No. 24. / Vienna, 15 June 1900. / Fourth Year

A Question of Culture or of Power.

Chinese Matters, by O. Erter.

The whole world is at present speaking of the Boxers. Under this name the Chinese secret league has hitherto been known which has now attained so remarkable an importance for Europe also. The Boxers are making revolution, killing the European missionaries, destroying the railways and threatening all foreigners. The number of their armed men is already estimated at 100,000; they carry on their bloody mischief up to the very walls of Peking, the capital of the Chinese Empire, and threaten the great port of Tientsin, the seat of foreign commerce. In order to protect their representatives and their subjects in Peking and Tientsin, the European Powers have united the warships stationed by them in Eastern Asia in a common blockade and have landed naval detachments; and since the Chinese troops sent out to put down the Boxers have everywhere been worsted, it may come to pass at any moment that Europeans and Chinese Boxers fall into bloody conflict with one another.

Thus far the situation which has arisen in consequence of the European seizures of territory in China would be clear and intelligible, if by no means gratifying. The Boxers are orthodox Chinese who set themselves in defence against the invasion of the foreigners and seek to bar the entry into China of European culture, which they fear means to set itself in the place of the immemorial Chinese culture. The fanaticism of the pigtail has awakened and does battle against the spirit of a new age, which is to dawn for China too, after she had outstripped the Europeans by thousands of years in her autochthonous culture, but has gradually become ossified within it.

But are the Boxers alone the representatives of the old in the struggle with the new? Or does the whole yellow race, numbering hundreds of millions, stand behind them? Do the Boxers act upon their own account, or do they receive instructions from the Chinese Government and from the Imperial Palace at Peking? How important these questions are lies upon the surface. If the Boxers are only an isolated horde, rising, be it from religious or from national or merely from material motives, against all foreign influence in China, then the danger is a comparatively slight one; for in conjunction with the Chinese Government the European Powers interested in China, together with America and Japan, would doubtless be in a position to master the Boxers, even were they more than 100,000 men strong. But in the Imperial Palace at Peking the party hostile to reform now dominates under the leadership of the Empress-Regent, and there is ground for the suspicion that the Boxers are the instrument of this party. This suspicion is of course calculated to lend the Chinese proceedings a very dangerous aspect.

And now the other question arises: are the Powers at one in their procedure; do they postpone their several interests, which are of course interests of power, to that common interest of culture which they invoked when they established themselves in China? To all appearance hitherto this is not the case. With quite unmistakable mistrust the English watch the fingers of the Russians, these those of the Japanese, and all together those of the Americans. This mistrust expresses itself most strongly in the discussions over the leadership of the co-operation. Is England to lead, or Russia? With her ships England is by far the strongest among the interested parties, but Russia is by land the nearest and the readiest to strike; she has numerous Cossack detachments at her disposal along the railway through Manchuria and can quickly set troops and guns in motion from Port Arthur towards Peking. And at Russia's side stands France. Forty years ago it was otherwise. Then England and France united to make China pliant, and the French General Palikao marched into Peking and dictated to the dynasty the will of the two allies. In those days men did not even take the trouble to put forward the question of culture as the driving motive, but made no secret of it that the true motive was to be sought in the question of power.

From all this it is to be gathered that the Boxer revolution is not a danger through itself, but rather because, in the first place, the Chinese Government