The roots of these attacks lie in the broader history of antiforeign protest in China, which is as diverse as the history of anti-Asian feeling in the United States. From their earliest encounters with the Chinese, Western traders, missionaries and diplomats faced local discontent and hostility, often leading to fatal confrontations. Catholic missionaries and their converts suffered arrest or martyrdom in the 1620s, the 1660s and the 1700s, before their religion was formally banned by the emperors. Western traders confronted Chinese restrictions on their activities in the 18th century, but lost their opium stockpiles, their elaborate commercial houses, and almost lost their lives in the antiforeign agitations in Canton during the early 1840s. (It was at this time, in desperation, that the British seized the nearby island of Hong Kong as a temporary trading and military post.) In 1856, British diplomats sought to reopen treaty negotiations with the Qing, but were arrested and killed along with their retinue near Beijing. In reprisal, Lord Elgin burned the imperial summer palace to the ground. Outbreaks of deadly violence plagued Western missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, throughout the remainder of the 19th century.
Such incidents had a complicated mix of causes. On the Chinese side, they often sprang from exasperation with foreign arrogance, as they did again this month. Anger at those Chinese who connived with the foreigners to exploit their fellow Chinese has also been a major factor. The threat posed to treasured Chinese social and ethical values by foreign institutions, material culture and ideologies was also an underlying theme. By around 1890, to confuse the issues further, the swiftly modernizing Japanese were seen as having joined with Westerners in their race to exploit China economically.
One further paradox, which many commentators have spotted in the recent violence, is that outrage against foreigners often went along with intense admiration for many elements of foreign societies. Within a few years of the humiliating defeat of China by Japanese land and naval forces, thousands of Chinese students were streaming to Japan for their education. Within a few years of the suppression of the Boxer Uprising, they were also moving in unparalleled numbers to the United States and Europe. The massive outpouring of antiforeign sentiment in 1919, triggered initially by the news that the Allied powers at the Versailles peace conference had betrayed Chinese hopes to regain many of their lost territories, was orchestrated by Beijing university faculty and students under the twin banners of “science and democracy.” It was in this emotional mix of anger, humiliation and yearning for profound economic and social transformation that the Chinese Communist Party was able to put down its first roots in the early 1920s, and the Nationalist party (later led by Chiang Kai-shek) also flourished.
After it unified China in 1928, the Nationalist party imposed a powerful police presence in major cities, and also placed trusted party personnel in key positions at the major universities. The Communist Party built a similar apparatus after its victory in 1949. Thus the kind of strident yet controlled antiforeign political rallies that we have seen after the Belgrade embassy bombings would not have surprised anyone familiar with China during the middle half of this century. At different times, the political authorities directed rallies against the British, the Japanese, the Americans and the Soviets. They developed rally protocols and rituals for the chanting of slogans, the display of banners, the arrangement of marchers by school and occupational affiliation and the distribution of pamphlets. But such displays still held the possibility of great disruption. They could be assaulted from without–for instance, foreign troops or nervous police might open fire–or disrupted from within by more radical political forces or by hoodlums ripe for a rampage.
The political and patriotic sincerity of such manifestations should never be discounted just because they were or are in part orchestrated or monitored by pro-government elements. At the same time, they must be carefully distinguished from those that arose without government approval or even acquiescence. Examples of this latter type would include some of the massive labor demonstrations of the 1920s, the anti-Japanese agitations of the 1930s, the Beijing demonstrations that erupted against the Maoist Communist Party leadership in the spring of 1976, the pro-democracy rallies in Hefei and Shanghai during 1986 or the initial gatherings on Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is from such barely planned protest that the most lasting chords arise. The violence this month does not seem to be one of those dangerous occasions.
