The Boxer Uprising was the subject of one of my very first columns, back in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. And no surprises there: the movement is fascinating in its own right, with tremendous consequences for China’s history. The Boxer movement was driven by powerful economic and social grievances, sparked by natural catastrophe, and accelerated by religious and cultural practices that, together, made it, in the description of historian Joseph Esherick, “a prairie fire” that swept across the North China plains and into Manchuria, leading to 100,000 deaths.

But as as devastating as the Boxer uprising itself was, it may have been its settlement that accomplished what neither the Opium Wars, nor the Taiping War, nor the Nian Uprising, or Panthay Rebellion, or any of the other 19th-century crises could: bring down the Qing Dynasty. And it wasn’t force of arms, but economic attack that dealt the decisive blow.

China’s relations with the West were shaped by the Boxers in particular ways. Although the overwhelming majority of those killed in the Uprising were Chinese (Chinese Christians were especially targeted), 200 European and American missionaries were also victims. Monuments can be found to those who died at several American campuses with strong missionary presences in China (Oberlin, Yale, and Mt Holyoke are the most prominent examples). In many cases, their deaths were grisly, carried out by mobs who blamed the foreigners for the misfortunes facing China in 1900. At the same time, the press reported false and exaggerated claims that caricatured the violence. While many died, other reports of massacres turned out to be fabrications.

For foreign interests, the Boxer movement culminated with the siege of the Beijing Legation Quarter, popularized in the English-speaking world by the Charlton Heston film “55 Days at Peking” (described by the South China Morning Post as “an Orientalist Alamo, while white actors ‘yellowface’ as the main Chinese characters”). The siege was lifted after nearly two months by an “eight-nation alliance” of Imperialist powers, which fought its way into Beijing and broke through the Boxers’ lines.

The eight nations in the alliance did not participate equally. Japan, for reasons of proximity if nothing else, provided almost 40% of the 55,000 troops that comprised the

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China is not always known for its naval history. With apologies to Admiral Zheng He and his treasure fleet that navigated from Nanjing to the Middle East and East Africa in the 1400s, China’s maritime past is rarely celebrated, and often not remembered.

Which is not to say that Chinese sailors deserve to be ignored. So, for This Week in China’s history, let’s look back to a pivotal naval battle as Zhu Yuanzhang pursued his bid to establish what would become the Ming Dynasty, the 1363 Battle of Lake Poyang 鄱阳湖.

The battle is full of hooks to tempt the 21st century historian seeking to draw in an audience. It was one of — by some measures the — largest naval battle ever. Reliable estimates are hard to come by, but historian Tonio Andrade is comfortable with the claim that half a million people, and several hundred vessels, participated in the battle. Even more significant, Poyang Lake saw the first documented use of firearms in shipborne warfare, foreshadowing the blazing broadsides of the age of sail (though perhaps not as specifically as some portrayals would have you believe).

Today, the setting does not suggest itself as a location for a naval battle of any sort, let alone one of the magnitude that took place in the summer of 1363. The lake is China’s largest freshwater lake, but if you’re imagining North America’s Great Lakes, think again. Poyang is just a fraction of even the smallest of those lakes. The lake’s surface area has always varied in size, seasonally, and in the rainy season it can reach 1500 square miles, so it’s formidable (by comparison, Utah’s Great Salt Lake covers about 1000). Iin recent years Lake Poyang has dwindled, beset by climate change and starved by the Three Gorges Dam. Its seasonal variation has grown even greater and during the dry season–typically late fall–Lake Poyang is often a mere puddle compared to what it once was, in some years almost disappearing entirely, covering fewer than 100 square miles.

But in the waning years of the Yuan Dynasty, Lake Poyang was larger than it is today— some sources say more than twice its current size — and late summer is its seasonal peak. And in 1363 it became the key to China’s civil war.

Zhu Yuanzhang, the man who would found the Ming as the Hongwu Emperor, had risen in prominence as part of the Red Turban Rebellion, an uprising with roots in millenarian Buddhist principles but which came to serve as a broad umbrella for those with grievances against the Yuan. By the middle of the 1350s, Zhu was one of several powerful generals in the Red Turban movement, with some 20,000 troops at his disposal. By 1360, that number had grown to perhaps 100,000, and Zhu ruled from his capital in Nanjing over as many as eight million people, including much of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui provinces.

Zhu was certainly one of the most powerful men in China, but he was just one of several men with even greater ambitions. Besides Zhu, Chen Youliang 陈友谅, based in Jiujiang (Jiangxi), and Zhang Shicheng 張士誠, based in Suzhou, were the best positioned to succeed the Yuan and form a dynasty that would rule China. And when, early in 1363, Zhu moved his armies north against Zhang Shicheng, Chen Youliang saw an opportunity.

Lake Poyang was positioned at the boundary between the two men’s territories. Chen’s plan was to organize an invasion fleet and attack the city of Nanchang, Zhu Yuanzhang’s main garrison on the lake that guarded the entry to the Yangtze. After taking Nanchang, Chen could then move downriver and take Zhu’s capital at Nanjing.

Contemporary sources place the size of Chen’s fleet at 600,000. That is accepted as an exaggeration, but even at half that size (as seems likely) it was as large a force as could be mustered anywhere in the world at that time. The central feature of Chen’s fleet were “tower ships”: three decks high with armored sides. These vessels were not

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Some things that are true can disguise the truth. For instance, it is common to point out that China — unlike most nations in Asia and Africa — was not made a European colony. Although parts of the country came under foreign control — many of which I have written about here, like Hong Kong, Zhoushan, Guangzhouwan, Qingdao, and parts of Shanghai — the empire, and later the Republic, remained independent. That is not to say that Chinese did not feel oppression from colonial attitudes and actions. Indeed, the interactions between foreigners and Chinese shaped China’s modern history in fundamental ways.

Such was the case in Tianjin in the spring of 1870. The city and the surrounding region, like much of China, had been turned upside down in the preceding decades as European colonialism flooded the empire in the years following the Opium War. Foreigners, and foreign interests, spread inland from the coast and along China’s rivers, especially in the Treaty Ports. Tianjin — the port city of Beijing — was not among the first Treaty Ports opened by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, but was included in a second round of ports opened following the Second Opium, or Arrow, War. In the spring of 1861, the foreign presence in Tianjin increased sharply.

The terms of the treaties ending the Second Opium War permitted Christian activities and institutions in treaty ports. In Tianjin, one of those was a mission led by the Lazarist Chinese priest, Joseph Tsiou. Tsiou’s priority was baptizing gravely ill infants — some of whom had been abandoned as acts of infanticide. From Tsiou’s perspective, his work was merciful, offering innocent souls entry to heaven. (The fate of unbaptized babies is a surprisingly complex theological debate, which includes the now-out-of-favor notion of “limbo,” but this column takes no official stance on such matters.)

To the non-Christian people of Tianjin, though, the effects of Tsiou’s ministry seemed clear: he sought out infants — sometimes paying for the privilege — and the great majority of them died soon after he took them in. Tsiou himself died of illness just months after beginning his mission; he was soon replaced by a French order, the Sisters of Charity. These nuns followed the practice of a Catholic society called the Holy Childhood Program, focused on the baptism and education of infants and which had grown explosively across the world starting in the 1840s. (Historian Henrietta Harrison has detailed the work of the Holy Childhood Association in China, which had branches in many treaty ports.)

The Sisters of Charity continued the work that Tsiou had begun. By 1870, there were ten nuns in Tianjin working to educate, baptize, and care for abandoned infants. The project was becoming increasingly controversial in the eyes of the local population. The nuns’ focus on infants, many of whom were sick or poorly nourished, meant that most of the children they brought in died soon thereafter. The pattern was unmistakable, even if the reason for the correlation was not sinister.

It was true that the sisters sometimes offered money to parents to surrender their babies. In the nuns’ eyes, this may have been a double-charity, benefiting the parents’ who had been driven to desperation while also helping the child, either in the present or in the afterlife (perhaps both), but it created a troubling incentive. Motivated by

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The decades following the fall of the Qing dynasty were full of colorful characters who managed to accrue personal power and wealth (often at the expense of the people who lived in the areas under their control). The abrupt end to the imperial system — even if many elements of society, culture, and politics persisted — meant that the people who had successfully risen to power suddenly found themselves needing to reinvent themselves. Some of those who succeeded in this would emerge as “warlords” when Yuan Shikai died and the Chinese republic collapsed. Some, though, never had that chance.

One such man was Xu Baoshan 徐宝山. Xu, born in 1866, built his career as a smuggler, moving salt around the lower Yangtze valley in defiance of the imperial monopoly. By the end of the 20th century, according to historian Paul Martin, Xu had nearly 10,000 people working for him and some 700 vessels at his disposal to move salt up and down the river and the coast. Going by the nickname “Tiger,” Xu negotiated expertly a complex space between Qing authorities and would-be revolutionaries, oscillating, in Martin’s description, “between conflict and cooperation depending on which policy best served to maximize Xu’s interests at any given time.”

To illustrate Xu’s skill, he was appointed as an official by the Qing government to oversee their anti-smuggling efforts in Jiangnan, the lands south of the Lower Yangtze — a relatively easy brief since his own organization was responsible for most of the illegal trade in the region. He could now use his official office to persecute rivals. What had previously been ruthless business practices became law enforcement. And after 1911, Xu seized control of Yangzhou and, at first, rallied his troops to fight against the rebels. But then, rather than going down with the Qing ship, Tiger Xu made a deal with the anti-dynastic forces. He agreed to side with the new Republic as long as he could retain control over, and the revenue from, the salt manufacturing and distribution apparatus that he had, by turns, been bypassing or enforcing for the previous decades. The Qing dynasty was gone, but Xu Baoshan had strengthened his own wealth and power in its wake.

But power in the years following 1911 was precarious. Xu’s influence and location made him crucial for anyone wanting to strengthen power in the lower Yangtze, which was in turn an essential part of any aspiration for nationwide power. Yuan Shikai had recognized this and bought Xu’s loyalty with money — reportedly a quarter of a million taels — and favors — he gave Xu’s son a military appointment. Then, when Yuan revealed his dictatorial ambitions by murdering his political rivals,

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The tension between party and state is an important one. Proving loyalty to a party (or its leader) is often essential to gaining, or keeping, a government office. But ideological purity is rarely the most important asset for running a country well. Do you want to prioritize competence, or political conformity?

In the mid-1950s the Chinese Communist Party was on a heater. After facing extermination in the 1920s, and surviving by the skin of its teeth thanks to its Long March to Yan’an, the Party rallied through the war against Japan. Then, against the better armed and better supported KMT in the Civil War, the Communists swept to victory fueled largely by popular support, and on October 1, 1949, declared the founding of the People’s Republic. The CPC continued to defy the odds as it rapidly rebuilt the nation’s economy after decades of war and imperialism and then fought the United States to a standstill in the Korean War. Just a few years removed from being guerillas living in caves, the Communists now found themselves leading the world’s most populous country with momentum and aspirations to become a great power.

The Party had overcome numerous opponents during its rise, and it maintained a long list of enemies. In the early years of the PRC, a campaign against “counterrevolutionaries” suspected of harboring Nationalist sympathies had been repressive and destructive: more than a million people may have been killed between

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In recent years, China’s rise has been one of the most important aspects of geopolitics. From various vantage points, observers have framed China as a more benign alternative to Western-style imperialism, or as a disruptive challenger to the post-World War II order, or as a hypocrite disguising its ambitions as benevolence, or as a clear-eyed practitioner of realpolitik, contrasting American moral paternalism. That list is neither nuanced nor exhaustive, of course, but in each case we see an acknowledgment that China is a dominant regional power and, at the very least, an important global player.

And as often as we use the phrase “China’s rise,” we don’t often make clear just what it is rising from. It’s a fool’s errand to find one single moment that represents China’s nadir in terms of global influence, but I’ll play the fool for this exercise and suggest April 17, 1895. On that day, events were underway that would see China reduced to a minor player in world affairs, and a subordinate power even in its own backyard. The Treaty of Shimonoseki would end the first Sino-Japanese War decisively in Japan’s favor, leaving the Qing empire defeated and dismembered.

The war had begun in the summer of 1894. Then, it was Japan, not China, that was the rising global power, seeking hegemony in East Asia and respect abroad. Japan’s quest for resources and strategic positioning collided in the Korean peninsula with Qing China’s claims to regional dominance. Both sides used disingenuous claims that they were supporting Korean autonomy — neither side was in truth interested in Korea serving as anything other than a vassal state or colony — to intervene on behalf of their proxies. Fighting took place first on the Korean peninsula and surrounding waters, and the Japanese advance was steady. Naval defeats all but destroyed the Qing Beiyang Fleet early in the war, and Japanese forces invaded China, advancing down the Liaodong peninsula. Port Arthur fell in November, 1894. Ten weeks later, Japanese marines captured the northern Shandong port of Weihaiwei and destroyed what was left of the Qing fleet in port, “ending Chinese naval power,” as historian Sarah Paine wrote, “for more than a century.”

On a map of the region, China’s predicament at this point is obvious. Port Arthur, on the north, and Weihaiwei, on the south, controlled the entry to the Bohai Sea and, therefore, the approaches to Beijing. The Qing court was left with little choice but to sue for peace.

On March 19, the Qing delegation arrived in Shimonoseki, at the southernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu. Comprising some 100 bureaucrats and diplomats, the Chinese side was led by Li Hongzhang, one of the empire’s preeminent statesmen who had been in the halls of power for decades after his central role in winning the Taiping Civil War for the Qing. He was, both literally and figuratively, a towering figure, standing six feet tall (exceptional for the time), his height accentuated by the flowing traditional robes he wore. Li’s reputation for loyalty, integrity, and honesty matched his dignified demeanor, commanding respect from all around him.

Meanwhile his counterpart, Itō Hirobumi, cut a very different figure. He stood nearly a foot shorter than Li, short even by the standards of the day. His clothes were also a stark contrast, wearing a western-style military that was festooned with medals. “Chronically insecure,” writes historian Paine in her definitive history of the Sino-Japanese War, “he craved praise to his face and decorations on his chest.” Itō was also known to be disrespectful to subordinates and was late to cabinet meetings because he lingered at a geisha house.

But the two men’s personal integrity belied their positions as they began negotiations in the Shuntarō guesthouse. The hotel itself was familiar to Itō as it was his visit in 1888 that had made it the first place to legally serve Fugu, the pufferfish that can be fatal to eat if not prepared correctly. Itō had arrived there, as the hotel now tells it, during a storm that had left the fleet unable to fish. With nothing else on hand, the chef had been forced to serve Fugu, which although illegal had long been a local delicacy. After its chef demonstrated his ability to prepare the delicacy, Shuntarō became the first place in Japan licensed to offer the risky meal. (The original structure was destroyed in the second world war, but the rebuilt hotel still bears the same name and is open for business!). Whether they ate Fugu or not, the delegations began their negotiations in late March. They were conducted, it’s worth noting, entirely in English — Li speaking through an interpreter, while Itō spoke English fluently.

But in any language, Li had little leverage. The Qing forces had been all but annihilated and Japan’s navy was unchallenged in Chinese waters. Nothing stood in the way should Japan decide to take the capital, Beijing. Li’s only hope was to convince western powers to intervene on China’s behalf, a hope built on the proposition that the colonial powers would be loath to see Japan ascendant to the point that it could challenge their own ambitions in the region. As the talks went on, it became clear that Japan would press its advantage.

Ironically, Li’s position was improved in a turn of events that nearly took his life. As Li returned to his accommodations after the fifth day of negotiations, a would-be assassin shot him in the face at close range. Miraculously, the shot did not kill the Qing diplomat, but lodged in his face. As Paine describes it, “Li decided not to have the bullet removed. He preferred to get on with negotiations.

The bullet remained lodged deep under Li’s nose, a souvenir from his first trip abroad and a continuing source of discomfort.”

The Japanese were deeply embarrassed at their inability to keep a foreign diplomat safe on their own territory. Ultranationalists, like the one who had shot Li, had been a recurring problem for Japanese leaders: a Japanese policeman had scarred the future Tsar Nicholas with a sabre while the heir was on a goodwill tour in Japan four years earlier — and the attack on Li tempered the Japanese demands.

More modest they may have been, but the Japanese peace terms were humiliating for Qing China. In just a few clauses, China’s dominance in East Asia was erased and the Qing state flipped from colonizer to colony: Korea’s tributary relationship to China was terminated. The Liaodong peninsula, the Pescadores Islands, and Taiwan were all ceded to Japan, along with a substantial war indemnity. Chinese ports, on the coast and up its rivers, were opened to Japanese ports, and economic interests were conceded.

Barely had the ink on the treaty dried, though, when the European powers who had refused to intervene on the behalf of the Chinese found themselves uncomfortable with the new circumstances. Realizing that Japan was now a mainland Asian power, Russia, France, and Germany through a so-called “Triple Intervention” compelled Japan to give back the Liaodong peninsula in exchange for a greater indemnity.

The intervention was a mixed blessing for the Qing. It did preserve the territorial integrity of the empire (at least on the mainland) but the fact that the European powers were able to protect Chinese interests when the Chinese themselves were not illustrated the empire’s weakness. And the retrocession of the Liaodong peninsula provoked outrage in Japan, especially after the peninsula was leased to Russia. Ten years later, Russia and Japan would be at war with one another over Chinese territory.

Even mitigated by the Triple Intervention, the impact of the Treaty of Shimonoseki was enormous. Now China was clearly a second-rate regional power, far from the global actor it had been and even pretended to be just decades earlier. And the precedent that was established by Japan’s territorial acquisitions — even with the return of Liaodong, Japan acquired Taiwan and the Pescadores, as well as economic interests on the mainland — opened the door for other imperial powers. The insidious “most favored nation” clause in the treaty regime that began in the 19th century meant that every country with imperial ambitions toward China could bring with them the expectation that they too could claim pieces of the Qing empire. A scramble for concessions that would see pieces of China given to France, Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, and others was underway.

Once commanding tribute and respect from its neighbors, China was now at the mercy of its much smaller neighbor, which was prying apart the Qing empire. Japan’s presence in China would increase steadily through 1945. It’s no exaggeration to point to Shimonoseki as a crucial inflection point in the relationship of Taiwan to the mainland, which today sits as the central tension between China and the United States.

In the several years of this column, it has occasionally touched on important episodes to do with China’s history that took place outside its borders. These have included overseas Chinese communities, such as the 1740 Batavia Massacre or the tragically similar 1871 Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre; China’s actions abroad, like the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, or events outside of China’s borders that impacted China’s future, like the sailing of the Empress of China and the start of U.S.-China trade. This week, though, might be the first instance describing events that took place within China but were primarily focused on the history of another country, in this case Korea.

Japan’s occupation of Korea began in the 1890s, when Japan defeated Qing China in war that was largely about influence over Korea. Another war — this time against Russia — solidified Japan’s position in 1905, and in 1910 Japan formalized the arrangement, making Korea a Japanese colony. For the next several years, a series of laws went into effect, each one aimed at appropriating Korean resources — land, timber, fish — for Japanese use and profit. More than that, Japanese policies sought to erase Korean culture altogether. The December 2019 issue of Korean Quarterly records the views of a Japanese official at the time, who noted (being clear that this was his personal opinion, not official policy) that “if you ask me as an individual what is to be the outcome of our policy I can only see one end…. The Korean people will be absorbed in the Japanese. They will talk our language, live our life, and be an integral part of us…. We will teach them our language, establish our institutions and make them one with us.”

Resistance, needless to say, was widespread. Two events in the winter of 1918-19 galvanized the movement against the occupation. The first was American President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech, celebrating national self-determination and railing against the evils of colonialism. Many have questioned Wilson’s commitment to self-determination, and certainly — given his record at home — he was an unabashed racist. The idea that he supported democratic principles without regard to race was questionable, at best, but his rhetoric took hold around the world, including in Korea, where nationalists (many of whom were Christian and saw the United States as an ally) seized on Wilson’s supposed anti-colonialism for inspiration.

The second was the death of the former Korean emperor, who had been deposed by the Japanese and had worked for Korean independence during the preceding decade. Gojong had lived his last years under house arrest and had several times tried to escape to China, without success. Foul play was suspected in his death, with rumors

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Listen to my narration of This Week in China’s History in the embedded player above! - Kaiser

I’ve written before in these pages about the An Lushan rebellion, the 8th-century uprising that fractured the Tang dynasty and ended one of China’s brightest Golden Ages. In that earlier column, I detailed more about An Lushan’s rebellion — one of the longest and deadliest in human history — that brought the Tang to the brink of collapse. I encourage you to return to that earlier chapter for an introduction to that cataclysm, but today I’ll focus on An Lushan’s own personal destruction.

An Lushan proclaimed his new Yan dynasty on February 5, 756 (as if either of those dates would have been meaningful to him, but never mind), shortly after capturing the Tang’s eastern capital, Luoyang. Plans to swiftly occupy the western capital, Chang’an, and depose the Tang emperor went awry, however, and it would be six months before Chang’an fell. The emperor and his entourage fled for the southwestern mountains, a flight immortalized in Bai Juyi’s poem, 長恨歌 Song of Everlasting Sorrow. An Lushan took his place on the throne, as emperor of China (at least one of them)

But as is often the case, ruling proved more difficult than conquest. Although the Tang court had fled, it survived, based in its mountain stronghold in Sichuan. Tang and Yan armies waged war against one another across central China. Rivalries within the rebellion consumed the court at Chang’an. An Lushan himself, afflicted by numerous ailments, became paranoid and lashed out at members of his entourage, seemingly without provocation.

At this point, it is important to note that our sources about An Lushan are far from neutral. One of the first tasks of any Chinese dynasty is to write the history of its predecessor. Wanting to ensure their legitimacy, each dynasty typically presents its forebears as worthy and noble…until they weren’t. The “dynastic cycle” becomes nearly clichéd, as the early rulers of each dynasty are almost universally portrayed as wise and strong, while the last emperors are depicted as dissipated and corrupt.

Alongside this, though, dynastic histories are quick to portray rebels as unworthy threats to the Mandate of Heaven. Had An Lushan’s Yan dynasty defeated the Tang entirely and taken its place as one of China’s official dynasties, he would have been portrayed as the valiant founder of a dynasty. This was not to be, though, and the histories of the Tang dynasty are unsympathetic, depicting An as erratic and power-hungry. Such depictions, for the reasons I have suggested, are best taken with a grain of salt. They are, though, what we have.

With this in mind, An Lushan is shown to be a violent and cruel emperor. His physical presence and thuggish temperament verged on the monstrous: he was said to have grown so obese that his weight crushed a horse he sat upon. Ulcers spread across his body, and his eyesight failed to the point of blindness. He lashed out even at his most trusted associates, including a eunuch who had served with him for decades, Li Zhuer 李猪儿. After first designating his son An Qingxu 安慶緒 his chief deputy and heir, he then switched his support to another son, sowing dissent and treachery within the court.

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Listen to my narration of Jay’s column in the embedded player above! – Kaiser

When American forces removed Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, it prompted international crises on numerous fronts. Many of them concerned the United States’s renewed “Monroe Doctrine,” as well as the challenge to — some would say destruction of — international law and principles of national sovereignty. In the hours after Maduro’s seizure, Trump and his representatives said repeatedly that Venezuela had become a staging ground for America’s “adversaries” to project power, acquire resources, and establish a presence in the region.

Just hours before the American operation began, Maduro received his last international visitor: China’s special envoy to Latin America Qiu Xiaoqi (Eric Olander described the visit in the China-Global South Newsletter). Whether it was coincidence that Chinese diplomats were the Maduros’s last visitors to the Miraflores palace or there was something more to it (did the Chinese have intelligence about what was about to go down?), the presence of PRC officials in Venezuela illustrates that when Trump talked about “adversaries” in Venezuela, he was referring, at least in part, to China.

The U.S.-China relationship has been the world’s most important bilateral relationship, at least since the end of the Cold War. Sometimes combative and sometimes collaborative, the United States and the People’s Republic have jointly defined much of the last century. It’s useful to go back to the beginning — even before the PRC was formally established — to January of 1947, when one of America’s most famous diplomats tried, and failed, to resolve the Civil War that would end with Mao as China’s head of state.

In the fall of 1945, George Marshall was one of the world’s most acclaimed military leaders. He had served as U.S. Army Chief of Staff and was the first American to be promoted to the rank of five-star general. Hailed by Winston Churchill as the architect of the victory, Marshall was not chosen to lead the D-Day invasion of Normandy in part because President Roosevelt did not want to part with Marshall as Chief of Staff.

The war won, Marshall looked forward to retirement, which began with a discharge ceremony in December 1945. As Daniel Kurtz-Phelan describes it in his book The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-47, Marshall and his wife had barely been home an hour, in Leesburg, Virginia, when the phone rang. President Truman apologized for interrupting Marshall’s retirement, but he needed him for one more mission: to settle the conflict between China’s uneasy allies — and mortal enemies — the Nationalists and the Communists.

Mao Zedong’s Communist Party and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party had been united in a so-called Second United Front, fighting against Japan since 1937. The alliance had not been easy after the Nationalists nearly eliminated the Communists in April 1927. The Communists barely survived Chiang’s extermination campaigns, undertaking the Long March that left them — what remained of them — isolated in northwest China. Public pressure, and ultimately his kidnapping, would eventually compel Chiang Kai-shek to ally with the Communists against Japan, forming this Second United Front (the first having ended in the 1927 massacre).

The alliance was never much of one. The two armies coordinated only loosely, and more than once they did battle against each other, most notably in the New Fourth

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Students were fed up.

Frustrated by a government they perceived to be corrupt and unable — unwilling? — to make good on its promises, they organized, determined that a show of popular frustration could change policies. From universities around the city — which had been China’s capital for most of the preceding five centuries — they converged on the center of the city. Defying official orders to disperse and return to their campuses, soon students from more than a dozen universities had found their way to Zhongnanhai, the center of power in China. In support, protests broke out in dozens of cities across the country.

It was not the spring of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, though. It was the winter of 1935. Tiananmen was just a gate — not yet a square — and the city we know as Beijing was then officially “Beiping,” or Peiping. Though Zhongnanhai was a critical site for China’s ruling elite, it was not then the home of its leaders. And rather than rallying to call for democracy and an end to corruption, these students were looking for a government that would stand up to a foreign invader, urging the ruling Guomindang (KMT) to ally with the Communists and fight the Japanese who were menacing China’s frontiers. The movement would take its name from the date they arrived at Zhongnanhai: December 9th.

The roots of the December 9th movement went back at least as far as Japan’s imperial ambitions. Japanese aggression against China had begun in earnest in 1894, when Japanese forces sank the Chinese steamship Kowshing, precipitating the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, which established Japan as a continental power by (effectively) colonizing Korea and seizing the Liaodong peninsula (although that occupation was rescinded under Western pressure). Japan then won another war in Manchuria — this time against Russia — to advance its interests there. Then, in 1931, elements in the Japanese army launched a false-flag operation near Shenyang — the so-called Mukden Incident — and invaded Manchuria, separating Northeast China from the rest of the Republic and installing the puppet regime of Manchukuo, with the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as its leader.

It was in many ways the response to the Mukden Incident and the invasion of Manchuria that led to December 9th. Chiang Kai-shek infamously ordered his military to retreat from the advancing Japanese, believing that China was not yet

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It was the 9th of October, 1813 — a date that would have been known as the 15th day of the 9th month of the 17th year of the Jiaqing reign. It’s been a while since I nodded to the conventions used for assigning and converting dates, but I wrote about it in more detail in a previous column on Yue Fei.

In any event, just as that day was dawning, two eunuchs in the employ of the imperial household left their quarters and slipped out of the Forbidden City, passing through the Donghua Gate in the southeastern corner of the palace complex. There, they joined Chen Shuang 陈爽, the leader of a group of about 60 men who were scattered across tea and wine shops in the area. Chen and the two eunuchs exchanged a few words, went over the details of some plans, and waited, sipping wine.

The hour was early for wine, but they could be forgiven under the circumstances: the plans they were reviewing were for nothing less than the overthrow of the Qing dynasty that had ruled China for more than 150 years. They were to be the culmination of the Eight Trigrams rebellion, an uprising that had been organizing for months an invasion of cities across north China, including Beijing, with the assault on the Forbidden City as its centerpiece. The men gathered near the Donghua gate were hiding banners and weapons while they breakfasted. On a signal from their leader at noon, they readied their weapons and made their way to the gate itself, its enormous doors open, tended by more than a dozen guards. Led by the two eunuchs, Liu Decai 刘得财 and Liu Jin, the would-be invaders began their attack.

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Broadly speaking, Chinese emperors — maybe most emperors — met their end in one of two ways. Most died peacefully of old age in a palace, surrounded by the splendor and privilege that accompanied being one of the most powerful men on earth. Others, beset by internal or external enemies, meet a violent end. Few, though, came to an end as horrifying as did Wang Mang. His armies defeated and his palace alight, Wang was killed by rebel soldiers — or perhaps his own people — who dismembered his body to prove they had played a role in his killing. He was beheaded so that his head could be hung from the city gate, but before it could get there, it became a soccer ball for bloodthirsty residents.

How did Wang Mang come to be so hated? In the official historiography, his name has become synonymous with “usurper”: a megalomaniac who plotted, extorted, and murdered his way to the throne of the Han dynasty, and then established his own regime. As emperor, he launched an unhinged quest to return China to a mythical past, seizing land, imposing heavy taxes, and targeting any family powerful enough to be a threat. Frivolous wars and gimmicky monetary policy drained the state treasury, compromising the regime’s ability to deliver disaster relief. Corruption, debauchery, and incompetence brought the pretend regime to a quick end; the dynasty’s only virtue was its brevity.

That’s the official version anyway.

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At ten minutes after midnight on September 9, 1976, Mao Zedong died. He had been among the founders of the Communist Party and had led that party for nearly four decades. Under his leadership, the Communist Red Army had helped defeat the Japanese in World War II. It went on to overthrow the Republic of China to establish the People’s Republic that he had himself announced, standing atop Tiananmen, in October 1949.

Mao was, to this point in time, the only head of state the PRC had known. Under his leadership, China had recovered with remarkable speed from the devastation of World War II and fought the American army to an unlikely stalemate on the Korean Peninsula. Emboldened by those successes, he had led a series of catastrophic domestic initiatives. His Great Leap Forward led to a famine that claimed tens of millions of lives and derailed Chinese industrial and agricultural production. The Cultural Revolution, built around his cult of personality, was a disaster of unspeakable violence, disrupting China’s infrastructure in almost every arena, from government to education to foreign policy.

Even though he died almost 50 years ago, Mao is one of the few world leaders who meaningfully define an era to which we still belong: “Post-Mao” China. The label may now be too broad and incomplete, but it is still relevant in the way that “post-war” can be applied to Japan, or “interwar” to Europe. Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton’s documentary about 1989 succinctly places Mao’s death as “between an earthquake and a solar eclipse,” and its impact was certainly momentous, even though it was in many ways slow coming.

Death is always both profound and banal. Everyone dies; the details are familiar and commonplace. Yet, a sense of mystery accompanies it. Appropriately, then, Mao’s death was both far-reaching in its consequences and mundane to the point of comedy in its details.

Mao had prided himself on his physical well-being. His swim in the Yangtze at the start of the Cultural Revolution — though exaggerated — was meant to illustrate that. But his health was clearly failing. Meetings with foreign dignitaries were increasingly few — his meeting with Richard Nixon four years earlier was among the last. In his memoir, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui describes an endless stream of panicked interventions through the early 70s as doctors tended to problems with the Chairman’s heart, lungs, stomach, circulation, and more. In 1974, he was diagnosed with ALS, known colloquially in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and in the first nine months of 1976, Li reports, he suffered at least three heart attacks. Mao was blind in one eye, could not walk reliably, and was on a constant stream of medications to combat various infections and chronic diseases.

Despite this, no plans had been made for his death. Li Zhisui attributes this to the political infighting at the highest levels of the party-state, as well as the laughable excesses of Mao’s cult of personality. At a time when something as simple as wearing the wrong badge or singing the wrong song could have disastrous consequences, no one was willing to risk planning around Mao’s death for fear it would be perceived as disloyal. As a result, in the small hours of September 9, a macabre comedy played out in Zhongnanhai.

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Late in the summer of 1892, the village of Beitang, east of Tianjin on the Bohai Gulf, experienced a cholera outbreak. “The epidemic coincided with exceptionally hot weather,” as I wrote in Heart of Buddha, Heart of China, “and temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit were blamed for the disease. Hundreds of people in the village became ill, and most died within a few days of the first symptoms. Coffins were stacked high along the side of the road, and everyone in Beitang worked constantly making coffins, burying the dead, and trying to keep the corpses from rotting in the stifling heat…”

In the midst of this suffering, Wang Futing prepared for his wedding, a juxtaposition of grief and joy made even more acute when his closest friend, Jin Desheng, contracted the disease and died. Like Wang, Jin was 17 years old, with everything seemingly stretching before him. Instead, his life was cut short. Wang Futing was left wondering what might have been, staring at his friend’s bloated corpse lying in a casket.

Wang Futing was married, the celebration muted by the scenes of death all around. Then, perhaps predictably, Wang Futing began to get sick. Just days after his wedding, he began feeling sharp abdominal pains and began running a fever. His thoughts went first to his mother. He was the eighth and last child she had brought into the world, but the only one who had lived long enough to get married — the previous seven had all died as children. It seemed impossibly cruel for him to die just as he was beginning the next generation. Not wanting to alarm his mother, he retired to his room to sleep, fitfully and wracked by dreams.

And then he died.

What happened next, by his own account, was a descent into the underworld. Ghostly guards escorted him to an office where he was interrogated and challenged. At each stage, Wang Futing disputed with anyone who would listen — bureaucrats, mostly — that he did not belong here. Could he be returned to the living and spare his mother additional grief? Eventually, he argued with the King of Hell himself that he was the only one who could care for her. Finally, he negotiated a five-year extension of his life, provided that he recited a designated number of Buddhist sutras every day and dedicated his life to alleviating suffering. Every five years, his case would be reevaluated.

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As July turned to August 1945, the Second World War was grinding to an inexorable end. Japan’s defeat had been a foregone conclusion for some time; the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands was seen as both inevitable and months — perhaps many months — away. In the meantime, American firebombs devastated Japanese cities, and an “island-hopping” campaign brought American forces ever closer to Japan through some of the bloodiest encounters of the entire war. Soviet forces, freed of their European adversary, prepared for their own invasion of Japan’s mainland empire, massing on the border with Manchuria. Neither invasion, by sea of the home islands, nor by land into Manchuria, seemed imminent.

All that changed abruptly in early August, when American B-29s dropped two atomic bombs in swift succession, destroying two cities and killing tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands instantly. Faced with the prospect of total annihilation, Emperor Hirohito began directing his military leaders to move toward surrender. American planners had hoped to achieve victory within months; instead, hurried — maybe panicked — preparations for surrender were underway across Asia.

One of the orders given during this time was to shut down and destroy a cluster of buildings in the Heilongjiang village of Pingfang, today in the far outskirts of Harbin. This was Imperial Army Unit 731, comprising 80 major structures and an equal number of smaller ones, which housed a staff of 3,000 and approximately 600 prisoners, mostly Chinese but also Russian and Korean. In addition to dynamiting the structures of the camp, according to the website Pacific Atrocities Education, staff were ordered to kill any remaining prisoners and discard their cremated remains in the Songhua River.

Variously described as a water purification plant, a lumber mill, or an epidemic prevention facility, Unit 731 was in fact the center of Japan’s biological weapons research and testing facility, where gruesome experiments were carried out on prisoners to test and develop biological and other weapons systems. Over nearly 10

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The Grand Mosque of Shadian (Yunnan) today

One of the words most commonly applied to China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is “chaos.” “Ten years of chaos” — 十年动乱 — is one of the semi-official names for the period. The label can encourage laziness: any time events seem to defy easy understanding or confound attempts at analysis, “chaos” is a convenient explanation (without actually explaining anything). And how can we resist the label when confronted with some of the shocking violence that wracked China between 1966 and 1976, several examples of which this column has covered before.

Part of the reason “chaos” is so appealing is that the Cultural Revolution laid its own complex patterns and motivations onto existing ones. Explaining the Cultural Revolution through conventional terms — of class conflict, Mao’s cult of personality, political fractiousness within the Party, and attempts to eradicate tradition (to use just a few examples) — is hard enough. These are all complex dynamics. But the addition of those new forces didn’t erase what had been there before. Often, instead, those new forces made existing challenges even more confused and, often, violent. So it was in July 1975, in Yunnan province, in and around the town of Shadian.

On the night of July 29, 1975, some 10,000 PLA soldiers entered Shadian, south of Kunming and not far from the Vietnamese border. They had been kept at bay for almost a month while local militia resisted their entry, but they were now ordered to end the resistance once and for all. As recorded by historian Wang Xian in her 2023

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Anyone who has endured summertime in Nanjing will not forget it. The heat and humidity are relentless, such that even the smallest of movements — and sometimes not even that — sends sweat streaming down foreheads and backs. As a result, and especially before the advent of air-conditioning, the city in summer takes on an eerie stillness. On the afternoon of July 19, 1864, that stillness was literally blown apart as thousands of pounds of explosives tore through the city’s wall and allowed invading troops to stream in. This was the climax of a month-long campaign by Qing forces to recapture Nanjing from the Taiping forces that had occupied the city for a decade. Within days, the Taiping leaders had been captured and survivors had dispersed and fled. It marked in many ways the end of a bloody war that had reshaped China and caused unimaginable suffering.

The American Civil War is often held up alongside the Taiping War for reasons that make sense: they overlapped completely in time, and both were existential threats to their respective governments. But while the Civil War remains the deadliest in American history and its echoes remain loud in American politics and society, it was orders of magnitude less cataclysmic than the bloodletting in China. At least twenty — perhaps fifty — times more people died in the Taiping War, which lasted a decade longer than its American counterpart. I wrote about the early days of that war in one of my very first columns, but five years later, it seems worth revisiting, not least because its lessons desperately need to be learned.

“It is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it.” The traitorous general Robert E. Lee is said to have made this observation in 1862. To my reading, it sounds as though he is trying a little too hard to convince himself that, despite all its pageantry and play, war is not a good thing. (For a longer reflection on Lee’s quote, including its veracity, have a look at Kevin Levin’s post here.) But whatever Lee may have meant, I think it is undoubtedly true that a fascination with, even fetishization of, war has made the damnable practice hard to eradicate.

As evidence, look no further than the news (I first wrote “the nightly news,” before realizing that the concept is meaningless these days). The war that Russia launched against Ukraine has been ongoing for three years. War in Israel and Palestine for nearly two. There is war between Israel and Iran. It has been a generation since the end of the Cold War promised to deliver a “peace dividend.” While recognizing (as this column has often dwelt on) that the Cold War was only “cold” in Europe and North America, its end suggested to many that the world was going to be a safer and more peaceful place, free from the never-ending threat of nuclear annihilation.

But more than three decades after the Berlin Wall fell, it is clear that such hopes were naive.

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Yunnan, a province on China’s southwestern border, acquired a reputation in the late 20th century as a paradise of sorts. Western backpackers were one population that found the province’s mild climate, natural beauty, and unhurried lifestyle combined to their liking. If the place could be reduced to one word, it might be “peaceful.”

Such was not the case in 1856.

For three days, from May 19-21, hundreds of local thugs flowed through Kunming with impunity and with tacit — perhaps active — consent from the local government. By the end of the three days, at least 4,000 and perhaps more than 8,000 people were dead, almost all of them Hui, or Chinese Muslims.

Even within the striking cultural and geographical diversity of China, Yunnan stands out. As historian David Atwill has described, “numerous mountain ranges ripple across the province, often juxtaposing temperate valleys with towering alpine peaks.” The rugged terrain was often at the very limit of the imperial state, its “diversified topography and unique geographical position at the confluence of Tibetan, Chinese, and Southeast Asian cultures forged an ethnically disparate population singular in all of China.” While today 26 of China’s official 56 state-recognized ethnic groups are present in Yunnan, Atwill notes that in the 19th century, Qing officials described at least 140 different groups as calling Yunnan home, “demonstrating not only the province’s diversity but also the Qing state’s cognizance of its multiethnic subjects.”

With all this as context, it may not be surprising that what we might today describe as ethnic tensions were not unknown to Yunnan. In the mid-19th century, the region was difficult to govern and prone to local violence, a situation that intensified as the Qing government weakened amid foreign and domestic pressures. The focus of the tension was conflict among Han Chinese, Hui, or Chinese Muslims, and the state. Violence — often on a terrible scale — was not uncommon: in 1839, Han militia massacred some 1700 Muslims in the town of Mianning, near the border with Myanmar. The city of Baoshan was “cleansed” by local officials, supported by Han militia, in 1845. Eight thousand Muslims died.

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On the night of May 7-8, 1999, an American B-2 “stealth” bomber, part of NATO operations against Yugoslavia, launched bombs against targets in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. NATO forces were part of an effort to stop the ethnic cleansing being carried out in what was then the Kosovo region of Serbia, which NATO said was being perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serbs. The war was controversial, both in terms of its legitimacy and its effectiveness, and had begun just a month earlier.

According to official U.S. government sources, the bombs were targeting a Yugoslav military target. There is much controversy about what the target was, how it was arrived at, and who made those determinations, but the result was indisputable. Sometime after midnight, local time, five precision-guided bombs landed on and exploded in the compound of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, reducing the building to rubble. The attack killed three journalists and injured more than 20 Chinese nationals, and was immediately the center of an international diplomatic furore.

That the weapons in question were informally known as “smart bombs” was a bitter irony, because the attack could scarcely have been any less intelligent. American officials immediately expressed regret at what had happened, saying it had been a mistake: the bombs did hit their intended target, but U.S. intelligence claimed that an outdated map had been used. American officials had even checked, they asserted, the target against a list of “no strike” locations, including hospitals, churches, and, yes, foreign embassies, but because the Chinese embassy had recently — several years earlier — moved to a different address, it did not come up on the list. Moreover, although the United States was integrated into NATO operations, in some cases it maintained its own parallel command structure rather than submitting its forces to NATO orders. NATO was not authorized, for instance, to operate the B-2 bomber, which carried out the mission, and so the targeting process was done exclusively within American command and control processes. This meant both that the faulty intelligence on which the U.S. attack was based was not checked against European information and that approval for the strike rested solely within American authority.

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For three weeks in the spring of 1970, anyone with a radio tuned to the right frequency could hear a haunting melody being broadcast from the heavens. The song had been blaring ceaselessly from radios, loudspeakers, and televisions around China for a decade now — The East is Red, a succinct and audacious summary of a cult of personality. Based on a Shaanxi folk tune extolling the virtues of cabbage and sesame oil, the song’s new lyrics, written in the 1940s, celebrate Mao as “the people’s great savior” who will lead the masses to build a new China. Now its revolutionary and hagiographic message could be heard around the world as it was broadcast from China’s first satellite — itself named Dong Fang Hong — as it circled the Earth following its launch on April 24, 1970. That the satellite became an homage to Mao, repeating the Cultural Revolution’s anthem, was a bitter irony as Mao’s war on science and promotion of ideology over rational inquiry nearly stymied China’s attempts to join the ranks of space-going nations.

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