IN A schoolyard in a village on the dusty north China plain, martial artists drill children in the stylised kicks and punches of Plum Flower Boxing. This discipline, they proudly claim, spearheaded the Boxer Uprising of 1900. In a village recreation room, musicians practise the ear-splitting tunes which their ancestors played for Boxer braves heading into battle with the foreign “hairy ones”. Folk memories abound of an event that transformed the country's relationship with the West, and its own view of itself.
The Boxer Uprising, 11 years before the collapse of China's last imperial dynasty, was portrayed in Western accounts as a savage outburst of primitive xenophobia directed at the West and its civilising religion, Christianity. The northern Chinese peasants with their red headscarves, who believed in a magic that protected them from foreign bullets and in the power of ancient martial arts that could defeat the industrial world's most powerful armies, were described with a mixture of fear and racist scorn. But in China the Boxers are officially remembered as somewhat misguided patriots. In the countryside south of Beijing where they burned churches, killed foreign missionaries and slaughtered tens of thousands of “secondary hairy ones”, as Chinese converts to Christianity were known, some call them heroes. The missionaries they attacked had it coming, having trampled on China's sovereignty. Their converts were no more than local ruffians who exploited foreign protection to ride roughshod over their countrymen.
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