History in Three Keys

History in Three Keys (1997) is a comprehensive survey of the 1899-1901 Boxer Uprising in Northern China by American author and historian Paul A. Cohen. The book's title comes from Cohen's unique approach to a historical survey. He examines the Boxer Uprising from three perspectives: Historians, polemicists, and—arguably the most rewarding viewpoint—the everyday people who lived through the event.

Cohen begins with a broad summary of the events, as reconstructed by historians over the years. The Boxer Uprising began as a nationalist response to a perceived increase in Chinese vulnerability to foreign intervention and potential colonialist efforts. The conflict quickly took on a xenophobic quality as the Militia United in Righteousness began harassing and later, massacring Christian missionaries and the native Chinese that had been converted to Christianity. Estimates say that some 32,000 Chinese Christians were slaughtered, along with hundreds of foreign-born Christian missionaries. It was termed the "Boxer Uprising" because many of the members of the Military United in Righteousness were experienced in Chinese martial arts or "Chinese boxing." The state of fear and distrust of foreigners was exacerbated by widespread droughts and colonialist efforts by Russia to invade the Manchuria region.

The violence was deeply alarming to the Eight-Nation Alliance made up of the United States, Austria-Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia. Meanwhile, popular opinion about the Boxer Uprising was largely split across the Chinese nation. For example, citizens in the Southeastern regions of China were predominantly opposed to the rebellion and reluctant to suffer a repeat performance of their recent loss in the First Sino-Japanese War five years earlier. After the Empress Dowager of China came out in support of the Boxers and their anti-foreigner, anti-Christian siege, the Eight-Nation Alliance sent 20,000 soldiers to fight the Imperial Army. The Alliance succeeded in defeating the Chinese Imperial Army and lifting the siege, leading to dramatic monetary reparations being paid by China to the Alliance member countries over the next four decades.



The second part of the book focuses on the lived experiences of the participants of the Boxer Uprising. Here, Cohen begins with recorded statements from peasants suffering through the worst drought in a generation. These recollections are a strange brew of long, sustained periods of mundane boredom punctuated by moments of deep suffering and death. For many North Chinese farmers, particularly the younger peasants, the Boxer Rebellion began less as a point of intense ideological contention and more as just "something to do" to distract from the banality of slow starvation. Most strikingly, teenage participants in the rebellion conducted strange, mystical possession rituals they believed would grant them "invulnerability" against foreign invaders and Christian interlopers.

For others, there was a clear, if supernatural, connection between the increase in foreign influence and the droughts. The author attributes this to the fact that floods have discreet causes that are either natural or governmental in nature. The beginning of a drought, however, cannot so easily be traced. Therefore, the most superstitious Chinese peasants looked for any change corresponding with the beginning of the drought, settling on the growth in Christian missionary activity. That such a large number of citizens could make such a specious connection and act so dramatically on it speaks to the desperation of the peasant class in North China at the turn of the twentieth century.

Finally, Cohen discusses how history is filtered and often distorted over time by sloganeers, polemicists, and other politically motivated mythmakers. He speaks at great length of a string of philosophers and politicians who cite the Boxer Uprising in order to “draw on [the past] to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present.” For example, in 1915, members of the modernization movement demonized the entirety of the Boxer Movement as a group of backward, superstitious rubes. While superstition was indeed common among Boxers and their supporters, this is an overly simplistic view used to demonize political opponents who had once been allied with the Boxers. Later, in the 1920s, these negative aspects of the Boxers were completely erased by propagandists who sought to use the Boxers as inspiration for a new generation of anti-imperialist, intensely nationalist Chinese citizens. Finally, in the 1960s, Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party created his own myth about the Boxers, painting them as once-humble farmers who rose heroically to the call of history to beat back the tide of foreign adversaries. This particular myth completely erases the reality that Western troops only invaded China after the Boxers had already slaughtered thousands of Christians.



What makes History in Three Keys so fascinating is that, while it uses the Boxer Uprising as a case study, the book's lessons can be applied to practically any historical movement. Cohen's thesis is that whenever one looks at a historical event, it is essential to separate the selective hindsight of historians and the manipulative mythmaking of propagandists from the real experiences of those individuals who lived through the event.