The Rapture, the Ghosts and the Dragon: China on the Eve of World War One and the Warning to America
The fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911–1912 marked one of the most consequential political transformations in modern Chinese history. The end of over two millennia of imperial rule did not occur suddenly. It was the culmination of internal decay, foreign humiliation, and revolutionary anger that reshaped China’s political landscape before the First World War.
Around 1894 the United States of America replaced the Great Qing Empire as the world’s largest economy. Most centuries since the fall of Rome had belonged to India or mighty China, but the 20th century would be American. How had American risen so fast is a question as captivating as how had China fallen so low. This story would determine not only the history of China from 1914-1945 but also the current trajectory of the People’s Republic of China, whose legitimacy, comes from their claim to have ended the Century of Humiliation.
Like the 1789 French Revolution, the turmoil came from frustrated lower-tier elites and the army. They were done with a government that could not stand up for China.
The Century of Humiliation
Throughout the nineteenth century, China endured a series of defeats and humiliations that killed the legitimacy of Qing rule. Beginning with the assaults of the British Empire’s drug lords, the Mandate of Heaven was stripped away from the Great Qing Empire. Beginning in the 1830s, the First Opium War opened this long season of decline. Forced to sign unequal treaties, forced to let foreigners poison their people with drugs, China granted Western powers special privileges—expanded trade rights, treaty ports, and the loss of Hong Kong to the UK. These concessions shattered the empire’s sovereignty. Foreigners lived under their own laws on Chinese soil through extraterritoriality. No proud country could accept that, only one for whom pride was a joke.
The economic toll was immense. The British East India Company’s opium monopoly drained silver from the empire and spread addiction with all the dysfunction we know comes from that. Concession zones appeared in major cities, while missionaries, shielded by treaty rights, built schools and hospitals outside imperial control. The duality of Westerners trying to save Chinese souls and the officially Christian government of Great Britain backing the drug lords of the East India Company was not lost on the Chinese. To Chinese nationalists, such foreign enclaves were a state within a state, proof that their nation had been carved apart. When people defend “empire” in these instances I question if they are truly taking the long view or if they are just playing to a political moment that is against down-on-the-West political correctness. I do not think they have a bigger view of the past, rather they are stuck on a narrative. Because of what happened in the 1830s and afterwards, the Chinese elites today have a grudge against the West, especially Britain and to a lesser extent its offspring the United States of America. European peoples often make this mistake regarding non-Europeans, they believe that they are the only ones who can hold grudges. But sin is common to all mankind and non-Europeans can work for revenge like anyone else, and Europeans can receive powerful, painful, payback.
Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! Matthew 18:7 (King James Version)
Over the next half-century rebellions, and additional British interventions sapped the strength of China while the island Empire of Japan watched with fear and envy. Japan was afraid that if China continued to weaken the European powers would use it as a staging ground for the conquest and colonization of Japan. The best thing for the Japanese was to assert that they were not China. The First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 struck that blow for Japan. Japan’s victory, punctuated by the destruction of the Chinese fleet at the Yalu River, revealed the Qing dynasty’s rotting decay—corruption, poor training, and technological inferiority. That the humiliation came at the hands of another East Asian nation, once itself closed and deferential to China, made the defeat unbearable. Japan’s triumph emboldened Western powers and ignited new reformist and revolutionary movements against the Dragon throne.
Anxious Societies and Decline
The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 was the Qing dynasty’s last desperate hope to expel foreign power while keeping their throne. Peasant militias rose in fury, and the court, torn between fear and opportunism, lent them covert support. The Boxer Rebellion was named by foreigners after the Chinese secret society called the Yihequan (“Righteous and Harmonious Fists”). Members practiced martial arts like kung fu and wushu and what appear to have been calisthenic rituals, believing these made them invulnerable. Later, the group was renamed Yihetuan (”Righteous and Harmonious Militia”). You can see in its behavior the same manic actions of a people driven to despair and fantasy by desperate problems they cannot face but wish they could. Like the Native American Ghost Dancers of the American West that in the face of white American invasion and conquest, believed that if they remained peaceful and performed a ritual circle dance, the land would return its natural state before European colonization and bury the white settlers under the soil or make them disappear and perhaps raise Indigenous ancestors from the dead. The Chinese Boxers believed their rituals would make them bulletproof. In neither case did it happen. This was similar to how American Evangelical culture struggled to cope with social change and the threats of the Cold War. It was really during the Cold War, that the idea of the Rapture gained popularity. Some argued that God might use the superpowers’ nuclear weapons to bring about the End Times. The threat of nuclear war during the Cold War increased the currency of prophecies about the Rapture whereby the faithful would escape having to confront the coming troubles of the world by being plucked into Heaven. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the movie Thief in the Night (1973) also contributed to the embrace of the premillennial Rapture scenario by the evangelical movement in the United States. Rather than confront the hard tasks before them, some people have thrown themselves into a delusion of contradictory active-passivity: Ghost Dancing without building a future plan of protection, pursing personal purity to be worthy of Rapture rather than engaging society through civic reform, or believing one is bulletproof and that hand-to-hand martial arts will overcome the need to build a modern military force. Societies that fall prey to these kinds of movements are setting themselves up for failure, because they sap communal energy that could otherwise go into productive efforts to reform and self-strengthen to win the future.
