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  • Some Did It for Civilisation; Some Did It for Their Country: A Revised View of the Boxer War
  • Klaus Mühlhahn (bio)
Jane E. Elliott . Some Did It for Civilisation; Some Did It for Their Country: A Revised View of the Boxer War. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002. xv, 610 pp. Hardcover $39.00, ISBN 962-201-973-0.

The Boxer War has always occupied a special place in the Western imagination concerning China. No other event in modern Chinese history has drawn so much attention among professional and popular historians in the West. Immediately following the events of 1990 in North China began the appearance of the dozens of book-length studies in Western languages that have been published ever since. One reading of these events that has particularly fascinated the West is the narrative of a showdown between the Occident and the Orient, an early culture clash that was finally won by the forces of "Progress" and "Enlightenment." This view stubbornly persisted in the Western mind for some time, despite a number of more sophisticated studies by historians of China.

As the title of the book indicates, Jane E. Elliott's intention is to revise this and other similarly simplistic interpretations. Her approach and sources are well [End Page 402] chosen for such a revisionist undertaking. Elliott focuses on contemporary image makers, who consisted of various groups working at the interface between China and the West. Their profession was to gather and process information about the events taking place in North China. On the Western side they included journalists, cartoonists, photographers, and military observers. On the Chinese side this task was fulfilled by a small number of journalists who worked for newly established pictorial publications, but above all by Chinese artists, who produced New Year's pictures or woodblock prints depicting scenes of the War.

Chapters 1 through 5 of this richly illustrated study examine the graphic representations of the Boxer War that were generated by these various groups. This part of the book is based on an extensive analysis of newspapers and illustrated periodicals that appeared during summer and autumn of 1990. The first two chapters examine American and British publications such as The Times (London), The World (New York), The Daily Mail (London), the Illustrated London News, and The Review of the Reviews (London). In the discussion of the news coverage in these media the author's interest is mainly in the degree of accuracy and factuality in the reporting. She comes to the conclusion that the mass-circulation papers tended "overall more to inform readers than otherwise" (p. 94). Only a minority of the illustrated papers portrayed China as "exotic and different, something sinister or inferior" (p. 94). Especially tendentious, according to Elliott, was the reporting in such a renowned newspaper as the Times, whose coverage of the War is judged by Elliott to have been false, misleading, and overtly partisan (p. 19).

The third chapter contains a lengthy discussion of Chinese illustrations depicting military encounters between China and the Great Powers in the nineteenth century. The production of nianhua dealing with contemporary events constituted a break with traditional nianhua, which primarily showed symbols of prosperity and good fortune that depicted only Chinese victories and avoided defeats and other negative topics. Now, however, the artists were taking a traditional genre and modifying it to illustrate the military twists and turns of modern times. All these depictions—although they were, in fact, limited in number—underline the massive scale of the military encounters as observed by the artists. Elliott emphasizes that there was no tendency "to ridicule, to parody or to create the enemy as a grotesque monster" (p. 188).

The fourth chapter moves on to the photographers (mostly Americans) and the way they portrayed China. She comes to the conclusion that many of the American photographic images represented an effort to document the events of the war in all its chaos, cruelty, and destruction. But these images did not receive widespread publicity in the West; they conveyed a political message that was not compatible with the mainstream thinking in America at that time.

Cartoonists and their work is the subject of...

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