Anti-foreign sentiment in China
As can be seen in the above shown cartoons, racism and anti-foreign sentiment played an important aspect in colonial China. While in the left picture, China is represented as a cake, which is shared by the foreign allies without any consideration of the Chinese ruler, the second cartoon depicts especially the anti-foreign sentiment in regard to the boxer rebellion. Westerns are represented through goats and a crossed pigs, which refers to the anti-Christianity sentiment.
All in all the origins of anti-Western attitudes in China are rather difficult to trace, however widespread dislike by the population at large goes back to at least the Opium War. It imposed unequal treaties on China as well as forced China to import opium and open ports.
These feelings worsened over the course of the 19th century as Western colonial powers seized portions of the Chinese Empire. More and more Christian missionaries came to China and forced local officials to side with Christian converts as well as to change traditional Chinese ceremonies and family relations. These activities and the growing anti-foreign sentiment highly provoked the establishment of the secret society and the Boxer Rebellion.
Westerners were called as “devils”, “barbarians” and “evil”. As Frank Dikötter said,
All in all the origins of anti-Western attitudes in China are rather difficult to trace, however widespread dislike by the population at large goes back to at least the Opium War. It imposed unequal treaties on China as well as forced China to import opium and open ports.
These feelings worsened over the course of the 19th century as Western colonial powers seized portions of the Chinese Empire. More and more Christian missionaries came to China and forced local officials to side with Christian converts as well as to change traditional Chinese ceremonies and family relations. These activities and the growing anti-foreign sentiment highly provoked the establishment of the secret society and the Boxer Rebellion.
Westerners were called as “devils”, “barbarians” and “evil”. As Frank Dikötter said,
- “A common historical response to serious threats directed towards a symbolic universe is ‘nihilation’, or the conceptual liquidation of everything inconsistent with official doctrine.Foreigners were labelled ‘barbarians’ or ‘devils’ to be conceptually eliminated. The official rhetoric reduced the Westerner to a devil, a ghost, an evil and unreal goblin hovering on the border of humanity. Many texts of the first half of the nineteenth century referred to the English as ‘foreign devils’ (yangguizi), ‘devil slaves’ (guinu), ‘barbarian devils’ (fangui), ‘island barbarians’ (daoyi), ‘blue-eyed barbarian slaves’ (biyan yinu), or ‘red-haired barbarians’ (hongmaofan).