in pursuing their own interests. Up until 1900 , despite wishing it could drive
out the foreigners, the Qing government generally suppressed the Boxers.
In 1900 , following two years of considerable political turmoil at the Qing
court, the Dowager Empress Cixi had regained enough support to change
course. Cixi was anxious to divert the unrest away from the imperial court
and saw the endorsement of the Boxers as an opportunity to drive out the
foreigners. At the very least, the two sides, Boxers and foreigners, would
weaken each other, thus increasing the power of the imperial court. The
imperial army now even helped some Boxer forces. The Boxers massacred
many missionaries, and a large force converged on the foreign legations in
Beijing. Yet after afifty-five-day siege, foreign military forces were able to
break through to Beijing and raise the siege. Cixi and the court temporarily
fled the capital. From then on, foreign governments maintained enough
troops in China to protect their citizens.
Conclusion
Despite its many military defeats, the Qing Dynasty did begin to modernize
its military and bring parts of it up to Western standards. More and better
handguns and riflesfiltered down to the local level, changing the nature of
violence for many ordinary Chinese. As with most societies in the age of guns,
however, the Chinese found the martial arts still helpful for the ordinary sorts
of violence a person might face. There were significant changes in practice,
and these had broader effects within Qing society. Archery, either mounted
or on foot, which had been such a marker of steppe identity and even military
identity, became completely obsolete. Qing military exams had followed
earlier practice and tested archery as a basic skill. Modernfirearms and
modern tactics rendered the exams archaic.
Internal schools of martial arts like Taiji, Bagua, and Xingyi became
more prominent over the course of the nineteenth century in parallel with
the growth of modernfirearms. This may be a coincidence or an artifact of
the source materials written by educated, urban elites. It is entirely possible
that martial arts in rural areas were mostly unaffected by the modernization
of warfare or that the changes were just an acceleration of the effects that
firearms had been bringing to warfare in China for centuries. Guns were
not new in China in the nineteenth century. The importance of the internal
schools for some writers may have been a reaction to modernization
through Westernization rather than the change in battlefield martial arts.
Certainly there was a break in military practice during the nineteenth
century, but it seems that the development of internal style martial arts was
210 The Qing Dynasty