Remaking of Luddites As Heroes PDF

"Civilization" and Its Discontents: The Boxers and Luddites as Heroes and Villains
Author(s): Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 16, No. 5 (Sep., 1987), pp. 675-707
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657679 .
Accessed: 21/06/2014 10:49
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Theory and Society.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
675
"Civilization" and its discontents
The Boxers and Ludditesas heroes and villains
JEFFREY WASSERSTROM
[W]e have inherited the views of those who opposed

machine breaking [and] constructed technological
myths about the power of the past and promise of the
future. And in the light of these myths the courageous
Luddites were made to seem mistaken, pathetic, dan-
gerous, and insane,... The term "luddite"became an
epithet, a convenient device for disparaging and
isolating the occasional opponent to progress and
a charge to be avoided at all costs by thoughtful peo-
ple.
David F. Noble, 19831
A bit of creative Luddism might not be amiss until we

sort things out...
An Australian labor leader, 19792
Ever since the bandit troubles of 1900, the name

"Boxer"has become a general term for barbarity,irra-
tionality and cruel slaughter.
A Guowen Zhoubao [National Weekly] editorial,
19253
Not in vain did the Yi He Tuan [Boxer] heroes shed

their blood. Their patriotism and dauntless courage
will inspire the people forever.In the annals of the Chi-
nese nation... the Yi He Tuanwill always be a lustrous
chapter. Long live the anti-imperialist revolutionary
spirit of the Yi He Tuan!
A 1972 textbook account from the People's Republic
of China (PRC)4
Theory and Society 16: 675- 707 (1987)

? Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

676
The Boxer and Luddite risings were obviously very different historical
events, but, as the above quotations indicate, their participants have met
very similar fates as historical symbols. The Chinese insurgents known for
their 1900siege of the foreign legations in Beijing, and the English weavers
who gained fame by destroying looms during the second decade of the
nineteenth century, were unlike each other in innumerable ways. Among
many obvious points of dissimilarity are the simple facts that, unlike the
Boxers, the Luddites did not believe themselves to be invulnerable to
bullets and neverreceived government support for their actions. As differ-
ent as the Boxers'and Luddites'lives may have been, however,their symbol-
ic and historiographic afterlives have been remarkably similar in at least
three important ways. Both "Boxerism"and "Luddism"entered the popu-
lar vocabulary as synonyms for "irrational violence" and attempting to
"block progress." Each has subsequently been used to delegitimize move-
ments that have been (or have been made to appear) "anti-foreign" or
"anti-technological" and hence "backward." Finally, the pejorative con-
notations of "Boxerism"and "Luddism"have been challenged by people
who see more heroism than foolishness in the struggles of the Chinese in-
surgents and English weavers.
These parallel "afterlives" are the main focus of this article, the primary
aim of which is to explain why these two movements have attracted so
much attention over the years and shared such turbulent fates. Before trac-
ing the transition of the terms "Boxerism" and "Luddism" from descrip-
tors to epithets to words of disputed significance, and the implications of
this process, however,it is worth looking briefly at ways in which the origi-
nal events from which the terms are derived were themselves comparable.
The profound differences between the Luddite and Boxer movements al-
luded to above should not lead one to conclude that the two uprisings had
nothing in common at all.5 A number of points of commonality, ranging
from the obvious - the Yi He Tuan destroyed telegraph poles and other
technological symbols of Westernencroachment6 - to the farfetched -
at least one Luddite song presents the movement's mythical leader, Gener-
al Ludd, as invulnerableto "Death itself'7 - do indeed exist between the
two. Only one such point of commonality, however, has direct relevance
for understanding later uses and abuses of the Boxer and Luddite legacies:
the targets the two groups singled out for attack were charged with equiva-
lent kinds of symbolic meanings. The Christian Church and its representa-
tives, on the one hand, and the power looms and their owners, on the other,
were emblematic of new forces that large portions of the Chinese and En-
glish populaces, respectively, viewed with profoundly mixed emotions,

677
ranging from evangelical fervor to apocalyptical dread. The Boxers' and

Luddites' decisions to single out these highly charged targets had impor-
tant repercussions for the way their actions were viewed by contem-
poraries. Moreover,because the new forces the foreigner and the machine
symbolized have continued to inspire both utopian and dystopian visions
in subsequent generations of Chinese and Westernminds, the Boxers' and
Luddites' target selections have also profoundly affected the ways their ac-
tions have been presented and interpreted to the present day.
An initial objection to any attempt to equate the Boxers' and Luddites'

targets is bound to be that only the Yi He Tuan directed their enmity
against members of a different nationality and culture, and that the
xenophobic aspect of the Chinese group's actions make them qualitatively
different from those of the machine-breakers. Such an objection is no
doubt partially true, but only partially, because in a very real sense the
Luddites too were engaged in fighting an "alien" presence if not literal
foreigners. The growth and spread of capitalism in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Britain were in many ways a kind of "invasion." The
penetration of the values and mechanisms of the new profit-oriented "po-
litical economy" into a rural world ruled by a "moral economy" based
upon customary rights and practices - in which traditional notions of
"fairness" were viewed as more legitimate considerations for price setting
than market forces, and time was not yet the commodity scientific
management techniques would help it to become - could be as disrupting
a process as a direct physical attack.8
There is undoubtedly something crucially different about the imperialist

invasion the Boxers fought, and the kind of encroachment the Luddites
(as well as food rioters and other defenders of "moral economy" norms)
resisted. The intense cultural pride of the Chinese, and their keen sense
of "nei-wai" (inner-outer/native-foreign) distinctions, make any kind of
strict equation of the two kinds of "invasions" ridiculous. It is by no me-
ans implausible, however,to assert that both the Boxers and the Luddites
perceived themselves as fighting an alien force that threatened to destroy
a way of life they and others around them treasured. The Luddites may
not have been part of quite the same sort of clash of cultures the Boxers'
struggle with the West entailed, but they too saw themselves as defending
values and traditions their community held dear. In both cases customary
rights werebeing threatened by new forces:just as manufacturersthwarted
traditional notions relating to prices and working conditions, Christian
missionaires (by arranging for their converts to be exempted from con-
tributing to village temple funds and given special status in legal disputes)

678
destroyed customary notions of economic duty and judicial process that

had been integral parts of Chinese village social structure.9The differ-
ence in nationality between the Boxers and some of their targets can in
fact be misleading: the Boxers killed far more Chinese converts to Chris-
tianity - members of their own nationality who had become "alien" by
going against traditional norms and separating themselves from the com-
munity - than actual foreigners.10
The friends and foes of the new "political" or "market" (as opposed to
"moral") economy may, in summation, have been of the same nationality
and religion in most cases, but this did not preventthem from seeing each
other through xenophobic lenses. Merchants and millers had become
almost as richly villified in English folklore by the beginning of the nine-
teenth century as missionaries would be in China by the end of that centu-
ry: the tales of churches in which Chinese babies were killed to serve
demonic Christian purposes were matched by images of the "dark and sa-
tanic mills" in which children workeduntil they died, the preaching foreign
devil by the soulless factory owner.11
Struggles between defenders of the moral economy and their foes could
even evolve at times into genuinely xenophobic riots aimed at ridding the
community of alien religious groups. This was certainly the case in at least
some of the eighteenth-century attacks against Quakers, who were viewed
by the populace as worthy of contempt because they were both strangers
(because they often had just migrated from other regions and held to for-
eign creeds) and profiteers.12 Even in those cases when rioters and their
targets were inhabitants of the same regions and members of the same
religions they were still, as the work of E. P. Thompson and others shows,
in a crucial sense not of the same culture. The "invaders" of the English
countryside, like those that came to China, not only threatened the auton-
omy of the "native"populace, but also brought with them a new cosmolo-
gy and value system, in this case primarily based upon alien conceptions
not of God but of labor, profit, value, and time.13
The nature of the targets the Boxers and Luddites attacked played an im-
portant role in shaping contemporary reactions to the two movements, for
it was the threatening quality of the invading forces the insurgents resisted
that led traditional elite groups in the two contexts to view the insurrec-
tions in question with mixed emotions. The country gentleman as well as
the weaver were threatened by the forces the machine symbolized, and
hence Luddism was viewed sympathetically by many members of the En-
glish ruling classes, in spite of their ingrained antipathy toward social dis-

679
order. Similarly, the fact that foreign gunboats and missionaries were as
dangerous to Chinese rulers as they were to peasants made it inevitable
that the Boxers' choice of targets would bring them a great deal of elite
as well as popular support. The Luddites neverreceivedthe kind of official
sanction that was accorded the Boxers, for only in the Chinese case did
the insurgents seem potentially useful enough to the elite to outweigh
general upper-class antipathy toward disorder.This difference in outcome
should not, however, obscure the basic similarity between the way the
governing classes responded to the movements in question: many members
of the Chinese gentry opposed the Empress Dowager's decision to support
the Yi He Tuan to the very end,14 and although they may never have
received an official seal of approval, the unwillingness of magistrates
forcefully to prosecute Luddites shows that the ruling classes had mixed
reactions toward the English riots.15
The comparability of the "invasions" the Boxers and Luddites fought

would also have important ramifications for the groups' afterlives, be-
cause so often those who wrote about them would be either victorious "in-
vaders" or people trying to come to terms with the effects of the "inva-
sions" in question. The identification of these two "invasions" with
positively charged notions of "progress" would be instrumental in
cementing the image of "Boxerism" and "Luddism" as forms of insanity,
and would lead even some of those suffering from the effects of "moderni-
ty" to condemn those who had been "irrational" enough to try to "resist
it." At the same time the possibility of seeing good in the Boxers and Lud-
dites has neverfaded awaycompletely: wheneverimperialism has been per-
ceived as a threat, the "fanatics" of 1900 have ceased to seem quite so
deluded to many Chinese; while in the West when technological develop-
ments have seemed to hold more promise for causing misery and destruc-
tion than salvation, the "madness" of the Luddites has seemed to some
at least a sensible response. The complexities of and pendelum swings ob-
served in the "afterlives" of the Boxers and Luddites are both thus inti-
mately bound up with the peculiar ambivalence toward symbols of
"modernity" within China and the West, and this theme - which I return
to and explore in more detail at the end of this article - is worth remem-
bering while these "afterlives" are described in the sections that follow.
The birth of an epithet, Part I: Luddism
Luddism's evolution into an epithet began in 1811 with contemporary

newspaper accounts of the Luddites' activities. Some journalists, swayed

680
by the same feelings that led to elite ambivalence, presentedthe insurgents'

actions in a positive (or at least sympathetic) light, but for the most part
the press treated the machine breakerswith disdain. As George Beaumont
(who himself thought breaking machines foolish) complained at the
time:16
When the Luddites began first to break Machinery, the News Printers, and espe-
cially those of London, abused them in the most unqualified language calling
them infatuated men; deluded men; wicked men and ill-designing men. But I
did not observe any of these infatuated Printers had the candour to call the poor
Luddites empty-bellied men-ragged men-or worn-out, emaciated, half-starved,
dying men.
Thanks to "News Printers" then, from the very start of the movement the
picture of "Luddism" and machine-breaking in general as irrational vio-
lence began to be embedded in the public mind. In the next severaldecades
numerous sources would help to solidy this image, lodging it firmly in the
popular imagination and common language. The champions of the new
political economy played an important role in this process. These people,
who had obvious reasons for despising the Luddites, tried in a variety of
ways to convince the reading public as a whole that destroying machinery
was the height of folly. At times taking the form of essays, at others ser-
mons, their writings consistently portrayed "Luddism" as both senseless
and against the "true" interest of workers.17
In additon to straight polemics on the topic of machine breaking (a genre

especially popular for understandable reasons during the agriculturaldis-
turbances of the 1830s), defenders of policital economy utilized fictional
and historical accounts to discredit Luddism. Harriet Martineau, a partic-
ularly active foe of machine-breaking, devoted an entire novel to the topic,
as well as writing a History of England; A.D. 1800-1815, in which the term
"Luddite" is described as a "name of great terror."18To Martineau, and
other "historians" like her, the Luddites were a violent mob, blind to the
fact that new machines brought prosperity, "desparadoes," in short, who
were "in no mood for reasoning" and were ready at the slightest excuse
to "ravage" villages and towns.19 There is no way to gauge how many
people read the works of political economy polemicists, but between their
sermons, pamphlets, and narrativesthey doubtless reached a large enough
readership to help shape the popular image of the events in question.
Overtly hostile writers were by no means the only ones to contribute to

the term "Luddism's" descent into infamy - self-proclaimed "friends"
of the working class also played a role in this process. Even that greatest

681
of "friends," William Cobbett, helped make machine-breaking a symbol

of senseless violence. Near the end of the uprising Cobbett wrote a "Letter
to the Luddites," the intent of which was to dissuade the insurgents from
continuing to break looms.20 According to Cobbett, it was a delusion to
destroy machinery instead of fighting a broader political fight; he urged
the Luddites to give up their misguided violence and follow the path of
reform he championed instead. Other radicals of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centures - many of whom werejust as convinced as their politi-
cal foes that technological "progress" offered a viable panacea for all
forms of human misery - also helped to consolidate the image of the Lud-
dites as backward fanatics, either by directly criticizing the weavers' ac-
tions, or simply by distancing newer forms of struggle as much as possible
from machine-breaking.21
A final force that helped to solidify "Luddism's"transformation into an

epithet was nineteenth-century industrial novelists' treatment of machine-
breaking. The most comprehensive treatment of the topic is of course
found in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, which, though in many ways an in-
sightful and sympathetic account of the disturbances, nonetheless serves
to reinforce what E. P. Thompson calls "middle-class myths" relating to
Luddism.22Bronte gives a good sense of the way the machines appeared
to the community as an alien presence, and the ambivalence of smaller
manufacturers and the "respectable"folk in general toward the machine-
breakers. Nevertheless, she falls into the trap of presenting the rioters as
ruffians from outside the community, ratherthan artisans who saw them-
selves as defending that verycommunity, and seeing less method in the Lud-
dites' "madness" than there actually was. Other novels of the time,
although less directly concerned with the Luddites, also contributed to the
negative associations of the term by painting working-class violence of
all sorts, whether directed at machines or people, as fanatical activity that
hurt the very people it attempted to help and hindered the forces of
"progress."23
Thanks to the various kinds of writings outlined above, the equation of

"Luddism" with senseless mob violence was soon complete. Used to dis-
credit new worker outbreaks as early as the 1830s, in the twentieth century
management could continue to use the spectre of Luddism to discourage
support for labor activities that seemed in any way aimed at "stopping
progress." The negative image of Luddism became so entrenched that as
late as the early 1950s two of the most astute British historians of the day
could still dismiss the whole movement as nothing but a "frenzied, point-
less, industrial Jacquerie" or an "overflow of excitement and high
spirits. "24

682
The birth of an epithet, Part II: Boxerism
The evolution of "Boxerism"into an epithet proceeded along very similar

lines to those just sketched out for "Luddism." Beginning with contem-
porary accounts of the Boxers' activities, a variety of types of writings
helped shape an image of "Boxerism" as fanatical and futile violence.
Once created and embedded in the public mind, this image was used to
discredit further outbreaks of "anti-foreignism" (or "anti-imperialism")
just as the spectre of "Luddism" was directly or indirectly used to
delegitimize working class violence in general and machine-breaking in
particular. However, one major difference between the makings of the
epithets does exist: in the case of the Boxers the process involved two "pub-
lics." The Western and Chinese evolutions of the term "Boxerism,"
though generally following along parallel lines, need to be considered
separately.
The Boxers first made an appreciable impact on the Westernpublic when

they laid siege to the foreign legations in Beijing. Prior to that time reports
from missionaries detailing the rise of anti-foreign "fanatics" trickled
back, but had little impact, and most Westernersremained only vaguely
aware of Chinese events of any sort. This all changed in the summer of
1900. From June through August of that year more articles concerning
China appeared in the Westernpress than had been printed in the previous
decade, and the vast majority of these articles concerned the violent activi-
ties of the Boxers.25Glaring headlines detailed each new outrage commit-
ted by the "bloodthirsty" and "fanatical" "savages"who held Westerners
hostage.26Thanks to this coverage, and the rash of popular accounts of
the 1900 troubles, with titles such as Massacres of Christians by Heathen
Chinese and Horrors of the Boxers27by journalists and former hostages,
that appeared in the following years, a horrific image of "Boxerism"
quickly became embedded in the Westernpublic consciousness. "Boxer"
became a household word signifying superstitious violence, resistance to
civilization and progress, the "Yellow Peril" incarnate.28
The treatments of Boxerism in Westernwritings of the following decades,

whether in historical or fictional narratives,did little to refine this picture.
Scholars would ultimately begin to give more attention to the causes be-
hind the Boxer movement, the real physical and psychological injuries
Western encroachment had brought with it, but the dominant image as-
sociated with the Boxers would remain the terror of the siege. Throughout
the twentieth century the horrific nature of this episode has been played
up in a variety of media forms, from turn of the century silent movies to
sensationalist novels to the 1963 Hollywood epic "55 Days at Peking."29

683
Almost from the instant it came into being, the symbol of "Boxerism"was
put to use by Westerners intent on protecting their privileges. In 1905
foreignersin China were faced with what was by all standards a much more
"civilized"30movement than that of the Boxers - a non-violent, anti-
American economic boycott aimed at protesting U.S. immigration poli-
cies. As soon as this "anti-foreign" agitation started, Boxer fears were
rekindled by the press, and when a freak outbreak of violence (essentially
unconnected to the boycott) occurred, talk of "Boxerism" ran rampant.31
This was to become a pattern: during the following two decades whenever
a conflict between Chinese and Westernerstook place, the "Boxer" label
would be used by foreigners as a potent delegitimizing symbol, whether
the dispute was violent or non-violent, xenophobic or anti-imperialist.32
The image of "Boxerism" among educated Chinese quickly came to ap-

proximate that embedded in Western minds during the decades that fol-
lowed the 1900 debacle, though this image was obviously less colored by
racist notions. Some Chinese officials had never seen the Boxers as any-
thing more than superstitious troublemakers, and, although the Empress'
brief sanctioning of Boxer activities had limited the spread of this view
until the Yi He Tuan'sfinal defeat, as soon as the legations were freed by
Western troops this view came to predominate. The Empress herself, in
an effort to lessen Western reprisals, began to claim that the Boxers had
never been anything but "bandits," and it was as "bandits" that official
reports thenceforth treated them.33The mixture of sympathy and fear that
had dominated elite perceptions during the uprising itself was replaced by
nearly universalcontempt after the movement ended in failure and humili-
ation. Ambivalence gave way to repulsion as soon as all hope of ridding
the foreigners from the land by use of the Boxers faded, and from 1900
on most members of the elite were only too glad to refer to the "rebels"
with pejoratives such as "hoodlum" and "fanatic."
The Empress and her clique, though once the Yi He Tuan'spatrons, quick-
ly became the group's harshest detractors, but, as was the case with Lud-
dism, enemies of the ruling elite also played a crucial role in cementing
the negative image of Boxerism. At the time of the 1900 uprising many
"radical" reformers had already been critical of the Boxers; one, Kang
Youwei, had even gone so far as to suggest that his revolutionary party
help the Westernerssuppress the insurgents as a means of gaining foreign
support for their own cause.34And though some radicals of the first two
decades of the twentieth century saw the Boxers in a more mixed or even
positive light,35between 1900 and 1924 it was much more common for a
radical to criticize the Boxers' foolishness than to praise their bravery.In

684
a great irony of early twentieth-century radicalism, Chen Duxiu, who

would go on to help found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and even-
tually champion the Boxers in print, explicitly dissociated Chinese nation-
alism from "Boxerism" in a 1918 article, writing that "new" China had
two paths before it: the enlightened road of "republicanism, science and
atheism" and the dark path of "despotism and superstition" personified
by the reactionary Boxers.36
Two decades after their rising the Boxers had thus become intimately as-
sociated with fanaticism, savagery, and backwardness both in the West
and in their own country. Calling a new movement "Boxerlike"was to en-
sure that foreigners would fear it and most educated Chinese despise it.
Because of this Chinese activists generally tried to distance themselves
from the 1900 "rebels"as much as possible; to show that they were "ration-
al" and "civilized" "nationalists," rather than "barbaric xenophobes."
The remaking of a symbol, Part I: Boxerism
Although "Luddism"was the first term to appear in the annals of history,

and also the first to be transformed into a negative symbol, "Boxerism"
was the first of the two words to undergo a comprehensive reassessment.
The first significant move toward placing the Boxers in a more positive
light took place in the mid-1920s when a new wave of anti-imperialist agi-
tation was sweeping China. Writersof this period were not the first to say
positive things about the Boxers:some Chinese revolutionariesof the early
twentieth century had, as pointed out above, seen good in the 1900 insur-
gents; Lenin's writings on turn of the century events had been much more
critical of Westernthan Chinese actions; and Mark Twain had eulogized
the Yi He Tuan as "China's traduced patriots."37 Nonetheless, before
1924 the image of "Boxerism" as superstitious folly predominated, and
counter-images were rare exceptions.
It is far from coincidental that work on revising the Boxer symbol would
begin in 1924 and pick up steam during the summer of 1925, because the
former saw the forging of an anti-imperialist alliance between the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) and Sun Zhongshan's (Sun Yat-sen's)Guomin-
dang (GMD, also known in the West as the "KMT"), and the latter date
marked the beginning of the militant May 30th Movement. These two
events led immediately (and perhaps inevitably) to reexaminations of the
meaning of "Boxerism." Chinese activists and writers, both because of
an internal desire for symbolic self-definition, and because of a need to

685
respond to Westernpropagandists' taunts that they were nothing but "new

Boxers," were forced to come to terms with the legacy of 1900, and decide
whether their predecessors were positive models for action, or a disgrace
from which future nationalist radicalism should be distanced as much as
possible.
The CCP response to the Boxers during the mid-1920s was strongly posi-
tive, as evidenced by the articles in the special 1924 issue of Xiangdao
Zhoubao (The Guide Weekly), one of the Party's main organs, dedicated
to the heroes of 1900.38Edited, ironically enough, by the former anti-
Boxerjournalist and scholar, Chen Duxiu (who was by then a leading CCP
theorist), the issue contained several articles devoted to denouncing the
traditional image of "Boxerism"as a symbol of backwardness.The Boxers
had been badly misunderstood, these articles claimed; imperialist
propaganda had tricked the Chinese people into thinking the heroes of
1900 were fools and madmen. In fact, the Boxers were merely early oppo-
nents to imperialist oppression, the articles argued; the enemies they
fought, Westernersbent on exploiting China, were the same ones that still
needed to be defeated. The Boxers had their failings, of course, not being
Marxist-Leninists, but were first and foremost patriots, not fanatics.
Chen Duxiu's own contribution to the 1924 special issue, "Our Two Mis-
taken Views of the Boxers," echoed many of the themes outlined above
and went so far as to call the 1900 events "the great and tragic prologue
to the Chinese Revolution." The two mistaken viewpoints concerning the
Boxers the new Chen Duxiu criticized were: writing the 1900 movement
off because it involved a relatively small group of people, and hence was
not a "popular" uprising (by this standardthe 1911Revolution would also
be dismissed, he said); and emphasizing the comparatively small numbers
of Westernerskilled by the Boxers, although ignoring the much more sig-
nificant sufferings, economic and physical, of Chinese at the hands of
foreigners.
These rumblings of revisionism became a roar in 1925 after unarmed Chi-

nese protestors were shot by foreign police in Shanghai on May 30th.39
In the ensuing months China was rocked by anti-imperialist demonstra-
tions, strikes, and boycotts. The English-language press, both in the West
and even more so in China itself, immediately brandedthis agitation "Box-
erist," filling their papers with headlines such as "Twenty-fiveYearsAgo
and Today," lurid recountings of Boxer atrocities, and warnings that the
present "anti-foreign" fanaticism could easily "grow into a conflagration
similar to that of 1900 with results as deplorable."40As one sympathetic

686
Westernjournalist remarked, whenever foreigners talked of anti-Western

sentiment, "memories of the Boxer outbreak always lurk[ed] somewhere
in the background... like a mediaeval incomprehensible spook."41 Ar-
thur Ransome, a British journalist who had been travelling in China at
the time, claimed that the 1925-1927 events were continually viewed
through the lens of 1900 by sinophobic Westernerswho "think of anti-
foreignism" (itself a kind of code word for Boxerism) "as China's original
sin, to be exorcised by periodic penances."42
GMD writers responded to this fierce propaganda attack laced with im-
ages of demonic Boxers and irrational "anti-foreignism"by trying to dis-
tance their enlightened "nationalism" from the primitive "anti-
foreignism" of the Boxers, in the same way that labor leaders have often
tried to distance "rational"trade union struggles from the "irrationalism"
of the Luddites. Literally scores of articles appeared in GMD sponsored
publications delineating the differences between 1900 and 1925 and stress-
ing the fact that Chinese nationalism was no longer superstitious and anti-
Christian (themes sympathetic but non-Communist Westernerspicked up
on as well).43Another propaganda technique used by non-Communist
nationalists of the time, which shows even more clearly the extent to which
they continued to accept the negative connotations attached to the term
"Boxerism," was to defend their cause by claiming that in 1925 the
Westernerswere acting like "Boxers." Thus the caption below a cartoon
that ran in a moderate Chinese journal appeared just after the May 30th
shootings, which showed a giant Westerner bayonetting a tiny running
oriental man, read: "Yi He Tuan shi shei," or "Which one is the Box-
er?"44
This distancing reaction was but one way to fight the West's use of the
Boxer tag, however;the CCP adopted a very different tactic - that of wel-
coming comparisons between the patriotic outbursts of 1900 and 1925.
Articles following along the lines laid out in the 1924 special issue of
Xiangdao Zhoubao began to appear with increasing frequencyin the wake
of the May 30th shootings, and in some provinces at least anti-imperialist
activists began overtly to identify themselves with the Boxer "heroes."45
Not all articles responding to the Westernpropagandists' charges in CCP
propaganda organs explicitly took up the issue of "Boxerism." Some
limited themselves to debunking the code word "anti-foreignism," saying
that it was nothing but a synonym for nationalism, because the only
foreigners the Chinese were against were the imperialist ones.46 Others,
however, unabashedly defended the Boxers, claiming that despite their
failings the insurgents of 1900 were patriotic heroes.

687
One of the most explicit treatments of the issue is found in an article by

Qu Qiubai, a leading CCP theorist, literary figure, and political activist,
entitled "The Boxers and the Future of the May 30th Movement."47Both
cognizant of the Boxers' failings and of the need to redeem the symbolic
significance of a nascently patriotic movement, Qu's article (with its mix-
ture of criticism and praise) is an unusually developed example of a trend
in CCP writings of the time to try to undercut Western attempts to label
all Chinese protests "Boxerist anti-foreignism" by denying the stigmatic
implications of both terms. Qu both lauds the Boxers' nationalism and
points out that the 1925 movement is more advanced because: it is led by
workers instead of peasants, is guided by a Leninist party, and has none
of the superstitious trappings of the 1900 uprising.
Generallyspeaking the period since the 1920shas been markedby a variety

of permuations upon May 30th era Boxer themes. The Boxers have re-
mained a contested symbol, signifying barbarity to some, patriotism to
others. Moreover,familiar themes, most of which have less to do with dis-
agreements over facts than emphases, have continually informed scholarly
debates and popular images of turn-of-the-century events. For example,
Chen Duxiu's claim that stressing Chinese as opposed to Western atroci-
ties (including those of Boxer suppressing troops) skews our picture of the
Boxers remains an important part of the battle over symbolism. PRC
writers stress "imperialist" violence in their presentations of the 1898-
1901 events, but in the West images of Chinese cruelties continue to
come to mind almost exclusively whenever non-Chinese hear the term
"Boxer."48
CCP historians and propagandists continued to be the Boxers' staunchest

defenders during the half century that followed the publication of Qu
Qiubai's article, and eventually began to praise the Boxers far more une-
quivocally than Qu would have dreamed of doing himself.49 During this
same period the anti-Boxer line became more extremistas well, as the main
exponents of it gradually ceased to be sinophobic Westernersand became
anti-Communist Chinese. The rise to national power of Jiang Jieshi
(Chiang Kai-shek) in 1927 was accompanied by a drastic shift in the
GMD's approach to history. As Mary Wright so skillfully describes,
although Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) had identified with the rebels of
Chinese history, his successor Jiang began to identify himself with tradi-
tional "bandit suppressors."50This, coupled with Mao's contrasting un-
compromising self-identification with the "bandit tradition," led to an in-
creasing polarization with regard to historical symbols. This polarizing
trend reached even greaterlimits after 1949:the physical split between Peo-
ple's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwanis matched by a symbolic divi-

688
sion of the Chinese past into those events and figures embraced by the
GMD but despised by the CCP and vice versa, which only a small group
of symbols such as Sun Zhongshan (who is glorified by both sides) strad-
dle.
The treatment scholars and propagandists in the PRC and Taiwanaccord

the Boxers provides an extreme but otherwise not atypical picture of the
effects of this splitting up of the past into heroes and villains. PRC scho-
lars, up until the late 1970s, always used terms such as "patriotic" and
"revolutionary"to describe the turn of the century insurgents, and grant-
ed 1900 an important place in China's evolution from a semi-colonial
state into an independent socialist one. Scholars on Taiwan, by contrast,
have always used negatively charged terms meaning "bandit" to describe
the Boxers, and GMD officials have denounced the 1900 uprising as a na-
tional disgrace.51
The gap between CCP and GMD positions vis-a-vis the Yi He Tuan was
widest during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" (circa
1966-1976). In China during those years, not only did the Red Guards
proudly call themselves "new Boxers," but a major CCP propagandist,
Qi Benyu, went so far as to claim that anyone who considered the rebels
of 1900 anything less than unblemished heroes was a counter-
revolutionary. A film "Qinggong Mishi" [Secret History of the Quing
Court], which portrayed the Yi He Tuan in an equivocal light, was even
made the subject of a massive public criticism campaign during this trou-
bled decade.52Writerson Taiwanduring these same ten years continually
pointed to the CCP's identification with the foolish Boxers as a final proof
of the perfidy of Mao and his followers. In speeches at home and abroad
GMD leaders, including Madama Jiang, railed against the idiocy of con-
sidering the disgraceful Boxers "heroes."35
It is worth noting as an afterthought that since the late 1970sPRC scholars

have begun to be more cautious in their assessment of the Boxers.54This
is not surprising; in trying to show the world that China is ready to open
its doors more widely to Westernbusiness, the CCP has an obvious interest
in downplaying radical anti-imperialist symbols. Additionally, the "Gang
of Four" figures from which the new leadership group is trying to distance
itself were closely linked to the Boxer image. This cautionary trend is en-
couraging in a historiographical sense, because for over a decade serious
work on the Boxers was limited by theoretical dogmatism. From the stand-
point of symbolism, however,this trend is meaningful for other reasons:
it shows just how potent and multi-dimensional the afterlife of the Boxers
continues to be.

689
The remaking of a symbol, Part II: Luddism
The process by which "Luddism"was transformed from a derogatory term

to a word whose very meaning is subject to debate followed along very
similar lines to that outlined above for "Boxerism," though peculiarities
arising from the PRC-Taiwansplit have given a unique twist to the most
recent phase of the Boxers' afterlife. As was the case with Yi He Tuan,
changing interpretations of the Luddites have been affected by political
developments. Also, as was the case with Boxerism, arguments over the
meaning of Luddism have had important consequences for ongoing politi-
cal struggles.
The exact date at which the transformation of the Luddite symbol started
is difficult to date, but 1952, the year in which Eric Hobsbawm's pioneer-
ing essay "The Machine Breakers"appeared in the inaugural issue of Past
and Present, seems the most sensible place to start. Earlier points could
obviously be chosen, of course, for Hobsbawm was by no means the first
person to reject the political economists' negative view of the Luddites.
The actions taken by agriculturallaborers of the 1830s, and the symbolism
that accompanied their struggle ("Captain Swing" bears more than a pass-
ing resemblance to "General Ludd"), show that they were never fully con-
viced that the struggles of 1811-1816 were the doings of madmen.55Even
limiting the discussion to historiography proper, Hobsbawm was not the
first scholar to try to dispel myths regardingthe "lunacy" of the Luddites'
behavior - the Hammonds and others had already made important
moves in this direction.56 "The Machine Breakers," nonetheless,
represents a crucial turning point in the "afterlife" of the Luddites: be-
cause of it, and similar pieces by radical historians building upon it, the
whole terms of the historiographical debate over Luddism have been al-
tered. Even unambiguously "non-radical" historians have been forced in
recent years to admit that Luddism was more than simply an outbreak of
fanatical anti-technology feeling; the main area of dispute now revolves
around whether the Luddites were quasi-revolutionary,ratherthan wheth-
er they were lunatics.57
Hobsbawm's article has important things to say about many aspects of

the Luddite movement, but the most important things about it for the
purposes of this discussion relate to his assessment of the motivations be-
hind machine breaking, and the implications of his arguments for placing
the Luddites within the British social-protest tradition. His thesis regard-
ing motivation is aptly summarized in his much quoted synopsis of Lud-
dism as "collective bargaining by riot." According to Hobsbawm, Lud-

690
dism had less to do with objections to new machinery per se than feelings
on the part of workersthat the specific ways some manufacturerswere us-
ing technologies were illegitimate. Far from randomly attacking new
machines wherever they found them, the Luddites' attacks were for the
most part rational and systematic; they generally only wrecked those
machines belonging to manufacturerswhose policies they deemed unfair,
whether these machines werenew or old, and left even the newest machines
of "good" employers untouched. Machine breaking, in short, was general-
ly a rational tactic rather than a paroxysm.
Hobsbawm claims, moreover, that machine breaking of this type (which

was seldom accompanied by violence against persons) was one of the most
effective means of collective action available to workersbefore the age of
unionization, and that the Luddites should not therefore be dismissed as
"foolish" by modern laborers. The implications of his overall assessment
of the weavers for placing the Luddites within the British social protest
tradition are obvious: understood in Hobsbawm's way they become
precursors to, even spiritual godparents of, later more sophisticated pro-
testors.
Treatments of the Luddites by radical historians writing since the "The

Machine Breakers"have not been in complete agreement regardinga vari-
ety of specific points, but have nonetheless generally affirmed Hobs-
bawm's main points. George Rude'sinfluential work, The Crowd in Histo-
ry, contains a section devoted to Luddism in which Hobsbawm's primary
thesis regardingthe rationale behind machine-breaking, as well as a con-
cluding chapter that ends with an eloquent argument in favor of giving
early protestors, such as the followers of General Ludd, their due when
discussing the later successes of worker struggles. E. P. Thompson differs
from Hobsbawm and Rude in his interpretation of the revolutionary
character of the Luddites, whom he views in less strictly economic terms
and to whom he ascribes greater political potential.58His interpretation,
presentedin TheMaking of theEnglish WorkingClass, is not so very differ-
ent from that of Hobsbawm and Rude, however,as far as the reinterpreta-
tion of the Luddite symbol goes: for Thompson as much as (or even more
than) the other two Luddism appears as sensible behavior, and the Lud-
dites themselves as noble, if imperfect, fighters of oppression.
This revisionist approach to the Luddites adopted by the "new" social

historians has been but one of several elements contributing to the trans-
formation of the symbolic meaning of Luddism. A growing skepticism in
many sectors of society toward the innate goodness of uncontrolled tech-

691
nological advance has emerged as the coming of the "Second Industrial

Revolution" of automation has caused many people to raise the same
questions the Luddites and others did during the first. Due to the growing
role of the computer in society, and the development of evermore devastat-
ing "high tech" weaponry, a great many people throughout Westernsocie-
ty have begun to doubt (as the Luddites did) whether progress is always
benign. Beginning in the 1950sand 1960sand reaching greaterproportions
in the 1980s, this new skepticism has served as a counterpoint to the con-
tinuing strain within Westernculture that sees technological and scientific
advance as a way to salvation. One can see manifestations of this coun-
trapuntal strain in things as disparate as the writings of Herbert Marcuse
and Lewis Mumford, the rise of the Green Party in Germany and the
worldwide anti-nuclear movement, and the widespread use of technologi-
cally derived metaphors (e.g. "the war machine") in radical student rheto-
ric of the 1960s.59
This new skepticism toward "progress"traditionally defined is often only

implicitly related to arguments over the specific term "Luddism," but at
times the relation between the first half of the nineteenth century and the
second half of our own are made explicit. The works of David Noble are
a clear illustration of this. An M.I.T.professor concerned with the impact
of new technologies on workerautonomy, Noble's most recent works com-
bine discussions of the ways the Luddites of history have been misunder-
stood with suggestions for making the "Second Industrial Revolution" a
more livable experience than the first.60 E. P. Thompson's decision to
leave academia in order to devote more energy to struggles for nuclear dis-
armament is another example of how resurrectionof the Luddites and the
practical critique of runaway technology can intertwine.
The Luddite legacy has also made its presence felt in the workplace during
recent years;reinterpretationsof the meaning of Luddism have gone hand
in hand with practical struggles, with the former helping activists to over-
come the fear of seeming "reactionary" that limited machinery-related
struggles for so long. During the past decades workershave adopted an in-
creasingly militant attitude toward automation and manifested a renewed
Luddite spirit. Thus Pierre Dubois begins the first chapter of a recent work
with these words:
"Workers'sabotage? That's all past history! A hundred years ago, yes, they broke
machines, with angry shouts that mechanization was taking away their jobs and
their livelihood. But workers today are disciplined... and no one would dream
of damaging the tools of his trade." Ten years ago it would have been true to
say all this - there was just such a contrast between past and present. But today
it is so no longer; workers' sabotage has returned.61

692
Workers in a variety of industries and nations have begun to rediscover

the once familiar technique of machine-breaking, and to look to it as a
useful tool for: waking up apathetic union leaders, meeting threats posed
by technological innovations implemented without their approval, gaining
concessions from management, expressinganger, or some combination of
the above. Not all contemporary saboteurs see themselves as following a
historical tradition, of course, but a surprising number have become as-
sociated with the Luddite legacy, because they have either chosen to link
their actions to this tradition, or had their tactics labelled "Luddistic" by
detractors.
When the management of the Washington Post introduced machinery

that made typesetters "obsolete"in 1975, the workersresponded by smash-
ing the machinery in question. Promptly branded the "Washington Lud-
dites," these workers gained national notoriety for their acts, which the
bureaucratic unions associated with the Post either dismissed as fits of
rage, or explicitly denounced. These workersseem never to have explicitly
linked themselves with the Luddite legacy, but their acts showed that to
them, anyway, breaking machinery appeared to be a sensible thing to do.
The same kind of implicit approval of Luddism is shown by an article
that appeared in a Detroit newspaper in 1983: in response to Time Maga-
zine naming the computer its "Man of the Year,"this paper proclaimed
the sledgehammer its "tool of the year."
Another phenomenon intimately connected with the symbolic legacy of

the Luddites is the increasing militancy of workers around the globe who
are demanding more input in deciding how new technologies will be im-
plemented. This new activism is marked by a readiness to challenge
management myths concerning the uselessness of "fighting progress,"
which negative images of the original Luddites helped to keep in place for
over a century. Workers'groups in Denmark, Germany, and other Euro-
pean countries have all won important concessions relating to the style
in which new technologies are implemented. Somewhat belatedly, Ameri-
can unions have made important moves in similar directions; most notably
the International Association of Machinists has launched a "technology
bill of rights" program. Like the European arrangements upon which it
is modelled, this "bill of rights" is intended not to fight "progress" but
to make management take threats to human dignity and livelihood more
seriously.
As important as such European and American examples are, perhaps the

most forceful and overt attempts to resurrectthe Luddites, and transform

693
the idea of "Luddism" into a powerful positive symbol to aid in practical

struggles, have taken place in Australia. John Baker, a former union offi-
cial, recently claimed that the fact the Luddites were transported to his
country was one reason the Australian labor movement had been so suc-
cessful, stating that "England's loss was our gain." From as early as 1954,
telecommunications workers and other affected labor groups have been
winning technology-related concessions from management in Australia,
and in 1979 a recommendation that all countries associated with the Inter-
national Labor Organization "consider placing a five-yearmoratorium on
all technological change" was passed by the Australian Council of Trade.
The following quote from a speech by Baker on runaway technological
change illustratesthe significance the Luddite legacy has had in the former
prison colony to which the early nineteenth-century insurgents were sent:
The developing consciousness of the Australian trade unionist illustrates the old
challenge of the Luddites to the factory-owners: "you haven't any right to take
over my tools and skills and build them into a machine [that] you, alone, own
and whose products you, alone, sell in the marketplace." This old objection is
being resurrectedagain as owners of technology and capital build the skills, ex-
perience and knowledge of millions of office and factory workersinto the micro-
machine processes that make them unemployed. Like John Brown's Body [our]
special understanding of the Luddite Martyrs marches on ....
It would be tempting to claim that the scholarly articles and activist reas-
sessments of the Luddite legacy dealt with above have worked together to
reshape completely the popular image of the machine-breakers,and that
thanks to less laudatory textbook assessments of the Industrial Revolution
it is easier for present generations to question assumptions connected to
the unqualified goodness of technological "progress"than it was for their
parents. Such a claim would be misleading, however, for the term "Lud-
dism" has remained a synonym for "backwardness" in many people's
vocabularies, and has continued to be used to delegitimize those who are
presented as "fighting progress" both inside and outside the factory. Thus
in 1970 Zbigniew Brzezinski compared student activists motivated by
"fear,hatred, and incomprehension" to "the Luddites of early-nineteenth-
century England, who reacted to the machine age with primitive passion,
destroying that which they did not understand well enough to harness."62
The press also provides a clear index to how entrenched the traditional
meaning of the symbol remains: journalists continue to use the epithet
"Luddistic"to dismiss everything from a movie mogul's complaints that
dual videocassette recorders will cut into the film industry's profits, to a
Nobel laureate economist's claim that uncontrolled technological "ad-
vance" will lead to increased unemployment.63Old images do not die eas-

694
ily as the following headline, from a 1983 Barrons story about strikes in-
volving questions of technology and worker autonomy, shows: Breaking
the Luddites: Reactionary Unions Everywhere are Losing the Battle
Against Change.64
Traditional images of "Luddism" thus linger on, but just because The
Times can still ridicule British foreign secretaryHowe's criticisms of Rea-
gan's "Star Wars"program by calling Howe a "Luddite"65does not mean
nothing has changed relating to the popular life of the symbol. A vital
process of change has occurred during which the meaning of the term has
gone from being unarguably negative to being disputed territory: at the
same time the editors of The Times scoff at Howe's "Luddism," some
scientists are beginning to wonder if a neo-Luddite approach to arms
research might not be a good thing;66and although some union leaders
still try their best to distance themselves from charges that they are acting
like nineteenth-century weavers, others are fighting to have the weavers
viewed as models worthy of emulation.
Conclusions
The preceding sections present the case for seeing the "afterlives" of the
Luddites and Boxers as comparable, so rather than recap the story here
it seems more worthwhile to focus on the issue of why the Boxers and Lud-
dites have so captured the imagination and partisanship of historians and
non-historians alike. The "afterlives" of the two movements raise other
issues as well: such as the nature of the interaction between scholarship
and politics; whether it is possible to do "value-free" historical writing;
the important role past events play as thinking tools for present situations;
and so forth. Consideration of each of these important issues is beyond
the scope of a single article, but the preceding sections and the discussion
to follow here may at least suggest some new ways to approach these
weightier questions.
Part of the answer to the rhetorical question of why the Luddites and Box-
ers have receivedso much attention is simply that they were colorful actors
involved in violent events. Attacks on missionaries and smashings of
looms are both dramatic activities, and this has made the Boxers and Lud-
dites attractive to writers of fiction as well as scholarship, playwrights as
well as academicians. Another reason for the continuing interest in both
groups is that the Boxers and Luddites have remained mysterious to us;
the gaps in our knowledge of them, arising in part from the secret nature

695
of their organizations, have made varying interpretations of their actions

possible and given them an almost mythical aura as figures of legend as
much as fact.
These kinds of factors only give a partial answer to the question, however,
for above and beyond the drama and mystery of the events is the fact that
the targets of the Boxers' and Luddites' violence were (and still are) them-
selves symbols of such magnitude. By striking at representativesof West-
ern ideas and machines the two insurgent groups struck central nerves of
the societies they affected, and this more than anything else is responsible
for the richness of their symbolic "afterlives." The question of how best
to deal with the West has been a vital (and often the vital) concern for Chi-
nese leaders ever since the Opium Wars, and the foreigner has alternately
been a personification of science and progress, military might, and bar-
baric cruelty. Similarly,throughout much of the nineteenth century in En-
gland the image of the machine was of enormous political and psychologi-
cal significance, as a progressiveyet potentially demonic entity. For people
then, and still to a degree to us now, the machine conjured up the same
kinds of utopian/dystopian mixture of images of power and fear that a
Western gunboat did for a nineteenth-century Chinese official, as both
the way to the future and a threat to all true "civilization." The double-
edged quality of the West, as imperialist threat yet also the source of
"wealth and power," and the machine, as depriver of autonomy yet
bringer of a new world, have contributed to the lure of the Luddites and
Boxers; their special critiques of certain notions of "modernity" have led
to them being embraced as saviors and despised as fools.67
The ambivalent nature of the targets the two groups chose helps to account
both for the unusual warmth with which they were treated by some mem-
bers of traditional elite classes, and the surprisingly harsh views expressed
about them by some early radicals. The double-edged quality of technolo-
gy and Westernculture guaranteed that attacks on foreigners and machin-
ery would always have the potential to be seen as radical or reactionary
acts, which could be praised (or at least viewed with sympathy) by reac-
tionaries while being dismissed by revolutionaries, or vice versa. The am-
bivalence inherent in elite responses to the two groups has already been
explored, but the ambivalent reaction of early radicals perhaps needs more
explication.
Marx's view of the factory is a clear example of the kind of ambivalence

technological "advances" can engender. He saw the factory as represent-
ing exploitation and alienation taken to the furthest extreme, yet claimed

696
that it was only when workers were brought together in such conditions
that class consciousness became possible. The factory thus became a
Janus-sided entity: it brought misery in its wake and made people into
slaves, yet without enduring capitalism and the new technologies accom-
panying it the achievement of salvation through communism would be im-
possible. A similar ambivalence plagued Chinese patriots of all political
hues: the West loomed before them as the depriver of national honor, at
the same time learning from the West appeared as the key to the achieve-
ment of a full and "modern" sovereignty.
The ambivalent reaction of radicals to the Luddites and Boxers draws at-
tention to a key issue regardingthe legacy of these two rebel groups: what
relevance has the remembrance of their actions had on the construction
of viable radical critiques of established definitions of "progress" and
"modernity." When considering this issue an important difference be-
tween the two historical events in question must always be kept in mind:
scholarship on the Luddites has uncovered the existence of a fairly
sophisticated critique of the premises of the new political economy within
the nineteenth-century machine-breaking movement itself, but work on
the Boxers has not uncovered any kind of comparably developed views on
the part of the Yi He Tuan. Thus with the Boxers all one needs to consider
is how the historical events of 1900 were used symbolically to galvanize
support for later anti-imperialist agitation, whereas with the Luddites one
must consider this symbolic dimension but also ask whether there are ele-
ments of the historical actors' own ideology that have been (or could be)
incorporated into subsequent critiques.
This added dimension of Luddism is of crucial importance because it has

proved much more difficult to find an autonomous position from which
to attack technological determinist conceptions of "progress," than it has
to construct a critique capable of challenging ethnocentric definitions of
"modernity." The emergence of Marxism-Leninism - which both came
from the West and included a harsh attack on imperialism - as an impor-
tant force within Chinese politics in the 1920s gave Chinese radicals a
strong theoretical standpoint from which to challenge foreign domina-
tion, and overcome some of their ambivalence toward the West. This
meant that, although the Boxers' bravery and patriotism appeared as a
useful source of inspiration for struggles such as the May 30th Movement,
the ideology of the Yi He Tuan, which never really developed beyond a
fairly crude if justified anti-foreignism, could be ignored. Marxism-
Leninism has by no means completely resolved the ambivalences toward
the West felt by early twentieth-century radicals - as the events of the last

697
two decades dramatically show - but it has at least provided a solid van-
tage point from which to criticize imperialism. Because no comparable
theoretical standpoint exists for those who wish to continue the fight
against the invasion the Luddites first resisted, however,the possibility that
the machine-breakersmight provide more than simply a symbol of bravery
takes on a special relevance.
The fact that nineteenth-century radical theorists subscribed to so many

of the same ideas regarding the inherent goodness of technological ad-
vance as non-radicals has created a difficult situation for recent and con-
temporary critics of increased mechanization and other forms of
"progress," who have had to try to overcome a theoretical vacuum engen-
dered by what Marcuse describes as the "one-dimensional" nature of
modern society.68Acc"rding to theories of one-dimensionality and tech-
nocracy, by the middle of this century the Left and Right had become so
similar in their views regardingthe futility and irrationality of all attempts
to stand in the way of scientific and technological "advances," that creat-
ing a critique of the accepted and self-justifying definition of modernity
that permeated Western society had become virtually impossible.69 The
growing tide of dissatisfaction with the course of "progress," which has
made itself felt in various quarters during the last several decades, has
shown that interest in constructing such a critique is far from dead, and
one source that has looked promising for those wishing to solve the prob-
lem of one-dimensionality has been the historical struggles of the "pre-
industrial" Luddites, who operated within a world in which technological
change was still viewed (by some at least) as an option to be contested rath-
er than a given to be accepted.
David Noble's arguments regarding the need for a reconsideration of the

machine-breakers'challenge to manufacturersis one example of elements
of Luddism being incorporated into a contemporary critique of tech-
nocratic ideology, but other examples exist as well. Francis Hearn's work,
for example, applies the ideas of Marcuse and Habermas to the general
topic of the incorporation of the English nineteenth-century working
class, in an attempt to recover preindustrial viewpoints, such as that of
the Luddites', that can help us break out of the one-dimensionality of our
current views on "progress" and technological change.70 Appeals to
traditional norms, such as those of the Luddites and other moral economy
rioters, cannot be simplistically dismissed as "reactionary," Hearn and
others writing along similar lines claim, because in many cases they em-
body a critical perspective, which emphasizes humanistic concerns and
conceptions of community that can have radically progressive implica-
tions.71

698
An even more explicit attempt to use the Luddites' perspectiveto construct

a critique of contemporary society appears in Langdon Winner's Autono-
mous Technology, a subsection of which is entitled "Luddism as Episte-
mology."72 Here Winner argues that it is essential for us to recover the
ability to think of machines as entities built to serve human needs, and
that we will only be able to do so if we can regain the capability, which
the Luddites had, of treating both new and existing technologies as things
we have the power and the right to use or dismantle depending on whether
they will servethose needs. What links efforts such as Noble's, Hearn's, and
Winner's together is that each in its own way uses ideas embodied in the
original LudditeMovement to defend a Neo-Luddite approach to contem-
porary events. These types of attempts are both timely and significant, ap-
pearing as they do when new social movements have appeared throughout
the Westernworld, which share common concerns with the deterioration
of the environmentand the threat of nuclear war,but lack a strong theoret-
ical core and are prone to be dismissed as romantic or reactionary
responses to "progress."73
With respect to the relation between history and critique, therefore,

Luddism has had an even richer afterlife than Boxerism, both because
the foe of technological determinism is still more likely to be dismissed
as a fanatic than the critic of imperialism,74and because the Luddites
bequeathed a more viable alternative ideology to their contemporary
counterparts than the Boxers did to theirs. This does not mean, however,
that remembrance of the Boxers has not played an important role in
post-1900 anti-imperialist struggles: as the preceding sections have shown,
coming to terms with the Boxer legacy played a crucial part in defining
the nature of one's position vis-a-vis foreign aggression during the early
stages of the Chinese Revolution, and the Yi He Tuan symbol has con-
tinued to affect post-Revolutionary political struggles. The Boxers, like the
Luddites, have in fact remained touchstones of a sort, historical events
whose interpretation is always relevant for critics and defenders of
cherished conceptions of "modernity."
The two groups, in conclusion, remain very much with us to this day, in-
fluencing our definitions of legitimate and illegitimate political action,
helping to shape our images of historical development in China and the
West, and being in turn shaped by the myths of an inevitable, civilizing
progress we hold so dear. Their continuing power is a reminder of how
important a role the past can play in the present, and that deciding how
to interpret those that have come before us is an important act. Whether
the actors in question are ultimately seen as "heroes" or "villains," or as

699
something in between, the uses and abuses of the Boxers and Luddites are
also a harsh reminder of the need to question just how foolish actions
labelled as attempts to "block progress" really are, and continually to ask
ourselves whether the "civilized"are alwaysmore enlightened than the dis-
contented.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments
regarding earlier drafts of this essay and/or general suggestions concern-
ing the comparability of the Boxers and Luddites: Timothy Cheek, Paul
Cohen, Joshua Fogel, Peter Hoffenberg, Daniel Kleinman, Dan Letwin,
Elizabeth Perry,Julia Strauss, Hue TamHo Tai, Rudolph Wagner,Frederic
Wakeman, Jr., Richard Wasserstrom, and R. Bin Wong.
Notes
1. "Present Tense Technology," democracy, iii, 2 (1983), 14 and 24.

2. John Baker, quoted in ibid, part 3, democracy, iii, 4 (1983), 79.
3. June 14, 1925, 2.
4. China in Chaos (Shanghai: North China Herald, 1927), 1.
5. The Yi Ho TUanMovement of 1900 (Beijing: F. L. P., 1976), 127-28. I have changed
the romanization used in this passage from "Yi Ho Tuan"to "Yi He Tuan" for the sake
of consistency. In this and all other cases Chinese terms and names are rendered here
in the pinyin system presently used within the People's Republic; in cases for which a
different romanization form is likely to be equally or more familiar to the reader, this
form is placed in parentheses.
6. For general background information on the Luddites, see: J. L. Hammond and B. Ham-
mond, The Skilled Labourer (London: Longmans, 1936);E. P. Thompson, The Making
of the English WorkingClass (New York:Random House, 1963);E. J. Hobsbawm, "The
Machine Breakers,"Past and Present, i (1952) - reprintedin the same author's Labour-
ing Men (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964); F. 0. Darvall, Popular Distur-
bances and Public Order in Regency England (London: Oxford University Press, 1934);
and M. I. Thomis, The Luddites (New York:Schocken, 1972). My reading of the Boxers
is based on: Victor Purcell, The Boxer Uprising (London: Cambridge University Press,
1963); Chester Tan, The Boxer Catastrophe (New York: Columbia University Press,
1955);Dai Xuanzhi, YiHe Tuan Yanjiu[Researcheson the Boxers] (Taiwan:Commercial
Press, 1963); Joseph Esherick, "Lun Yi He Tuan Yundong de Shehui Chengyin" [On
the Social Origins of the Boxer Movement], Wenshizhe, [Literature,History and Philos-
ophy], i (1981), and Qian Bocan et al, Yi He TUan[The Boxers] (Shanghai: Shenzhou
Guoguangshe, 1951), four volumes.
7. For the Boxers' attacks on telegraph poles, see Dai, Yi He Than, 57; the song in question
is entitled "General Ludd's Triumph," and is reprintedin full in Malcolm Thomis, Lud-
dism in Nottinghamshire (London: Phillimore, 1973), 1-2. Along with the claim that

700
"Death itself" cannot defeat Ludd, the song speaks of "the Elements themselves" aiding
the General. Many sinologists have referredto the machine-breakingaspect of the Boxer
Uprising as "Luddistic," but this is done simply in passing with no reference made to
other possible analogous features shared by the two movements.
8. My treatment of this "invasion" is based largely on the works of E. P. Thompson: The
Making; "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century," Past and
Present, no. 50,76(1971); "Patrician Society, Plebian Culture," Journal of SocialHisto-
ry, vii, 4 (1974);and "Time, Work, Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Pres-
ent, no. 38, 56 (1967). Maxine Berg's The Machinery Question and the Making of Politi-
cal Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) contains an insightful
discussion of the contrast between the values of the city and the countryside and the sym-
bolism of the machine within economic debates of the 1820sand 1830s. Adrian Randall's
"The Shearmen and The Wiltshire Outrages of 1802," Social History, 7, 3 (1982) and
"The Philosophy of Luddism: The Case of the West of England Woolen Workers,ca.
1790-1809," Technology and Culture, 27, 1 (1986) push some of the main themes Berg
treats - and the occurrence of Luddism itself - back two decades, while continually
highlighting the "alienness" of machine-related economic values.
9. See Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1966), 77, for an example of how Chinese "anti-foreign" sentiment of a slightly
earlier period could end up being directed not only at aliens but also at Chinese (in this
case weak officials) who became foreign-like.
10. See Esherick, Lun.
11. See Thompson, The Making, 548, on the "dark and satanic mill," Berg, Machinery,
on perceptions of the machine as evil incarnate, and Randall, "The Philosophy of Lud-
dism," 10-13, for illustrations of the ways in which anti-marketeconomy propagandists
juxtaposed the moral virtues of manual work with images of factories as "nurseries...
of vice and corruption." The negative myths concerning Christianity rampant in China
during the latter half of the nineteenth century are treatedat length in Paul Cohen, China
and Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); see also p. 119
of Guy Puyraimond, "The Ko-lao Hui and the Anti-Foreign Incidents of 1891," in Popu-
lar Movements and Secret Societies in China 1840-1950, edited by Jean Chesneaux
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 113-124, for the symbolic significance of
children in this folklore.
12. "The Rites of Violence" is, of course, the title of an article on French religious riots
by Natalie Z. Davis, Past and Present, 59 (1973). On the merging of themes of religious
pollution, xenophobia, and class-based hatred of merchants, manufacturers, and other
kinds of middlemen, see: the 1756 riots described in Robert Wearmouth, Methodism
and the Common People of the 18th Century (London: Epworth, 1945), 26; Barry Reay,
"Popular Hostility TowardQuakers in mid-17th century England," Social History, v,
3 (1980); and, especially, the machine-breaking cum anti-dissent riot described in A. L.
Wykes, "The Leicester Riots of 1773 and 1787," The Leicestershire Archeological and
Historical Society Transactions, v, 54 (1978-1979).
13. Some even died for this opposition,see "Memorials of the Anti-Boxer Martyrs," in Chi-
na's Response to the West,ed. Ssu-ya Teng and John Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1954), 190-193.
14. Byron's speech is reprintedas an appendix to Ernst Toller'splay, The Machine Wreckers
(New York, 1923); see Thompson, The Making, Thomis, The Luddites, 155-157, and
Hobsbawm, "The Machine Breakers"for general evidence of elite ambivalence toward
the Luddites. Such ambivalence toward the crowd on the part of European and Chinese
elites was by no means unique to the Luddite and Boxer movements. Randall's "The

701
Shearmen," 209-300, convincingly demonstrates that proto-Luddites of the first de-

cade of the nineteenth century enjoyed a high degree of elite support, with Thompson's
various works on moral-economy price riots and the treatments of "Church and King
Riots" in Rude, The Crowd in History (London: Wiley and Sons, 1964)and Hobsbawm's
Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton and Company, 1959) showing that such support
was by no means reserved for those who smashed machinery. Similarly, prior to 1900
elements within the Chinese literati almost always viewed popular anti-foreign, anti-
imperialist outbreaks with either approval or at least a strong degree of ambivalence
- see Wakeman's Strangers, 168-173, Cohen, China and Christianity, and Puyrai-
mond, "The Ko-lao Hui."
15. See Francis Hearn, Domination, Legitimation, and Resistance: The Incorporation of
the 19th Century English WorkingClass (London: Greenwood, 1978), for a comprehen-
sive treatment of the way in which the "invading" force of industrial capitalism trans-
formed virtually all aspects of working-class life during the decades immediately preced-
ing and following the Luddite Rising.
16. Beaumont's "Beggar'sComplaint" is reprintedin The Luddites: ThreePamphlets, part
of British Labour Struggles: Contemporary pamphlets 1727-1850, (New York:Arno,
1972);for more on newspaper coverage, see Thomis, The Luddites and Luddism in Not-
tinghamshire.
17. For this section I have drawn very heavily from Berg, Machinery. Her bibliography gives
an extensive list of anti-machine-breakingtracts from the early to mid-nineteenth centu-
ry; but see also R. K. Webb,The WorkingClass Reader 1790-1848 (New York:Augustus
M. Kelley, 1955) for additional information.
18. The novel is entitled The Rioters, see R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1960) for full information on Martineau's various writings
in defense of political economy.
19. The same types of descriptions with equally colorful adjectives appear in Charles Knight,
The Popular History of England (New York: Sangster, 1880), v. vii, 434 and passim,
and Harriet Martineau, History of England; A.D. 1800-1815 (London: G. Bell and
Sons, 1878), 392-394.
20. Cobbet's Weekly Political Register, November 30, 1816.
21. A comprehensive survey of the pro-machinery views of early socialists can be found in
Berg,Machinery. Marx and Engel's comments on Luddism are fragmentaryand ambiva-
lent - since sympathy for the workers' struggles is mixed with denigration of the form
this struggle took - but Marxism too helped lay the basis for a negative vision of
machine-breaking as reactionary and misguided violence. See Frederick Engels, The
Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1958), 243, and Capital, Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1977), 554-555 for
specific comments on the Luddites. See also Langdon Winner'sAutonomous Technolo-
gy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1977), 264- 277, for an insightful discussion of Marx and
Lenin's views on the utopian potential of machinery; and B. N. Ponomarev et al., The
International Working Class Movement: Problems of History and Theory, V I
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 192-200, for a sophisticated (but still somewhat
dismissive) assessment of the Luddites' place in history by contemporary Soviet scholars.
22. See Asa Briggs, "Privateand Social Themes in Shirley," Transactionsof theBronte Soci-
ety (1958), and Thompson, The Making, 563-565.
23. Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and George Eliot's Middlemarch are cases in point -
see Berg, Machinery, for a discussion of these and other novels' attitudes toward
working-class violence. The general theme that violence of all kinds including machine-
breaking always works to the detriment of the working class was a common one in fic-

702
tional and non-fictional writings dealing with labor throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries - see Julius Henry Cohen, Law and Order in Industry (New York:
Macmillan, 1916), 207 for an example of a union-affiliated writer using references to
Marx and Engels' criticisms of "law-breaking"to back up his claim that actions such
as "sabotage" have "invariably served to demoralize and destroy the [workers']move-
ment."
24. See the opening paragraphs of Hobsbawm, "The Machine Breakers."
25. The Times carried more than 300 items concerning the Boxers during the months of
July, August, and September alone. For a sense of the sensationalism and intensity of
the coverage, see: the surveys of press reports in Nineteenth Century, xxxxviii (1900),
320, 324 and 328; "Thirty foreigners in a Perilous Plight - Escape Cut Off by a Mob
of Bloodthirsty Fanatics," Los Angeles Times (June 3, 1900); and The Missionary Her-
ald, 96 (1900), 351.
26. Until the end of the siege, there was little variation in the way the Boxers were treated,
but with the beginning of reprisalsby the Powers, which entailed the killing of thousands
of Chinese and the raping of women and girls by foreign troops, some journalists became
more critical of Westernactions in China. Never as prevalent as anti-Boxer tirades and
often printed in obscure places, early attempts to present a more sympathetic view of
Chinese actions probably had little impact on the popular conception of the Boxers, but
are interesting nonetheless. Some examples appear in, The Nation, 71 (1900), 41 and
71; Arena (1900), 258-267; and The Living Age, 228 (1901), 401-414 and 491-502.
27. Harold Cleveland, Massacres of Christians by Heathen Chinese andHorrors of the Box-
ers (Philadelphia: National, 1900);for an extensivelist of similar works, see the bibliogra-
phy in Peter Fleming, The Siege at Peking (London: Harper, 1959).
28. For "YellowPeril" imagery, see Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds (New York: J.
Day, 1958).
29. Earlier films, from turn of the century silent ones, with titles like "Attempted Capture
of an English Nursery and Child by Boxers," to MGM's 1927 "Foreign Devil" focused
on the Yi He Tuan. See Jay Leyda,Dian Ying (New York, 1972), 4- 7 for details. Various
novelists from Putnam Weale,Indiscreet Lettersfrom Peking (New York:Dodd Mead,
1906), on have used the Boxers as subjects.
30. Though I will place judgmental terms such as civilized in quotation marks throughout
this essay, even the most sympathetic and radical scholarly analyst has to acknowledge
that therewas a genuinely superstitious and brutal side to the Boxersthe ignoring of which
undermines the credibility of defending their motivations. The most effective treatments
of the Boxers by radical scholars in the West have therefore been mixed assessments,
which both acknowledge the fanatical side of the Yi He Tuan, and stress the very real
grievances that motivated the insurgents to act. Marilyn Young's treatments in her The
Rhetoric of Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1982)and "The Quest
for Empire,"inA merican-East Asian Relations (Cambridge, Mass., HarvardUniversity
Press, 1972) ed. E. May and J. Thomson are good examples. The most unabashedly pro-
Boxer Westerntreatment is probably that in Jean Chesneaux et al., Chinafrom the Opi-
um Wars to the 1911 Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
31. See North China Herald, September 8, November 10, December 8, and 15 (1905). On
December 22 the same paper ran a rebuttal by a "Chinese Patriot" chiding the West
for bringing up the Boxer "national disaster" whenever "foreigners and Chinese are in-
volved in a dispute."
32. Uses of the "Boxer" tag during the 1925-1927 period will be dealt with below; the label
was also used during the Changsha Riots of 1910 and the May 4th Movement of 1919
- see Japan Daily Mail, April 30, (1910), and Paul Reinsch, An American Diplomat
in China (New York: Doubleday, 1922), 371.

703
33. A clear index of the hostility of the late Qing elite toward the Boxer "bandits" is provided
by the early twentieth-century novels, poems, and essays collected in Gengzi shitian
wenxuan ji [Selected writings connected with the 1900 events] (Beijing: Renmin
Chubanshe, 1959), the vast majority of which portray the insurgents in an extremely
negative light, as superstitious, bloodthirsty, and foolish. A bizarre counterpoint to this
general trend is provided by Gu Hungming (Ku Hung-ming), a pro-Empress, anti-
reform, yet Western educated, member of the Chinese gentry. Gu defends the Boxers
as patriots in severalparts of his Papers From a Viceroy's Yamen(Shanghai: Commercial
Press, 1901), comparing the 1900 rising to the Paris uprising of 1789, and dedicating
a Burnsian ode to the "Boxer lads" of "Bonnie Prince Duan."
34. See Hu Sheng, Cong yapian zhanzheng dao wusi yundong [From the Opium Wars to
the May 4th Movement] (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1981), vol. 2, 647-648, which
also mentions Liang Qichao's negative views of the Boxers; Hu Hanmin, another "radi-
cal" criticizes the Boxers in an early Minbao article (November 15, 1906), entitled
"Paiwai yu guoji fa" [Xenophobia and International Law].
35. Hu Sheng mentions one little known early radical defense on the Yi He Tuan, "The Box-
ers Have Benefited China," Cong Yapianzhanzheng, 651; and Harold Schiffrin notes
that as early as 1903 Sun Zhongshan "had kind words for the Boxers," Sun Yat-senand
the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1968),
309.
36. In the body of his article, which appeared in Xin Qing Nian [New Youth], v. 5 (1918),
Chen continually denigrates the Boxers as worthless "bandits." For the negative view
of the Boxers of another important intellectual leader of the May 4th Movement and
early nationalist, Hu Shi, see Zhou Minzhi (Chou Min-chih), Hu Shih and Intellectual
Choice in Modern China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 50- 51 and
97.
37. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works(Moscow: Progress, 1960), v. 4, 373 - 374; and Great Short
Works of Mark Twain (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 208. Twain'scomment on
the Boxers comes in the mist of a scathing attack on members of the "civilized" world
(some of whom wanted "a head for a head" to avenge Boxer deeds) for daring to think
that they had a right to "improve"the "barbaric," when they themselves were so barbar-
ic. As far as I can tell Twain never directly commented on Luddism per se, but as John
F. Kasson's insightful interpretation of A Connecticut Yankeein King Arthur's Court
- in Civilizing the Machine (New York: Viking, 1976), 202-215 - shows, Twain was
as skeptical of the claims of those who were convinced that technological progress was
inherently beneficial to the human race as he was of the conceit of missionaries. Some
Japanese journalists' variations on Twain'sattack on the anti-Boxer forces can be found
translated into Chinese in Qing Yi Bao [Ch'ing I Pao], viii (1901), 811-814, and
4188-4194.
38. September 3, 1924.
39. For details on this event, see Rigby, The May 30th Movement (Canberra:Griffin, 1980).
40. The last quote comes from the North China Herald (June 20, 1925), 473. Similar exam-
ples can be found in nearly every Westernpublication that dealt with the Chinese situa-
tion at the time of the May 30th Movement and the subsequent Northern Expedition
(1926-1927). The May 30th events generated scores of Boxer analogy articles, and the
"Nanjing [Nanking] Incident" of 1927, in which (unlike the May 30th one) some foreign-
ers were actually killed by Chinese, provoked even more. See Christian Century (Febru-
ary 3, 1927), 134, for the prevalence of such articles in 1927, and the pamphlet "China
in Chaos" (Shanghai: North China Herald, 1927), which contains reprints of dozens
of relevant articles, or Literary Digest (June 20, 1925), 12-14, for the tone of such dia-
tribes.

704
41. See The Living Age (September 1, 1925), 241.

42. The Chinese Puzzle (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1927), 27-31.
43. One of the most developed Chinese "dodging" response to the Boxer tag is found in
a contemporary article by Cai Yuanpei (Tsai Yuan-p'ei), which is reprinted in Geming
Wenxian [Documents on the Revolution] (Taibei: Academia Sinica, 1957), v. 18,
3312-3317; one of many comparable defenses of the new nationalism by a foreigner,
appears in Christian Century (May 5, 1927), 554-555.
44. Guowen Zhoubao [National Weekly] (June 21, 1925); the June 14th article in the same
journal, which I quote from at the very beginning of this piece, claims even more explicit-
ly that the only "Boxers" around at present are the "Yang Yi He Tuan" or "Western
Boxers" who shoot down defenseless Chinese students.
45. See Jonathan Spence, To Change China (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1980), 179,
for pro-Boxer boasts by Hunan students. "Wusa yundong de yiyi" [The Significance
of the May 30th Movement], in Xiangdao Zhoubao [The Guide Weekly] (July 16, 1925)
praises both the Taipingsand the Boxers as forerunnersof the current patriotic upsurge.
Hu Shi (Hu Shih) felt the need to denounce explicitly the tendency of radicals to regard
the Yi He Tuan as heroes, in his defense of the new nationalism as non-Boxerist, which
was published in English in Religious Education, xx (1925), 434-438.
46. Cf. the Zhongguo Qingnian [Chinese Youth]article reprintedin Wusa YundongShiliao
[Historial Documents on the May 30th Movement] (Shanghai: Renmin, 1981), 185-186.
47. This was published in Xiangdao Zhoubao as well, exactly one year after the Chen Duxiu
special September 3, 1924 issue. Yetanother interesting pro-Boxer treatment of the peri-
od, which happens to have appeared in an English language publication is Yi Hu (I Hu),
"Did the Boxer Uprising Recur in 1925?," Chinese Students'Monthly (January, 1926),
53-58.
48. Westernpresentations of the Boxers have become much more varied in recent decades,
with some scholars - cf. Purcell, The Boxer Uprising - using terms such as "national-
ism" in reference to the Yi He Tuan and even some encyclopedias laying some of the
"blame" for the movement's violence at the feet of the Powers - see Encyclopedia
Americana (Danbury: Americana, 1982), v. 4, 374. Still, the traditional image of the
Boxers as irrational, bloodthirsty savages has been reinforced (either directly or indirect-
ly) by a variety of recent scholarly, quasi-scholarly, and fictional treatments, ranging
from the film "55 Days at Peking" to Burt Hirshfeld, 55 Days of Terror(New York:
Julian Messner, 1964), to Fleming, The Siege at Peking.
49. An enormous amount of material on the Boxers has been published in Chinese since
the founding of the PRC. James Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Re-
bellions (New York:Atheneum, 1971),provides extensive bibliographic information on
pre-CulturalRevolution treatments of uprisings in general and the Boxers in particular,
as well as analyzing general trends in interpretation. Two works translated into English
that give a sense of the range of pre-1966 treatments are: Hu Sheng, Imperialism and
Chinese Politics (Beijing: F. L. P., 1955), 133, which is moderate in its praise of the Yi
He Tuan; and Yu Shengwu, Highlights of Chinese History (Beijing: F. L. P., 1962),
36-44, which is much freer with its praise.
50. Mary Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1957), 301-304.
51. Jiang Jieshi's (Chiang Kai-shek's) statements at the time of the "May 24th Incident"
(which involved attacks by Taiwaneseupon the American embassy in Taibeiduring 1957)
provide a clear illustration of the way the Boxers are used by officials and propagandists
on Taiwan. When the incident occurred, Jiang immediately apologized for the "Boxer-
like" events, saying that his government would never stand for any kind of repetition

705
of the 1900 catastrophe, which remained a "stigma" on the nation's "prestige and digni-
ty." In this same statement he also denounced the Chinese Communists as villains,
whose vileness was shown by their "publishing books on the [1900] Uprising, un-
ashamedly confessing that they are the successors to the Boxers" - Jiang Jieshi, Selected
Speeches and Messages (Taibei:TaiwanOffice of the President, 1957), 24- 26. See Dai,
Yi He Tuan Yanjiu, for a sample scholarly treatment of the Yi He Tuan.
52. For a sense of the ideological importance of the Boxers within the GPCR, see: Oi
Benyu's "Patriotism or National Betrayal," translated in Survey of Chinese Mainland
Magazines, 571 (April 10, 1967), 1-16; Jeremy Ingalls, Malice of Empire (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970), which contains both a translation of the play upon
which the denounced film was based, and an introduction that analyzes the mass criti-
cism campaign directed at the movie (which Liu Shaoqi was alleged to have praised);
and, Ross Terril, White-Boned Demon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1984), 103.
53. Cf. the anti-Maoist tirade in Jiang Meiling (Chiang Mei-ling), Selected Speeches
1965-1966 (Taibei: Taiwan Office of the President, 1968), 192; see also Issues and
Studies, iv (1968), 1. Western attempts to compare the 1966-1976 events with the
1898-1900 ones have generally been more geared toward understanding as opposed to
either defending or delegitimizing the Red Guards and Boxers. Nevertheless, some Red
Guard/Boxer comparisons, such as those that appeared in Life (September 23, 1966),
66-67, and The Far Eastern Economic Review (September 28, 1967), 621-622, have
served to reinforce traditional images.
54. See the "Refutation of Qi Benyu's Article 'Patriotism or National Betrayal'" in Lishi
Yanjiu [Historical Research], 12 (1979), 3-14; and the articles in Yi He 7lian Yundong
Shi Taolun Wenji [Collected Articles on the History of the Boxer Movement] (Jinan:
Qilu Shushem, 1982), for a sense of this new trend. Many recent assessments, with their
mixture of praise for the Boxers' bravery but criticism for some of the Yi He Tuan's
methods, targets and allies, are not terribly different in tone from those advanced by
Qu Qiubai in 1925and Hu Sheng in 1955. It is interesting to note that the latter's Imperi-
alism has been republished recently after being out of print for years.
55. See Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain Swing (New York: Pantheon, 1969).
56. The Skilled Labourer and Darvall, Popular Disturbances, are both careful, well-argued
studies of Luddism.
57. Currentscholarly debates on the revolutionary potential of Luddism are treated in John
Rule's introduction to the 1967 reprint of the The Skilled Labourer.
58. Two interesting critiques of aspects of the Rude, Hobsbawm, and Thompson treat-
ments of Luddism are in Thomis, The Luddites, 159-174 and John Bohstedt, Riots and
Community Politics in England and Wales 1790-1810 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 213-223.
59. One of the most famous pieces of neo-Luddite student rhetoric is Mario Savio's 1964
call to arms at the start of the Free Speech Movement, in which he called on students
to put their "bodies on the gears" of the establishment "machine" to show "the people
who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all."
See Ronald Segal, America's Receding Future (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1968), 193-194, for the text of this speech; as Segal points out Savio draws heavily upon
Thoreau - one of the earliest neo-Luddites(?) - for his imagery. On the Luddite strand
within the New left genenally, see Nigel Young. An Infantile Disorder? The Crisis and
Decline of the New Left (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1977), 379- 383. For a sample
critique of the new Luddism, which singles out the "Luddistic" Greens for particular
abuse, see Christopher Coker, "The Peace Movement and its Impact on Public Opin-
ion," The Washington Quarterly, viii, 1 (1985).

706
60. See Noble's Smashing Machines, Not Peoples (San Pedro, Cal.: Singlejack Books, 1986)
and "Present Tense Technology," democracy, iii, 2, 3, and 4 (1983). I draw very heavily
upon the latter throughout this section, and where no footnote appears during the fol-
lowing paragraphsassume that relevantcitations appear in Noble's series of articles. See
Barry Jones's subsection on "The social impact of the First and Second Industrial Revo-
lutions," in Sleepers, Wake! (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 20 and passim,
for another work that like those of Noble relates contemporary workerconcerns to those
of the early nineteenth century.
61. Pierre Dubois, Sabotage in Industry (New York: Penguin, 1979), 21.
62. Brzezinski, Between TwoAges: America's Role in the TechnetronicEra (New York:Vik-
ing, 1970), 108.
63. See New YorkTimes, March 16, 1985;and Bruce Bartlett, "The Luddite Answer to Un-
employment," The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 1983, which labels both economist
WassilyLeontief and Tom Hayden "Luddites," making it very clear that he sees the word
as a term of ridicule.
64. December 12, 1983.
65. Cited by George Will in The Washington Post, March 24, 1985. A computer data base
search aimed at finding all uses of terms derived from "Ludd" in newspaper and maga-
zine articles during the past several years pulled up no less than 292 citations. Run on
the Nexis data base, which contains full text copies of a variety of periodicals, including
such things as The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, Computerworld,
and The Economist, this figure gives a sense of how prevalent uses of the term "Lud-
dism" (and nearly all articles pulled up used the word in the traditional, pejorative sense
of "resisting progress") remain. Two typical epithetic uses appear in The Economist
(January 12, 1985), 4, and Fortune (December 10, 1984), 10.
66. Cf. K. Tsipis, "A Neo-Luddite's Interpretation," Bulletin of theAtomic Scientists, xxxiv
(1978), 42.
67. Numerous works handle the Chinese dilemma, but Joseph Levenson'smasterpiece, Con-
fucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley:University of California Press,
1965), remains the definitive treatment. Benjamin Schwartz'sbiography of YanFu (Yen
Fu), In Search of Wealthand Power (New York: Harper, 1969), also has interesting in-
sights into the general issue, as well as noting that Yan, the famous early translator of
Westernbooks and seemingly the last person to sympathzie with xenophobes, thought
of the Yi He Tuan as patriotic despite their foolishness - see 142. On the image of the
machine, see Maxine Berg, Machinery, Arthur Lewis, Jr.'s anthology volume, Of Men
and Machines (New York:E. P. Dutton, 1963), Winner, Autonomous Technology, and
Kasson, Civilizing the Machine.
68. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964);useful sum-
maries of Marcuse's position can be found in his "Remarks on a Redefinition of Cul-
ture," Daedalus, Winter (1965), and in Hearn, Domination, Chapter 1.
69. Theories of "technocracy" are treated at length in Winner, Autonomous Technology,
135-146 and 258- 262; see also the section entitled "Philosophers of the Technological
Age," which includes chapters by Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse, in Technology
and Man's Future, ed. Albret Teich, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972), 66-126.
70. Hearn develops this argument throughout Domination, but see 110-115 for Luddism
in particular,and the introductory and concluding chapters of the work for the author's
overall theoretical stance. See also Hearn, "Remembranceand Critique," Politics and
Society, 5, 2 (1972).
71. The idea that appealing to traditional norms can have progressive as well as reactionary
implications is a dominant theme within much recent writing on popular upheaval, by

707
those who subscribe to some version of "moral economy" ideas. Along with sources
previously cited, see: Craig C. Calhoun, "The Radicalism of Tradition," American Jour-
nal of Sociology, 88, 5 (1983), which explicitly examines Luddism; James C. Scott, The
Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); and Irwin
Scheiner, "The Mindful Peasant," Journal of Asian Studies, 32, 4 (1973). Though
neither moral economy notions nor Luddism per se plays an important role in his the-
ories, Alain Touraine'swritings are also worth considering in this regard, because he
speaks of the need to develop a mode of resistance to our contemporary pro-
grammed/technocratic society that relies upon such things as "attachment to tradition"
- see The Post-Industrial Society (New York: Random House, 1971), 27-28 and
51-69. For the impact Touraine'sideas have had on recent ecologically oriented social
movements in France, see Tony Chafer, "The Anti-Nuclear Movement and the Rise of
Political Ecology," in Philip G. Cerny, Social Movements and Protest in France (Lon-
don: Frances Pinter, 1982), 202-220.
72. 325-335.
73. See Elim Papadakis, The Green Movement in WestGermany (London: Croom Helm,
1984), 18-62 in particular,for an indepth look at one such new social movement, which
has been plagued by a certain degree of theoretical fuzziness, in part because of the "seri-
ous problems" posed by a "lack of clarity over the consequences and implications of
[its] critique of modern civilisation" - 31. See also Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New
York:Random House, 1970), 81 and passim, and The Third Wave(New York:William
Morrow, 1980), 166-168, both for information on the rising tide of ecological activism
and for insights into the theoretical problems involved in constructing a critique of
modernity free from charges of fanaticism. Toffler takes great pains in the first book
to distance the program he advocates from that of "technophobes, nihilists and Rous-
seauian romatics" prone to "Luddite paroxysms" - 81; in the latter work he uses less
dramatic terminology, but again contrasts the new "techno-rebels"with the earlier, less
sophisticated Luddites of Nottingham.
74. That the fear of being labelled "Luddites"has played an important role in limiting work-
er activism vis-a-vis the new technologies is demonstrated in F. Webster, "The Politics
of New Technology," The Socialist Register 1985-86 (London: Merlin Press, 1986),
385-413. See also K. Robins and F. Webster,"Luddism: New Technology and the Cri-
tique of Political Economy," Science, Technology and the Labour Process, ed. L.
Levidowand B. Young,vol. 2 (London: FreeAssociation Press, 1985), 9 - 48. These show
"Luddite" has remained a term of opprobrium even to some labor activists.


Remaking of Luddites As Heroes PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Remaking of Luddites As Heroes PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Remaking of Luddites As Heroes PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

"Civilization" and Its Discontents: The Boxers and Luddites as Heroes and Villains

Author(s): Jeffrey Wasserstrom

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

"Civilization" and its discontents

The Boxers and Ludditesas heroes and villains

[W]e have inherited the views of those who opposed

A bit of creative Luddism might not be amiss until we

An Australian labor leader, 19792

Ever since the bandit troubles of 1900, the name

Not in vain did the Yi He Tuan [Boxer] heroes shed

Theory and Society 16: 675- 707 (1987)

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

ranging from evangelical fervor to apocalyptical dread. The Boxers' and

An initial objection to any attempt to equate the Boxers' and Luddites'

There is undoubtedly something crucially different about the imperialist

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

destroyed customary notions of economic duty and judicial process that

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

The comparability of the "invasions" the Boxers and Luddites fought

The birth of an epithet, Part I: Luddism

Luddism's evolution into an epithet began in 1811 with contemporary

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

by the same feelings that led to elite ambivalence, presentedthe insurgents'

In additon to straight polemics on the topic of machine breaking (a genre

Overtly hostile writers were by no means the only ones to contribute to

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

of "friends," William Cobbett, helped make machine-breaking a symbol

A final force that helped to solidify "Luddism's"transformation into an

Thanks to the various kinds of writings outlined above, the equation of

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

The birth of an epithet, Part II: Boxerism

The evolution of "Boxerism"into an epithet proceeded along very similar

The Boxers first made an appreciable impact on the Westernpublic when

The treatments of Boxerism in Westernwritings of the following decades,

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

The image of "Boxerism" among educated Chinese quickly came to ap-

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

a great irony of early twentieth-century radicalism, Chen Duxiu, who

The remaking of a symbol, Part I: Boxerism

Although "Luddism"was the first term to appear in the annals of history,

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

respond to Westernpropagandists' taunts that they were nothing but "new

These rumblings of revisionism became a roar in 1925 after unarmed Chi-

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

Westernjournalist remarked, whenever foreigners talked of anti-Western

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

One of the most explicit treatments of the issue is found in an article by

Generallyspeaking the period since the 1920shas been markedby a variety

CCP historians and propagandists continued to be the Boxers' staunchest

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

The treatment scholars and propagandists in the PRC and Taiwanaccord

It is worth noting as an afterthought that since the late 1970sPRC scholars

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM

The remaking of a symbol, Part II: Luddism

The process by which "Luddism"was transformed from a derogatory term

Hobsbawm's article has important things to say about many aspects of

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:49:05 AM