The 1929 Sino-Soviet War Read online

  The 1900 Boxer Uprising

  The West may have equated the 1900 Boxer Uprising with the siege of the Peking Legations, but in the Northeast, it was a full-scale war between China and Russia over control of the CER. The Boxer Uprising, a confused affair from the start, ended in disaster for China and was grounded in the fanatical beliefs espoused by the Yi Ho Chuan (Righteous and Harmonious Fists), or Boxers, so called for their public displays of martial arts drills. It arose at the height of imperialist encroachment in China at the close of the nineteenth century. The catalyst was an intertwining of nationalist frustration and the desperate poverty gripping parts of North China, especially in Shantung. The movement legitimized violent xenophobia, and to the Boxers, their drills were more than a means to conventional military power, as the training claimed to impart to its followers supernatural strength, which included psychic imperviousness to bullets, known as the “armor of the golden bell,” a protection acquired after following a months-long ritual. While seen as outlandish to outside observers, they were in keeping with ancient traditional martial beliefs. The Art of War and other martial texts dating back to the Warring States Period (476–221BCE) had remained and still are part of China’s military science, but the Boxer’s practices were a link to lessons that had been abandoned in the modern era, such as sections of Tai-kung’s Six Secret Teachings, which emphasized the ability of military leaders to use their mental and spiritual prowess to make battlefield prognostications while identifying and manipulating the chi (roughly meaning the life force) of the enemy, their army, and even nature itself. The Boxer’s pseudomystical beliefs were unusual but not unprecedented.24

  Grounded in this form of mysticism and secret military learning, the goals of the Boxers were to restore traditional Chinese beliefs by overthrowing the Ch’ing dynasty and expelling the “foreign devils” to remove their corrupting influences—ends that were as unwelcome in the capitals of Europe as in the Forbidden City. As the Boxers grew in power, their strong antiforeign beliefs—a conflicted mishmash of justified anger at foreign abuses and distasteful ethnocentrism—came to be embraced by Peking as a means to put the foreign powers in their place. By 1898, after the collapse of the progressive Hundred Days of Reform, an uneasy quasi-official relationship advocated by Shantung governor Yu-hsien had been formed, symbolized by recasting many Boxers groups as militias. A missionary in Shantung noted the change in a slogan, now directed at “supporting the Ch’ing dynasty and eliminating the foreigners.” Even though the initial targets were both Chinese Christians and foreigners, the overarching antialien sentiment was always present. Predictably, the first murder of a foreigner occurred in Shantung with the brutal death an English clergyman, Sidney Brooks, on 31 December 1899.25

  The Powers, save Russia who saw no direct threat, protested the violence.26 More incidents soon followed. The situation for foreigners and Chinese Christians had become so dangerous in North China by mid-1900 that they began to evacuate the countryside, with many seeking refuge in Peking, congregating in the legation quarter and the nearby North Cathedral abutting the fortified walls inside the Imperial City. The Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi attempted to assuage the fears of the Powers by replacing Shantung governor Yu-hsien with the more capable and aggressive Yuan Shih-kai. Yuan, who was also the commander of the Newly Created Army (one of the only military formations in China that was trained and equipped along modern Western lines), succeeded in suppressing the Boxers, only to see them flee into Chihli and toward Peking, making the situation there all the more precarious for the foreign population.27

  Faced with a dangerously deteriorating situation that the Ch’ing seemed incapable of correcting, the Powers assembled a fleet of ships off the coast on the Bay of Pohai and landed a military force of several thousand troops, under the framework of an eight-nation alliance, to relieve the 4,000 souls now surrounded and besieged in Peking. When the allied troops advanced from the coast near Tientsin in mid-June without imperial permission, the Empress Dowager ordered the Chinese army to halt the relief column. This was no sign of overt support for the Boxers, but on the grounds that suppressing the Boxers was the responsibility of the Ch’ing, a foreign military strike was unacceptable. The intervention of the superior Chinese army gave the allied force no choice but to fall back, arriving just outside Tientsin on 26 June to await reinforcement. The situation was still perilous for the allies, as nearly two weeks earlier, on 15 June, the Boxers had risen in Tientsin, besieging the foreign quarter there as they had in Peking. In response to the uprising, and to protect the allied rear, the multinational naval force attacked and seized the nearby Chinese Taku forts on 17 July, opening the Pei River from the Bay of Pohai and paving the way for the relief of Tientsin’s foreign quarter while securing a base of operations for a future allied relief expedition to Peking. The assaults were met with a declaration of war against the allies by Peking on 21 June, and the city of Tientsin remained in the hands of the Boxers.28

  By this time, the Boxer movement had also spread to southern Manchuria—an expected outcome given the presence of over 100,000 sparrow laborers from Shantung, many of them CER workers. While the growth of the Boxers was less dramatic than in North China—their calls to violence proved less appealing, in part reflecting the better lot of the typical Northeastern peasant, who was disinterested in revolutionary change—it was enough to alarm the Russians, who had felt that they had a special relationship with the Chinese, thus shielding them from the more extreme forms of antiforeignism. One Russian CER rail guard officer who came upon a secret rally being held by Boxer recruiters in April noted their distinctive yellow sashes, headbands, and martial exercises, but was allowed to observe and walk away unmolested. The Russians also noted that bandits, particularly the Red Beards, were posing a serious danger to the CER. Apprehensions rose again after Boxer attacks against Christians soon branched out into attacks against railways, the hated “iron centipedes.”29

  Chief Engineer A. I. Yugovich feared that the CER would bear the brunt of Chinese anger in the Northeast, where Major General Aleksandr A. Gerngross’s 4,500-man CER Independent Border Guard Unit protected the railway. Formed in 1897, it was an unusual organization, as it operated within China but was under the supervision of the Finance Ministry, not the Russian army. Although Gerngross was a career army officer and guards were paid better than soldiers, the army looked down on the unit, whose members were referred to as Matilda’s Guards—a disparaging reference to Minister Witte’s wife. Major General Vladimir V. Sakharov, commander of the border guard corps at Khabarovsk and Gerngross’s superior, was concerned enough to cable Vice Finance Minister P. M. Romanov at St. Petersburg on 6 June, requesting that a force of 11,000 infantry and cavalry be sent to defend the CER. Protecting the CER from the Boxers had become a priority.30

  June witnessed a dramatic increase in “expel the barbarian” activities in the Northeast—so much so that by 25 June, the War Ministry issued a mobilization order to Governor-General Lieutenant General Nikolai I. Grodekov at Khabarovsk for all Russian army units in the Priamur, containing the Trans-Baikal, Amur, Maritime, and Kamchatka districts. Two days later, the first attack on the CER took place. Witte was in St. Petersburg, along with much of the CER management. They resisted military action, as they feared the arrival of Russian troops would prove counterproductive by inflaming Chinese sensibilities. Eventually the violence demanded action, and even Witte asked the tsar to authorize a military campaign by mid-July. Like outbreaks elsewhere in China, the attacks were widespread and seemingly uncoordinated, but unlike those in China proper, the attacks in the Northeast centered on the physical destruction of the CER.31

  Until the declaration of war, the imperial policy emanating out of the Forbidden City of overtly vowing to rein in the Boxers while covertly supporting them confused both the Russian and the local Ch’ing commanders. In part a reflection of divisions within the Manchu court, when the declaration of war was announced, it was so vague that General Tseng-chi in Fengtien
was not even sure what country or countries were at war with China. Peking had attempted to limit the role of the army, advising the Kirin Governor-General Chang-chun, “If we have to fight against the Russians, let the Boxers be the vanguard, and we ourselves must be most discreet.” Committing the Ch’ing army, however, was unavoidable, as there simply was not a credible Boxer force in the Northeast—a reality that accounted for the heavy fighting that followed. Unfortunately, the provincial forces in Manchuria had benefited little from the military reforms that began after China’s defeat by Japan four years earlier; there were no modern units akin to those in the Self-Strengthening or Newly Created armies, and although Manchurian forces had been equipped with improved artillery and a few units were armed with first-rate Mauser rifles, they were no match for the tsar’s troops.32

  The conduct of the war was complex, unlike the more straightforward allied drive to relieve the Peking Legations. The fighting in the Northeast was widespread and went through several phases that began with the June CER attacks. The Chinese were quick to take advantage of the departure of over 7,000 tsarist soldiers sent to join the Peking relief expedition. When the Boxer crisis erupted in North China in mid-June, there were three Russian brigades in the Far East. Within a few weeks, the 2nd East Siberian Rifle Brigade had left Vladivostok, and the bulk of the 3rd Brigade departed Port Arthur to join the allied force assembling near Tientsin. The remaining 1st Brigade was sent to Port Arthur, leaving one of its regiments at Vladivostok. The Chinese proved so successful at severing the CER that the isolated Russian guard detachments were cut off and overwhelmed along almost the entire line. In one case, the guards, the railway employees, and their families at Mukden were forced to trek overland to Korea and safety. The Russians abandoned one section of the railway after another, having no choice but to retreat toward their enclaves at Harbin or under the protection of Vice Admiral Yevgeni I. Alekseyev’s forces on the Liaotung Peninsula and the nearby treaty port of Yingkow or the border cities of Manchouli and Poganinchnaya at the extremes of the CER.33

  The attacks were not limited to the CER. The Amur River in the far north of Manchuria became a war front, with the Russian port city of Blagoveshchensk the focal point of the fighting. Troubles on the river between Chinese and Russian ships began in June, and Russian authorities reacted by impressing and arming several paddle-wheel steamers into service to end the often violent disputes. The fighting between Blagoveshchensk and the Teheiho–Aigun region on opposite banks of the Amur River was in many ways a uniquely isolated conflict, and one uncharacteristic of the battles fought along the CER. The two towns held important positions. Blagoveshchensk, with a population of just under 20,000, was the capital of the Russian Amur District, while Teheiho–Aigun was the site of the original Manchu capital of Heilungkiang province, established in the late seventeenth century to monitor Russian activities in the Far East, and had become an important agricultural and lumber shipping hub. War came to Blagoveshchensk on the Sunday afternoon of 15 July with a shelling by Chinese batteries located across the river at Teheiho, an attack that killed and wounded several women and children and threw the civilian population into terrified confusion as they sought shelter.34

  Two days later, the worst atrocity of the war occurred at Blagoveshchensk when soldiers under Lieutenant General Konstantin N. Gribsky, the local commander, gathered up some 4,000 Chinese civilians living on the Russian side of the Amur, either from Blagoveshchensk or the nearby Chinese community of Hailanpao (also known as the Sixty-Four Villages). The soldiers marched them to the river’s edge, where they were given the choice of trying to swim the two kilometers across the river to the Chinese bank or facing execution. Complete terror ensued as the massacre got underway. Only a few dozen survived. Many Russians were appalled. One commentator wrote, “What shall we tell civilized people? We are mean and terrible people; we have killed those who hid at our place, who sought our protection.”35 Over the next several weeks, the two sides bombarded each other, regardless of civilian casualties, and river raids became the norm as the action shifted to Harbin, the CER headquarters and center of Russian power in the Northeast. The damage to Sino-Russian relations in the region was lasting but yielded an important result: it eradicated Chinese settlements north of the Amur River once and for all. Those lands were now the sole domain of Russia.36

  Harbin had begun to receive refugees as early as 6 July. Four days later, CER officials, led by Chief Engineer Yugovich, lined the docks to bid farewell their wives and children, who were being evacuated to Khabarovsk by steamer while a militia was hastily formed to reinforce the combined police and guard detachment under General Gerngross. Harbin at the time was populated by perhaps 20,000 clustered in three districts: Pristan (the wharves on the Sungari River); New Town, which was under construction; and the Old City, which was populated by Chinese railway workers, who made up more than half the population. Over the next week, Russian civilians and guard detachments from places such as Tsitsihar and Tiehling continued to arrive, often having fought their way through Chinese army units to the west or through soldiers and armed bands of Boxers to the south. Things took a turn for the worse as the news of the Blagoveshchensk massacre spread. Heilungkiang governor-general Shou-shan at Tsitsihar, after hearing of the deaths, informed the Russians that as of 22 July, a state of war existed.37

  The next night, as merchants attempted to embark their goods, women, crying children, the infirm, and anyone not subject to CER orders—approximately 3,000 people in all—left for Khabarovsk. Surprisingly, only three casualties were suffered when Chinese gunners shelled the steamships as they left the Pristan docks. Yugovich drafted every male CER employee under the age of fifty into the guard with the promise of a 50 percent salary bonus. In order to form a defensive perimeter, Gerngross directed that both Old Harbin and New Town be abandoned in favor of Pristan and to clear fields of fire. Outlying buildings were rigged with demolitions, including the recently built Cathedral of St. Nikolai. The city, now cut off, had been able to muster almost 2,000 men under arms when the weeklong siege began on 26 July with the shelling of docks. The population had plummeted to 4,000 souls.38

  The Harbin siege signaled the high watermark of the Chinese offensive as the balance of military power shifted to the Russians. The Chinese attacks had swept like a prairie fire that raged along the CER but burned itself out after the initial fighting. Having survived the onslaught, General Grodekov prepared for a counterattack. Russian forces in Manchuria had been organized into two corps, with the overall command of the northern army corps given to Grodekov while Admiral Alekseyev led the southern army corps from Port Arthur. By the end of July, the two had gained control of the Amur, Ussuri, and most of the Sungari rivers, stabilized the situation in the Kwantung Peninsula, and secured the South Manchuria branch of the CER from Port Arthur to Tiehling, sixty kilometers south of Mukden. When reinforcements arrived from European Russia, the two commanders were ready to go on the offensive, opening the final phase of the Boxer Uprising in the Northeast. Military operations were divided between the commanders. The aim of their two-phase offensive was to first have Grodekov’s northern forces regain control over the east and west CER lines from Manchouli to Pogranichnaya, which was to be followed by two converging attacks along the South Manchuria line conducted by Grodekov from the north and Alekseyev from the south.39

  The northern offensive began with a thrust into the western extreme of Manchuria on 25 July, one day before Chinese forces surrounded Harbin, and was the first of a four-pronged penetration of the Northeast from the Priamur. Under the command of Major General Nikolai Orlov, 5,000 Cossacks from the Trans-Baikal District crossed the frontier on a drive for Hailar, some 120 kilometers to the east; Hailar was captured by 6 August. Three days later, Orlov began to march on Tsitsihar, farther to the east with additional reinforcements heading his way. Grodekov had also been building up the garrison at Blagoveshchensk, so that by the end of July, there were nearly 10,000 Russian troops there ready t
o cross the Amur and carry out the next attack. General Gribsky, the man who ordered the 19 July massacre, went on the offensive on 2 August; within a matter of days, he had successfully crossed the Amur, captured the Teheiho–Aigun district, and sent a force to advance on Tsitsihar to the south under Major General Paul (or Pavel) von Rennenkampf. At the same time, the third and fourth prongs of Grodekov’s offensive, aimed at the relief of Harbin, got underway.40

  On 21 July, a convoy of armed steamships carrying 5,000 troops under General Sakharov prepared to depart Khabarovsk, steam up the Amur to the mouth of Sungari, and from there head upriver to Harbin. Simultaneously, near Pogranichnaya at the eastern terminus of the CER, Major General Nikolai M. Chichagov, with 4,000 troops, advanced west along the CER toward Harbin. By 3 August, Chichagov’s cavalry had reached the outskirts of Harbin, and that evening, the first of Sakharov’s steamships docked at Pristan. The siege of Harbin had been lifted, and soon the forces under Gerngross were striking in two directions: east along the CER toward Chichagov’s main body, and at Tsitsihar, nearly 300 kilometers west of Harbin. Tsitsihar, the provincial capital and the last remaining Chinese stronghold in Heilungkiang, was now facing three converging Russian columns from the east, north, and west. Faced with a hopeless situation, the Chinese surrendered to Rennenkampf’s cavalry on 28 August. Governor-General Shou-shan committed suicide shortly thereafter, and Rennenkampf was joined by Orlov’s force six days later.41

  The Harbin column was recalled upon hearing the news of Tsitsihar’s surrender, while the ever-aggressive Orlov and Rennenkampf opted to march into Kirin province on 7 September. Organized resistance by Chinese in the north ended within a fortnight, when Prince Ch’ing (Yi Kuang) urged the Kirin governor-general to cease hostilities on 23 September. The province was surrendered to Rennenkampf on the same day. The situation in North China had also turned against the Chinese: on 14 July, one of the darkest days for the Russians in the Northeast, the allied expeditionary force had taken Tientsin, opening the road to Peking, and one month later, on 14 August, the legations were relieved and the defenseless Forbidden City surrounded by the allies.42 The only remaining center of resistance was the Chinese army in Fengtien province under Governor-General Ching Chang, but Admiral Alekseyev was doing his best to change that. With Grodekov’s northern offensive advancing on all four axes, Admiral Alekseyev was still awaiting sufficient reinforcement. Nonetheless, he did order a limited offensive toward Harbin on 10 August that advanced the front along the CER’s South Manchuria line, culminating in the capture of Haicheng on 12 August, a city almost 300 kilometers from Port Arthur but still over 600 kilometers from Harbin to the north.43