ACCOUNTABILITY FOR “CRIMES AGAINST THE LAWS OF HUMANITY” IN BOXER CHINA:

 

China was in the wrong in failing to protect non-combatant, private subjects of even the nations upon whom she was declaring war. For such a crime there would come most drastic retribution. 

So far as the Imperial Government is concerned, she either forced such persons to become belligerent in self-defence, or violated all feelings of humanity by encompassing their death, and that, too, by barbaric methods.

 To be shot down, as dies the soldier on the battle-field, may be passed calmly by; but one's blood boils to think of delicate women, little children, and strong men, beheaded, outraged, cut to pieces, their bodies cast to dogs and 

wolves.

 The American missionaries, burned or slaughtered at Pao-ting-fu, had never given the slightest offence, and were from 

homes of Christian culture and refinement. 

- Gilbert Reid, The Ethics of the Last China War, 32 THE FORUM

446, 454 (1901) 

Literature concerned with the history of international criminal law omits a major advancement in the field; the fin de siècle trial of four Chinese officials in an international theatre for their participation in the massacre by Boxers of Chinese and Western Christians in the city of Paoting-Fu.

 Before the matter was resolved the murders exacerbated tensions between the Allies and the Qing government, and would be acknowledged by the Great Powers as “crimes against the laws of humanity.” The trial and execution of 

the guilty officials excited international attention, and forced a diplomatic and public conversation on the limits and appropriateness of international criminal punishment and retaliatory sentiment. 

The case offers a cogent illustration of the dilemma confronting the more conscientious elements of the Allied command; how to honor the spirit of the new Hague Conventions, which were unprecedented in the degree to which they humanized war, while preserving national honor. Ultimately, General Gaselee, commander of the Paoting-Fu expedition, managed to craft a judicial forum for the trial which, while imperfect by modern standards, fit squarely in the interstices between the old world of empire and the 

emerging world of universal international law. 

 The birth of international criminal law is typically traced to the post-war prosecutions of Nazi and Japanese war criminals by the Allies,1 when in fact the Great Powers frequently turned to internationalized criminal or quasi-criminal forums, as well as the rhetoric of ‘humanity’ and ‘civilization,’ to project power, establish narratives, manage public opinion, express dissatisfaction, and defend humanitarian values in the century after the Napoleonic

wars.

2 That these stories have been relegated to a narrative hinterland belies the important role each played in establishing an international criminal law vocabulary and shaping subsequent expectations of accountability.

3 The purpose of this paper is to restore one such significant but unexplored caesure—the trial of a number of Chinese officials, accused of participating in Boxer atrocities, before an ‘International Commission’ by the Great Powers in 1900. The Boxer Uprising was an anti-Western and anti-Christian peasant insurgency mostly located in Northeast China.

 A series of Boxer attacks on Western missionaries, Christian Chinese converts, 

and foreign legations and diplomats in Peking in early 1900 prompted the Great Powers (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Great Britain, the United States, and neophyte Japan) with interests in China to dispatch an international relief force in the summer of that year. During the early stages of the intervention it was reported that seventy Christians had been gruesomely murdered in Paoting-Fu;

4 securing and punishing that city thereafter became a priority for the Allies, who organized a punitive expedition after securing footholds in the nearby cities of Tientsin and Peking. The operation could have taken the form of other Allied expeditions, which were characterized by acts of extreme violence to-ward Boxers (or unlucky civilians who came from villages suspected of harbouring Boxers).

 But the Paoting-Fu expedition was different. When the Allies reached the city in mid-October 1900, they 

established an “International Commission” to inquire into the 

cause of the massacres and apportion responsibility among guilty 

parties who fell into their hands. In what was widely hailed as “one of the most satisfactory aspects of the campaign,”5 the French, German, Italian and British commissioners gathered evidence for seven days and ultimately recommended death by beheading for three Chinese officials, removal from office for another, and an additional trial in Tientsin for a fifth. The punishment was approved by the Allied Field Marshal, the German General Alfred von Waldersee, and carried out on November 7, 1900. 

The trial was the only one of its kind held as a result of the intervention, as the punishment of other middle and high-ranking Chinese officials 

proceeded on the basis of negotiations between the Qing government and the intervening powers. Although the Commission has recently received some brief attention by a few dedicated historians, it has so far escaped scrutiny 

within the international criminal law community.

6 Accordingly, a number of questions about the trial have remained unanswered. What actually happened at Paoting-Fu? Was it fair? Why did this operation, unlike others, result in an international criminal trial? What meaning did the trial have for the belligerents and the communities they represented? What consequences did the trial have for the development of international criminal law? 

Drawing on previously unexplored material from state archives, published and unpublished missionary correspondence 

and military memoirs, and contemporaneous press reports, this 

paper addresses these questions in four parts. Part 2 of this article 

first sets the scene by briefly describing the state of the armed con-flict in October 1900, then recounts the story of the Commission’s day-to-day operation, culminating in the execution of three Chinese officials. Part 3 sets the trial in its legal, cultural and strategic 

context, positioning it as an event framed by, among other factors, the concomitant coherence of international criminal law and a shift in thinking about the role of collective punishment in war. 

Part 4 

highlights how the relevant constituencies viewed the trials, and traces the influence of this seminal experiment with individual accountability for international crimes on later efforts to create an international jurisdiction to try the Kaiser in the wake of the First World War. Finally, Part 5 explores the judicial character and fairness of the Commission.