To the Editor:
Since 1903, walking through the Memorial Arch in Tappan Square has been a Commencement tradition, honoring the Oberlin missionaries killed in the "Boxer Rebellion." Then, in the 1970's, Asian-American students initiated an alternative tradition - walking around the Arch -to recognize the unacknowledged massacre of thousands of Chinese people during the rebellion and to protest the narrow and biased perspective of history that the Arch represents. This practice of representing one side of history as the only valid prespective is itself a tool of imperialism and other continuing forms of oppression.
The Boxer Rebellion was a peasant rebellion stirred by domestic unrest and the imposition of Western imperialism. At the time, socioeconomic instability and internal conflicts for political power followed China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. The U.S. and European powers exploited this instability to expand their political and economic control of Asia and enhance their domination of international trade markets. Christian missionaries, despite their "good intentions," were often active or passive participants in spreading a doctrine of Anglo-Saxon superiority and manifest destiny. Also, the movement to "civilize the Chinese" is an inherently racist and ethnocentric assumption often used to justify imperialism. Economic and political pressure was used to convert the "primitive masses" of Chinese people to Christianity, as Christians in China received many benefits and privileges over the common people. Many of these missionaries took advantage of this, displaying arrogant attitudes and using their access to treaty privileges to protect their own converts.
In 1899, the Boxers or Yi Ho Tuan (Society of Righteousness and Harmony), composed primarily of peasants, began a sporadic drive against both Chinese Christians and Western Christian missionaries by burning their homes, in an attempt to regain self-determination. Exploitation by the local officials, the Chinese Imperial Court, foreigners, and the church, together with a period of poor harvests, all had contributed to the domestic unrest that eventually triggered a peasant rebellion. While few Westerners were killed, officials, residents, and missionaries panicked over an increasing anti-Christian sentiment. To protect Western interests and citizenry - a phrase used to justify countless imperialist aggressions including the recent Gulf War - thousands of additional foreign troops were brought in, against the protests of the Chinese Government. Though these new troops saved most Western lives, they also killed thousands of innocent Chinese and looted their villages. Amidst all the bloodshed, nineteen missionaries from Oberlin in the Shansi Province were killed.
We call on our fellow classmates not to deny or dismiss history, but rather to recognize the full range of history, and to show respect for those voices silenced by the victor's accounts of Western expansion and imperialism. To walk around the Arch, then, is a symbol of solidarity with the thousands of innocent Chinese also killed in the Boxer Rebellion. However, since Western - and specifically U.S.- imperialism continues to this day, as U.S. military, cultural and economic domination seeks to expand within the New World Order, the gesture of recognition of those silenced by the forces and the histories of imperialism is as important as ever in the present day.
For many students, certainly, the Arch seems to be nothing more than a meaningless public monument, and its significance in the commencement exercises simply a vestige of a dusty tradition. In recent years, however, the Arch has been a magnet of controversy, with the appearance of graffiti in 1993 and of the additional plaques in 1994. These controversies, over the message of the Arch and its relation to the college's vision, remain unresolved and bitter memories for many. Nonetheless, they testify to the fact that the Arch's legacy is ongoing. For those of us who understand its history, then, it is a concrete and ever-present reminder of precisely whose ideals, goals, interests and motivations lie behind Oberlin College's world-famous progressive vision. The ritual of walking through the Arch thus honors an approach to social consciousness that has painfully excluded many of us, even as it continues to do harm all over the world.
On Commencement Day, we ask you to walk around the Arch to acknowledge the thousands of Chinese who dedicated their lives to self-determination. Walk around the Arch to recognize all those who have been left out of Oberlin's vision of social progress. Walk around the Arch to honor those struggles that are obscured or denied by the dominant narratives of history.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 25; May 24, 1996
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