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This chapter probes Xue’s poetic response to late Qing reforms. Her four hundred fifty traditional-style poems literally chronicled the era. The termination of the Hundred Days and the repressive aftermath only urged Xue into more profound contemplation on the purpose and practice of the reform. One major issue was women’s proper positions within the guo amidst its re-conceptualization as state, country, and/or nation-state in the reform era. She would apply related ideas to the portrayal of women in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The final section examines Xue’s last poems composed during the New-Policy campaign and the constitutional movement, when Xue argued for a democratic republic as an ideal political structure for China.

This chapter presents a reading of Gene Luen Yang's two-part epic Boxers & Saints. In the novel, the fierce yet compassionate female warrior Mei-wen asks Boxer Rebellion leader Little Bao, “What is China but a people and their stories? ” (Boxers 312). Within the plurality of Mei-wen's rhetorical question is the implication of a multitude of stories, leading the words to be a self-referential gesture to the dual narratives of Boxers & Saints itself. The chapter first explores James Phelan's concept of narratives of contest before looking into examples of how Yang structures the narrative to highlight the synthetic component in aid of his authorial purpose. It then reflects on the complication of Yang's choice to conclude the narrative in epilogue. The chapter closes by returning to Yang's rhetorical purpose and situating it, as well as Phelan's contest of narratives, in connection to dialectics.

Homer Lea was a five-foot, three-inch hunchback whose career was stranger than those found in fictional romantic stories. He was known as a mysterious adventurer, author, and geopolitical strategist, and this created for him a role in the world. Lea began his adventures in 1900 after dropping out of Stanford University and went to China during the Boxer Rebellion where he became the ultimate and trusted personal military consultant to Chinese revolutionary leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. During his stay in China, Lea started to write and then soon became recognized as a prominent geopolitical and military strategist. In 1912, Homer Lea died due to his health condition but his short life and writings left an insightful imprint on the era's history. After his death, his writings were intentionally destroyed for the protection of his associates against possible legal prosecution.

This chapter asks: why have states stopped issuing formal declarations of war in interstate war? The chapter begins with an historical overview of the use of declarations of war, then moves to an empirical analysis based on original quantitative data and primary qualitative data. The main hypothesis of the chapter, which is supported by the data, is that states avoid declaring war because they want to avoid the legal liability of complying with the laws of war as those laws have proliferated over time.

This introductory chapter provides background and context for the remainder of the text, which is arranged by chronological chapters. There are three parts; the first examines the question of China's ‘distance’ from Britain, both geographically and in terms of cultural difference; the second focuses on three intellectuals (Bertrand Russell, RH Tawney and Joseph Needham) whose engagement with ‘The problem of China’ helped to shape the attitudes of the British left; the third section examines the pre-history of radical interest in China since the first Opium War of 1839–42. Although this was never a major feature of the politics of the left before the mid-1920s, left-wingers in the twentieth century were still able to ‘salvage’ a past from these earlier campaigns.

This chapter concentrates on the imperial significance of Australian engagement with China around the turn of the twentieth century. It illuminates the ways in which that relationship came to permeate a series of broader historical developments, each connected to Britain’s search for imperial unity, in an age of intense international rivalry. This influence is explored in relation to five key themes: the growing preoccupation with improving Britain’s system of imperial defence; the impact of the Boxer War on the evolution of Australian attitudes to China; the continuing imperial resonance of Australian efforts to enforce policies of migration restriction; the resulting impact on contemporary thinking about the future of the empire in the Pacific and the unity of Greater Britain; the re-importation of colonial ideas on race and exclusion into Britain itself.

This chapter focuses on the history of the period from the 1860s to the fall of the empire in 1911–12. The chapter details through minute analysis of books, journals, and the press, the extent to which the wider Chinese community distanced itself from any belief that Confucian values could be matched by Western international law that could have a simple ethical foundation. All that counted in international relations was military power, and the industrial strength which grounded it. Confucian ideals of world order, above all Kang Youwei’s, were too idealist. The other great intellectual of the turn of the century, Liang Qichao, believed that international law was a product of power.