Chinas Boxer Rebellion of 1900

China's Boxer Rebellion of 1900 The Boxer Rebellion,  a bloody uprising in China at the turn of the 20th century against foreigners, is a relatively obscure historical event with far-reaching consequences that nevertheless is often remembered because of its unusual name. The Boxers Who exactly were the Boxers? They were members of a secret society made up mostly of peasants in northern China known as I-ho-chuan (Righteous and Harmonious Fists) and were called the Boxers by the  Western press; members of the secret society practiced boxing and calisthenic rituals that they thought would make them impervious to bullets and attacks, and this led to their unusual but memorable name. Background   At the end of the 19th century, Western countries and Japan had major control over economic policies in China  and had significant territorial and commercial control in northern China. The peasants in this area were suffering economically, and they blamed this on the foreigners who were present in their country. It was this anger that gave rise to the violence that would go down in history as the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxer Rebellion Beginning in the late 1890s, the Boxers began attacking Christian missionaries, Chinese  Christians  and foreigners in northern China. These attacks eventually spread to the capital, Beijing, in June 1900, when  the Boxers destroyed railroad  stations and churches and laid siege to the area where foreign diplomats lived. It is estimated that that death toll included several hundred foreigners and several thousand Chinese Christians. The Qing Dynastys Empress Dowager Tzu’u Hzi  backed the Boxers, and the day after the Boxers began the siege on foreign diplomats, she declared war on all foreign countries that had diplomatic ties with China.   Meanwhile, a multinational foreign force was gearing up in northern China. In August 1900, after nearly two months of the siege, thousands of allied American, British, Russian, Japanese, Italian, German, French and Austro-Hungarian troops moved out of northern China to take Beijing and put down the rebellion, which they accomplished. The Boxer Rebellion formally ended in September 1901 with the signing of the Boxer Protocol, which mandated the punishment of those involved in the rebellion and required China to pay reparations of $330 million to the countries affected. Fall of the Qing Dynasty The Boxer Rebellion weakened the Qing dynasty, which was the last imperial dynasty of China and ruled the country from 1644 to 1912. It was this dynasty that established the modern territory of China.   The diminished state of the Qing dynasty after the Boxer Rebellion opened the door to the Republican Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the emperor and made China a republic. The Republic of China,  including mainland China and Taiwan, existed from 1912 to 1949. It fell to the Chinese Communists in 1949, with mainland China officially becoming the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan the headquarters of the Republic of China. But no peace treaty has ever been signed, and significant tensions remain.

Definition and Examples of Subvocalizing

Definition and Examples of Subvocalizing Though subvocalizing, the act of  saying words silently to oneself while reading, tends to limit how fast we can read, it isnt necessarily an undesirable habit. As Emerald Dechant observes, It seems likely that speech traces are a part of all, or nearly all, thinking and probably even silent reading. . . . That speech aids thinking was recognized by early philosophers and psychologists (Understanding and Teaching Reading). Examples of Subvocalizing A powerful but woefully under-discussed influence on readers is the sound of your written words, which they hear inside their heads as they subvocalizegoing through the mental processes of generating speech, but not actually triggering speech muscles or uttering sounds. As the piece unfolds, readers listen to this mental speech as if it were spoken aloud. What they hear is, in fact, their own voices saying your words, but saying them silently.Here is a fairly typical sentence. Try reading it silently and then out loud. It was the Boston Public Library, opened in 1852, that founded the American tradition of free public libraries open to all citizens. As you read the sentence you should notice a pause in the flow of words after Library and 1852 . . .. Breath units divide the information in the sentence into segments that readers subvocalize separately.(Joe Glaser, Understanding Style: Practical Ways to Improve Your Writing. Oxford Univ. Press, 1999) Subvocalizing and Reading Speed Most of us read by subvocalizing (saying to ourselves) the words in the text. Although subvocalizing can help us remember what we read, it limits how fast we can read. Because covert speech is not much faster than overt speech, subvocalization limits reading speed to the rate of speaking; we could read faster if we didnt translate printed words into speech-based code.(Stephen K. Reed, Cognition: Theories and Applications, 9th ed. Cengage, 2012)[R]eading theorists such as Gough (1972) believe that in high-speed fluent reading, subvocalizing does not actually happen because the speed of silent reading is faster than what would occur if readers said each word silently to themselves as they read. The silent reading speed for 12th graders when reading for meaning is 250 words per minute, whereas the speed for oral reading is only 150 words per minute (Carver, 1990). However, in beginning reading, when the word-recognition process is far slower than in skilled fluent reading, subvocalizati on . . . may be taking place because the reading speed is so much slower.(S. Jay Samuels Toward a Model of Reading Fluency. What Research Has to Say About Fluency Instruction, eds. S.J. Samuels and A.E. Farstrup. International Reading Assoc., 2006) Subvocalizing and Reading Comprehension [R]eading is message reconstruction (like reading a map), and for the most part comprehension of meaning depends on using all the cues available. Readers will be better decoders of meaning is they understand sentence structures and if they concentrate most of their processing ability on the extraction of meanings using both semantic and syntactic context in reading. Readers must check the validity of their predictions in reading by seeing whether they produced language structures as they know them and whether they make sense. . . .In summary, an adequate response in reading thus demands much more than the mere identification and recognition of the configuration of the written word.(Emerald Dechant, Understanding and Teaching Reading: An Interactive Model. Routledge, 1991)Subvocalization (or reading silently to oneself) cant in itself contribute to meaning or understanding any more than reading aloud can. Indeed, like reading aloud, subvocalization can only be accomplished with anythi ng like normal speed and intonation if it is preceded by comprehension. We dont listen to ourselves mumbling parts of words or fragments of phrases and then comprehend. If anything, subvocalization slows readers down and interferes with comprehension. The habit of subvocalization can be broken without loss of comprehension (Hardyck Petrinovich, 1970).(Frank Smith, Understanding Reading, 6th ed. Routledge, 2011)