Boxers Rise: China Fights Foreign Domination

Militants of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, whom Westerners called "Boxers" for their martial arts practices, surged into Beijing in the summer of 1900 with the tacit support of Empress Dowager Cixi, attacking Chinese Christians and besieging foreign diplomatic compounds. The uprising had been building for years in Shandong Province, driven by resentment of foreign missionaries, economic exploitation by imperial powers, devastating floods, and drought that peasants blamed on the disruption of feng shui by foreign railroads and telegraph lines. The Boxers drew from poor rural communities, practicing rituals they believed made them invulnerable to bullets. They destroyed railroad tracks, cut telegraph wires, and murdered Chinese converts to Christianity, whom they viewed as traitors. By June 1900, the movement had reached the capital. Foreign legations in Beijing's diplomatic quarter prepared for siege, while the imperial court debated whether to support or suppress the uprising. Cixi, who had lost control of the political situation, chose to back the Boxers. An international relief force of roughly 20,000 troops from eight nations, including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States, fought its way from the coast to Beijing. The fifty-five-day siege of the Legation Quarter ended on August 14 when the allied force breached the city walls. The occupying armies then engaged in widespread looting, destruction of cultural sites, and reprisals against Chinese civilians that rivaled the Boxers' own violence. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed massive indemnities on China, totaling 450 million taels of silver, and granted foreign powers the right to station troops in Beijing. The humiliation accelerated the Qing Dynasty's decline and contributed directly to its collapse in 1911.