Boxer Rebellion

The Yihetuan, the Militia United in Righteousness, grew out of North China's village martial arts and spirit possession societies, whose members believed ritual trance and boxing exercises could make them invulnerable to bullets. Through 1898 and 1899 these societies turned their anger on Christian missions and Chinese converts across Shandong and Zhili provinces, blaming missionaries' legal privileges and the churches' interference in local disputes for the province's economic hardship. By the summer of 1900 the movement had grown large enough, and gained enough sympathy at the Qing imperial court, that the Empress Dowager Cixi's government joined it in declaring war on the foreign powers.

What followed was the Boxers' most famous episode: a fifty five day siege of the foreign legations in Beijing, where diplomats, missionaries and Chinese Christian refugees held out until an international relief force, the Eight Nation Alliance, fought its way into the city in August 1900. The alliance's occupation was followed by extensive reprisal killing and looting across the countryside. The war ended formally with the Boxer Protocol of September 1901, which fined the Qing government a massive indemnity and permitted foreign troops to remain garrisoned in the capital, terms that shaped Chinese politics for the following decade.

For much of the twentieth century the Boxer uprising was read straightforwardly as a religious explosion: a spirit possession cult that turned its trance rituals and belief in bullet invulnerability directly against Christian missions, driven by a genuinely millenarian hostility to the foreign faith. Joseph Esherick's 1987 study, still the standard academic account of the movement's origins, reframed that reading. Working from Chinese, missionary and diplomatic archives, Esherick traced the Boxers' emergence to specific and material causes in late nineteenth century Shandong: repeated flooding and drought, disruption of traditional livelihoods along the Grand Canal as steamships and railways displaced boatmen, and mounting local resentment at the legal privileges Christian converts enjoyed under missionary protection in disputes with their non-Christian neighbors.

On Esherick's account, the movement's anti-Christian violence grew out of these grievances rather than preceding them, and its religious vocabulary, the spirit possession, the invulnerability rites, the martial societies, gave a shared, locally recognizable form to a rebellion whose roots were economic and social. The debate his work opened has not been resolved into a single consensus. Later historians have generally accepted his ecological and economic evidence while still insisting that the movement's religious character, not merely its idiom, remains central to explaining why it took the specific, violently anti-Christian shape that it did.