Boxer Rebellion: Anti-imperialist uprising which took place in China 1899-1901

It was led by the Boxers, a group of Chinese against the huge amount of foreign influence in China.

The rebellion happened while many foreign countries (Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia) were scrambling for concessions in the Qing dynasty in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the First Sino-Japanese War. These countries were Japan, Britain, Germany, and Russia.

The Boxers were Chinese who were angry about the growing power of foreigners in China. They wanted to fight and drive out all foreigners and even the Chinese who helped the foreigners. The Boxers got many people to help them and drove their fight to Peking (now Beijing).

The interior inner city of Beijing was known as the Tartar city because it was mostly Manchu and half of all Manchus in China lived there. Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy made an alliance to conduct an expedition against the Boxers in Beijing. That made Empress Dowager Cixi declare war on all of them and send the Gansu Army to help the Boxers.

The first foreign expedition to Beijing, the Seymour Expedition, was defeated. The foreign legations in Beijing were surrounded for 55 days before the foreign reinforcements got through in the Gaselee Expedition, which got to the legations in Beijing. The Manchus suffered tremendously as the foreign soldiers went around raping the women and killing the men. The rest of China outside Manchuria and Zhili Province, was not affected since the Han governor generals such as Yuan Shikai, Li Hongzhang, Liu Kunyi and Zhang Zhidong, signed a pact, the Mutual Defense Pact of the Southeastern Provinces, to keep their provinces out of the war and not to help the Qing court. That made the foreigners not attack them.

The foreigners were very angry with the Qing and said that China had to pay them even more money and to execute othe fficials responsible for supporting the Boxers like the Manchu Bannerman Governor Yuxian, Qixiu, Captain Enhai (En Hai) and Manchu Zaixun, Prince Zhuang and Han General Dong Fuxiang. China agreed to execute all the Manchu officials like Yuxian, Qixiu, Enhai and Zaixun but refused to execute Dong Fuxiang. A few years later in 1911, the Qing dynasty collapsed, and China had a new government, the Republic of China, but the foreigners, especially the Japanese, still influenced the country.

• Opium Wars
• First Sino-Japanese War
• Qing dynasty
• Empress Dowager Cixi
• Imperial Japanese Army
• Open Door Policy
• Imperialism