Today, the impact of the Boxers Uprising is evident in the amount of debate and research surrounding it. What caused the movement to spread out of Shandong and throughout northern China? What were the goals and motivation behind the uprising? I believe the Boxer Uprising erupted in the summer of 1900 because of a combination of factors, including the increase of Western influence encroaching on China, the build-up of resentment caused by previous historical events felt in nearly every social class, such as the Opium Wars, and allegations that environmental issues were aggravated by foreign powers. This increased anti-foreign and anti-Christian sentiment boiled over in a catastrophic manner.
The causes of the Boxer Uprising can be seen if you
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From missionaries who were attacked by the Boxers, to word of mouth stories passed down from the peasants involved, to Chinese higher ups, who rejected the movement as well as those who supported it, these accounts have biases to them that should be taken into account. A common link between the historians’ theories on the Boxers are that they were heavily motivated by anti-foreign sentiment. In Hu Sheng’s book, From the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement, the Chinese “suffered from an increasingly large amount of foreign imports, notably textiles, that destroyed the natural economy of the villages, bankrupted the native handicraft industry, and made life miserable for the peasant and other laboring masses.” I agree with Victor Purcell, who attempted to tie the different perspectives together and concluded that the Boxer Uprising was an anti-foreign and anti-Christianity movement, starting off as an anti-Qing uprising, then coming to support it later. This view is evident in the records of Boxer leaders pronouncing their desire to “restore the Ming dynasty!” and to “Kill the foreign devils!” and later taking on a more nationalistic approach, saying that they want to support the Qing empire by expelling the foreigners and their ideas. (Purcell …show more content…
They performed “boxing art” and “devotees of the ritual became possessed by spirits who made them happily invulnerable to bullets.” Joseph W. Esherick, in his book The Origins of the Boxer Rebellion, believed that the movement was rooted, spread and motivated by “an instance of mass shamanism, and it had more to do with the spread of magical techniques than the mobilization of any organization of Chinese martial arts.”
The Boxer uprising came to a peak in the summer of 1900, and was the accumulation of many aspects. Empress Ci Xi encouraged the Boxers with her anti-foreign sentiments, the foreigners partially instigated it by encroaching on the land of the Chinese, and environmental aspects correlated with the foreigner’s arrival, giving the Boxers further reason to further their anti-foreigner and anti-Christian