Was the Boxer Rebellion the most influential event in Chinese history?

I’m admit I’m no expert on Asian history and I’d love to learn more, but I do pick up stuff here and there.

I was recently reading African Kaiser and they had a section on the Boxer Rebellion which is a subject I had only really heard in passing, but it kinda struck me as having so many implications for China greater than anything I’ve ever heard of at least.

Long story short, a bunch of European countries had holdings in China in the 1890s. And the Chinese people didn’t like it, including the empress (who by many accounts was a sexual TRex).

After the second opium war, the Chinese emperors had to agree to let westerners preach across all of China. This was very insulting to a lot of Chinese people. So in the late 1800s, religious anti-western martial arts societies started forming. Let’s call these groups boxers.

By all accounts, these Boxer groups were nuts. They believed they were invincible against western armies. They thought they could stop bullets with swords, etc. They slowly began assassinating western missionaries across China. This encouraged the local peasantry to also step up anti-western efforts.

Eventually a German diplomat was assassinated and the diplomatic quarter of Peking was besieged.

Soon after this happened, everyone’s least favorite newspaper, the Daily Mail, printed a completely false newspaper article claiming that every man , woman, and child in the diplomatic quarter was killed.

This infuriated the west. So, Great Britain, Germany, the US, France, Japan, Italy, and Austria-Hungry declares war on China. They came to China and completely wrecked ship. Martial law was instituted, all the boxers were summarily executed, and the Chinese Army was made into a laughing stock.

This whole incident showed how weak China truly was and the effects of this are the China we have today.

The Qing dynasty never recovered, collapsing several years later with us getting the brutal civil war between nationalists and communists.

These groups whoever, remained horrified with just how crazy all the different boxer groups were so they implemented hard line anti/religious followings. The boxers showed the leaders of China that ‘independent thought is dangerous’.

The Boxer rebellion wasn’t a very big war. But it was the integral war that transitioned imperial China into the current country it is today.


Anyway, just my random take on doing some light reading on the subject.


Btw, for you military folk. I read that the Western officers in Peking were strongly encouraged to get Chinese mistresses to learn the language. I’d be shocked if it is, but does anyone know if that’s still standard practice for occupying forces?