By Jinchen Li
Northern China, Summer 1900 – Dusk settles over a drought-stricken village. In the temple courtyard, dozens of young men bow and kowtow in unison, foreheads thumping the dusty earth. Incense smoke curls in the air as they chant incantations to ancient war gods. With a sudden cry, they leap up, eyes glazed in trance Swords whirl and charms are consumed in flickering torchlight. Villagers watch in awe – these are the Yìhétuán, the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” better known to foreigners as Boxers. Possessed by martial spirits and convinced of their own invulnerability to bullets, the Boxers charge off into the night. Their target: a Christian mission on the outskirts of town. “Revive the Qing, destroy the foreigner!” they roar, invoking their slogan “扶清灭洋” (fu Qing mie yang). In their wake, chapels and railway stations burn, foreign priests lie hacked to pieces, and Chinese converts – denounced as “secondary devils” – flee for their lives. What began as a local ritual to summon divine protection has exploded into an anti-foreign eruption that will shake an empire and sow the seeds of a new, ferocious kind of nationalism.
From Spirit Possession to Nationalist Crusade
By 1899–1900, bands of Boxers roamed the countryside of northern China, attacking mission stations, vandalizing telegraph lines and railroads, and clashing with any symbols of foreign influence. Their rallying cry, “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners!” (扶清灭洋), captured a vision of both political loyalty and spiritual cleansing. In their worldview, the white missionaries were “foreign devils”(洋鬼子), while Chinese Christian converts—labeled “secondary devils”—embodied a more insidious danger: the moral corruption of the Chinese soul by foreign influence. These converts were not merely political traitors but symbols of a deeper cultural betrayal.
This cosmology gave the movement a quasi-religious urgency. The Boxers saw themselves as divine instruments, not just defending China but purging it of spiritual pollution. Their violence was not only xenophobic—it was redemptive. In this sense, the Boxer uprising echoed earlier millenarian revolts like the Yellow Turban Rebellion, where salvation came through the destruction of a corrupt order. Such logic helped lay the emotional groundwork for proto-nationalism: the belief that China could only be reborn by purifying itself of foreign contamination and internal decay.
Race, Nation, and the “Yellow People”
Chinese thinkers at the time, influenced by Western scientific racism, began speaking of the Chinese as a distinct “Yellow Race” in competition with white empires. Where older Confucian views distinguished “civilized” from “barbarian” based on culture, this new view focused on binding blood and descent to notions of cultural identity.
The Boxers themselves were mostly illiterate peasants, far removed from academic racial theory. Their hatred of the foreign was visceral, rooted in folk religion and rumor. (Some villagers truly believed Christian missionaries kidnapped children to drain their blood or grind their organs—the writer Lu Xun later recalled terrified whispers of foreign doctors “gouging out eyeballs” for photograph processing.) Yet their instinctive identification of a national “Self” versus an alien “Other” foreshadowed the more refined racial nationalism of the 20th century.
Importantly, their struggle was not just national, but cosmological. The Boxers believed they were restoring a sacred order, not merely defending territory or sovereignty. Foreigners were not only imperialists—they were agents of disorder, demonic intruders into a moral and spiritual universe. In that sense, the movement blurred lines between proto-nationalist uprising and millenarian crusade: a mass eruption fueled by what one scholar calls “a primordial soup of xenophobia, populist fervour, and patriotic pride,” which would later be distilled into modern Chinese nationalism.
Far from being a quixotic peasant revolt only about superstition, the Boxers tapped into currents of thought that Chinese modernizers would later harness – the idea that China’s people form an endangered nation-race that must awaken, unite, and fight back to avoid annihilation.
This way of thinking would soon be reinterpreted and refined. After the Qing fell in 1911, revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen drew on the same well of ethnic resentment and anti-foreign sentiment that had energized the Boxers. But unlike the Boxers, whose ideas were steeped in folk religion and millenarian violence, Han nationalists reframed China’s crisis in racial and political terms. They spoke of “four hundred million Yellow people” rising up—not through spirit possession, but through modernization, racial unity, and republican revolution. In this way, modern Chinese nationalism did not directly inherit the Boxer ideology, but rather built upon its raw emotional foundation and gave it a new ideological form.
Nationalism’s Double-Edged Sword
The Boxer Rebellion reveals the double-edged nature of nationalism forged in crisis. In 1900, the Boxers transformed spiritual conviction into political violence—invoking ancient gods while attacking modern imperial forces. Their rituals were primitive, but their goals echoed modern ideals: a nation purified of foreign domination.
This paradox is telling. On one hand, nationalism gave voice to the wounded and united the weak against powerful outsiders. On the other, it easily tipped into extremism—fueling massacres, xenophobia, and irrational violence. The Boxers’ fury led not to liberation, but to deeper humiliation.
Later, the idea of a unified “Yellow Race,” descended from ancient emperors, gave strength to reformers and revolutionaries. But it also narrowed the definition of who belonged—justifying the exclusion of those deemed un-Han/Chinese.
The Boxers remind us that nationalism born of pain is both a cry for dignity and a dangerous flame. It carries ghosts of the past even as it demands a future. Their legacy lives on—not just in memory, but in every moment when national pride walks the fine line between solidarity and intolerance.
Identity Hunters 