Historically inaccurate and really, quite a foolish take.
Backward, primitive, ultra nationalist Chinese chose to go miles out of their way to turn every other significant power on earth against them with their barbaric wanton murders of civilians and diplomats. By supporting that, the Chinese government managed to get China's ass kicked extra special hard. Foreign military forces rolled in, CRUSHED the boxers with gusto, then set about sacking China's palaces. Then China was forced to pay a heavy indemnity.
That was all foreseeable when a country decides to try to take on every single other significant power all at once. Adolf would follow this same recipe later and would get Germany's ass kicked extra special hard by everybody else.
The morons even managed to make enemies of countries that did not have colonial possessions in China - like America. Your devotion to Mao-ist and current Chicom propaganda is cute and all but its not historically accurate and its extra special stupid - and led to disaster before and would lead to disaster again. If they follow the same policy prescriptions again, they'll get their asses severely kicked again. Hopefully, they've actually learned a thing or two from their last bitter experience.
“...Historically inaccurate and really, quite a foolish take.
Backward, primitive, ultra nationalist Chinese chose to go miles out of their way...all foreseeable... morons even managed to make enemies of countries that did not have colonial possessions...If they follow the same policy prescriptions again, they’ll get their asses severely kicked again...” [FLT-bird, post 36]
In no sense was the Boxer Rebellion a coordinated counterattack imagined, planned, and chosen by the leaders of a Western-style modern state, then implemented with military precision.
The parallels you are drawing between today’s PRC and the moribund Imperial China of 119 years ago aren’t so clear as you believe. But breezy assumptions about universal human behavior traits and dogmatic faith in the moral superiority of all that Western Civ has done in the past 2019 years aren’t unknown in this forum.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at your flung accusations; my sources for the details & timelines of the Boxer rebellion are no one’s propaganda, but are largely Western.
To reiterate an outcome or two that you have ignored, the Boxers weren’t “crushed” in the sense a Western army might nail down and eradicate an identified adversary. They were never that organized.
What passed for a central government in China at the time fled the scene. The peasants that had swollen the ranks of the Harmonious Righteous Fist went back to whatever they had been doing before: “melting away” is apt.
Imperial Germans - whose obstreperous machinations had been a cause - were less than pleased that they’d missed out on the rescue of the Peking Legation. Western and Japanese allied troop levels in the area had risen dramatically; Kaiser William II saw another big chance to prove how his nation had mastered Weltmacht and sent a large number of his own soldiers, haranguing them in person just before they embarked with explicit personal orders to get really nasty. He pestered other Euro leaders until they agreed to make the commander of this German detachment the supreme commander of allied forces in China.
Arriving after it was over, the Imperial Germans set about raping, pillaging, plundering, and burning villages; officers of the other allied contingents noticed but remarked on it privately. William had told his minions to go at it with no mercy, to ensure the primitive pagans learned their lesson: lots of dead peasants - women & children included - whose guilt may have had some tortured Westernesque legalistic foundation but whose operational involvement was minor.
I thought our self-appointed moral arbiters had been telling us that revenge wasn’t ours to take, and that pride was a sin. What does that say about upset pursuant to injured pride?
The Kaiserliche Marine went back to building up its naval station at Tsingtao.
I’ve no interest in the religious nor metaphysical import of the Western missionary presence in China in the 19th century. Only the geostratigc, logistic, and technological aspects concern me. This will of course earn me a flurry of condescension from most American conservatives, who take it on faith that the United States was Divinely Inspired and created expressly to prosecute the Church’s Sacred Mission of spreading Western religious beliefs to every heathen corner of the globe (and, one presumes today, the galaxy) - whether the locals want it or not.
From our perch in the 21st century, proselytizing in remote regions by numerous sects during the 18th and 19th centuries (and even today) looks less wonderful than we Americans believed it to be as recently as 80 years ago. Can we seriously claim that Spanish & Portuguese takeover of the Americas was bad, but that Catholic & Protestant missions undertaken in Africa, China, and other places in the 19th century were good?
The Chinese have a history longer than ours - indeed longer than the West - by orders of magnitude. The century-plus that has passed since the Boxer Rebellion is barely discernible from their viewpoint. They will look on us as barbarians no matter how many indignities and outrages are visited on them. They will not indefinitely lie down and allow a bunch of religious types to trample on every facet of their culture. We will never change that, no matter how zealous our missionaries become. I urge forum members to set aside chauvinism and conviction to think it over. For a minute or two, anyway.