According to Esherick, the treaties signed with the European powers and with Japan after the Opium Wars were considered very unfair by many Chinese, thus increasing their hatred towards outsiders as well as their disapproval towards the imperial government, whose prestige had been greatly diminished with the severe military defeats before the United Kingdom in 1840 and more recently with the war of 1895 with Japan, which not only involved the payment of enormous compensations to the victors but also the loss of territories.
Such failures, coupled with the loss of huge amounts of territory without much discussion (Hong Kong, Formosa, Korea, the Amur region, the Sakhalin island, parts of outer Mongolia and Central Asia, etc.) caused a major upheaval in the the people, until then immersed in the fictional idea of an absolute superiority of the Chinese state against foreign "barbarians" who were despised.
The Qing Dynasty itself had nurtured for decades the idea of the "superiority" of the Chinese Empire against outsiders, dismissed as "barbarians", but the severe defeats of 1840 and 1895, together with the military intervention of France and the United Kingdom in 1854 (which came to invade and plunder Peking itself) showed many officials that the ideology of the imperial court was far from reality, and that the technological and economic backwardness of China made it easy prey to foreign ambitions. However, this situation also generated a silent but firm rejection by some intellectuals of all foreign culture and the presence of foreigners in China, accusing the imperial court of weakness in this situation; Soon rumors began to spread about crimes carried out with impunity by foreigners, before whom the submissive emperor preferred to ignore.
The massive arrival of Western Christian missionaries after the Chinese defeat also caused friction with the Catholic Church and with Protestantism, while the more traditional sectors accused them of upsetting the Chinese culture and of attacking the national character of the country, while the Chinese that accepted such influences were condemned as traitors. In Guizhou, local authorities expressed their bewilderment at the sight of a Catholic cardinal who was transported in a litter with the decoration of a regional governor. All these mistrust led to numerous outbreaks of civil disobedience in much of the country at the end of the 19th century, with attacks against foreigners and against Chinese people converted to Christianity.
The popular uprising was driven by a group known as the Yihetuan or Boxers, a group that initially opposed the Qing Manchu dynasty but later reconciled with it and concentrated in the north of the country, where the European powers had begun to demand territorial, railway and mining concessions. In November of 1897, the German Empire responded to the death of two missionaries in the province of Shandong seizing the port of Qingdao. The following month, a Russian squadron took possession of Lüshun, in southern Liaoning. The United Kingdom and France followed, taking possession of Weihai and Zhanjiang, respectively.
