anti-imperialist, pro-Qing

The phrase "anti-imperialist, pro-Qing" renders the Chinese slogan fu Qing mie yang (扶清滅洋), literally "support the Qing, destroy the foreign," which defined the ideological posture of the Yihetuan (義和團, the "Boxers United in Righteousness") during the Boxer Uprising of 1899–1901. It marked a decisive shift from the movement's earlier secret-society slogan fan Qing fu Ming ("oppose the Qing, restore the Ming"). By dropping anti-Manchu rebellion and instead pledging to "prop up" the dynasty, the Boxers redirected mass peasant grievance away from the throne and toward foreign missionaries, Chinese Christian converts (jiao min), railways, telegraph lines and the unequal-treaty system imposed since the Treaty of Nanjing (1842). The slogan thus expressed a paradoxical conservatism: it was anti-imperialist in targeting Western and Japanese encroachment, yet pro-Qing in defending the very dynasty whose military weakness had permitted that encroachment.

The movement's appeal rested on spirit-possession rituals, martial-arts invulnerability cults, and rural distress aggravated by the Yellow River floods and droughts of Shandong and Zhili in the late 1890s. Its anti-foreign edge sharpened after the German seizure of Jiaozhou Bay (1897) and the wider "Scramble for Concessions" following China's defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). The decisive political turn came when the conservative court faction around Empress Dowager Cixi, having crushed the reformist Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, chose to harness Boxer xenophobia. On 21 June 1900 the Qing court issued an imperial declaration of war against the foreign powers, effectively endorsing fu Qing mie yang and the siege of the Beijing Legation Quarter and the Northern Cathedral (Beitang).

The gamble proved catastrophic. The Eight-Nation Alliance (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary) captured Tianjin and relieved Beijing in August 1900, forcing Cixi to flee to Xi'an. Southern viceroys including Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi refused to obey the war edict, declaring the "Mutual Protection of Southeast China" (dongnan hubao) and exposing the fiction of central authority. The settlement, the Boxer Protocol of 7 September 1901, imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, permitted permanent foreign garrisons along the Beijing–coast corridor, and demanded the punishment of officials. The episode discredited reaction at court and pushed the dynasty into the belated New Policies (Xinzheng) reforms after 1901, abolishing the examination system in 1905.

For the exam, fu Qing mie yang recurs in modern Chinese history papers and in UPSC/CSS World History sections as a case study in popular anti-imperialism, peasant millenarianism, and the limits of dynastic legitimacy. Typical question angles ask candidates to contrast it with the Taiping Rebellion's anti-Qing character, to assess whether the Boxers were "patriotic" or "reactionary," and to trace the causal chain from the Boxer Protocol's humiliations to the 1911 Xinhai Revolution and the collapse of the Qing. Examiners reward precise dating (1899–1901), the named Eight-Nation Alliance, and the Protocol's terms.