and anti-imperialist uprising which occurred in China between 1899 and 1901. It was led by a new group, the "Militia United in Righteousness', the group was popularly known as the Boxers because many of its members had practiced Chinese martial arts, at the time, these martial arts were popularly referred to as Chinese Boxing. After China's defeat in war by Japan in 1895, villagers in North China feared the expansion of foreign spheres of influence and resented the extension of privileges to Christian missionaries. In a severe drought, Boxer violence spread across Shandong and the North China Plain, destroying foreign property, attacking or murdering Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians. In June 1900, Boxer fighters, convinced that they were invulnerable to foreign weapons, converged on Beijing, and their slogan was "Support the Qing government and exterminate the foreigners." Diplomats, missionaries, soldiers and some Chinese Christians took refuge in the diplomatic Legation Quarter. They were besieged for 55 days by the Imperial Army of the Chinese government and the Boxers. George Makari says that the Boxers, "promoted a violent hatred of all those from other lands and made no effort to distinguish the beneficent from the rapacious ones.... They were unabashedly xenophobic." The Boxers were overthrown by an Eight Nation Alliance of American, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian troops—20,000 in all—that invaded China to lift the siege in August 1900. The allies imposed the Boxer Protocol in 1901, with a massive annual cash indemnity to be paid by the Chinese government. The episode generated worldwide attention and denunciation of xenophobia. Chinese nationalism and xenophobia Historian Mary C. Wright has argued that the combination of Chinese nationalism and xenophobia had a major impact on the Chinese worldview in the first half of the 20th century. Examining the bitterness and hatred which existed towards Americans and Europeans in the decades before the Communist takeover in 1949, she argues:The crude fear of the white peril that the last imperial dynasty had been able to exploit in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 had been submerged but not overcome, and expanding special privileges of foreigners were irritants in increasingly wide spheres of Chinese life. These fears and irritations provided a mass sounding board for what otherwise might have been rather arid denunciations of imperialists. It is well to remember that both Nationalists and Communists have struck this note.In further support see Donald Gillin, "China