Naturally, once China showed a willingness to abandon its axenic attitude towards foreign devils and all things foreign-devilish, the European Powers turned their eyes and energies towards her, and a strenuous commercial and diplomatic race after prospective concessions for railways, mines, and undertakings of all kinds began. Each Power feared that China would be gobbled up by a rival, or that at least a partition of the vast Chinese Empire was at hand. Consequently, when China was beaten in her war with Japan, and made the unfavourable treaty of Shimonoseki, the European Powers were ready to appear as helpers in time of need. Russia, Germany, and France got the Shimonoseki Treaty altered, and the Laotung Peninsula with Port Arthur given back, and in return Russia acquired the right to build a railway through Manchuria (the first step towards "penetration" and occupation), French engineers obtained several valuable mining and railway concessions, and Germany got certain privileges in Hankow and Tientsin.
Meantime the old, deeply-rooted hatred of the foreign devil, the European, was spreading among the population, which was still, in the mass, conservative. Missionaries were murdered, and among them, in 1897, two German priests. Germany demanded compensation, and in default sent a cruiser squadron to Kiautschau Bay. Russia immediately hurried a fleet to Port Arthur and obtained from China a lease of that port for twenty-five years. England and France now put in a claim for their share of the good things going. England obtained Wei-hai-Wei, France a lease of Kwang-tschau and Hainan. China was evidently throwing herself into the arms of Europe, when, in 1898, the Dowager Empress took the government out of the hands of the young Emperor and a period of reaction set in. The appearance of Italy with a demand for a lease of the San-mun Bay in 1899 brought the Chinese anti-foreign movement to a head, and the Boxer conspiracy grew to great dimensions.
The movement was caused not merely by religious and race fanaticism, but by the popular fear that the new European era would change the economic life of China and deprive millions of Chinese of their wonted means of livelihood. The Dowager Empress and a number of Chinese princes now joined it. Massacres soon became the order of the day, and it is calculated that in the spring of 1900 alone more than 30,000 Christians were barbarously done to death. Among the victims were reckoned 118 English, 79 Americans, 25 French, and 40 of other nationalities. The Ambassadors and Ministers of all nations, conscious of their danger, applied to the Tsungli Yamen (Foreign Office), demanding that the Imperial Government should crush the Boxer movement. The Government took no steps, the diplomatists were beleaguered in their embassies, and were only saved by friendly police from being murdered.