in 1908, the regent (Guangxu Emperor's brother) launched reformation. However, these efforts seemed to be too late. The revolutionaries within Han Chinese could not wait. The imperial government's humiliating failure to defend China against the foreign powers contributed to the growth of nationalist resentment against the "foreigner" Qing dynasty (who were descendants of the Manchu conquerors of China). By circumstance, the Qing Dynasty, weakened by the war and the 1911 revolution, led by Sun Yat-sen, became the last dynasty in Chinese history.
Views differ as to whether the Boxers are better seen as anti-imperialist or as futile opponents of inevitable change. In the People's Republic of China, orthodox textbooks analyze the Boxer movement as an anti-imperialist, patriotic peasant movement whose failure was due to the lack of leadership from the modern working class. In recent decades, however, large-scale projects of village interviews and explorations of archival sources have led historians to take a more nuanced view. Some Western scholars, such as Joseph Esherick, have seen the movement as anti-imperialist; while others view this interpretation as anachronistic in that the Chinese nation had not been formed and the Boxers were more concerned with regional issues. Esherick comments that "confusion about the Boxer Uprising is not simply a matter of popular misconceptions," for "there is no major incident in China's modern history on which the range of professional interpretation is so great.". Paul Cohen's recent history includes a survey of "the Boxers as myth," showing how their memory was used in changing ways in 20th-century China from the New Culture Movement to the Cultural Revolution.
In 2006 Yuan Weishi, a professor of philosophy at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China, published an essay titled Modernisation and History Textbooks, criticizing the official theme of government-issued middle schools history textbooks, claiming that they contain numbers of non-neutral historical interpretations. Yuan wrote that these "criminal actions brought unspeakable suffering to the nation and its people! These are all facts that everybody knows, and it is a national shame that the Chinese people cannot forget." For many years, history text books had been lacking in neutrality in presenting the Boxer Rebellion as a "magnificent feat of patriotism", and not presenting the view that the majority of the Boxer rebels were both violent and xenophobic. Professor Yuan stated that Manchu rulers did not comply with signed international treaties, and that it is wrong to blame "the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s entirely on foreign nations". On the other hand, such views are criticized and considered to be unfair, unneutral and logically absurd by some people and Yuan Weishi is even called Hanjian (漢奸, national betrayer) by some Chinese people.
The philosopher Tang Junyi viewed the Boxer Uprising as a religious war between the Chinese and Christianity. In fact, facing what they viewed as an aggressive religious invasion by Christianity, Chinese Righteous Harmony Society had the slogan "Defend Chinese Religion (保華教, or 保漢教) and Get Rid of Foreign Religion (of Christianity) (滅洋教)." Some scholars consider it to be a war against the invasion of China by the foreign religion of Christianity.
The rebellion was covered in the western illustrated press by artists and photographers. Paintings and prints were also published including Japanese wood-blocks.