From indemnity to indispensability: China’s 125-year reversal

When eight foreign flags flew over Beijing in August 1900, no one in the Forbidden City could have imagined that the city would, 125 years later, host the president of the United States as a guest of honor and the president of Russia just days afterward.

The contrast is almost cinematic. In 1900, some 51,755 troops from Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States marched into the Chinese capital, looted the Forbidden City and the Old Summer Palace, destroyed volumes of the Yongle Dadian and the Siku Quanshu, and imposed the punitive Boxer Protocol of September 1901.

In May 2026, those same eight capitals — through their successors and alliances — watch as Beijing, not foreign legations, sets the choreography of great-power diplomacy.

The Boxer Protocol was a humiliation engineered around indemnity, extraterritoriality, and the permanent garrisoning of foreign troops on Chinese soil. The 2026 Trump–Xi summit was the photographic negative of that arrangement.

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