However, actually during this era Chinese authority had been so undermined and the prestige of the government with its own people so completely destroyed "that it may well be said to have prepared the ground for the Walpurgis night of imperialism, which was witnessed in the decade following the Sino-Japanese War in 1895." For example, one major complication that rendered diplomatic relations between China and the Western nations led by Britain extremely difficult was the attitude of the British mercantile community. The chimera of inexhaustible trade had drawn them into the interior. The central highway of China, the Yangtze, had now been opened. "Settlements" and trading establishments existed in every important city. Yet for some reason the results were bitterly disappointing. The fabulous China trade did not materialize.

The mercantile community blamed their failure on the opposition of the Chinese officials. Their remedy, pressed on the British government through every possible available source, was for the exercise of compulsion on China to buy British goods. They cried for "treaty enforcement," for direct dealing with the Chinese consumers. They expressed the desire that the whole country should be enlarged into a vast treaty port with all authority vested in local officials.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Chinese were being treated as slaves in order to finish the train tracks in the West. The way that they were treated surely shows that the communication between China and the West that was going on left a lot to be desire.

As Frederic Wakeman Jr. noted in the Fall of Imperial China, everything was collapsing. Other uprisings were also going to occur that greatly affected China at this time including the Mohammedan risings, which were more separate events than uprisings connected to each other. The problems caused by internal unrest were further worsened by Japan's Westernization and goal of conquering the surrounding nations in order to provide both a buffer against attacks itself and to have additional trading networks. At the same time, Russia began to come into contact with China, and treaties were signed that defined the China/Russia border and allowed for types of trade.

Then, the Boxer Protocols imposed on China by European powers, after the abortive Boxer Rebellion in 1900 drove the government to undertake even greater Westernization....

In 1901, the education system was reformed to allow the admission of females and the curriculum was altered from the study of the classics and Confucian studies to the study of Western mathematics, science, engineering and geography. The civil service examination was altered to reflect this new curriculum. In 1905 it was abandoned altogether. The Chinese began to send its children to Europe and to Japan to study these new sciences, such as economics, and radical new Western modes of thinking started making their way into China, such as Marxism. Yuan Shih-k'ai reorganized the military and adopted Western and Japanese models of military organization and discipline. Most important, was the establishment of the military as a career; a new professional officer corps was created built on a new principle of being loyal to one's commander rather than to the Emperor..