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The question of who actually constituted 'the Qing government' in 1900 is not as straightforward as it may appear. Many histories of the Boxer Uprising tend to gloss over political developments in Beijing leading up to the uprising or present them as relatively minor background detail, to focus either on the Boxers or the Western intervention as the case may be. However, the reality was that the Qing state in 1900 was a badly fractured entity, having emerged out of a political crisis of limited proportions but immense implications only two years earlier.

The events of the prior decade had seen a decisive shakeup to the political landscape of the Qing Empire, involving three principal groupings, though not always organised as coherent factions:

• The first, sometimes described by foreigners as the 'Manchu party', can be considered the reactionary faction, consisting principally of high-ranking Bannermen who sought to maintain the empire's traditional mechanisms of power and the primacy of the Manchus within it. This group largely coalesced around the comparatively moderate figurehead of Prince Gong, brother of the Xianfeng Emperor (d. 1861) and uncle to the Tongzhi (r. 1861-75) and Guangxu (r. 1875-1909) Emperors. But it was mainly metropolitan and focussed on Beijing, and provincial Banner households in this period found themselves 'orphan warriors', institutionally tied to a state increasingly unwilling or unable to support them.

• The second, which might be thought of as a moderate faction, was made up mostly of Han Chinese bureaucrats, predominantly from non-coastal regions, who supported gradual political reform towards provincial autonomy as well as economic and military modernisation, but wished to maintain the social status quo and avoid shaking up what they saw as China's traditional social structures. This was probably the least coherent in terms of any sort of factional organisation, but people of this group wielded the greatest actual power in the state, particularly those in what Pamela Crossley terms the 'Beiyang Intendancy', a group of officials such as Yuan Shikai and Zhang Zhidong who were associates or clients of Li Hongzhang, who had been Viceroy of Zhili until the defeat to Japan in 1895.

• The third, decidedly radical faction, consisted predominantly of Cantonese scholars from outside the bureaucratic hierarchy who were tuned in to Western intellectual currents, who advocated for rapid reforms to the empire's systems of governance and the widespread introduction of modern technology and Western institutions, and in the longer term radical social reforms that would entail sidelining the traditional elites among the Han Chinese, and abolishing the Qing empire's systems of Manchu privilege. Chief among these was Kang Youwei, whose pupils, devotees, and supporters included Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, and Yung Wing.

These factions in these forms had owed much to the Taiping War, which formally began in 1851 and effectively concluded in 1866. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had drawn in hundreds of thousands of supporters across southern China, many disaffected by a prolonged economic downturn, but many also by a more-or-less racist anti-Manchu rhetoric, leading to an existential crisis for the Qing state, which scrambled to draw on its resources to respond to the uprising. As part of this scramble, the Qing had empowered provincial officials, most prominently Hu Linyi and Zeng Guofan, to raise armies of provincial militias, first to contain the spread of the revolt, and eventually, after the defeat of the Qing's regular armies, to take the fight to the rebels. This delegation of military authority would be accompanied by the creation of a new tax, the lijin or transport tax, which charged duties on goods in transit and effectively doubled the empire's revenues, but the handling of which was given, effectively, to the militia army commanders. These officials, and their clients and proteges such as Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang, would form the core of the moderate faction in the post-Taiping War years.

The 'Manchu party' had seen a brief place in the limelight after the Qing defeat in the Opium War in 1842, which the Daoguang Emperor had blamed on the machinations of Han officials, but the Xianfeng Emperor quickly restored Han authority on his accession in 1851. However, the Taiping War would see the resurgence of Manchu power at court, as the Xianfeng Emperor, taking refuge in Jehol after the British and French attack on Beijing in 1860, died suddenly on 22 August 1861. His son would be enthroned as the Qixiang Emperor, overseen by a board of regents, but within less than three months, Prince Gong and the Empress Dowagers Cixi and Ci'an would depose the regents and install themselves as the regents of the renamed Tongzhi Emperor, and work towards centralising Manchu power in the capital while conceding authority at the provincial level to the new crop of Han officials who had, so to speak, earned their stripes during the war. However, the court did not divest itself of all relevance: the Qing state still exercised indirect authority in provincial affairs thanks to retaining control over a number of important fiscal mechanisms, including oversight of office-selling and, perhaps more importantly, controlling interprovincial finance – that is to say, it controlled the movement of money from surplus-producing provinces to those running up deficits. The relationship between the two broad groupings was thus stable enough, but there was potential for tension if either started to pursue a more ethnocentric agenda.

Finally, there was the mostly-southern radical faction. While some of its major players in the 1890s first came to prominence within that decade, particularly in response to the Qing defeat to Japan, it too had its roots in the 1850s, as a number of Han Chinese scholars saw the Taiping as not only preferable to the Qing, but indeed a potential means of effecting China's modernisation, and so had offered their services to them. The Christian convert Wang Tao fed intelligence to the Taiping from Shanghai before fleeing to Hong Kong, while Yung Wing, the first Chinese man to graduate from Yale, was briefly resident at Nanjing attempting to act as an advisor to the Taiping prime minister. Both would, however, come to identify with reformists within the Qing empire: Wang Tao was pardoned at the behest of Li Hongzhang in 1884 and continued to publish pro-reform material from his residence in Shanghai; Yung Wing came to work for Zeng Guofan in 1862 and later worked as his purchasing agent in the United States when he prepared to establish the Qing's modern naval arsenals.

The situation at the beginning of the 1890s, then, was one in which three broad political tendencies existed in tandem with reasonable stability: the imperial court pursued a limited centralisation, expanding direct control over metropolitan affairs but conceding the Han officials' preference for provincial autonomy; the southern radicals had pulled back from anti-Qing revolt towards cooperating with the moderate faction where possible. This leads into a critical dimension of what was to follow: the moderate faction could cooperate with either the reactionaries or the radicals, but it had certain red lines.

By 1890, the Qing's process of imperial reconsolidation had been a qualified success: although the Sino-French War of 1884-5 had caused Vietnam to come under French control, in its wake the Qing established Taiwan as a province and had its interior opened to Han settlement in in 1887; Qing Turkestan was back under its control by the end of the 1870s and made a province in 1884; and it had established a limited but recognised semi-suzerainty over Korea. While its military record had been mixed, the Qing had generally won or drawn in its foreign conflicts since the defeat of the Taiping.

All this would be shattered by the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-5: the Qing's main modernised army was utterly routed at the Battle of Pyongyang, and its main modernised fleet was virtually annihilated at the Battle of the Yellow Sea. The resultant Treaty of Shimonoseki forced the Qing to pay considerable indemnities, give up the strategic Liaodong Peninsula, and recognise full Korean sovereignty, and it was only thanks to a tripartite intervention by France, Russia, and Germany that the most damaging of the provisions were rescinded. The Qing defeat had two concurrent implications: the first was that Li Hongzhang, along with some other prominent moderates, fell out of favour and was demoted to Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi for the next few years, somewhat weakening the moderate faction. The second was that the radical faction was revitalised, indignant at what they saw as Qing defeatism, and began mobilising support and petitioning for rapid reform.

A test run for what would come later began in Hunan in 1896, when Huguang viceroy Zhang Zhidong attempted to implement a series of reforms. In August 1897, he would invite a number of radical scholars, including Liang Qichao, for assistance with reforms to education in particular, which the radicals used as a springboard to publish increasingly inflammatory anti-Qing rhetoric. Exploiting his newfound authority, Liang began publication and distribution of an edition of A Record of Ten Days in Yangzhou, a text written by a Ming loyalist describing Manchu atrocities during the sack of Yangzhou in 1645, which had generally been proscribed under the Qing. Following the German seizure of Qingdao in November, he petitioned Hunan governor Chen Baozhen to follow the example of Satsuma and Chōshū domains in the Tokugawa Shogunate, and declare independence from the Qing, which would either force the Qing to commit to reform, or lead to the creation of a new regime that would. In the spring of 1898, the provincial government began cracking down on the activities of its education advisors.