Examine this text for bias. does esherick view the boxers in a positive or negative way? support your answer with evidence.

text:
excerpts from the origins of the boxer uprising by joseph w. esherick:
few events in chinese history are more widely known than the boxer uprising. the dramatic siege of the beijing legations captured the attention of the world in the summer of 1900, and provided ample copy for journalistic sensationalism of the day and hollywood scriptwriters half a century later. the "siege of peking" was finally lifted by an international expedition of eight nations — including american troops fighting on chinese soil for the first time. but the boxers are not only important for their unusual command of an international audience. above all they stood as a dramatic example of ordinary chinese peasants rising up to rid china of the hated foreign presence. as such they were an important episode in the emergence of mass nationalism in china. .
a second common misunderstanding relates to the usual name for the boxer movement: the boxer rebellion. the appellation is truly a misnomer, for the boxers never rebelled against the manchu rulers of china and their qing dynasty. indeed the most common boxer slogan, throughout the history of the movement, was "support the qing, destroy the foreign" — where "foreign" clearly meant the foreign religion, christianity, and its chinese converts as much as the foreigners themselves. in the summer of 1900, threatened with a foreign military advance on the capital, the qing court even declared its explicit support of the boxers. but after the movement was suppressed, both chinese officials and the foreign powers realized that the qing would have to continue as china's government. in order to save face for the qing court and the empress dowager at its head, the fiction was created that the boxers were really rebels, who happened to gain support from some manchu princes who usurped power in beijing. it was accordingly the "boxer rebellion," and the qing only had to be punished for not suppressing it earlier. despite this purely political and opportunist origin of the term, the "boxer rebellion" has shown a remarkable ability to survive in texts on chinese and world history.
confusion about the boxer uprising is not simply a matter of popular misconceptions. there are remarkable divergences in scholarly opinion on the boxers. in fact, there is no major incident in china's modern history on which the range of professional interpretation is as great. this is particularly true with respect to the subject which is the focus of this book: the origins of the boxer uprising. as the boxer movement was just beginning in 1899, a county magistrate by the name of lao nai-xuan wrote a pamphlet entitled "an examination of the sectarian origins of the boxers united in righteousness." (such was the full name of the boxers, though it is often mistranslated "righteous and harmonious boxers.") lao argued that the boxers were descended from a group linked to rebels of the millenarian white lotus sect in the early nineteenth century. these alleged sectarian and anti-dynastic origins of the boxers have been accepted by most scholars to this day. but there is also a strong minority position which argues that the boxers were from the beginning a loyalist militia unit — the product of village defense forces that were operating under official sponsorship. .
despite these obstacles, i believe that the time is ripe for a new look at the origins of the boxers. the last serious treatment of this subject in english was victor purcell's the boxer uprising: a background study, published in 1963.1

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