i'm reading a book on china and it's talking about the boxer uprising in the early 1900s. what happened was large numbers of chinese peasants and other poor chinese rose up against foreigners in their country, especially missionaries and their chinese converts. when the uprising reached peking, all the foreigners and missionaries in the city banded together and retreated into a defensive area consisting of the british, russian, german, japanese, and american compounds and tried to defend themselves from the boxers. i wonder what would have been the right thing for a christian to do...would it be to not resist and not to fight and defend your family and simply be killed by the boxers?

a parallel would be when the early christians were killed by the romans and didn't resist, but the difference is that that was the roman government, and the bible says God appoints all civil authority, which means to obey their laws even to death, though not to stop preaching the gospel. however, the persecution of christians during the boxer uprising was not from the government (even though the boxers had the support of the evil empress dowager of the time) but rather from ordinary chinese who took matters into their own hands. so what should christians in the western defensive compound in peking have done, especially with other westerners fighting around them, trying to save their lives?

this particular situation confuses me because it seems to fall into a category between war and persecution of christians.