Abstract: In the eyes of Western missionaries, the Boxers’ concept of “superhuman feats of martial arts”was a rival that Christian teachings must compete against. But to the majority of Chinese intellectuals at the time, both Christianity and the Boxers’claim to superhuman abilities belonged to the realm of the strange and supernatural——things that “Confucius did not discuss.” Thus under the general framework defined by Confucian orthodoxy, the social categorization of Christianity and “superhuman feats” were similar in the sense that they were both considered marginal and heterodox. The Qing court’s making use of the Boxers, by encouraging people to pay attention to such heterodoxies, in effect allowed them to gain greater influence. Thus, under the broad trend of Westernization and modernization, at a time when Chinese culture itself was being increasingly marginalized in the intellectual world, the heterodoxies of the old days had paradoxically become the “orthodoxy” of Chinese tradition in the eyes of the modernizers.