Hey, I'm the person who submitted 55 Days at Peking Chinese Boxer Version to Shufflecomp. I tried to leave a comment on this earlier, but it didn't go through because apparently changing my VPN location triggered the spam detection system or something. After contacting Itch support:
I really liked this story. It's a clever spin on the circumstances of the song and the surrounding history, and the faux-Wikipedia alternate timeline blogpost format is neat. The fictional nations aren't 1:1 parallels of any real countries, but you can draw the similarities in your head.
Also, the lithograph is insane. Don't know how you even found that.
A not particularly related anecdote about 55 Days at Peking Chinese Boxer Version: I saw a video once from a Chinese influencer who was excellent at English, whose whole schtick was that he would go around on these language exchange apps like HelloTalk to talk to Chinese citizens, in English, while pretending to be an ABC or some other East Asian who only spoke English and didn't know Chinese. Then he would say outrageous stuff and put the reactions up on Rednote.
In this particular video, he pretended that he knew very little about Chinese history but really wanted to go to Beijing, and he'd recently discovered this awesome martial arts group that was active in Beijing, and they seemed to be really into Chinese culture and stuff, and he wanted to know if they were still around, and if he would be able to join them, and this was their theme song, by the way...
I felt a bit sorry for the person on the other end, who had to hurriedly explain that the Boxers were no longer around, and in fact had been very enthusiastic about killing foreigners and wouldn't have accepted one into their martial arts group.