Why and with what consequences did Qing China lose its conflict with Japan in 1894-5? Most historians agree that the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 had a great impact across the world. However, public discourse on modern East Asia often sidelines or leaves out entirely the war’s consequences on international diplomacy and imperialism. This paper will briefly address the reasons by which Japan utterly overpowered China in 1894, and then will highlight the war’s diverse consequences after the signing of the peace treaty of Shimonoseki across a variety of nations; including China, Japan, Korea, and the western imperial powers.
The immediate reasons by which China lost so completely to the Japanese make for a rather mundane study. From an uninformed perspective, it may seem shocking that diminutive Japan could be anything but a “thorn in the side”[1] of the geographically and militarily immense Qing Empire. And indeed, the Japanese did not enter the war feeling particularly confident of victory. In China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period, Urs Matthias Zachman shows that China’s armed forces, both on land and at sea, vastly outnumbered Japanese numbers: “numerically speaking, there was ample reason for doubt [in Japanese supremacy before the war]: at the time of the Sino Japanese War, China boasted a combined fleet of 82 warships and 25 torpedo boats against 28 Japanese warships and 24 torpedo boats. Moreover, the 240,000 Japanese men who were deployed during the war met a Chinese army of 350,000 men, joined by another 650,000 recruited during the war.”[2] (34-35) However, the giant Qing military proved rather somnolent and disorganized due to the recent regional de-centralization of Chinese military affairs. This weakness was further exacerbated by the Japanese advantage of first move,[3] and the rapidity with which Japanese forces arrived at key points and attacked Qing forces and holdings. Zachman concludes on this subject that,
Since the combined Chinese fleet was not under unified command, only a fraction of it, 25 warships and 12 torpedo boats, actually met the Japanese fleet in fighting. Moreover, in sea battle speed was of the essence and in this respect the Japanese mode of fighting far excelled the Chinese in terms of equipment and formation. Likewise, although the Chinese army eclipsed the Japanese in numbers, mobilizing those numbers throughout the vast empire and concentrating them on the battlefield posed an almost insurmountable logistical problem.[4]
Thousands of pages could be and certainly have been written on the longue durée causality of Chinese weakness at this moment (military and political fragmentation, et cetera); but I argue these are superfluous to the main direction of this paper, and thus it is sufficient to understand that the Qing Empire, while massive and on paper far mightier than Japan, was by 1894 in no state to be efficiently and effectively mobilizing its forces against a directed naval invasion. It is rather more historiographically sporting to focus on the question as to the consequences of the Qing defeat. It is known that China lost; it is not commonly known what effects this had. The immense political tidal waves that the Qing’s defeat created, while still readily felt in the 20th century, prove a more challenging picture to paint.
While states across the world felt the effects of these waves, let us begin with the most obvious region of fallout: the defeated Qing Empire. The 19th century had certainly held a number of decisive and rather humiliating defeats and diplomatic incidents for the Qing, but per the rather unanimously held view of the historiography, it was the Sino-Japanese War that finally sealed the Qing’s coffin. However, the war did not merely cripple the Manchu dynasty; in The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, S.C.M. Paine argues that the Japanese victory signaled the defeat of the hallowed Confucian political order itself: “the war shattered any basis for China’s tenacious sense of unbreachable superiority and forced a Chinese reappraisal of their place in the world… Victory by a transformed former member of the Confucian order fatally undermined the legitimacy of that order.”[5] Japan had actively participated in the Confucian system for over 1000 years.[6] For the newly modernized nation to so quickly and totally annihilate Chinese defenses was potent with symbolism about the pessimistic fate of the Confucian world.
Paine continues, “a century later, [the Chinese] had yet to find a satisfactory replacement for the stable Confucian order that so long had formed the bedrock of Chinese thought,” and also notes that in annexing Taiwan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Japan created the two-China system still extant in 2021.[7] Whether in 1995 China had not found a “satisfactory replacement” for the Confucian system seems rather subjective. But his point stands, China continued to be massively politically unstable at least well into the mid-20th century.
The same holds for Korea. Japan invaded China primarily over hegemonic rights to Korea as a buffer state/protectorate; China’s defeat meant the crumbling of the old Sino-Korean order of tribute and Confucian political interdependence. As the centerpiece of the conflict, the Sino-Japanese War plunged Korea into a chaos rivaled only by that of the defeated Qing Empire. Korea had historically held what appear from the outside to be rather strained relations with both Japan and China; receiving a number of military invasions by the former throughout history, and being continually subjected to the political and moral authority of the latter. Despite its geopolitical precarity, as an official tributary of the Qing, Korea experienced relative stability for a long time under the centuries-old Joseon dynasty order. However, as with the Qing dynasty, the Sino-Japanese War ended up shattering this old order. On the fallout after the Treaty of Shimonoseki (April 1895), S.M.C. Paine writes “for the Koreans, the Sino-Japanese War ushered in an era of war and devastation with no resolution to the underlying geopolitical problem of terrible internal stability due to its precarious location at the grinding point among three acquisitive imperial powers… for the world, Korea emerged as a thorny international security concern.”[8] While the Treaty actually granted Korea autonomy (from the Chinese) rather than formally subjecting it to the Japanese state (which would happen in 1910), old China and the accompanying Sino-Korean relations shattered irreparably, creating a power vacuum that would define Korean and broader East Asian history for decades after. This newfound state of chaos in Korea and China implicated both the immediate offending power—Japan—as well as the global European empires of the day. Let us first look at the war’s consequences to the victorious Japanese.
The Sino-Japanese War strengthened the new Japanese nation in the eyes both of foreign powers and its own citizens. Although Japanese victory did not directly lead to the dissolution of the Unequal Treaties, nor rocket Japan directly into the cosmopolis of Great and Imperial Powers, it proved that the island nation could walk with the big diplomatic players of the world. Paine argues “the Western perception of Japan as a great power was born in September of 1894. In a three-day period, Japan used modern arms so professionally and defeated China on land and on sea so decisively that quite suddenly the Western world perceived Japan as a modern power.”[9] The claims here may strike the reader as fallaciously simplistic—there is no metric by which Paine can reasonably argue Japan actually became a great power at this moment, not the least because its war-spoils were denied by the real great powers of the world only months later (more on this later on) and that its subjection to the Unequal Treaties continued. One victory against a crumbling and disorganized China does not a great power make. However, the war certainly helped to project Japanese power onto the world stage, and show that the Japanese military-industrial complex was capable of efficiency and efficacy to rival those of the West.
Internally, Japanese triumph also lit an imperialist flame in the hearts of the Japanese public—a flame that would burn uninterrupted for the next half century. Japan’s overwhelming victory proved to its own nationals the enormous strength of their industry and military, and convinced many of the invincibility of the Japanese army. Although many Japanese elites regretted the jingoism and destruction the war created, a huge portion of the population was not so sympathetic: Urs Matthias Zachman argues that
once the Japanese public had come to know the ‘excitement’ of the war, it did not want it to end so soon… consequently, when the peace was concluded in Shimonoseki not at the ‘gates of the enemy’ on 17 April 1895, the public was not elated… the premature timing of the Peace Treaty severely disappointed the Japanese public and left it pining for the consummation of its hopes – a treaty at the gates of Beijing.[10]
China’s total defeat created an imperial fervor in Japan that, while curtailed in the short term because of the limited extent of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, led[11] to Japan colonizing Taiwan (as part of the Treaty), and eventually Korea, Manchuria, the southwest Pacific, China proper, and southeast Asia. The Sino-Japanese war may only have been a step in this process, not inevitably leading to Japanese imperial explosion. But it does appear to have set the imperial snowball rolling down the hill.
As China (and Korea) collapsed rather catastrophically before the eyes of the onlooking Japanese during and after the Sino-Japanese War, new diplomatic tensions entered or were exacerbated in east/north-east Asia. As mentioned, the chaos in Qing and Korean territories created a power vacuum that became a highly international concern between Japan and the European great power rivals of Great Britain, Russia, France, and Germany.[12] Although the diplomatic entanglement related to the fallout of the Sino-Japanese War could serve as the subject of a whole essay, this section of this paper will primarily address the political dance between Japan, Great Britain, and Russia—as these empires fit most directly into the proceeding history of the region. Great Britain and Japan, despite their immense differences and fragile relationship,[13] were both quite invested in their (new for Japan, mostly old for Britain) economic and political holdings in China and Korea. Both also held quite a tenuous grasp on the Asian mainland, with few points of security from which to project power and defend interests.
Russia, meanwhile, loomed over all of continental Asia, with thousands of miles of direct and contested border with China and Korea; this threat only grew as Russia upped its posturing in Asia in the late 1890s, knowing that China and Korea were both weak and ripe for Russian exploitation. In “Linkage Diplomacy: Economic and Security Bargaining in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance,” Christina Davis shows that “in November 1900, Russia tried to force an agreement on the Chinese government that would have granted exclusive privileges,” and that “the perception that Russia was trying to make Manchuria into a de fact Russian protectorate created a sense of crisis” both in Japan and Britain.[14] In “Race, Monarchy, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance,” Antony Best shows that “Britain’s key interest in East Asia was in protecting its commercial and financial stake in China, which it felt to be under threat from Russia.”[15] In Sir Claude MacDonald, the Open Door, and British Informal Empire in China, Mary Wilgus expands upon the sheer precarity of Britain’s position in China after the latter’s defeat: British policy in China “had to be based on the premise that Britain no longer monopolized informal political influence at Peking. It had to be cautious enough not to topple the Manchu dynasty or to plunge England into a war with one or more of her European rivals; but it had at the same time to be aggressive enough to secure British diplomatic prestige and economic hegemony in China in order to satisfy mercantile and public opinion in Britain.”[16]
Davis argues that “Japan also feared Russian influence and had its own ambitions to extend Japanese influence into neighboring regions.”[17] Thus, “an alliance with Britain would help Japan in a future war with Russia over Korea and Manchuria by forestalling intervention by France. Japan hoped to receive British approval of Japanese ‘special rights’ in China and Korea.”[18] This global entanglement in northeast Asia reveals the extent to which the ripples of Chinese defeat were felt all across the industrialized and imperial world. Given that the Russian push east/southeastward toward China and Korea resulted explicitly from the Chinese and Korean defeat and post-war collapse, I hold—with the backing of the historiography—that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 was a direct consequence of China’s defeat in 1894-95. Unlike Japan’s victory in 1895, this alliance did more formally place Japan in the scene of international power balances,[19] and also marked the end of a long era of British isolationism (read: rejection of formal alliances) that had characterized the Victorian era.[20] Both of these changes preceded a number of remarkable developments, including the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Pan-European conflict in East Asia, further Japanese imperialism, and the alliance system which (directly or indirectly) produced the Great War in 1914. Further analysis of those later developments would certainly be imperative; this paper merely holds, and now concludes, that China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 led to a collapse in the Qing sphere (mainly in China and Korea), and a desperate scramble for power and stability between Japan and the various European empires—of which the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and Anglo-Russo-Japanese tensions, were noteworthy results.
Bibliography
Best, Antony. “Race, Monarchy, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-1922,” Social Science Japan Journal 9, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Brooks, Barbara J. Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China 1895-1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000).
Davis, Christina L. “Linkage Diplomacy: Economic and Security Bargaining in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-23,” International Security 33, 3 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 156.
Otte, T.G. The China Question: Great Power Rivalry and British Isolation, 1894-1905 (Oxford: OUP, 2007).
Paine, S.C.M. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Wilgus, Mary H. Sir Claude Macdonald, the Open Door, and British Informal Empire in China, 1895-1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987).
Zachman, Urs Matthias. China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1852-1904 (Routledge: New York, 2009).
[1] Scare quotes mine.
[2] Urs Matthies Zachman, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1852-1904 (Routledge: New York, 2009), 34-35.
[3] As the attacker in the war
[4] Zachman, 35.
[5] S.C.M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5.
[6] Although with a great deal of complexity, given the traditional Japanese claim of their emperor’s parity with or superiority to the Chinese emperor.
[7] Paine, 5.
[8] Paine, 6
[9] Paine, 4
[10] Zachman, 35-36
[11] Via public pressure as well as state will
[12] And Germany and France, to a lesser but still significant extent.
[13] Britain, of course, being one of the primary offenders in the Unequal Treaties and the enforced opening of Japan
[14] Christina L. Davis, “Linkage Diplomacy: Economic and Security Bargaining in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-23,” International Security 33, 3 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 156.
[15] Antony Best, “Race, Monarchy, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-1922,” Social Science Japan Journal 9, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 172.
[16] Mary H. Wilgus, Sir Claude Macdonald, the Open Door, and British Informal Empire in China, 1895-1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 37.
[17] Davis, 157
[18] Davis, 157
[19] Although, as Best argues, power dynamics between Japan and the European Great Powers were often still strained after this point, and Japan may not have been formally considered a “Great Power” until later.
[20] Best, 173
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “East Asia in the Age of Imperialism, 1839-1945” at the London School of Economics, November 2021
Haus Lilienfeld 