Why and with what consequences did Germany acquire a lease over Qingdao in 1897?
When Germany invaded Shandong province and acquired a lease over Qingdao in 1897, the Kaiser’s empire took its first step into the colonial-imperial world of East Asia that had been dominated for decades by the empires of Britain, Russia, and France. Although an entire book could be written on the reasons for which Germany took Qingdao, this essay will treat the “why” in simple terms because it is in the consequences of this lease that we find the biggest ripples on imperial policy across East Asia, from Britain to Russia to Japan (the third of which had won a crushing defeat over China and gained investments in Qing lands only two years prior to the Qingdao lease).
Germany’s primary motivation for taking the Qingdao lease can be summed up by the Kaiser’s Weltpolitik focus of the late 19th century and early 20th. Upon the unification of Germany by Prussia in the mid-19th century, German statesmen and theorists alike became fixated on the world colonial “game” across Asia and Africa, in which all of the new nation’s major neighbors (Britain, France, and Russia) had been engaged for centuries. Germany’s fixation on “catching up” to the other Western empires in the late 19th century can be seen in its acquisitive policy toward lands as close-in as Poland and Old Prussia, and in its rapid acquisition of islands in the southwest Pacific. However, Qingdao makes for perhaps the most interesting case study of Germany’s imperial catch-up game not only because it was the German Empire’s first engagement on continental East Asia, but also the first direct territorial acquisition in China of any of the European imperial powers. Germany used as pretense for invasion the murder of two German missionaries in Shandong, and soon had acquired a substantial hold on the territory. This direct acquisition sent shockwaves across Britain, Russia, and Japan—all of whom had their own unique stakes in northwest China, and all of whom became implicated in the consequences of the German lease.
As many historians have argued, maintenance of the “status quo” in China had long been the defining preoccupation of the British foreign office in China—not surprisingly, given that Britain held the overwhelming majority of foreign investment in the country (80% according to the figure of one author whose name escapes me), and had taken a substantial role in Chinese politics at least since the mid-19th century. As with British investments in Ottoman space at the time, the foreign office prioritized maintaining the territorial integrity of the subject country precisely to avoid third-party intervention and a territorial carving-up as was happening in Africa at the time. If all the major European powers took their own “slice” of the Chinese territorial pie, this would lead both to dramatic increase in imperial tensions between the powers, and perhaps more importantly to a crippling of the free-trade and open-door policies in China that Britain had so long tried to maintain. Furthermore, because Britain held “most-favored nation” status with China in commercial treaties, most of the British people concerned with East Asia policy believed that keeping Qing China alive and territorially independent was the greatest way to maintain British interests.
As our authors argue, Germany’s acquisition of Qingdao very rapidly made it apparent that the status quo was no longer tenable. The Qingdao lease set off a domino effect in which all the major colonial powers of the region became obsessed with getting their “fair share” of territorial holdings nw that the Germans had interrupted the old way of empire in East Asia. By 1900, Russia had followed suit and taken Port Arthur to rival Germany’s land presence in the region, and Britain itself had expanded its territory in Hong Kong to include the lands around the city, and moved aggressively into the Yangtze Delta region where the British held their most valuable trade investments. In the German Empire’s desperation to “catch up” to the empires of Britain and Russia (et cetera), they in fact initiated a snowball effect of the crumbling of the old economic-imperial order in the Chinese sphere.
It is from this snowball effect that I identify another, if slightly longer-term, consequence of the Qingdao lease in the fraying of Anglo-German relations in the decade after 1897. It was around this time that the Anglo-German naval arms race began approaching it fevered pitch—the very arms race that many historians argue contributed (if not led to) the outbreak of World War I. Notably, until the German lease of Qingdao, Britain had held nearly uncontested naval superiority in the East Asian sphere; but Germany’s acquisition of Qingdao (and the building of a substantial shipyard in that city) introduced a novel threat to Britain’s supremacy in the region.
Certainly, Russia’s fleet-building at Vladivostok and acquisition of Port Arthur also loomed large in the concern of the British foreign office, as rampant Russophobia loomed large in the minds of the late-Victorian people. Russia remained the greatest concern of the British empire for a few years after the Qingdao lease, and it was the Russian threat that led to the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902—an alliance that brought the British out of an extended period of “isolationism” (in the sense of avoidance of foreign entanglements).
But I argue, as our authors show, that Russia increased its aggression in Manchuria and northwest China in part as a response to Germany’s Qingdao lease. And furthermore, after Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the Russian threat in East Asia diminished meteorically—and, in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Germany replaced them as the defining threat to British interests in the region. Because of the Kaiser’s port at Qingdao, by the mi-1900s, the threat of the German navy loomed large in the Pacific as well as in northern Europe. This helped redefine the Anglo-Japanese Alliance such that Britain could move its main fleets to the North Sea to guard against Germany, leaving the Japanese responsible for the East Asian naval threat.
Lastly, Germany’s occupation of Shandong lead rather directly to the Boxer War of 1900—a critical turning point in the collapse of the Qing imperial order and territorial sovereignty. All of the main Boxer and adjacent movements originated in the Shandong area, and many in specific response to German forces’ brutal repression of various uprisings or unrest across the region. The Boxer War, of course, did not inevitably seal Qing China’s fate as a doomed empire; in some sense, the Boxers were actually in favor of the Qing court, as the rebels’ primary stated enemies were European foreigners. But it did cause drastic disillusionment with the ability and power of the dynasty both from within China and from the other empires that looked on, and also increased Chinese anti-foreignism toward their own Manchurian rulers. The Boxer war, which had snowballed from Germany’s lease of and subsequent violence in Qingdao and Shandong, also created a further opportunity for Britain and other western powers to step in and take direct control of Chinese affairs, as the Qing could no longer be trusted to protect commercial interests on their own. Territorial sovereignty was to become a critical issue in East Asia over the following decades, and the Qingdao lease marked an important encroachment on East Asian lands in the period—also creating a further disillusionment with Western imperial practices in Japan, where many feared their nation was next in line to be divided up among Europeans after the imperial players were finished with China.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “East Asia in the Age of Imperialism, 1839-1945” at the London School of Economics, February 2022
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