Presented for Reimagining Progression and Retrogression in History: 1st LSE Department of International History Student Conference (June 17, 2022)
Public and even historical discourse on modern East Asia often sidelines the consequences of the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War on international diplomacy. This paper will highlight the war’s consequences in European imperialism, which led to a fevered rush among European empires for territorial concessions in China that in turn ignited the concept of the “Open Door” in American and British diplomatic circles—an American policy that attempted to guarantee Chinese national integrity in order to preserve open access to Chinese markets for all foreign imperial powers.
‘Progress’ was the buzzword of the age in late 19th century imperialism, as Britain and America expanded their projects of bringing ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’ to the diverse peoples and economies of Asia. One prime example of this ‘civilizing mission’ can be found in Britain’s protracted engagement in China, beginning with the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860. To justify its imperialism in China, the British Foreign Office had long argued that Britain brought economic and moral progress to the Chinese by enforcing free trade in their ports. The Foreign Office’s aim in the late 19th century was to extract as much trade from Chinese markets as possible, while maintaining Qing territorial integrity so as not to lose China to an East Asian “Scramble for Africa” equivalent.
However, in 1897, the burgeoning German Empire took out a formal lease on the city of Qingdao in Shandong province. This marked the first incident of a European colonial power taking direct ownership of continental Chinese land—and it created a scramble for concessions from the Qing court by Britain, France, and Russia. Not to be left behind, in 1899, US Secretary of State John Hay (under President William McKinley’s government) declared an official “Open Door” policy in China in the hopes of reversing the scramble. Hay intended to reinforce the same policy that Britain had been maintaining for the half-century before the Qingdao Lease: that of trade and goods extraction from China without the divvying-up of Chinese territory among the Great Powers.
In this paper, I intend to examine the diplomatic records of Britain and the US in 1899, and analyze the rhetoric that they used to counter the scramble for Chinese concessions that took the imperial world by storm in the aftermath of the 1897 Qingdao Lease. In the 1890s, a western foreign minister’s greatest weapon was liberal economic ideology: in the dominant rhetoric of the US and Britain, territorial acquisition brought misery and economic exclusion to most—but peaceful control of markets brought prosperity and progress to all.
Let us first examine the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 to set the stage for this paper. 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.
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.”[1] Japan had actively participated in the Confucian system for over 1000 years.[2] 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.[3] 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.
As China 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 territories created a power vacuum that became a highly international concern between the European great power rivals of Great Britain, Russia, France, and Germany.[4] This section of this paper will introduce the political dance between Japan, Great Britain, and Russia, to show the diplomatic pressures in the region that led to the Open Door in 1899. Great Britain and Japan, despite their immense differences and fragile relationship,[5] were both quite invested in their (new for Japan, mostly old for Britain) economic and political holdings in China. 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 facto Russian protectorate created a sense of crisis” both in Japan and Britain.[6] 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.”[7] 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.”[8]
Meanwhile, 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.
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. 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, 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.
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 now 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.
Also worth mentioning is 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.
Anglo-American Rhetoric on the Open Door, 1898-1899
Based on the ideas I have already discussed in this paper, I will now conclude with a brief analysis of Anglo-American rhetoric on the idea of the Open Door in China in the late 1890s, as an exploration of the future of my project.
The United States took the Philippines as part of the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, and in doing so thrust East Asia into American interest and public discourse. American naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1900 published a book titled The Problem of Asia, in which he succinctly summarized present American and British concerns in China and elsewhere on the Asian continent. In the book, Mahan makes two statements which I believe highlight the importance of this precise moment in American international history. On traditional American foreign policy, Mahan wrote:
With the possible exception of the Monroe doctrine, the people of the United States have by long habit been indifferent to the subject of external policies. They have been so not only as the result of our particular circumstances of isolation, but by deliberate intention, inherited from a day when such abstinence was better justified than now, and depending upon a well-known, though misunderstood, warning of Washington against entangling alliances. Under changed conditions of the world, from the influence of which we cannot escape, it is imperative to arouse the necessity of conscious effort, in order to recognize and understand broad external problems, not merely as matters of general information or of speculative interest, but as questions in which we ourselves have, or may have, the gravest direct concern, as affecting ourselves or our children.[9]
On the change of American foreign policy in the late 1890s, Mahan wrote:
It is in no wise a disconnected incident that the United States has been suddenly drawn out of her traditional attitude of apartness from the struggle of European states, and had a new element forced into her polity. The war with Spain has been but one of several events, nearly simultaneous, which have compelled mankind to fix their attention upon eastern Asia, and to realize that conditions there have so changed as to compel a readjustment of ideas, as well as of national policies and affiliations.[10]
In fact, isolation was the name of the game in both American and British foreign policy; in the 1890s and through 1902, Britain practiced what some contemporaries referred to as “Splendid Isolation”; that is, by avoiding the very same “entangling alliances” against which George Washington had warned over a century earlier. This rhetoric of “isolationism” reached its apex under conservative Prime Minister Robert Gascon Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and concluded only with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902.
Salisbury favored the British lease of Wei-hai-wei as part of the international concessions-grab in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, preferring to compete rather than work with other European powers in the region. However, many of Salisbury’s subordinates within the government disagreed with this approach, and preferred international collaboration to protect British interests in China. Colonial Secretary Joseph “Jingo Joe” Chamberlain and Foreign Office member Arthur Balfour frequently discussed and actively pursued alliances with other colonial powers (primarily Germany and the US, but they also held talks with representatives of Russia) to maintain British interests not via an “Open Door” policy but rather through mutually agreed concessions. In The China Question: Great Power Rivalry and British Isolation, 1894-1905, T.G. Otte argues “Balfour’s and Chamberlain’s discussions indicated how China had provided the impetus for a possible end to British Isolation.”[11]
Although an Anglo-American alliance at the time was highly unlikely, Chamberlain frequently made overtures in 1898 on the creation of such a trans-Atlantic agreement. On the China issue, Chamberlain stated “even war itself would be cheaply purchased if in a great and noble cause the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together, over an Anglo-Saxon alliance.”[12] Otte argues that “this was stirring, if vacuous, platform oratory. The future of the Far East was the real core of his present concerns”[13]; that is, despite his claims of the spiritual unity of the American and British peoples, he really intended to use an American alliance to satisfy Britain’s own aims in China. He argued that “’if the policy of isolation’ were maintained, ‘then the fate of the Chinese Empire may be, probably will be…decided without reference to our wishes and in defiance of our interests.” Even Salisbury saw the danger in this, stating in 1899 “I do not look forward with pleasure to a ‘Concert of Europe’ in China.”[14]
Chamberlain, Balfour, Salisbury, and their peers all shared the same fear: if Britain did not take action on the ground in China, then the Chinese Empire would be carved up into European colonial territories like Africa had been in 1884 at the Berlin Conference (among the powers of the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe). This would be in direct contravention of Britain’s traditional informal “Open Door” policy in China since the 1840s, although pen had never been put to paper to formalize that policy in the British government. Rather, the Empire had merely avoided major competition with other European powers over China, and had long dominated the colonial sector. As I showed earlier in this paper, however, after the Sino-Japanese War, many European powers including Britain had stepped in to take a piece of China. The choice for Britain seemed either to let the other Empires carve up China while Britain maintained a fallacy of the “Open Door,” or for Britain to participate actively in that carving.
The “Open Door” was not new in China by 1898 but the concept of formalizing such a policy was novel. In The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy 1895-1901, Marilyn Blatt Young illustrates the rhetoric of the open door quite poetically.
The words ‘open door,’ first used to characterize British desires and then to name actual American policy, are semantically interesting. They offer rich metaphoric possibilities rare in diplomatic language. Doors may be shut, broken down, forced open; they can be halfway, three quarters open. Doors can even be multiplied—and some historians feel they make a distinction when they speak of an ‘open doors’ instead of an ‘open door’ policy. Moreover, like all good political catch-phrases, ‘open door’ has immediately more favorable connotations. An open door is, prima facie, more fair, more desirable than a closed one—at least to those who would like to get inside… by 1905 it had several layers of meaning; as a result it was well on its way to meaninglessness.[15]
By 1899, even the British Empire had abandoned its traditional “Open Door” approach, as it began to pursue a sphere of influence in the Yangtze Valley, and to pursue an agreement with Germany in which the Kaiser’s empire would receive a similar sphere of influence in which “capital investment was not ‘open’ at all but was the prerogative of the preponderant power.”[16]
But the Americans were deeply concerned about this partition of China, particularly in light of the Boxer Rebellion in 1899 which threatened to collapse the Qing Empire entirely (and with it, Chinese territorial integrity and any possibility of an “Open Door”) and viewed in their imperial rivals of Britain, Germany, and Russia a similar apprehension. On September 5, American statesman William Rockhill wrote the “Open Door” letter, which Secretary of State John Hay sent to a number of America’s great power rivals across the world in the following days.[17] The note stated
This Government is animated by a sincere desire that the interests of our citizens may not be prejudiced through exclusive treatment of any of the controlling powers within their so-called ‘spheres of interest’ in China, and hopes also to retain there an open market for the commerce of the world, remove dangerous sources of international irritation, and hasten thereby united or concerted action of the powers at Peking in favor of the administrative reforms so urgently needed for the strengthening of the Imperial Government and maintaining the integrity of China in which the whole western world is alike concerned.[18]
Thus, a formal “Open Door” policy was born, and in the US rather than in Britain. Was this progress? After all, the note stated that China’s government needed to be massively reformed to prevent a partition. Or would the powers who sought to divide China have considered that division progress? The US was proceeding into the international affairs of East Asia, as imperial politics around China were changing drastically; it may have been “progress” as in movement away from the status quo in East Asia, but this increased imperial fervor in China must have hardly held the positive connotations of the word “progress.” After all, that imperial fervor (of foreign intervention in Chinese affairs) led in large part to the Boxer Rebellion—which they considered a movement for progress away from the retrogressive effects of foreign imperialism. My future project will analyze the international affect (and fallout) of the “Open Door” policy, as an important step in the US’s self-assertion onto the imperial stage in East Asia.
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.
Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Problem of Asia and Its Effect upon International Policies. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900.
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).
Young, Marilyn Blatt. The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy 1895-1901. Cambridge: HUP, 1968.
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] S.C.M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5.
[2] Although with a great deal of complexity, given the traditional Japanese claim of their emperor’s parity with or superiority to the Chinese emperor.
[3] Paine, 5.
[4] And Germany and France, to a lesser but still significant extent.
[5] Britain, of course, being one of the primary offenders in the Unequal Treaties and the enforced opening of Japan
[6] 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.
[7] Antony Best, “Race, Monarchy, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-1922,” Social Science Japan Journal 9, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 172.
[8] Mary H. Wilgus, Sir Claude Macdonald, the Open Door, and British Informal Empire in China, 1895-1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 37.
[9] Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Problem of Asia and Its Effect upon International Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900) 9-10.
[10] Mahan, The Problem of Asia, 11.
[11] T.G. Otte, The China Question: Great Power Rivalry and British Isolation, 1894-1905 (Oxford: OUP, 2007) 145.
[12] Otte, The China Question, 158.
[13] Otte, 158.
[14] Otte, 180.
[15] Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy 1895-1901, (Cambridge: HUP, 1968) 115.
[16] Young, The Rhetoric of Empire, 116.
[17] Young, 131.
[18] Young, 131
Aidan Lilienfeld, presented at Reimagining Progression and Retrogression in History: 1st LSE Department of International History Student Conference, June 17, 2022
Haus Lilienfeld 