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1. China and the Imperialist Threat

On July 25, 1894, the Japanese warship Naniwa approached the Chinese steamer Kowshing, which was carrying 1,100 soldiers across the Bay of Korea to reinforce forces in China's tributary kingdom of Korea. Without warning, the Japanese ship opened fire on the unsuspecting transport. The steamer sank and 950 Chinese soldiers drowned.1 Striking before a declaration of war was an old Japanese custom, long employed by samurai warriors in Japan's feudal period, which had only ended a few years previously.2 The Japanese navy was to repeat this same kind of sneak attack forty-seven years later at Pearl Harbor with vastly different ultimate results. Japan got around to declaring war on China on August 1, 1894, and its troops, already in Korea, soon cleared the peninsula of Chinese soldiers.

The battle at sea was equally one-sided. The Chinese fleet encountered the Japanese navy September 27, 1894, in the Yellow sea off the Yalu river. Perhaps the Chinese would have done better if funds for their navy had not been scandalously diverted to build the summer palace for the Qing (Ch'ing or Manchu) dynasty's empress dowager, Ci Xi. Corrupt officers embezzled funds to give presents to the Qing court's chief eunuch who protected them.3 As a consequence, the Chinese navy had no shells for some of its guns and some powder bags were found to contain sand, not explosives.4 The Japanese sank four of the Chinese ships while losing one vessel of their own. The Chinese fleet drew off and didn't dare contest the sea again with the Japanese. In February, 1895, Japanese troops captured the Chinese naval base at Weihaiwei on the northern coast of Shandong province and the Chinese surrendered eleven warships, most of the surviving fleet.5

The Japanese attack appeared to be only the latest chapter in a long series of indignities the Chinese empire had suffered since the Opium War over half a century before (1839-42). In this war Great Britain forced China to cede it the island of Hong Kong, open five "treaty ports" to foreign influence and trade and to accept opium imports from India. China had to give up enclaves or concessions to imperial powers where foreign, not Chinese law, applied (extraterritoriality) and allow Christian missionaries to operate throughout the country.

The Qing dynasty failed to respond to the imperialist challenge because of the hopelessly inadequate state of its military forces. In the face of the rapidly developing technology of the West, especially modern armor-plated and steam-powered warships mounting heavy guns, long-range artillery, quick-firing rifles and machine guns, the corrupt Manchu dynasty made only feeble efforts to modernize its forces. In 1894 it had no effective army and, as its experience with the Japanese had shown, a virtually useless navy. The Qings believed like other dynasties that China was the central country on earth (thus the "Middle Kingdom") and was inherently superior to all others. From the Sino-Japanese War on, however, a realization dawned slowly that China's rigid society must change to counter Western demands and it would never regain its sovereignty until it could challenge the imperialists at their own game: military power.

In addition, it took China (and other powers) a long time to realize that the Japanese assault was different in kind, degree and purpose from what the Western imperialists had attained in China since the Opium War. Japan's design was to create a vast East Asian empire and, if things worked out, perhaps to rule the world.6 The European imperial powers aimed at a more modest goal of increasing their industrial and commercial sales to China, by force if necessary, but without conquering it.

The British and later French and other imperialist penetrations had created in the treaty ports (numbering thirty-three by 1893) a joint Chinese-Western economy that, as China-expert John King Fairbank says, stopped colonialism in its tracks.7 Many Chinese participated in this joint economy and established a highly complex structure that didn't fit the traditional pattern of the imperialist mother country exploiting weak, unsophisticated and unskilled colonial peoples.

Foreign-Chinese cooperation and conflict reached its highest expression in Shanghai, dominated by the International and French concessions there. Shanghai grew into the largest city in China and one of the largest in the world (from around 700,000 people at the turn of the century to 3.6 million by 19378), its burgeoning trade and factories drawing people constantly from the hinterland. Many Chinese served as managers for the foreign firms. They and other Chinese quickly learned about foreign markets and technology and a number set up their own factories or shops. Thus, a complex mixed economy developed in which Chinese and foreigners cooperated and competed.

With no one country responsible for what went on, an almost inconceivably permissive and exploitative society developed in Shanghai. Entrepreneurs flourished in this unfettered atmosphere, the extreme case of capitalism and laissez-faire, growing rich in part because the labor pool was bottomless and desperate. Coolies pulled rickshas at 5 cents a mile. Peasants came in from the countryside to work at wages barely above starvation. They vied for jobs with children less than ten years old who were sold to factories. The children worked thirteen hours a day, slept under their machines and were forbidden to leave the factory grounds. Crime flourished. Anyone could arrange to have an enemy murdered, maimed or disposed of. It was not for nothing that the word shanghai passed into the English language as a verb, meaning to kidnap, usually by drugging. There were 668 brothels. Drugs of all kinds could be bought easily, as could women and children. Shanghai, with justification, was known as the wickedest city on the planet.9

Nevertheless, Shanghai and the other treaty ports and concessions represented only a tiny fraction of enormous China's population. Its cohesive civilization resisted Western absorption with great tenacity. China offered little scope for rapid exploitation of resources by means of plantations, mining and other industries as were rising in the less-developed southeast Asian and African colonies. Western capitalists could find better industrial and commercial investments in newer, less-crowded countries like the United States and Argentina. Also, Britain, France, Germany and Russia were, by the time of the Sino-Japanese War, approaching some degree of parity in China. Thus they tended to check the ambitions of the others, preventing any one from attaining dominance.10

However, even before the final humiliation at the hands of Japan and the subsequent rush for concessions, China's experiences with imperialists had been costly and extremely disruptive to the ancient social order of the Middle Kingdom. China's gentry had allowed this to happen because they knew no way to change China's rigid, traditional, exploitative society without destroying their own class and the privileges they enjoyed. For well over a century, Chinese society had been breaking down, unable to respond to the challenges of overpopulation, widespread poverty and the pressures of a technologically more advanced Western civilization. Peasants revolted through much of the nineteenth century but were kept from overthrowing the dynasty and social order by violent repression. The Taiping rebellion alone (1850-64) claimed twenty million lives.11

China was the example that the Japanese ardently wished to avoid. Indeed, Japan in the mid-nineteenth century was in some ways more vulnerable than China. This was primarily because Japan, a naturally isolated island kingdom, had closed itself off to the rest of the world in the seventeenth century as a consequence of a profound Western threat then to its civilization, leaving Japan even more ignorant of Western technology and aggression than China. Seclusion started in the early 1600s because Western trade and Christian missionaries threatened to transform Japan's rigid feudalistic system. The ruling shogun and feudal lords killed or crucified thousands of Christians, forced others to renounce the faith and forbade Japanese to travel abroad. In 1639, they restricted foreign trade to limited contacts with the Dutch, Chinese and Koreans.12

The result of seclusion was profound.13 It perpetuated the military-dominated feudal system under a shogun with the emperor only a figurehead. It also turned the already culturally distinct population even further in upon itself, giving rise to a circumscribed, homogeneous, insular society little touched by influences from the outside.14 Although China had been the origin of much of Japan's culture, the centuries of seclusion brought to full development a singular Japanese civilization.

In the eighteenth century a school of national learning known as kokugaku spread. It revived interest in Japanese antiquity and focused on religious practices of the early Japanese built around worship of natural phenomena and mythological ancesters. This was known as the "way of the gods" (Shinto) and led to a national cult emphasizing the divine origins of the Japanese islands and ruling family. The movement disputed the superiority of Chinese learning and paved the way for an ideology based around abstract loyalty to the perceived true glory of Japan, the unbroken imperial line. Shogun rule itself seemed to be increasingly inimical to the concept of the emperor as supreme ruler. The national learning provided a basis for Japanese response to the challenge of the West.15

Although seclusion distilled Japan's culture into a powerful essence, it did not create its fundamental nature. This had been established nearly a thousand years before. Ever since, the masters had been the military classes, governed by the bushido, a code of militarism which emphasized subordination of law to the moral leadership of the ruler. Consequently, the vassal felt bound to absolute loyalty to his lord. Out of this came a strong and enduring spirit of duty, self-discipline and self-denial.16

A greatly relished event in the early eighteenth century clarifies much about Japanese loyalty, ideals and character. The feudal lord, Asano Naganori, had been insulted by Kira Yoshihide and had drawn his sword in the sacred precincts of Yedo castle. For this breach of court etiquette he had been condemned to death by his own hand, seppuku. The forty-seven retainers or ronin of Asano waited patiently for two years, then broke into the stronghold of Kira Yoshihide and murdered him, avenging their lord's death. They surrendered and, upon receiving judgment, committed seppuku without protest.17

Steeped in such traditions, the Japanese came to form a tough, intensely nationalistic and close-knit community. The national myth rested on the idea that the Japanese were of divine origin and that the emperor was descended from the god-founder of the nation. From this it was only a step for the Japanese to believe they were being guided infallibly by an omniscient hand toward establishing a new world order. The myth taught the Japanese soldier and sailor to give blind obedience to his superiors, to regard death in the service of the emperor as an honor, to believe he was invincible and to view weakness or surrender as a disgrace.18

The military solution to problems profoundly affected Japan's approach to foreign affairs. As the Japanese scholar, Ienaga Saburo, expresses it, "Japanese inevitably tended to regard international relations as tests of strength decided by superior power." From the moment it stepped onto the international stage Japan already possessed in full growth a Japanese version of the might-makes-right philosophy expressed by Otto von Bismarck (1815-98), the Prussian chancellor who unified Germany by blood and iron. Ienaga says Japan's response to Western powers was either servile accommodation or spirited antagonism. "Toward weak countries, it was an arrogant attempt at domination."19

Oddly, it was the United States, by comparison with Britain, France and Russia a positively benign aggressor in the Pacific, that finally cracked open the Japanese time capsule and forced the Japanese to enter the contemporary world. America's move was, in a real sense, the opening of Pandora's box. In July, 1853, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry anchored his squadron of four black paddle-wheeled steamers in Edo (later Tokyo) bay and demanded an audience with the shogun, the effective ruler of Japan. Perry wanted to deliver a letter from U.S. President Millard Fillmore asking that Japan open itself to trade. The shogun refused and Perry said he would return in one year for an answer. Meanwhile, the Russians were preparing to make a move to open Japan and Perry returned to Edo bay in February, 1854, not July as promised. He had ten black ships and told the Japanese he had fifty more nearby and another fifty in California, although his ten paddle-wheelers actually represented one-fourth of the entire American navy. The Japanese were largely defenseless because they could not cast large guns and the few they had purchased from the Dutch were small. They concluded a vague agreement which they hoped to renege on. But the Americans' success quickly brought in the British, Russians, Dutch and French, who concluded agreements on their own. These included grants of extraterritorial rights to foreigners. From then on, Japan had to accommodate itself to the foreign presence.20

The shogun had shown he could not keep out the barbarians. This gave an opening to his opponents who seized on the idea of restoring power to the emperor at Kyoto, as the legitimate symbol of unity, to face the foreign menace.21

In Kyoto the emperor Komei reigned as a sanctified symbol without authority. But pressure mounted on the shogun at Edo by critics who warned that Japan had to industrialize and arm itself to stop foreign aggression. In February, 1867, the emperor Komei died and was succeeded by his fifteen-year-old son Mutsuhito, who took the reign name of Meiji ("enlightened rule"). A coalition of Satsuma, Choshu and other clans not under the direct dominance of the shogun united under Meiji and on January 3, 1868, the imperial palace announced resumption of direct imperial rule. By autumn the shogun had lost support and resigned. The next year, Meiji ordered the capital moved to Edo, which now became Tokyo ("Eastern Capital"). The building of a modern state had begun. Leadership fell to a group of young reformers from the Satsuma and Choshu clans. They controlled the emperor.22

Results during the next twenty-six years were spectacular. There was no hope, of course, of expelling the barbarians. Instead the new leaders took the contemporary imperial West as their model and created a guiding motto, fukoku kyohei: rich country, strong military. In 1868, Meiji announced that "absurd customs of the past" would be discarded and that Japan would seek learning "throughout the world." In 1871 he wiped out the old clan boundaries, eliminated feudalism and created a centralized state. He abolished the old classes of feudal lord, samurai, farmer, artisan and merchant. The new state compensated the feudal lords with government bonds, making them dependent upon success of the new order. In 1884 the emperor created a European-style aristocracy of court nobles while commoners at last received the dignity of surnames. The sword-wielding samurai had no place in the new society and soon lost all their privileges.23

In 1874, despite Chinese protests, a newly confident Japan occupied the Ryukyu islands (Okinawa) southwest of the Japanese home islands, for centuries China's tributary kingdom of Liuqiu. In 1875, by giving up to Russia a claim to the southern half of Sakhalin island (which Japan had never possessed anyway), Japan got in return the Kurils, a strategic string of islands between Japan's northern island of Hokkaido and Russia's Kamchatka peninsula.

Japanese efforts to acquire the Ryukyus and Kurils signaled the government's intentions to expand. By 1890 these intentions were manifest. The economy had advanced far in industrialization. The state was strong and centralized and had created an effective modern army and navy. Japan no longer was a candidate for imperialist exploitation. Instead, Britain began to look at the island empire as a possible ally against Russian expansion. In 1894 Britain therefore agreed to end the extraterritorial status of its subjects. This was a gesture of friendship but also a recognition of reality: Japan, unlike China, was on the verge of rebelling against unequal treaties and Britain decided to act first. Britain's move brought the other European nations to renounce their extraterritoriality as well.24

However, Japan did not just want parity with the Western imperialist powers. Its leaders had seen how strong the imperialists had become and attributed much of the reason to the colonies imperialist power had brought them. Japan decided it required a colonial empire of its own, thereby swallowing a form of capitalist theory, then popular with imperialists, that resembled more the mercantilist doctrines of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries than the unrestricted laissez-faire free trade advocated by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776).25 Among other things, mercantilism held that a nation should build up home industries and acquire colonies as a market for exports and a source of raw materials. Ideally, mercantilism would create a closed economic system bringing great wealth to the imperial home country and exploitation of its colonies, while thrusting competing industrial powers out into the cold.

In China, the imperialists had been unable to practice mercantilism because all insisted on getting privileges any other got under the so-called "most-favored-nation" concept in which any special privilege granted one nation had to be extended to others as well.26 The most-favored-nation clause prevented any single power from dominating the Chinese coast. But it also kept China from manipulating imperialists by choosing between them.27

It was not immediately apparent to the U.S. or the other powers that Japan had no intention of becoming just one nation among many sharing in China's exploitation. For the Japanese, the Sino-Japanese War was merely the first stage in the process of achieving a commanding position in the Middle Kingdom. In the peace negotiations, Japan ominously demanded the "independence" of Korea, a kingdom that for centuries had been China's shield against Japanese aggression. And Japan wanted the Liaodong peninsula with its excellent harbors which would give Japan control of southern Manchuria and a strategic base from which to strike at the Chinese capital of Beijing and the north China plain, China's heartland. Japan also demanded that China cede it Taiwan (Formosa), the nearby Pescadores (Penghu) islands and pay an indemnity of 360 million yen (200 million Chinese taels), roughly three times Japan's national budget in 1894.28

The Japanese demand was a tremendous shock to the Chinese elite. They realized Japanese intentions were far more sinister than anything attempted by Russia or the Western European powers. A young Cantonese scholar, Kang Youwei, drafted a memorial to the throne signed by twelve-hundred other young scholars. This and other petitions asked that the capital be moved inland to carry on the war and numerous reforms undertaken to make China capable of defending itself.29 But the Qing dynasty was unable to respond and acquiesced in all Japan's demands in the peace treaty of Shimonoseki (April 17, 1895).

The great irony was that the Chinese indemnity, finally paid in gold in London, created a huge surplus of capital in Japan which largely went into the formation of new industry, especially textiles and iron and steel. Many Japanese industries more than doubled in size between 1896 and 1899. The indemnity permitted Japan to reach the economic "takeoff" stage of self-generating growth, producing a powerful industrial state which was all the more menacing to China.30

Japan, in one short war, had also neatly cut the Russian empire out of the spoils. Russia for a long time had coveted the warm-water port of Wonsan in Korea and control of Manchuria, since it hoped to run a stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway through northern Manchuria to connect with Vladivostok, thus avoiding the long arc of the Amur river. Russia also lusted for Lüshun at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula for a naval base.

Russia sought help from Britain. But London had deflected Russian attempts to advance in Afghanistan and elsewhere for much of the past thirty years and declined to encourage Russian interests. Germany and Russia's ally, France, were more amenable. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted Russia deeply committed in East Asia and hopefully in conflict with Japan and maybe Britain, thus reducing Russia's threat to Germany. France and Germany joined with Russia to inform Japan that, "in the interest of peace in the Far East," they could not consent to Japanese acquisition of Chinese territory on the mainland. The Russian note said Japanese possession of Liaodong "would be a menace to the capital of China, would at the same time render illusory the independence of Korea and would henceforth be a perpetual obstacle to the peace of the Far East."31 It was a prophetic statement.

Japan got no help from Britain or the U.S. and felt compelled to back down. But the Japanese were bitter. They returned Liaodong to China (for an additional indemnity of 30 million taels) and focused on Russia as the enemy. Japan learned perhaps the wrong lesson from the intervention of Russia, Germany and France: that force was the only way to operate in the world.32

The United States had taken a neutral position in the Sino-Japanese War but on the whole the U.S. favored Japan over China.33 It is evident that American leaders did not understand the nature of the Japanese challenge in 1894-95.

But a fear the United States had held for years that the imperialist powers would pounce on China at the first opportunity proved accurate. Cynically taking advantage of China's weakness, they pressed new demands upon the Qing dynasty in a scramble for concessions. Perhaps the most cynical was the Russian empire. China was looking everywhere for friends and Russia could pose as one; after all, Russia had been the primary party to oust the Japanese from Liaodong. Russia offered to help China borrow some of the money to pay the indemnity, arranged through a Russian-French syndicate. The rest came from a British-German consortium. But the hooker was that the loans were secured on revenues from Chinese maritime customs. This meant that China would have no control over imports and would be left with no funds to modernize its economy or improve its military defenses. Then Russia, in exchange for a Sino-Russian mutual-defense treaty against Japan, demanded that China grant it a concession to run without any Chinese control a branch of the Trans-Siberian railway (the Chinese Eastern) through northern Manchuria. To grease acceptance, the Russians bribed the Chinese negotiator, who in turn gave some of the money to the empress dowager, Ci Xi.34

But Russia proved to be a fickle friend. In December, 1897, under the pretext of protecting China from the Germans, Russia occupied Lüshun and forced China to grant a lease for the entire Liaodong peninsula. It also forced China to grant authority for it to build a railway (the South Manchuria) connecting the Chinese Eastern railway with Liaodong.35 Russia renamed Lüshun Port Arthur and began building a huge naval base.

Meantime, Germany had taken advantage of the murder of two German missionaries to occupy Jiaozhou bay and the city of Qingdao on the south coast of Shandong province and to force China to grant a lease. Britain forced China to lease Kowloon on the coast opposite Hong Kong and to Weihaiwei on the north Shandong coast and extracted recognition of the Yangzi river valley as a sphere of influence. Japan put the coastal province of Fujian under its guidance. France leased Guangzhou bay36 in southern Guangdong province and designated three southwestern Chinese provinces along the French Indochina (Vietnam) border as its sphere. France had acquired the Chinese tributary state of Vietnam in an undeclared war with China 1884-5.37

There was no longer any doubt that the empire faced possible dissolution. For a brief moment there was hope. The Cantonese scholar, Kang Youwei, argued that China must reform or perish. He and his collaborator, Liang Qichao, advocated a constitutional government. Kang convinced the Guang Xu emperor (ruled 1875-1908). The emperor, defying the empress dowager, commenced the famous "one-hundred days" in 1898, issuing edict after edict aimed at creating a modern government and wiping out the sinecures and corruption of the old. It was too much. The Manchu officials had no intention of losing their privileges and bribes. They enlisted the empress dowager, Ci Xi, 63 years old in 1898 and the most formidable woman in modern Chinese history.

Ci Xi started out as a low-ranking concubine to the Xian Feng emperor (1831-61) but got her power base by bearing his only son in 1856. At the age of five he became the Tong Zhi emperor and she emerged as one of the two regents during the emperor's minority and continued to control affairs after he attained maturity. She ruled through a clique of conservative and corrupt officials, suppressing badly needed reforms despite violent peasant revolts and imperialist aggression which cried out for a new order in China.

The empress dowager saw the end of her rule in the edicts of the hundred days. She staged a coup d'etat, deposed the emperor, confined him to the palace, declared herself regent, rescinded the edicts and executed six of the reformers but missed Kang and Liang, who fled to Japan.38

The palace coup of 1898 demonstrated there was little possibility of reforming China from above. Thereafter the concept of revolution gained supporters among China's small elite of persons educated in Western learning. Other reformers, especially Liang Qichao, persisted in hopes for a constitutional monarchy. But their dreams had little prospect of success. After the hundred days, China embarked irrevocably on the path toward revolution.

At the moment China's leadership was convulsed with the hundred days, the anticolonial United States became an imperialist power. The opportunities for creating an American empire were simply too great in 1898 for American leaders to resist. Although there was a strong movement in the U.S. against acquiring colonies by conquest, there were other powerful individuals who recognized that the future defense of the United States depended upon sea power and that a powerful navy required adequate bases. American leaders were profoundly influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan's books on the influence of sea power on history.39 There were also, to be sure, a large number of jingoistic expansionists who, seeing how powerful the United States was becoming, thought the U.S. should carve out an empire of its own. In April, 1898, the U.S. declared war on Spain and in short campaigns destroyed Spain's decrepit navy, defeated the few troops Spain could put into the field and occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam in the Marianas southeast of Japan. The U.S. retained all these former Spanish colonies except Cuba (though maintaining a protectorate there for many years). While the war was going on, the U.S. also annexed the hitherto independent Hawaiian islands (July 7, 1898). The next January, the U.S. took possession of Wake island about halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines and in December, 1899, partitioned the Samoan islands in the south Pacific with Germany. The swift movement of the United States into the Pacific brought about the decision to build a canal across the isthmus of Panama so that American warships could transfer swiftly between Atlantic and Pacific. When Colombia, which possessed Panama, would not quickly agree to give the U.S. control of the proposed canal zone, American President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged a revolt of local Panamanians willing to accept American terms, immediately recognized an independent Panamanian government and signed a canal treaty with the conspirators. It was Realpolitik at its nastiest.40

Chapter 2: Boxers, Open Door and Friendly Persuasion >>

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