Departments
Intermediate Japanese - Free Online Course
NISSHIN SENSŌ
日清戦争
"Japan-Qing War"
The Japan-Qing War (also called the First Sino-Japanese War) was Japan’s first major armed confrontation with China in the modern era. This war was also the first step of a Japanese expansionist drive that reached its apogee with the Second World War.
Conflict Flares in Korea
By the 1890s, Japan and China had been eying each other cautiously for years. China had been Japan’s model in centuries past, but the Middle Kingdom was now a “sick mammoth”—beleaguered by internal conflict and Western imperialist incursions. Japan, on the other hand, was ascendant. Since the beginning of the Meiji Era twenty years earlier, it had been eagerly adopting Western technology and modernizing its institutions.
In the 1880s, China’s leadership became increasingly nervous over the military buildup in Japan. The Japanese, for their part, remained hesitant about taking on China—a sick mammoth is still a mammoth, after all. A few incidents occurred in the mid-1880s which might have escalated into open conflict. But both sides held their tempers in check—for the time being.
Korea became the chief flashpoint of Sino-Japanese tensions. In 1885 Japan and China signed a treaty pledging not to send troops to Korea without notifying each other, but this agreement was sufficient to secure the peace. Although Korea was not a formal colony of China, it had long since acknowledged the Middle Kingdom as a cultural and political mentor. When an intractable rebellion broke out in Korea in 1894, Korea turned to China for help. China sent troops into Korea, and Japan responded almost immediately by sending troops of its own. Soon Japanese and Chinese forces were exchanging fire on the Korean peninsula. Japan’s twenty-year drive to modernize its military bore results, as the Japanese side emerged victorious.
Bloodied by the Japanese, the Chinese agreed to a wide range of concessions at the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the war in April of 1895. China gave Japan the island of Formosa (Taiwan), the Pescadores Islands, and the Liaodong peninsula. China also agreed to pay Japan an indemnity in gold.
Some of the Western powers were less than pleased to see Japan playing the imperialist game. When the West forced Japan out of isolation in the 1850s, America and the nations of Europe had imposed a series of “unequal treaties” on the Japanese government—including clauses of extraterritoriality. Japan had only recently renegotiated the extraterritoriality clauses of these agreements in 1895, and now it was trying to impose unequal treaties of its own.
France, Germany, and Russia banded to together to force Japan to give up its claim to the Liaodong peninsula. The Japanese government was of course incensed at this demand, but it could not defy three major European powers. Japan agreed to the concession, but riots erupted in the streets of Tokyo over the outrage. The Emperor himself had to intervene, beseeching the people to “bear the unbearable.”
In 1898 Russia would itself force China to grant a lease for a Russian base at Port Arthur, located on the Liaodong peninsula. But any Russian smugness over outmaneuvering the Japanese on this point would be short-lived. Less than ten years later, the Japanese would devastate a Russian fleet docked at Port Arthur.
