Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Consider the development of all civilizations on earth. There is not one of these that is not based on struggle. China has never existed in a time of struggle and its people have never had a mind to struggle. Therefore, it is no wonder that China has not been able to develop. Today, however, [the Chinese people] are struggling with others. The twentieth century is unquestionably the Chinese age of opportunity for development and the time when this ancient civilization may be restored.22

  CHAPTER 3

  JAPAN

  NO OTHER ISSUE DEFINED China’s foreign relations in the early twentieth century as much as the relationship to Japan. Japan is a small country in comparison to China, which has twenty-five times its land area. It is roughly the same ratio, in fact, as that of the earth and the moon. And the two countries have analogies to earth and moon in their interactions. Japan has always had to deal with the gravitational pull of its giant neighbor. Although its islands never belonged to China’s direct sphere of control, Chinese culture, ideas, script, and religion have influenced Japan for more than a thousand years. The seventeenth-century Japanese neo-Confucian Kumazawa Banzan called China “the realm of the central fluorescence” and “the parent to the children, who were the eastern, southern, western, and northern barbarians, as the mountain was parent to the river’s children.”1 But China has also been affected by its cultural satellite.

  Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, China saw Japan as an inspiration and a possible ally in the encounter with the West. From the mid-1880s on, however, the Qing leadership began to consider its eastern island neighbor a rival and a threat. In 1894–1895 the two countries fought a bloody and destructive war over influence in East Asia, resulting in Qing China’s first-ever military loss to another regional power. Korea and Taiwan became Japanese protectorates (and eventual colonies), and China stood humiliated in the region. With the collapse of the Qing, many Japanese viewed China as chaotic and unstable. They thought of their giant neighbor as a magnet for more Western influence, and therefore tried to expand Japan’s power for reasons of trade, security, and ideology. Japan, in the eyes of its elite, had a civilizing mission in China, just as the European great powers thought they had in Africa and South Asia.

  DURING THE TOKUGAWA PERIOD IN JAPAN, from 1603 to 1868, the country limited its contacts with the outside world, but trade with China never fully ended. Many of the leading intellectuals of the period, both at the shogun’s court in Edo (Tokyo) and at the imperial court in Kyoto, revered China as the center of an East Asian Confucian universe in a manner not much different from those of their counterparts in Korea or Vietnam. But from the late eighteenth century on, Japanese thinking slowly began to move in a more nativist direction, contrasting the naturalness, thrift, and industry of its own country’s inhabitants to the perversions, indolence, and artifice of the Chinese. After the Qing’s losses to the West and the great rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century, this new and more negative attitude turned into a flood of Japanese criticism of China. Having gone from being the center of the world to a country among countries, China was now represented as an horrid example of what Japan itself did not want to become: a divided, debased country, “an empire in name only,” an outcast. More and more Japanese observed that because they and the Chinese looked alike, the travails of their neighbors across the ocean diminished them too. Rescuing China from its filth and denigration became a racial task for the Japanese of the first part of the twentieth century.

  Chinese views of Japan also varied widely during the period up to the 1920s. From a view of the Japanese as eastern barbarians who had voluntarily cut themselves off from proper interaction with the imperial center, and who therefore were foolish or knavish or both, the sense of what Japan represented began to change rapidly in the middle part of the nineteenth century. Now, Chinese visitors commented on the willingness of Japanese elites to make use of Western knowledge and technologies during the Meiji era. Some Chinese saw the Japanese as deserters from a correct, Confucian worldview; many commented on a society gone mad, with factories and shipyards emerging as dark blots on Japan’s pristine landscape. Others, and first and foremost those eager to see more Westernizing reform in China itself, saw Japan as an example, the example, of an Asian society transforming itself into something stronger and better. While all over China the concern about Japan’s growing power increased through war and conflicts, the admiration for their eastern neighbor’s achievements filled some Chinese with hope about what they themselves could do. It was this duality in the relationship that defined Sino-Japanese links in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that gradually made a complex association one of enmity and hatred.

  In the late nineteenth century, China and Japan both went through a set of political changes that became known as restorations. The one in Japan, the Meiji Restoration, was really a revolution that changed the country’s economic, social, and political makeup forever. Under the Tokugawa regime, which, like the Qing, had ruled since the seventeenth century, Japan was an isolated society oriented toward self-sufficiency. But from the 1860s on, it commenced a profound transformation that would, within a generation, take it from international irrelevancy to the position of major regional power. The changes in Japan took place under the cloak of a restoration of direct imperial rule by Emperor Meiji, but the group of strongmen who held power after the Tokugawa collapse in 1868 wanted to take the country in new directions in response to the growing threat from the West and the unrest within Japanese society. Unlike the Tongzhi Restoration in China, which faced many of the same problems, the Meiji Restoration was headed by leaders who wanted a deliberate break with the past in order to save Japan. Frightened by the prospect of foreign control and growing instability at home, the Meiji elite set out to create a new Japan: outward-looking, industrial, militarized, and security-oriented.

  It is hard to exaggerate the depth of change in Japan in the 1860s and 1870s and therefore difficult to fault the Chinese leaders for missing the possible consequences it might have for them. Through government initiatives and public enthusiasm, the look of the country was made new: from haircuts and clothing to books, transport, land ownership, education, and military affairs. Then, in the early 1880s, the country moved toward a new constitution and a parliamentary political system. In foreign affairs, Japan’s main aim in the Meiji era was to abolish the unequal treaties that Western countries had imposed on it in the decade before the Restoration. But the Meiji leaders thought that in order to do so, Japan had to engage itself more fully on the Asian mainland, showing that it could conduct new forms of diplomacy with its neighbors. While building its new, centralized, and Western-trained army and navy, the Meiji oligarchs began collecting information on how they could rearrange international affairs in East Asia to strengthen Japan in its bid for autonomy vis-à-vis the Western powers.

  While the Meiji Restoration revitalized Japan, the Qing’s Tongzhi Restoration was a mirage. The Tongzhi group of statesmen (and women; the Empress-Dowager Cixi was a key figure) was aware of the dangers their regime faced, and had showed their survival skills through defeating the Taiping and other rebellions and by beginning the rebuilding of the Chinese state. While they were too split politically, too suspicious of each other, and too cautious in terms of reform to achieve a full restoration of Qing power, much was—as we have already seen—achieved in terms of finding Sino-Western amalgams. There was a sense in the 1870s—both among leading Chinese and foreigners—that China would find a way forward that was uniquely its own, that it was too big and too set in its ways to fail. The leading men of the Tongzhi era, such as Prince Gong and Li Hongzhang, believed that neo-Confucian self-strengthening would save China. The term implied making use of Western technology to protect and preserve Confucian China. The catchphrase for modernizers became “Chinese essence, Western form.” The Confucian core of Chinese learning remained valid. As the Confucian scholar Feng Guifen argued, “What we then have to learn from the barbarians is only one t
hing: solid ships and effective guns.”2

  Li Hongzhang, the foremost Chinese political and diplomatic leader between 1870 and the end of the century, agreed with Feng Guifen about ships and guns. Without military modernization, he argued, China would always be a victim of foreign powers. Born in 1823 in rural Anhui, Li was a classically trained scholar who had passed the central imperial exams in 1847 and made his mark fighting the Taiping and Nian rebellions. After he became governor-general of Hebei and Henan, including the capital Beijing, he headed an ambitious program of steering the imperial court toward importing Western technology and expertise in order to build arsenals and shipyards. As with Chiang Kai-shek in the twentieth century, Li’s main hope was that China could keep war at bay until it was strong enough to defend itself.

  Japan was the first foreign affairs problem Li Hongzhang faced as he consolidated his power at the imperial court. In spite of themselves having been forced to accept unequal treaties with the West, Meiji leaders quickly attempted to impose the same injustices on China. Instead, the Qing offered draft treaties that were reciprocal in terms of extra territoriality. As negotiations got underway in 1870, Li Hongzhang noted

  Japan, which was not a dependency of China, was totally different from Korea, Ryukyu, and Annam [Vietnam]. That she had come to request trade without first seeking support from any Western power showed her independence and good will. If China refused her this time, her friendship would be lost and she might even seek Western intervention on her behalf, in which case it would be difficult for China to refuse again. An antagonized Japan could be an even greater source of trouble than the Western nations because of her geographical proximity. It was therefore in China’s interest to treat Japan on a friendly and equal basis and send commissioners to Japan who could look after the Chinese there, watch the movements of the Japanese government, and cultivate harmonious relations between the two states.3

  But treaties to regulate intercourse between the two countries were not enough for Japan. Its leaders felt that Western powers were seizing the rest of East Asia in order to isolate the island country. The next Japanese mission to China, headed by one of the young Meiji leaders, Soejima Taneomi, in 1873, tried to widen Japan’s position along the Chinese coast by proclaiming Japan’s right to send troops to punish people on Taiwan for their attacks on Japanese shipping. The Zongli Yamen, unwisely, chose to fudge the issue, by claiming that the islands of Taiwan had both outer barbarians and inner barbarians and that only the latter were under Chinese jurisdiction. China, in other words, was not responsible for the actions of the coastal outer barbarians, the ones who had attacked Japanese ships. The Japanese response was full of the fear that would poison relations with China for two generations to come:

  If foreign powers occupied the aboriginal territories under the pretext of a massacre the aborigines had committed, and if these aboriginal territories became like the French territories in Vietnam, Macao, Hong Kong, and Russia’s expanding sphere of influence from the Amur river basin to our northern frontier, we would be confronted with a menace on our southern shores, which would threaten the islands in that area.4

  In 1874 Japan used the unclear Chinese sovereignty statements to send a punitive expedition to Taiwan, the first time the new Japanese army and navy had been deployed overseas. The expedition itself was a fiasco—ten times more Japanese troops died from disease on the island than the number of Taiwanese killed—and was soon withdrawn. But it emphasized an important point: If Japan wanted, it could project its power all along China’s coast without much chance for the Chinese state to intervene. This lesson was an ominous one for decades to come.

  THE CHINESE AND JAPANESE STATES saw each other as enemies throughout the twentieth century. But before conflict there was cooperation, admiration, and transmission. Some of these contacts remained in spite of the enmity of the states, even at times of war and occupation. Up to the end of World War I, many reform-minded Chinese believed that Japanese learning on matters of technology, science, politics, and international affairs was better suited to instruct China than what arrived directly from the West. In some cases these “Japanese lessons” were the result of misunderstandings: Chinese observers assumed that a certain form of knowledge was Japanese in origin simply because it was imported to China from Japan and its Japanese transmitters insisted on ownership (whereas in reality the Japanese had borrowed it from, say, a German magazine published a couple of years earlier). In other cases, Chinese wanted to believe that new things were Japanese in origin because it was easier to convince others of their appropriateness when they had already been adopted in a Confucian society. But often the transmission from Japan was genuine in the sense that laws, institutions, and technologies that had their origins in the West came to China after they had been adapted to Japanese purposes.

  Japan in the Meiji and Taisho (1912–1926) eras was a great workshop of ideas. Visitors from all over the world were struck by the energy of the place, talking about how Tokyo bustled with debates and controversy, and how the government ruthlessly carried out reform even against the most long-established rules. The image of Japan, not least among other Asians, was that of a great laboratory of reform, from which their own countries could draw inspiration or apprehension, depending on the direction you wanted to go. For some Chinese, Japan’s rapid transformation was part of a course they too wanted to follow, and a positive alternative to what they saw as the sluggish march toward change in Qing China. Chinese traders—operating in Japan’s coastal cities under the protection of Western-imposed extraterritoriality—visitors, students, and an increasing group of political refugees, all reported back to their home country on the speed and success of Japan’s transformation.

  Most of the ideas that reached China from Japan were connected to science. The transmission happened almost on an assembly-line basis. Japanese books, tracts, pamphlets, magazines, and journal articles were translated into Chinese and used alongside texts that had been translated from Western languages or, increasingly, that had been written in Chinese by those who had studied abroad or with foreigners in China. The Japanese texts were particularly valuable for late Qing scientists, because like their counterparts on the other side of the East Sea, they were looking for practical implementations of the new knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine. But other ideas also traveled: Concepts of citizenship and individual rights were part of the Meiji discourse and found their way into Chinese debates through Japanese writings. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was first translated into Chinese in Japan in the late 1870s,5 and a great number of other translations followed, including of the work of some German nineteenth-century philosophers, among them Karl Marx. As we shall see later, political ideas transmitted through Japan would have a decisive influence on China in the twentieth century.

  One field in which Japanese learning loomed large was in China’s understanding of its own place in the world through international law. Both Japanese and Western scholars working on East Asia concluded that China was not a possible partner in international affairs because of its lack of a reliable legal system. Some members of the Chinese elite agreed, and the government engaged in several large projects on translating texts in international public and private law. Almost all of the main Chinese texts on the latter came from the pen of Yamada Saburo, the chair of the Law Faculty at Tokyo University, who, during his long life, also served as president of Keijo University in Seoul during the Japanese occupation. Yamada’s terms became the Chinese terminology that is still in use. In field after field, Japanese concepts found their way into Chinese, irrespective of the diplomatic relations between the two countries. In strange ways, the closeness created by interstate conflict made Japanese society and culture even more attractive to many Chinese. As we shall see later, it was after the war between the two countries in 1894–1895 that the Chinese discovery of modern Japan really began. Liang Qichao, one of China’s key reformers around the turn of the century, even managed to meet his 1898 political
exile in Japan with enthusiasm:

  I have been in Japan . . . under these grievous circumstances for a number of months now, learning the Japanese language . . . and reading Japanese books. Books like I have never seen before dazzle my eyes. Ideas such as I have never encountered before baffle my brain. It is like seeing the sun after being confined to a dark room, or like a parched throat getting wine. So sated am I with happiness I dare not keep it bottled up, and so I let out with a shout and say to my fellow countrymen: Those of you yearning for new knowledge, join me in learning Japanese.6

  But how was the rest of Asia going to deal with the shift in power to Japan? Culturally, politically, and organizationally, Korea had been the key state in the Sino-centric international system in the region. In terms of self-identification, it was closer to China than was any other independent country. Its Confucian scholars helped create a joint intellectual agenda. They wrote in Chinese and thought of their country as closely connected to the Chinese empire, but still distinct from it. Korean elites had for a very long time served as a bridge between China and Japan, across which ideas had traveled freely and often. Chinese script had arrived in Japan from Korea in the fourth century AD, Buddhism had come the same way two centuries later, and paper and printing, silk- and porcelain-making followed. As the world changed in the mid-nineteenth century and the flow of ideas started to be reversed, Koreans were reluctant to give up their perspective, which put China at the center. Large numbers of Confucian scholars appealed to the government not to violate set practice by accepting Japan as China’s equal. One such petition, from 1881, sets out their view of Korea’s traditional position and the dangers of changing it: