by Odd Westad
We are a tributary state in our relations with China. For two hundred years we have sent tributes . . . and maintained our faith as a dependent state. If we are to accept official communications from Japan in which such honorifics as “the emperor” or “imperial” are used, suppose China questions our acquiescence. How are we to explain?7
From 1864 Korea was ruled by Prince Yi Haeung, termed the Daewongun (the Prince of the Great Court), on behalf of his son King Gojong, who was a minor. Prince Yi believed that Korea was coming under increasing threat from Western powers and Japan, and attempted to centralize power to be better equipped to resist. He fought a French landing in 1866 and an American one in 1871 but was removed from power in 1873 by his son, who had reached maturity. King Gojong wanted to negotiate with the foreigners, and he was encouraged to do so by Beijing, which hoped to maneuver between being seen as a facilitator in the opening of Korea to foreign trade and keeping its formal position of suzerainty intact. The scenario was not entirely dissimilar to Chinese–North Korean relations today.
The Meiji elite in Japan had different ideas. From the very beginning of the political changes in Tokyo, the leaders feared that Western domination of Korea would strangle the new Japanese experiment. They were particularly anxious when they learned about Russian advances on Korea’s northern border. Regime hotheads, such as Saigo Takamori (who would later rebel against the Meiji order and suffer the consequences), suggested in 1873 that Japan should invade and occupy Korea, thereby seeing off foreign competition and revenge Korea’s insults against the emperor, while providing gainful employment for thousands of unemployed samurai. Saigo’s proposal was rejected, but Japan increased its push to gain access to Korea’s resources and markets. In September 1875 the Japanese warship Unyo sailed to the Korean island of Ganghwa at the entrance to the Han river, which leads to Seoul, the capital. The Koreans shelled the ship, and, as retribution, Japanese marines landed and destroyed all they could find on the island, killing a number of Koreans in the process. In the aftermath of this first use of the new imperial navy, the Japanese government insisted on signing a Western-style treaty with Korea, patterned on the treaties Japan and China had been forced to sign with the Western powers. While the 1876 Treaty of Ganghwa did not give the Japanese extraterritoriality, it did open Korea to trade. Most importantly, it treated Korea as an independent state and ignored its tributary relations with China.
As in China and Japan, the 1880s was a turbulent decade in Korean politics. While the traditional elite tried to keep its rule intact and preserve at least some links with China, a new group of reformers emerged who, like their counterparts in China, were inspired by Japan’s example. For the opponents of fundamental change, Japan was now the enemy. “It is obvious,” one of them wrote, “that the Japanese and the Westerners are one and the same. How can one believe them when they say they are Japanese and not Westerners?” But for the reformers—among them the charismatic young nationalist Kim Ok-gyun who had traveled twice to Tokyo—Japan was a necessary ally in the battle for a strong and independent Korea. Two years after China had reasserted itself by sending troops to Seoul, the reformers tried to mount a coup d’état. Hoping that China would be too distracted by its war with France to intervene in Korea, Kim received promises from the Japanese ambassador for help. But the plan to assassinate leading members of the government failed, and Chinese forces and loyalist Korean troops confronted the rebels, who, after three days of fighting, fled to the port city of Inchon and boarded a Japanese ship bound for Yokohama. For the moment, the Sino-Korean alliance seemed secure.8
Given their difficulties with the Western powers further south, the Chinese Court had no intention of antagonizing the Japanese unnecessarily over Korea. Beijing followed a two-pronged strategy. Building on the victory of the traditionalists and the Chinese forces over the rebels, it increased the number of Chinese troops in Seoul and sent one of its most talented commanders, Yuan Shikai, to be the imperial resident there. The feisty twenty-six-year-old Henanese officer, who twice had failed in the imperial examinations and therefore had chosen an army career, became a sort of Chinese viceroy in Korea, moving into the royal palace and at times sleeping in the room next to King Gojong’s chamber. For Yuan, his twelve years in Korea would launch a career that would make him China’s president and, almost, its emperor. But his task in Seoul was not just to look after China’s interests and prop up the tottering Korean monarchy. It was also to make sure that the Koreans settled their affairs with the Japanese properly in the wake of the failed coup, so that a future internationalization of Korean politics could be avoided.
Yuan Shikai did not succeed in creating a more stable situation in Korea. Even though Seoul and Tokyo in 1885 negotiated a protocol in which the Korean king apologized for the damage to Japanese property during the fighting the year before and allowed the stationing of a small unit of Japanese troops in the Korean capital, the direct negotiations between China and Japan over the situation on the peninsula undermined most of Yuan’s work. The text of the Tianjin Convention between the two countries aimed at a non-interventionist policy with regard to Korea by sharply limiting the number of troops each country could have there. In effect, the convention undermined China’s role as suzerain, while providing little incentive for the Koreans to attempt to work with both of its powerful neighbors. Over the next ten years, while Korean politics became increasingly factional and the model of Japan became more and more an inspiration for reformers, the role of the Chinese representatives in Seoul became more and more difficult.
By the early 1890s Korean society was fragmenting. In the south, a new syncretic religion called Tonghak (Eastern Learning) was challenging the authorities. The Tonghaks called upon the Korean people to rise up against foreign influence in the wake of the disasters that had befallen the country. “The people are the root of the nation,” one of their pamphlets read. “If the root withers, the nation will be enfeebled. . . .We cannot sit by and watch our nation perish.”9 By defining Koreans as constituting a separate and defined nation, the Tonghaks—mostly peasants from some of the poorest areas of the country—linked up with a new trend in Seoul in which some officials wanted not only to reform the state but also to emphasize Korean identity against the two other countries in the region. This new Korean nationalism was seen as a threat both by the Chinese and the Japanese, and by traditionalists at the Court in Seoul. When the Tonghaks marched on the capital in 1894, King Gojong asked for Chinese help in putting down what he viewed as a rebellion. Li Hongzhang, in charge of China’s foreign relations in Beijing, obliged, after notifying Tokyo in accordance with the Tianjin Protocol. The Japanese responded by sending in their own troops, ostensibly for the protection of their citizens. By June 1894 the scene was set for a Sino-Japanese war.
At first, both Tokyo and Beijing attempted to avoid an all-out conflict. After landing 7,000 troops, the Japanese tried to get China engaged in setting up a joint commission for the reform of the Korean government. Beijing refused. Many leading Qing officials felt that China had done enough to appease Japan over Korea. They believed that China, after two decades of self-strengthening, was strong enough to defeat the “eastern barbarians.” The belligerent attitude was supported by the rise at Court in the late 1880s and early 1890s of a faction that claimed that China’s own reform had gone far enough, and that the Chinese essence was about to be lost. The Qingliu Dang, or purist party, as these officials were called, thought that compromise with foreign powers on internal or tributary matters was linked to China giving up its civilization through exchanging propriety and righteousness for barbarian habits. The Qingliu Dang often appealed to the Empress Dowager, Cixi, to quash plans put forward by Li Hongzhang and other moderate reformers. For her part, Cixi, who feared that the young Emperor Guangxu could be convinced to back radical reform in order to push her from power, more often than not concurred with the conservatives, including, in 1894, on the key issue of war or peace.
Li Hongzhang’s
dilemma was that he could not get direct backing from the Western powers, while the Beijing purists were pressing for war, and Japan was using its troop presence to take control of Seoul. When King Gojong rejected Japanese plans for government reform in late July, Japanese troops broke into the royal palace, kidnapped the queen and her children, and used their new leverage to bring the old Daewongun back into power. The Daewongun then declared Korean independence and war on China. When Li attempted to land Chinese reinforcements in Korea by ship, the Gaosheng, a chartered British steamer, was sunk by the Japanese navy on 25 July 1894 and 950 Chinese soldiers drowned. War could no longer be avoided.
The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 was the first war China fought with its new Western-type army and navy. It was also the first conflict between China and Japan in three hundred years, and the beginning of an enmity that was to define China’s foreign relations for a century to come.10 But in a curious way the war itself and the two decades that followed stand astride these two distinct periods in the Sino-Japanese relationship: China and Japan may have engaged in a bloody and terrible war, but the admiration that many Chinese felt for Japan’s successes in building a new type of state and army was not diminished by China’s losses. On the contrary, the sacrifices that China had to make were often blamed on the Qing dynasty and its inability to follow the examples set by Japan. To some Chinese, the Japanese model was in a perverse way validated by its victory: What should not happen and therefore could not happen in a Confucian world—that a younger brother beat and denigrated his older brother—had happened nonetheless. It was visible proof of China’s decline and decadence. For people from Korea to Burma, the war redefined power in their region and turned the known order of the world upside down.
At the outset, Japan’s victory was in no way assured. Chinese forces were well placed in Korea, and China’s navy was about twice the size of Japan’s. Both the civilian and military leaders in Tokyo were worried about the outcome, and much of their strategy was defined by the need to deliver decisive blows to the Qing military and thereby force it to accede to Japan’s war aims, which was to remove Chinese influence from Korea. A long war, they feared, would be to China’s advantage, since it would drain Japan’s resources and manpower. The first engagement on land, in southern Korea, went Japan’s way, but its leaders worried about what would happen in the north, where Chinese forces were stronger. And what they were most concerned about was what would happen at sea.
In September 1894 the Japanese forces landed at Inchon, the port city of Korea’s capital Seoul, just as US General Douglas MacArthur’s soldiers would do fifty-six years later. And, just as during that later Korean War, the Chinese forces concentrated on the defense of the north, assembling the majority of their troops around Pyongyang, a city 120 miles north of the capital. The Chinese forces were superior in numbers and consisted of some of the empire’s best-supplied and best-trained Western-style troops, augmented by traditional Manchu cavalry, fighting with swords and lances. But when the battle started on 15 November, the Chinese could not match their enemies in terms of organization, logistics, and firepower. The Chinese defense was poorly coordinated and began to run out of ammunition, not least because of the lack of weapons’ standardization among Chinese units. The Manchu horsemen attacked in wave after wave but were cut down by Japanese artillery, whose officers—in the midst of the slaughter—commented on the immense bravery of the old-style Qing army. With the city surrounded and the heavy Japanese guns trained on the main part of the imperial forces, the Chinese officers surrendered. Two thousand Qing troops fell in battle, against 700 Japanese, and the Meiji army continued its offensive toward the north.
The following day China’s northern fleet engaged Japan’s warships just off the mouth of the Yalu river, which marks the border between China and Korea. Again, on paper, the Chinese force was stronger than the Japanese. The Qing navy—and especially its northern fleet—was the modern pride of the empire. The Qing Court had spent immense sums buying ships from abroad and developing Chinese shipyards to serve them. The largest vessels in the northern fleet, the German-built battleships Ding Yuan and Zhen Yuan, were among the most powerful ships in existence (at 7,500 tons they were larger than the largest US battleship, the USS Maine). But China’s sailors and marines, compared to Japan’s, were poorly trained, and their officers—including the Western officers who served on them—did not understand naval tactics as well as their Japanese counterparts did. When the two fleets clashed, their training and tactics lost the clash for China. Tellingly, during the heat of battle the commanding Chinese admiral, Ding Ruchang—a former Taiping rebel turned Qing admiral—was seriously injured by a shell from his own ship that hit the bridge where he was standing. At the end of the four-hour engagement, four Chinese ships were sunk and all the others seriously damaged. With its army in retreat and the northern fleet destroyed, the Qing began to look for a way out of the war.
In Tokyo, leaders discussed whether to settle or continue the war. The proponents of continuing the war won hands down, since they could convincingly argue that Japan had been handed a golden opportunity to create a defensive environment that would secure their country against future Western encroachments, especially by Russia. Japanese forces now entered Manchuria by sea and land, and they landed on Shandong peninsula, and on Taiwan. The remnants of the Chinese northern fleet surrendered in February 1895, and Admiral Ding committed suicide. The following month armistice negotiations started, during which the Qing were advised by the former US secretary of state John W. Foster (the grandfather of John Foster Dulles, who would play a major role in China’s next war in Korea). In the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Beijing had to recognize Korea’s independence (under Japan’s tutelage), it had to pay the equivalent of $133 million (more than a hundred times that amount in today’s money) in indemnities, cede Taiwan, the Penghu islands, and the Manchurian Liaodong peninsula to Japan, open more treaty ports along the Yangzi river, and allow Japanese to run factories in China. If it had not been for a failed assassination attempt by a Japanese on the Chinese delegation leader, old Li Hongzhang, which embarrassed the Tokyo government, the resulting settlement would have been far worse for China. Even after a diplomatic intervention by Russia, supported by France and Germany, forced Japan to hand Liaodong back, the war stood as damning testament to the decline of the Chinese empire.
The defeat in the war against Japan led to a deep sense of crisis within the Chinese elite. But while there was much agreement about the problem—China’s weakness—there was little consensus in terms of remedy. For the Empress Dowager and most of the Court, China had given up too much of its Confucian essence already, and it was only through regaining this spiritual core that the empire could retake its place in the world. The correct response to the wrongdoing of people inside and outside the empire was to appeal to justice and to reason, and thereby help them understand the natural order of things. If China held fast to its Confucian principles, then matters would correct themselves over time. Chu Chengbo, a censor in the imperial government, told the Court that “our trouble is not that we lack good institutions but that we lack upright minds.”11
But for many Chinese who had witnessed their country’s humiliation, an appeal to traditional principles was meaningless. Across the empire, demands for thorough reform of the government system emerged. Younger members of the elite felt that China could not survive if its society and its state were not profoundly changed. The candidates for the imperial examination, who were gathered in Beijing as news of the Chinese defeat came through, in a unique step broke with the very purpose that had brought them to the capital—the promulgation of Confucian knowledge—and took the lead in appealing for reform. One of them, Kang Youwei, a thirty-seven-year-old Guandong native from a prominent scholar-official family, organized most of his fellow candidates to sign a petition protesting the Shimonoseki Treaty and calling for fundamental reform of the Chinese government. It was an intellectual mass rebellion of the younger memb
ers of the elite that the Qing could simply not ignore, especially as the reform movement began to set up associations and discussion clubs both in and outside the capital, and the government—fearful of the consequences—did not dare suppress them.
While seeing himself very much as a reformer in the Confucian tradition, Kang looked abroad—and first and foremost to Japan—for models of how China through innovation and conscious adaptation could find a place as a respected state within an international system of states. “A survey of all states in the world,” Kang wrote in a 1898 memorial to the throne, “will show that those states that undertook reforms became strong while those states that clung to the past perished. . . .
Our present trouble lies in our clinging to old institutions without knowing how to change. In an age of competition among states, to put into effect methods appropriate to an era of universal unification and laissez-faire is like wearing heavy furs in summer or riding a high carriage across a river. This can only result in having a fever or getting oneself drowned. . . . I beg Your Majesty to adopt the purpose of Peter the Great of Russia as our purpose and to take the Meiji Reform of Japan as the model for our reform. The time and place of Japan’s reform are not remote and her religion and customs are somewhat similar to ours. Her success is manifest; her example easy to follow.12
The young Guangxu emperor, so long under the thumb of the Empress Dowager and her Court officials, listened to the reformers, and acted on Kang’s recommendations in the summer of 1898. During an intense period of change, Kang, with the emperor’s blessing, not only remodeled the central government but set up new structures controlling the military, developing Western-style education, and improving government finance. The emperor himself had a long conversation with Ito Hirobumi, who had been prime minister of Japan during the war. For a brief moment China seemed to move toward fundamental reform of the Petrine or Meiji kind. Guangxu seemed a man in a hurry. One of his edicts read: