Authors: Odd Westad
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.
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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fiasco—ten times more Japanese troops died from disease on the island than the number of Taiwanese killed—and was soon withdrawn.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.
T
HE
C
HINESE AND
J
APANESE 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,
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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.
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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:
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?
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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.
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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.”
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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.