Restless Empire (15 page)

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 members 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:

Our scholars are now without solid and practical education; our artisans are without scientific instructors; when compared with other countries we soon see how weak we are. Does anyone think that our troops are as well drilled or as well led as those of the foreign armies? Or that we can successfully stand against them? Changes must be made to accord with the necessities of the times. . . . Keeping in mind the morals of the sages and wise men, we must make them the basis on which to build newer and better structures. We must substitute modern arms and western organization for our old regime; we must select our military officers according to western methods of military education; we must establish elementary and high schools, colleges and universities, in accordance with those of foreign countries; we must abolish the
wenchang
(literary essay) and obtain a knowledge of ancient and modern world-history, a right conception of the present-day state of affairs, with special reference to the governments and institutions of the countries of the five great continents; and we must understand their arts and sciences.
¹³

But Kang’s proposals for a constitution and a national assembly went too far for the conservatives to accept. Feeling that she alone stood between the empire and chaos, Cixi carried out a coup d’état in September 1898, ending the hundred days of reform. Her repression was intense: With the Guangxu emperor isolated on a small island in a lake inside the Forbidden City (not far, by the way, from where China’s president Liu Shaoqi was to be kept under house arrest during the Cultural Revolution), the empress dowager not only overturned the reforms but also executed a number of reformers, including Kang Youwei’s younger brother. For Cixi and the traditionalists, 1898 was about defending their personal power and defending China from an attack from within that could be more dangerous than any attack from without. In their view, reforms would do the empire no good if by adopting them it lost its Confucian soul.

To the surprise of everyone, including himself, Kang Youwei escaped the wrath of the Empress Dowager and fled to Hong Kong with the help of British officials. His main collaborator, Liang Qichao, made it to Tokyo on board a Japanese gunboat. Meeting up in Japan, they formed organizations that advocated fundamental reforms in their homeland. Kang and Liang also began translating into Chinese a large number of Western books that had already been translated or summarized in Japanese. Over the next decade they were joined in this effort by other exiles and by students who came to Japan to study at institutions set up for the purpose by the Japanese government. The largest of these, Kobun Gakuin (The Academy of Vast Learning), trained more than 7,000 Chinese in a broad Western curriculum during the 1900s, including Lu Xun, who would become a major writer, and Chen Duxiu, who would cofound the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 1905 alone there were more than 8,000 Chinese students in Japan, and some of them studied at the best new Japanese universities. At Hosei University, a special program trained them in law and administration. Others studied science, technology, agriculture, or—as did Chiang Kai-shek,
who would later fight a seven-year long war against Japan—military affairs and strategy. The Chinese and Japanese worlds of concepts and terms were being more and more closely woven together; thousands of words for new basic terms, from
science
(
kexue
) and
law
(
falu
) to
republic
(
gonghe
) and
socialism
(
shehuizhuyi
) came to Chinese through Japanese (a language which of course is, to a large part, written in characters originally borrowed from China).