Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
included cession of the Liaodong Peninsula and Taiwan (which had
been made a province in the 1880s) to Japan, formal Qing recognition
of the independence of Korea, and payment of an enormous war
indemnity to Japan.
Subsequent Qing investigation into the defeat of the Chinese fleet
uncovered extensive corruption and incompetence in the navy. Funds
earmarked for naval development had gone elsewhere, and it was
even discovered that some of the Qing ships' magazines contained
not gunpowder but sand. Prewar preparations and combat readiness
were also inadequate. Before the war, when the noted writer on Asia
Sir Henry Norman inspected a Chinese battleship, he found after the
canvas had been removed from a quick-firing gun that its barrel had
been filled with chopsticks and was generally littered with rice and
pickles (Paine 2003, 155-56).
China's defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War marked the emergence
of Japan, not China, as the preeminent military and economic power in
East Asia. It also revealed the full extent of China's weakness as the
“Sick Man of Asia.” Soon other vultures were circling overhead,
demanding their fair share of the “Chinese melon” that was being
divided among “the Powers,” or the imperialist nations. In 1895 the
Russians joined the French and the Germans and intimidated Japan
into surrendering its hold over the Liaodong Peninsula. Not long after
this, the Russians secured railway rights in Manchuria and seized
the port cities of Dairen and Port Arthur on the southern tip of the
Liaodong Peninsula for themselves. In 1897 the Germans pressured
the Qing into leasing part of Shandong province to them for 99 years.
The next year, China was once more John Bullied into surrendering
more territorial sovereignty to the British; this time the New Territories
opposite the island of Hong Kong on the mainland were leased to
Britain for 99 years. (The lease finally expired in 1997, when the British
gave the New Territories, as well as Kowloon and the island of Hong
Kong, back to China.) The Americans, busy in 1898 with their war with
Spain and their subsequent beginnings of empire in the Philippines,
Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, were too slow to get in on the divvying
up of the Chinese spoils.
Many Chinese patriots were humiliated by the aftermaths of the
First Sino-Japanese War and concluded that the halfhearted self-
strengthening efforts were insufficient to modernize China and enable
it to stand up to the international community. Some advocated more
radical reform programs; others such as Sun Yat-sen espoused out-
right revolution against the Manchu Qing regime.
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