Sino-Japanese War
The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 reflected several decades of increasing tension between China and Japan over the status of Korea, which China regarded as belonging to its sphere of influence, but which Japan saw as increasingly vital to its own imperialist interests. China continued to believe in a system of tributary relations in which Korea was a vassal state, but Japan had thrown off its feudal past and was rapidly modernizing in the aftermath of the 1868 Meiji Restoration that had returned the Japanese emperor to nominal power.
The stage was set for a clash over Korea as Koreans were caught up in the politics of the moment. Conservatives in Korea wished to continue tributary relations with China, whereas reformers in Korea looked to Japan for modernization and an "opening" of the so-called Hermit Kingdom. Amid increasing political violence, the conservative Korean government called on China for help in suppressing the Tonghak rebellion, a peasant rebellion whose participants were adherents of Tonghak ("Eastern Learning"), a religious movement that opposed both Westernization and the stratification of traditional Korean society. In early June 1894, Chinese troops began arriving.
The Japanese response was immediate and decisive. Within a week of Chinese troop movement into Korea, Japanese military units began crossing the narrow Tsushima and Korea straits to land in Korea. By mid-July, the government in Tokyo demanded that Korea make the sorts of modernizing changes Japan had made in the Meiji Restoration, and Japanese leaders hoped for a pretext for war. Korean leaders hesitated and turned to China for support.
The next step was war. Japanese forces occupied the Korean royal palace and forced the Korean king to ask for Japanese assistance against China. Then the Japanese navy sank a Chinese troop transport, and war was declared on 1 August. Japan was better organized, and its commanders were more willing to take risks. Japanese troops moved quickly up the Korean peninsula and trapped Chinese forces around Pyongyang. Other Japanese troops crossed the Yalu River and seized key positions on the Liaodong Peninsula and then moved into Weihaiwei in northern China. In September 1895, the Japanese navy forced a Chinese fleet to surrender, and the two sides looked to negotiate.
China recognized Korea's independence, ceded the Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan, and the Pescadores to Japan, and agreed to pay a large indemnity and to extend to Japan all the benefits of the so-called unequal treaties that China had signed with European powers. Russia was concerned about Japan's interest in Korea and southern Manchuria, and with the support of France and Germany (the so-called Triple Intervention) forced Japan to return Liaodong—while demanding an even larger indemnity from China—thus helping to set the stage for the Russo-Japanese War about a decade later.
Russo-Japanese War; Sino-Japanese Conflict, Second; Tonghak
Further Reading
Lone, Stewart. (1994) Japan's First Modern War: Army and Society in the Conflict with China, 1894–1895. New York: St. Martin's.
Selby, John Millin. (1968) The Paper Dragon: An Account of the China Wars, 1840–1900. New York: Praeger.
This is the complete article, containing 494 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
