The defeat that changed China's history(3)

HUMILIATION: An artist's representation of representatives from the Qing Dynasty and Japan negotiating the Treaty of Shimonoseki in Japan on April 17, 1895 (XINHUA)

Expanding influence

In the spring of 1894, the Donghak Rebellion broke out in Korea and threatened to overthrow the country's imperial regime. Answering the requests of the Korean court, China sent in troops to help suppress the rebellion.

Japanese forces claimed that this action by China broke the Convention of Tientsin (now Tianjin), which the two countries had signed 10 years earlier. The convention stated that China and Japan had to seek approval from one another if either were to send troops into Korea. Japan claimed that China has not sought approval or even notified them, while China asserted that they had contacted Japan and received approval.

In fact, Japan had long intended to weaken Qing influence over Korea and ended up using the incident as an excuse to begin their campaign. After refusing to withdraw its troops in spite of the diplomatic interventions from Russia and Britain, Japan went on to capture Seoul and install a new pro-Japanese government that Japan then used to grant the Japanese Imperial Army the right to expel the Chinese Beiyang Army from Korea. Eventually, on August 1, 1894, war was officially declared between Japan and China.

After a series of battles on land and at sea, including the defeat of China's Beiyang Fleet, which was largely sponsored by Li, and the Battle of the Yalu River on September 17, 1894, Japanese troops ultimately crossed the Korean border and entered Qing territory in October the same year.

The losses came as a surprise to the Qing government and foreign observers alike—the German General Staff had predicted Japan's defeat and William Lang (1843-1906), a British advisor to the Qing naval forces, had gone as far as to say, "In the end, there is no doubt that Japan must be utterly crushed."

At the time of the Battle of the Yalu River, the Chinese navy had 65 ships, compared to Japan's 32. However, not all of China's fleets were mobilized for the battle. Only the Beiyang Fleet, though the largest in China and Asia as a whole at the time which had 25 ships, fought the Japanese.

The fleet also suffered from a crippling shortage of ammunition. Their supply was so low that they had been unable to carry out live-fire training and were inadequately trained and prepared for the battle. Of the munitions that they did have, some were of the wrong caliber and unusable, while others were filled with porcelain or cement instead of gunpowder. Many of those that did have gunpowder were—as Philo Mcgiffin, naval advisor to Zhenyuan, a ship in the Beiyang fleet, put it—"Thirteen years old and condemned."

"From this, we can see how doomed the Qing Dynasty was," said Xiao Yusheng, a researcher with the Academy of Military Sciences of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

Within the Beiyang command itself, corruption and irregularities were also rampant. Li chose his subordinates according to personal loyalty and willingness to work rather than for their ability and experience.

"A navy is a modern and complicated system. It requires not only modernized ships and weapons but also modernized personnel and management systems. The Beiyang Fleet realized modernization in its weapons, which could not bring about victory at war by themselves," said Jiang Ming, historian and author of The Fleet That Flew the Dragon Flag, a book on the naval history of the late Qing Dynasty that was first published in Beijing in 2002.

In fact, there needed a thorough modernization of China as a whole. "After nearly 30 years of reform, Japan had become a modern country in which a nationalistic consciousness bonded the government and people into a unified body," said Pi Mingyong, another researcher with the Academy of Military Sciences of the PLA. "However, the Chinese general public lacked similar sentiments. In a sense, it was Li but not China that was fighting Japan."

A lack of introspection

In the two decades before the Jiawu War, Meiji reformers consistently focused on internal reforms at the expense of overseas ventures. They believed that Japan had to modernize at home before it could be adventurous abroad.

In contrast, there was no consensus in the upper echelons of the Qing government concerning an imperative to minimize conflicts abroad. Rather, its policies followed the demands of the faction of the hour. "As a result, Chinese foreign policy remained ineffectual and tragically reckless," said S. C. M. Paine, an associate professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island.

"Li did not understand the essentials of modern international politics, which weakened Chinese foreign policy," said Weng Fei, an Anhui-based scholar on late-Qing history. "He was obsessed with the antiquated tactic of pitting the 'barbarians' against one another."

Li's diplomatic efforts to seek interventions from Russia and Britain before the war were a typical example. When he finally recognized the inefficiency of his approach, much time had already been lost in making military arrangements.

"The war was a significant contest between China and Japan after a generation of modernization," said Zhang Haipeng, Director of the Association of Chinese Historians with the CASS. "The defeat broke the Qing Dynasty's Self-Strengthening Movement and was a testament to its failure."

"The limited diplomatic, military and technological modernization, without corresponding change in institutions and spirit, was incapable of revitalizing the country and transforming it into a modern state. China's loss seemed all but inevitable," Zhang added.