Korea
The Chinese Empire
was extensive but not intrusive. It demanded tribute and the
recognition of the Emperor’s suzerainty. But the tribute was more
symbolic than substantive, and suzerainty was exercised in a way
that allowed for autonomy almost indistinguishable from
independence. By the nineteenth century the fiercely independent
Koreans had reached a practical accommodation with the Chinese
giant to their north and west. Korea was technically a tributary
state and Korean Kings regularly sent tribute to Beijing. Korea had
adopted Confucian moral codes and Chinese written characters for
formal correspondence. Beijing, in turn, had a strong interest in
developments on the peninsula, whose geographic position
established it as a potential invasion corridor to China from the
sea.
Korea played in some
ways a mirror-image role in Japan’s conception of its strategic
imperatives. Japan, too, saw foreign dominance of Korea as a
potential threat. The peninsula’s position jutting out from the
Asian mainland toward Japan had tempted the Mongols to use it as a
launching point for two attempted invasions of the Japanese
archipelago. Now with Chinese imperial influence waning, Japan
sought to secure a dominant position on the Korean Peninsula, and
began asserting its own economic and political claims.
Throughout the 1870s
and 1880s, China and Japan engaged in a series of court intrigues
in Seoul, sparring for predominance amongst royal factions. As
Korea found itself beset by foreign ambitions, Li Hongzhang advised
the Korean rulers to learn from the Chinese experiences with the
invaders. It was to organize a competition among potential
colonizers by inviting them in. In an October 1879 letter to a high
Korean official, Li counseled that Korea should seek a supporter
among the far barbarians, especially the United States:
You may say that the simplest way to avoid trouble would be to shut oneself in and be at peace. Alas, as far as the East is concerned, this is not possible. There is no human agency capable of putting a stop to the expansionist movement of Japan: has not your government been compelled to inaugurate a new era by making a Treaty of Commerce with them? As matters stand, therefore, is not our best course to neutralize one poison by another, to set one energy against another?41
On this basis, Li
proposed that Korea “seize every opportunity to establish treaty
relations with Western nations, of which you would make use to
check Japan.” Western trade, he warned, would bring “corrupting
influences” such as opium and Christianity; but in contrast to
Japan and Russia, which sought territorial gains, the Western
powers’ “only object would be to trade with your kingdom.” The goal
should be to balance the dangers from each outside power, allowing
none to predominate: “Since you are aware of the strength of your
adversaries, use all possible means to divide them; go warily, use
cunning—thus will you prove yourselves good strategists.”42 Li left unstated
the Chinese interest in Korea—either because he took for granted
that Chinese over-lordship was not a threat of the same nature as
other foreign influences, or because he had concluded that China
had no practical means to secure a Korea free from foreign
influence.
Inevitably Chinese
and Japanese claims to a special relationship with Korea grew
incompatible. In 1894, both Japan and China dispatched troops in
response to a Korean rebellion. Japan eventually seized the Korean
King and installed a pro-Japanese government. Nationalists in both
Beijing and Tokyo called for war; only Japan, however, had the
benefit of a modern naval force, funds initially levied for the
modernization of the Chinese navy having been requisitioned for
improvements to the Summer Palace.
Within hours of the
outbreak of war, Japan destroyed China’s poorly funded naval
forces, the ostensible achievement of decades of
self-strengthening. Li Hongzhang was recalled from one of his
periodic forced retirements to go to the Japanese city of
Shimonoseki to negotiate a peace treaty, with the almost impossible
mission of salvaging Chinese dignity from the military catastrophe.
The side that has the upper hand in war often has an incentive to
delay a settlement, especially if every passing day improves its
bargaining position. This is why Japan had deepened China’s
humiliation by rejecting a string of proposed Chinese negotiators
as having insufficient protocol rank—a deliberate insult to an
empire that had heretofore presented its diplomats as embodiments
of heavenly prerogatives and therefore outranking all others,
whatever their Chinese rank.
The terms under
discussion at Shimonoseki were a brutal shock to the Chinese vision
of preeminence. China was obliged to cede Taiwan to Japan; to
desist from tributary ceremony with Korea and recognize its
independence (in practice opening it up to further Japanese
influence); to pay a significant war indemnity; and to cede to
Japan the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria, including the
strategically located harbors of Dalian and Lushun (Port Arthur).
Only a would-be assassin’s bullet from a Japanese nationalist
spared China an even more demeaning outcome. Grazing Li’s face at
the scene of the negotiations, it shamed the Japanese government
into dropping a few of its more sweeping demands.
Li continued to
negotiate from his hospital bed, to show that he was unbowed in
humiliation. His stoicism may have been influenced by the fact that
he knew that, even as the negotiations proceeded, Chinese diplomats
were approaching other powers with interests in China, in
particular Russia, whose expansion to the Pacific had needed to be
dealt with by Chinese diplomacy since the end of the 1860 war. Li
had foreseen the rivalry of Japan and Russia in Korea and
Manchuria, and he had instructed his diplomats, in 1894, to treat
Russia with the utmost sensitivity. No sooner had Li returned from
Shimonoseki than he secured Moscow’s leadership of a “Triple
Intervention” by Russia, France, and Germany that forced Japan to
return the Liaodong Peninsula to China.
It was a maneuver
with far-reaching consequences. For once again, Moscow practiced
its by now well-established interpretation of Sino-Russian
friendship. For its services, it extracted special rights in
another huge swath of Chinese territory. This time it was subtle
enough not to do so outright. Rather, in the wake of the Triple
Intervention it summoned Li to Moscow to sign a secret treaty
containing an ingenious and transparently acquisitive clause
stipulating that in order to guarantee China’s security against
potential further Japanese attacks, Russia would construct an
extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway across Manchuria. In the
secret agreement, Moscow pledged not to use the railway as a
“pretext for the infringement of Chinese territory, or for
encroachment on the lawful rights and privileges of H[is]
I[mperial] M[ajesty] the Emperor of China”43—which was, however,
exactly what Moscow now proceeded to do. Inevitably, once the
railway was constructed, Moscow insisted that the territory
adjoining it would require Russian forces to protect the
investment. Within a few years, Russia had acquired control over
the area Japan had been forced to relinquish, and significantly
more.
It proved to be Li’s
most controversial legacy. The intervention had forestalled the
advances of Japan, at least temporarily, but at the cost of
establishing Russia as a dominant influence in Manchuria. The
Czar’s establishment of a sphere of influence in Manchuria
precipitated a scramble for comparable concessions by all the
established powers. Each country responded to the advances of the
others. Germany occupied Qingdao in the Shandong Peninsula. France
obtained an enclave in Guangdong and solidified its hold over
Vietnam. Britain expanded its presence in the New Territories
across from Hong Kong and acquired a naval base opposite Port
Arthur.
The strategy of
balancing the barbarians had worked to a degree. None had become
totally predominant in China, and in that margin, the Beijing
government could operate. But the clever maneuver of saving the
essence of China by bringing in outside powers to conduct their
balance-of-power machinations on Chinese territory could function
in the long run only if China remained strong enough to be taken
seriously. And China’s claim to central control was
disintegrating.
Appeasement has
become an epithet in the aftermath of the conduct of the Western
democracies toward Hitler in the 1930s. But confrontation can be
safely pursued only if the weaker is in a position to make its
defeat costly beyond the tolerance of the stronger. Otherwise, some
degree of conciliation is the only prudent course. The democracies
unfortunately practiced it when they were militarily stronger. But
appeasement is also politically risky and stakes social cohesion.
For it requires the public to retain confidence in its leaders even
as they appear to yield to the victors’ demands.
Such was Li’s dilemma
through the decades he sought to navigate China between European,
Russian, and Japanese rapaciousness and the intransigent obtuseness
of his own court. Later Chinese generations have acknowledged Li
Hongzhang’s skill but have been ambivalent or hostile about the
concessions to which he lent his signature, most notably to Russia
and Japan, as well as ceding Taiwan to Japan. Such a policy grated
at the dignity of a proud society. Nevertheless, it enabled China
to preserve the elements of sovereignty, however attenuated,
through a century of colonial expansion in which every other
targeted country lost its independence altogether. It transcended
humiliation by seeming to adapt to it.
Li summed up the
impetus of his diplomacy in a mournful memorial to the Empress
Dowager shortly before his death in 1901:
Needless for me to say how greatly I would rejoice were it possible for China to enter upon a glorious and triumphant war; it would be the joy of my closing days to see the barbarian nations subjugated at last in submissive allegiance, respectfully making obeisance to the Dragon Throne. Unfortunately, however, I cannot but recognize the melancholy fact that China is unequal to such an enterprise, and that our forces are in no way competent to undertake it. Looking at the question as one affecting chiefly the integrity of our Empire, who would be so foolish as to cast missiles at a rat in the vicinity of a priceless piece of porcelain?44
The strategy of
pitting Russia against Japan in Manchuria produced a rivalry in
which both powers progressively tested each other. In its
relentless expansion, Russia jettisoned the tacit agreement among
the exploiters of China to maintain some balance between their
respective claims and a degree of continuing Chinese
sovereignty.
The competing claims
of Japan and Russia in northeast China led to a war for preeminence
in 1904, ending in Japanese victory. The 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth
gave Japan the dominant position in Korea and potentially in
Manchuria, though less than what its victory might have made
possible, due to the intervention of the American President,
Theodore Roosevelt. His mediations of the end of the Russo-Japanese
War based on principles of balance of power, rare in American
diplomacy, kept Japan from seizing Manchuria and preserved an
equilibrium in Asia. Stymied in Asia, Russia returned its strategic
priorities to Europe, a process that accelerated the outbreak of
the First World War.