On China (12 page)

If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it. The Chinese sense of uniqueness asserted that China was the one true civilization, and invited barbarians to the Middle Kingdom to “come and be transformed.” The Japanese attitude assumed a unique Japanese racial and cultural purity, and declined to extend its benefits or even explain itself to those born outside its sacred ancestral bonds.
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For long periods, Japan had withdrawn from foreign affairs almost entirely, as if even intermittent contacts with outsiders would compromise Japan’s unique identity. To the extent that Japan participated in an international order, it did so by means of its own tribute system in the Ryukyu Islands (modern-day Okinawa and the surrounding islands) and various kingdoms on the Korean Peninsula. With a certain irony, Japan’s leaders borrowed this most Chinese of institutions as a means of asserting their independence from China.
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Other Asian peoples accepted the protocol of the Chinese tribute system, labeling their trade as “tribute” to gain access to Chinese markets. Japan refused to conduct its trade with China in the guise of tribute. It insisted on at least equality to China, if not superiority. Despite the natural ties of trade between China and Japan, seventeenth-century discussions over bilateral trade deadlocked because neither side would honor the protocol required by the other’s pretensions of world-centrality.
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If China’s sphere of influence waxed and waned along its long frontiers in accordance with the power of the empire and the surrounding tribes, Japan’s leaders came to conceive of their security dilemma as a much starker choice. Possessing a sense of superiority as pronounced as the Chinese court’s but perceiving their margin of error as far smaller, Japanese statesmen looked warily west—to a continent dominated by a succession of Chinese dynasties, some of which extended their writ into Japan’s closest neighbor, Korea—and tended to see an existential challenge. Japanese foreign policy thus alternated, at times with startling suddenness, between aloofness from the Asian mainland and audacious attempts at conquest geared toward supplanting the Sinocentric order.

Japan, like China, encountered Western ships wielding unfamiliar technology and overwhelming force in the mid-nineteenth century—in Japan’s case, the 1853 landing of the American Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships.” But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western powers’ rise. (In Japan, this conclusion may have been assisted by the fact that foreign ideas were not seen as connected to the question of opium addiction, which Japan largely managed to avoid.) In 1868, the Meiji Emperor, in his charter oath, announced Japan’s resolve: “Knowledge shall be sought from all over the world, and thereby the foundations of the imperial rule shall be strengthened.”
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Japan’s Meiji Restoration and drive to master Western technology opened the door to stunning economic progress. As Japan developed a modern economy and a formidable military apparatus, it began to insist on the prerogatives afforded the Western great powers. Its governing elite concluded that, in the words of Shimazu Nariakira, a nineteenth-century lord and leading advocate of technological modernization, “If we take the initiative, we can dominate; if we do not, we will be dominated.”
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As early as 1863, Li Hongzhang concluded that Japan would become China’s principal security threat. Even before the Meiji Restoration, Li wrote of the Japanese response to the Western challenge. In 1874, after Japan seized on an incident between Taiwanese tribesmen and a shipwrecked Ryukyu Islands crew to mount a punitive expedition,
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he wrote of Japan:

Viewing the lumbering giant to its west with its increasingly hollow pretensions to world supremacy, the Japanese had begun to conceive of supplanting China as the predominant Asian power. The struggle between these competing claims came to a head in a country at the intersection of its larger neighbors’ ambitions—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:

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.”
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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”
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—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.