Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgments
- Part I The Clash of Two Orders: The Far East on the Eve of the War
- 1 The Reversal in the Far Eastern Balance of Power
- 2 The Decline of the Old Order in China and Korea
- 3 The Rise of a New Order in Russia and Japan
- Part II The War: The Dividing Line Between Two Eras
- Part III The Settlement: The Modern Era in Far Eastern Diplomacy
- Epilogue: Perceptions, Power, and War
- Bibliographic Essay
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Reversal in the Far Eastern Balance of Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgments
- Part I The Clash of Two Orders: The Far East on the Eve of the War
- 1 The Reversal in the Far Eastern Balance of Power
- 2 The Decline of the Old Order in China and Korea
- 3 The Rise of a New Order in Russia and Japan
- Part II The War: The Dividing Line Between Two Eras
- Part III The Settlement: The Modern Era in Far Eastern Diplomacy
- Epilogue: Perceptions, Power, and War
- Bibliographic Essay
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Japan has leaped, almost at one bound, to a place among the great nations of the earth. Her recent exploits in the war with China have focused all eyes upon her, and the world now comprehends the startling fact that this small island kingdom, so little taken account of heretofore in the calculations even of students and statesmen, has within a few decades stridden over ground traversed by other nations only within centuries.
The Honorable Hilary A. Herbert, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, 1895Those who most despair of China are those who know her best.
Western missionary in China, late nineteenth centuryThe Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5 is a seminal event in world history. Yet it has been virtually ignored in the Western literature. This is not the case in the East. Ever since this war, the focus of Chinese foreign policy has been to undo its results whereas the focus of Japanese foreign policy has been to confirm them. Japan used war to supplant Chinese regional primacy, but China refused to acknowledge the consequences of defeat. The war delivered a coup de grâce to the expiring traditional international order in the Far East: It shattered Chinese hegemony and demonstrated to an astonished West that Japan had become a modern great power. Such a seismic reversal in the traditional balance of power fractured the previous international harmony within the Confucian world and left an aftershock of enduring territorial and political fault lines that have embroiled China, Japan, Korea, and Russia ever since.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895Perceptions, Power, and Primacy, pp. 3 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002