THE END OF THE WAR AND THE TREATY OF SHIMONOSEKI
Filed under: America's Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan
The early diplomatic efforts to end the war consisted of numerous unrealistic Chinese proposals and staunch Japanese refusals.14 During the negotiations the war ground on, and the Chinese were continuing to lose large numbers of forces (indeed, Weihaiwei was taken after the Chinese had started its attempts at diplomacy). Japanese military officials had begun to think about which Chinese territories Tokyo should demand as part of peace negotiations, but the army and navy were divided on what lands should be annexed.15 The army proposed the more unrealistic of the schemes: it wanted possession of the Liaotung peninsula, a part of the Chinese mainland that was in striking distance of both Peking and the ancestral home of the Qing dynasty, Mukden. Japanese occupation of the Liaotung peninsula would thus not only have been of critical strategic concern to the Chinese; because of the proximity of foreign occupiers to the symbolic town of Mukden, it would have been a near-total loss of legitimacy for the ruling government. The Japanese navy, on the other hand, wanted to annex Taiwan and the Penghu Islands. In the wake of the stunning Japanese military victory, it was becoming increasingly evident in the West that a new important player was emerging in East Asia. The general wariness in the West regarding that new regional power, combined with the talk in Japan about taking mainland territory from China, caused some Japanese to fear intervention by Western powers.16 Demanding Taiwan and the Penghus, the navy reasoned, would be less provocative yet would provide a good strategic outpost to buffer Japan from a potential Western incursion.
Japanese Premier Ito Hirobumi and Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu decided to demand both the Liaotung peninsula and Taiwan (as well as a large indemnity) as conditions for peace. Although the Chinese made every attempt to retain both territories, their continued military defeats forced them to accede. The Japanese suspected (and had good reason to suspect) that the Russians would intervene to prevent Japanese occupation of the Liaotung peninsula, but Russia had told Japan officially that it would not object to Japanese occupation of Taiwan.17 Thus there may well have been doubts in Japan from the beginning about whether it could retain possession of the Liaotung.
China and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki on April 17, 1895, with the Chinese agreeing to cede both Taiwan and the Liaotung peninsula to Japan. On April 23, however, the Germans, French, and Russians offered Japan their “advice” that Japanese possession of the Liaotung peninsula would be a “constant menace to the capital of China, and would at the same time render illusory the independence of Korea; it would henceforth be a perpetual obstacle to peace in the Far East.”18 The German foreign minister, Baron von Gutschmid, went so far as to hint that force might be used if Japan were to refuse to disgorge the Liaotung peninsula. This joint European diplomatic warning became known as the Triple Intervention.19 The Western powers were only concerned about Japanese occupation of territory on the Chinese mainland, however. After Japan responded favorably to the Triple Intervention on May 4, the Liaotung returned to Chinese ownership, but Taiwan remained a new part of the Japanese empire.
NOTES:
14. The Chinese approach was bizarre. During its attempts to broker peace, it escalated its rhetoric, shifting from referring to the Japanese as “dwarfs” to referring to them as “dwarf bandits.” It also sent low-level diplomats and even negotiators without vested authority to conduct the peace negotiations (Paine, pp. 254-257).
15. Edward I-te Chen, “Japan’s Decision to Annex Taiwan: A Study of Ito-Mutsu Diplomacy, 1894-1895,” Journal of Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (November 1977): 61-72.
16. Frank W. Ikle, “The Triple Intervention: Japan’s Lesson in the Diplomacy of Imperialism,” Monumenta Nipponica 22, no. 1/2 (1967): 122-130.
17. Chen, “Japan’s Decision,” p. 70.
18. Quoted in Ikle, “The Triple Intervention,” pp. 127-128.
19. For a complete analysis of the dynamics of the Triple Intervention, see Ikle, pp. 122-130.
SOURCE: Ted Galen Carpenter, “America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course Over Taiwan“, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
